Battleground Pacific Page 17

  I damn sure wasn’t going to tell anybody about my dream and the chicken. I could hear it now, exactly what the boys would say if I told them.

  “A chicken? Oh, for chrissakes! Ya know what that dream means? It means you’re gonna lay some goddamn eggs, Mace!”

  Yeah, I’m sure that’s what it meant.

  The real Pacific war.

  8

  THE FIVE BITCHES

  WE START OFF IN A skirmish line, a zigzagging group of marines, taking furtive steps through the morning mist toward a place that looks more ominous and foreboding than any other place we’ve been on Peleliu. There is nothing more real than this.

  We’re in a draw composed of nothing but heat-baked coral, littered with mangrove, bits of wood, discarded marine gear, spent ammunition, and the scent of putrefaction and cooked blood, a silent testimonial that bodies once lay here, long carried off, leaving only their memories to linger. At the end of the draw, before us is a sixty-foot sheer cliff, running a thousand yards up the island. Its upper edges are cannibal’s teeth, eating away at the sky, breaking off pieces of the firmament as if it’s the end of the world. In many ways it is.

  On the opposite side of the cliff is more uneven ground, yet more punctured and blistered up close than it looks from afar.

  I was mistaken; right on top of it, it doesn’t resemble the surface of the moon at all. With the naked eye, you can see occasional craters on the moon’s glowing face. Down here, on the other hand, the ground is dull—millions of pores on a dead man’s skin: showing the effects of the constant bombing and shelling since D-day.

  This cadaverous earth. Man, what an earth!

  In the middle of it all sit two Nip pillboxes that had taken direct hits from incoming navy mail. The pillboxes are merely small pimples in the overall picture, yet I can only imagine the fits they would have given us if the navy had not taken them out first.

  From where I stand the panoramic view below is of the newly erected supply depot, the refurbished airstrip, and the blue Pacific Ocean. Beyond that? New York? Queens? God, I hope so.

  Tanks move up with us, and it feels swell having them here—assuredly just as good as the tankers feel about having marine infantry at their side.

  The tanks make an awfully big racket, and they churn up coral powder as if they’re slapping a thousand blackboard erasers together in front of our faces. Well, it isn’t like we’re sneaking up on the Nips anyway. As with the marines before us, slamming their noses against the ridges time and again, stealth isn’t the issue when brute force is the order of the day.

  It’s insane to think this way when it comes to tactics—and I don’t know tactics from Shinola. All I know is what’s right in front of me, and that’s the way it’s been since we landed on this island paradise.

  Soon, the fundamental theory of blunt action pays off, when a group of marines spots a pillbox about thirty feet up. They claim it’s bursting at the seams with Japs. Instead of taking potshots at it, though, a tank is called up: one with a gun like a long nozzle, very akin to what I’d seen back home, when the fire department was called in to quell a riot.

  Slowly the tank’s turret turns around to where its nozzle is facing squarely into the eyes of the pillbox, and with an air-sucking whoosh, a long stream of liquid fire belches out of the tank, trailing plumes of black soot and waves of heat that twinkle in the dry air.

  At first I’m encouraged by this, especially if there’s somebody in there, but after a few moments, Enough’s enough already, for chrissakes! The Nips come boiling out. Literally, boiling out of the pillbox, all from one exit, rife with mayhem—the whole lot attempting to get out at once. I wince at the burning clothes, licked with flames, the sizzling hair and charcoaled faces, and the sporadic cracks of ammunition detonating in cartridge belts from the compressed heat inside.

  The first Japs only make it out about eight feet from the exit, and the rest pile up behind them, doubling up and tripping on themselves, falling onto one another, creating a layer cake of crusted victims, and still this tongue of flame from the tank roasts whoever can’t make it out—gooey and tarlike they slip on their own liquefied fat, hot gelatin within their Imperial Japanese–issue uniforms.

  A magical voice rings out, “Hey, Mace, cover that mess over there and see if there’s any movement, willya?”

  The voice quickly snaps me out of my trance.

  I trot off.

