Battleground Pacific Read online

  The corrugated metal was loud enough as it was, so I didn’t try to find out. Any slight movement and the sheet rang out like Nippo’s phonograph machine.

  Oh, to hell with this! I merely tossed it aside. It made one last shimmying sound before it came to rest with the flotsam from which it had originated.

  I couldn’t imagine that Charlie was too pleased with my efforts, either, but that was alright. Matchsticks would do Allmann just fine. In fact, if Charlie had showed any kind of life whatsoever, I might have had to call a stretcher bearer to come take him away.

  “Hey, I think this guy might be dead—he’s movin’!”

  *

  Gilbert Amdur heard only two things right before he was killed: the sound of his own voice and something heavy thudding against the ground beside him.

  “Who’s out there? Gimme the password,” Amdur whispers into the darkness, greeted only by the sound of nothing in the night. Gilbert waits. He’s a nice soft-spoken kid you wouldn’t expect to be in the MG section. Gil’s not soft, though. He expects to hear the words “Bull Run,” which would be the correct response from a marine. Somebody approaches Gil, a shadow slipping up behind his position. Whoever it is, he’s as noiseless as he is wordless.

  Either out of annoyance or fear, Amdur challenges for the password again. “Goddammit, who’s out th—”

  Thud.

  The Jap grenade explodes right next to Machine Gunner Gil Amdur, killing him before he can register what happened.

  The sound of the blast jostles me.

  “Corpsman!” The cry pierces the night.

  If I’d been looking straight at the explosion I would have lost my night vision. As it is, I merely catch the halo of a flash in the corner of my eye, coming from about forty yards behind Charlie and me where the machine guns are set up. Fssssss! There’s a red glow in the night and a sharp thunderclap, and for me it’s immediate pins and needles. I’m sharp and alert to the sound of the grenade killing PFC Gilbert Amdur, just as I’m acutely aware that the action behind us is worse than to the front of us. Like the cowboy getting shot in the back by the villain, this is not fair play.

  “Stretcher bearers, c’mon, you guys!” I swing my rifle around in the direction of the commotion. The call for stretcher bearers is a little more moribund than a simple call for a corpsman alone.

  I stop myself from saying something to Charlie when I spy two shadowy figures coming in my direction. Two heads bob up and down as they steadily trot toward me. I’ve developed cat eyes now. Seeing things clearer in the dark is something my eyes have adjusted to, after spending so much time on this island. A form of necessary evolution, where previously my eyes would have screamed at me for trying to pick out something black-on-black, against shade. Now, however, I can see just about every detail of these figures, with the exception of … Are these ours or theirs?

  My BAR is leveled straight at these two figures, coming in closer and closer by the second. The pressure I’m putting on the trigger is just a tad under letting the whole magazine fly.

  “Charlie,” I say, “look at that. Do I shoot these or do ya think those are stretcher bearers?”

  I’m seeking words of encouragement from Charlie; in typical Allmann fashion, they don’t come. Charlie raises up to take a look, but he doesn’t say shit. My mind tells me that the two figures can’t be stretcher bearers because they’re heading in the wrong direction. Japs in marine uniforms?

  “Christ, Charlie, are those friggin’ marines or—?”

  The two outlines cut off to the right, toward elements of the rest of the 3rd Platoon, where Jim McEnery is. This is followed by peals of small-arms and automatic weapon fire as the company CP lights up for a few seconds. The noise trails off with a few sporadic shots.

  “Dammit, Charlie! Turn around, the bastards are comin’ up behind us!”

  Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump …

  I begin to wonder what this new thumping sound is before I quickly realize it’s the sound of my heart lightly thrumming in my ears. Lightly, because I’m otherwise calm, when under the circumstances I shouldn’t be. I’m operating in a gear I’ve just now realized that I have within me. I’ve killed before, but now that the shark has smelled the blood in the water he has no compunctions about doing it again. It’s as if every Nip that I wipe from the face of the earth leads me one step closer to making it home again … and since I have no qualms about going home again, why should I care about how I arrive there?

  “Charlie? Charlie, listen, we must’ve missed these bastards comin’ up here. There’s a ballroom fulla those suckers out there, an’ they’re gonna try an’ get through us, sure as shit.”

  Time passes. Every so often a star shell floats up at the airfield below us, giving us just enough light to see our surroundings. White coral cliffs show up like drawings on a blackboard. Each rock, each pebble on the ground, gets its own shifting shadow, moving clockwise and fading as the star shell fizzes and pops, petering out beyond my view. Every so often I see the figure of a marine or two, hugging the coral, but no Nips. Only darkness or the sickly sameness of artificial illumination from below.

  Still, the Japs are coming. There’s not just one or two Nips out there, no. These yellow devils run in packs. They’re caught behind us, and they’re trying to get back to the Five Sisters where the rest of their army congregates. One more thing: They’ve been watching us this whole time. They watched us when we came down, when we set up, and when we organized ourselves for the night—and they sure as hell won’t attack when the night is lit up by star shells. Instead, they’ll wait until the lights fade to make their move. That’s instinct. That’s smart.

  Okay, Mace, breathe easy. Wait for it. They’ll come right after the next flare.

  Suddenly I remember I have a full magazine of tracers in a cartridge pouch, and the last thing I’d want to do is use those rounds at night. So I take it out of my cartridge belt, slowly, and place it on a piece of wood in front of me. Deliberately, I inhale and then exhale.