  Sonuvabitch, why me? I swear it’s always Mace who does it.

  Dutifully, however, I do it, despite the natural protests in my mind. Picking my way gingerly up the small slope, rifle at the ready, I notice that this is a fool’s errand anyway. These Japs are dead beyond dead. They might as well have never been born. Around fifteen to twenty of them, stacked and black. Nearly inhuman looking, as the heat has just began to cool somewhat, allowing the melted skin of one Nip to solidify with that of his comrade below him. Just like melted wax, a glue that binds them into one entity. The only things that identify them as being human once are their talonlike hands, their lips peeled back against their gums exposing white teeth, and their hollow eye sockets (the eyes, composed of mostly liquid, are one of the first things to evaporate when you crank the oven on full blast).

  I look away, but that doesn’t help much. I can still smell them—enough to make a vulture gag; though more perversely, I can still hear them. The massed bodies crackle and hiss just like frankfurters on a grill. Exactly like roasting frankfurters.

  I swear to Christ I’ll never eat another goddamn hot dog!

  Oh, and there’s movement within the corpses, alright—yet nothing to shoot at. It’s only escaped gas making the frankfurters shift a little as—

  Pop!

  One of the corpses makes a loud noise, and it startles me so much that my foot slips off the loose coral gravel and down I fall a few feet—head over end—to another sandy perch below. Just like slipping on a banana peel in one of those vaudeville acts back home. No harm done. Merely stupid looking.

  Red-faced and ashamed, I quick-spy around to see if anyone witnessed my acrobatic flip; but no, it doesn’t appear anyone saw it. Someone would have ribbed me already if they had. A nice bunch of fellows—yet if some other marine had taken a crazy crash like that, I would have been the first to give him the business. They’d never let me live that one down.

  “Okay, fellas, that’s enough of this stuff. Let’s get movin’.”

  We don’t stay there long. We know where we’re going.

  The Five Sisters.

  On the approach, the Five Sisters were nothing more than chewed-up humps on the ground, covered all over with half-charred trees, appearing like roach legs poking out of the earth. The first rise in the earth was a shattered pyramid, dead to the pharaohs, blown to bits by the constant drop of napalm and 500-pounders.

  The Hellcats and Corsairs zoomed up from their runways, making their runs only fourteen hundred yards away. They were so close to the Sisters that the bombers didn’t even have time to retract their wheels. Now that was close combat. With a roar the napalm dropped, and it was a wonder the splash from the deadly incendiary bombs didn’t melt the wheels off their landing gear.

  Napalm we had more faith in, over the 500-pounders. Napalm looked like it really penetrated into the nooks and crevices of the terrain, while the big bombs just skipped off the surface and exploded on top of the coral. Napalm, made of jellied gasoline, was designed to stick to the skin while it burned, bathing the Five Sisters with a spray of fire. It was also created to suck the oxygen from the air and suffocate its victims. In theory, any Nips within the area should have been shriveled, burned husks of men. Either that or they should have asphyxiated in their holes. Hopefully both. There was no desire to face what the planes or the tanks could take out for us.

  That’s what made Corporal Raymond Grawet’s death so bitter. He didn’t have to die just to prove there were Japs still in a cave.

  At a slow move up to the Five Sisters, a Sherman tank spots some
Nips hiding in a cave. Maybe there’s only a few of them. Maybe a few hundred. So, at point-blank range, the Sherman blasts a round right down the spout of the cave, sending up a lot of smoke and flames.

  Right by the tank, shirt open, bare-chested—Ray leans over a little, his M-1 rifle at the ready, trying to get a better look into the cave.

  Corporal Grawet takes a Nip bullet right in the chest, before he can take two steps. Killed before he hits the ground.

  Quickly they rush Ray out of the way, and the demolition marines implode the cave, sealing up Raymond’s killer, along with any other little bastards who might be sucking air inside.

  They take Ray’s body back down the draw, moving right past me, at a trot. As they flash by, I remember the tattoo of a bulldog on Ray’s left deltoid. What’s the rush? Any life that was left in Grawet’s body had seeped out through a little round hole in his chest at the mouth of the cave.

  No matter. Before we even reach the Five Sisters, there’s more of this kind of slaughter. I am merely waiting, like Corporal Raymond Grawet, to enter my own cave.

  They will bury Ray’s body here, a side of beef, so far from his life and home.

  We move up and see five dead marines, nothing but sacks of bones lying up the path to the Five Sisters—all of them skeletons in saggy, discolored dungarees. One is on a stretcher, and the other four are obviously the stretcher bearers, caught coming down from the Sisters and wiped out where they now lay. Nobody even moved them. Then again, we might be the first marines to come up this way since the 1st Marines pulled out.

  “Oh my God, would ya look at the poor bastards?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell is this!”

  I was breaking all the rules by dwelling on such things—I couldn’t help it. I could only imagine, here’s this poor wounded marine, lying up there for a couple of hours, watching his funeral play out in his mind … and then here comes salvation. Stretcher bearers! Now the wounded marine is delighted. Instead of imagining his mother getting a telegram, he’s making plans for what he’s going to do when he gets home and then …

  It’s all over. All of them dead. Just like that.

  I looked away and up as sun flares made rings of light in my vision; the sweat was bitter in my mouth. All that time I had dead marines to think about while trying to keep my eyes peeled for Nips. It was too hot. It was too crazy to the senses. I glanced over my shoulder a final time at the dead Marines, with their bald faces in perpetual skeletal grins, with remnants of skin clinging to their bones, marking the time in which they’d lain exposed to the elements. If there’d been even a slight breeze, those flecks of skin would have drifted in the air.

  Lyman Rice and Lieutenant Bauerschmidt, on the other hand, had climbed up the side of one of the Sisters, about twenty-five feet up, and there they perched as one of our tank escorts pulled up to the edge of the draw and parked himself. If the tank went any farther, he would put himself in real jeopardy. In the case of a hand grenade attack, he would have to back out of there in a hurry.

  What’re Rice and the lieutenant doin’ up there, anyway?

  Frank Minkewitz stands at the base of the Sister looking up at them, and he’s talking to them about something, but from where I stand I can’t hear their conversation. I’m right by the tank, and everybody else is spread out around the base of the hill, all of us simply waiting for the orders to move up, or move out, to move somewhere, to do something … to do anything! It’s difficult to decide what’s worse, to sidle up by the tank and choke on its fumes in the shade, or to simply sit out in the open, baking under the sun.

  “Hey, you, marine!”

  I look up to see who’s calling me. One of the tankers is leaning out of the hatch in the turret.

  “Yeah?” I say back.

  “Here, I got somethin’ for you here.” He holds out a big can, probably a gallon of something.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s apple butter.”

  “Oh, no kiddin’, yeah?” I ask. I don’t realize how hungry I am until this moment. “Thanks!”

  So I take out my marine-issue spoon, clean it off with my tongue, and begin to dig in.

  It’s not dining at the Ritz-Carlton, but this thick, greasy stuff sure hits the spot, it’s so different from the common fare.

  The thing is, the war doesn’t give me time to wonder where the tankers got this delicacy before I spy one of the oddest things I’ve seen so far:

  Only about sixty yards away, four Marines come out of an opening in the ridge. One makes a strange little right turn, and the rest follow suit.

  What in God’s name’s goin’ on?

  Except they’re not marines. They are Japs in marine uniforms. Americans don’t walk like that. Americans don’t crawl out of the ridge like that. I start to bring my rifle to my shoulder. Sonuvabitch, those are Nips! I can’t get my weapon up before the last one disappears into the slice of ridge he had just come from.

  Almost instantly the intensity of the combat began catching fire somewhere in the middle of the Five Sisters. But those Japs? The ones in marine uniforms? I immediately felt they’d brought something sinister with them. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t superstitious, but on Peleliu I came to know these moments for what they were. The Japs’ appearance alone called forth a sense of doom. I could have dropped them all, only I hesitated slightly before I figured out they were not marines at all (and somehow, in the back of my mind I found it chilling that the Nips were wearing dead Americans’ uniforms). Yet I didn’t kill them. I knew then that something bad was going to happen.

  From that moment forward, everything seemed like a mad rush, although none of us were rushing anywhere. We merely pulled back a little. Slowly. Methodically. It’s just that time was on a racecourse around a bend that we didn’t know existed, let alone could see with any real clarity.

  “Bauerschmidt’s dead,” Jimmy says. “I guess that leaves me in charge.”

  “What happened?”

  “Got it in the stomach. Said somethin’ about the shot coming from behind him. From one of us maybe. Don’t know what the hell he’s talkin’ about, though.”

  “When?”

  I had only moved twenty yards behind the tank; I was amazed how I could be right on top of a killing and not even know that it happened.

  “What about Rice?” I ask.

  “Lyman? I dunno nothin’ ’bout Rice.”

  Minkewitz lopes by, and I recall him talking to Bauerschmidt and Rice about something. Suddenly it hits me that Rice is dead, too. It appears that whatever Minkewitz was talking about with the lieutenant and Rice, it involved either Frank staying put or Frank refusing to go up there with them. I’m guessing the latter. Nevertheless, I still can’t figure out what they were doing up there in the first place.

  Forget Minkewitz. My problem is that I can’t stop wondering if the Nips who got Bauerschmidt and Rice had on marine uniforms.

  No, it can’t be.

  Whatever happened, it was confirmed that Rice was killed a short while after the lieutenant.

  On this horrible landscape, tits up and covered with insect feelers, it even smells like heat: This is where we stop for the day. We have pulled back forty yards from the Five Sisters, yet the whole monstrosity looms over us.

  Charlie Allmann and I take the extreme left flank of the line, only about fifteen feet from the base of the cliff. There, the work begins as marines scrounge around for riffraff, wood, junk, anything that will make a marine feel secure against a hand grenade attack. Anything before the sunlight bends into darkness. A sleepy red glow is already filtering through the last haze of a scorched earth, though it’s ridiculous to think that some scraps from the ground are going to protect us out in the open like this.

  Charlie and I put together some bits of wood, arranging them in a U-shape around us—about five feet across at the inside of the U and only about a foot high at the most. Some pieces of wood are as long as two feet, while others are mere splinters at abo
ut two inches in length. I might be able to blow on the weakest portion of our little campground and the wood would tumble straight down, it’s that skimpy.

  Yet there’s always this false sense of security that keeps us moving. It’s akin to the same phony protection we feel by merely moving back a few yards from the most dangerous spot on the island. The reality of it, however, is that fifteen, twenty, or even forty yards doesn’t make a lick of difference as the bullet flies. Still, it’s the choice we make, to believe against rational thought, because rationality tells us that we’ve got no chance in hell. It’s the analytical mind that gets blown out the back of your head for believing you can think this thing through, without your instincts in the driver’s seat.

  Any marine who believes he can think around the next corner is only deluding himself. However, to sense what’s coming next—from your gut—without bursting into hysterics? That’s the free ticket to staying alive just a few minutes longer.

  So we built our “protection” for the night. I came across a sheet of corrugated metal, thinking it would supply some good cover—maybe bent over us, or perhaps wrapped to our side. However, not long after I sat down on it and unlaced my leggings, the whole piece of flimsy metal warbled and warped so loud it made a din like a platoon of marines cleaning their mess kits.

  I’d just gotten my boondockers off, too! I was really amazed at how fish-belly white my feet were. Palmolive-soap white. Not a smidge of dirt on them, not even between the toes. Since I hadn’t taken my boondockers off since Purple Beach, experience told me that my feet would be as mashed up as poor Dennis Hoffman’s dogs. Thank God they weren’t.

  What was equally amazing was my leggings—no longer pliable, nor a smooth marine beige; I sat them down and they stood straight at attention. More to my surprise, at the back of the leggings, molded into the fabric, was the perfect curvature of my muscled calves, detailing every line and fiber, as if they were made of Bakelite. I chuckled and wondered what the leggings would sound like if I knocked them together. A gong?