  I’m ready.

  Five Japs run straight for me, black pajamas, split-toed sneakers; they all have grenades in their hands.

  I can see them!

  They are only eight feet away from me when I really put the brakes on ’em. I pull the trigger. Each of my twenty rounds makes a dull flash into the rushing Nips. Chests, stomachs, and faces light up. Some bend back unnaturally as they skid and fall, while others collapse to the side or simply fold inward at the belly. All of them crumple together, touching one another, in a soft cloud of coral dust and the afterglow of my muzzle flash.

  Quick! I change magazines and I’m ready again. Scanning, scanning … There’s the clamor of distant battles on other parts of the island, yet it’s all quiet to my immediate front—only the unmoving heap of dead Nips before me. It’s then that I realize that Allmann and I are so far on the left flank, this very spot we occupy is where the Nips decided they’d go when it got dark enough to make their move. Charlie and I are probably the closest marines to the Five Sisters—the chink in the armor the Japs were looking for.

  “Do you need help over there?” Jimmy yells from somewhere in the area of the CP.

  I don’t say anything in response to this. Jesus Christ, you dumb fuck, what the hell you wanna do, give us away?

  Gene Holland is closer to us on the line, however—just a few yards away.

  “Mace,” he whispers. “Are there Nips out there?”

  “Yeah. I can see ’em.”

  Waiting. Waiting for something. Waiting for another star shell to go up. Waiting for the Japanese to make another run for it. I have no idea if there’ll be any more Nips coming, but I’m not taking any chances. I’ll stay awake all night if I have to, with my finger right on this trigger. Allmann is right beside me, under a poncho. I think he might be sleeping. If anything else happens I’ll make sure I wake him …

  *

  … Up!

  Boom! An explosion rocks me awake.

/>   Oh my God, I fell asleep! You can go to sleep without even knowing it, for chrissakes. Just like that.

  Another cry for a corpsman goes up. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump …

  “Someone’s hit, who is it?”

  Disoriented, I scan down the line where I heard the sound of the blast, and then quickly back out in front of me, my eyes sweeping for Japs again. I can barely shake the wool from my brain, my senses are so weak. To make matters worse, I don’t recall this big pile of rocks eight feet in front of my line of sight. How’d that get there? I squint at the rocks and then glance back at where some corpsmen are working on a couple of marines up the line a few yards. The acrid odor of a spent grenade still lingers in the air, nearly singeing my nose hairs. The smell brings me back to the real world. Those aren’t friggin’ rocks. Those are the Nips I piled up with my BAR. How long ago was that?

  I have no concept of time, but I do know we only have one wristwatch between us—and we probably paid the price for it.

  The word comes over that it’s Frankie Ocepek and PFC Bishop who’ve been wounded by a Nip grenade. Evidently they had fallen asleep. Everyone, like stupid asses, had fallen asleep, including me. Immediately I know it was the wristwatch to blame.

  See, the gag is, since this wristwatch only has an hour hand, whoever is on guard will take the watch, wait until his buddy is asleep, and then push the big hand up one hour and advise his buddy that it’s time to switch guard. Of course, everyone knows about the infamous “guard watch,” so the punch line is, your buddy would do the same thing to you. Nobody gets any sleep.

  Oh yes, it’s really funny until somebody gets hurt because we’re a bunch of clowns with rifles.

  Holland asks again, “Are they still here?”

  “Yeah, okay!” I yell back. “They’re all around us! We gotta stay awake, dammit!”

  I’m awake and more excited than I’ve ever been, as if I’m receiving a steady stream of juice from a low-voltage regulator. More wired than on Christmas morning with my Junior Racer Flexible Flyer. More charged than when I got my first kiss at the ballpark. More than when you’re getting away with something that you know you shouldn’t.

  See, the Nips are coming again, and maybe two or three of them got through when they bombed the hell out of Frank and that kid Bishop—when the Japs took the chance to hit the left flank of our line (or didn’t get the memo not to). Nevertheless, I’ve got this niggling feeling again, just like when I knew that hell was coming down before Bauerschmidt and Rice bought it.

  Yet it’s also a feeling of helplessness. Waiting. The truth is I can’t wait to pull the trigger again. My oxygen and my blood, my heart and my breath, are all wrapped up in the power I have in my hands. Who the hell can approach me with this thing I’ve got blazing away?

  All of a sudden, four more Nips run straight for me, almost the way the first five did. I tense up, but then I lay the steady down. Just a simple squeeze of the trigger and these four take the full magazine like the first group; stumbling and skidding, they rupture, spilling out on the coral, deflating as they fall.

  I swallow hard and slowly crane my neck to see what I’ve done. Amazing. Their corpses appear too flat to have been human once. They must have only pretended to be alive just a few seconds ago. All an illusion.

  Fast. I change magazines. The ammo slaps in with a click as I immediately begin to sight in again.

  The Nips must be either stupid or desperate. Not only do they keep coming on the same route—don’t they see their buddies fall or my friggin’ muzzle flash?—but in order to detonate their grenades, they have to first prime them by hitting them against something hard, e.g., a helmet, the ground … their heads? The Nips are not wearing helmets, so they might as well be chunking rocks. Even at that, they’re not even throwing them at me. They simply hang on and die.

  I just can’t figure it out, yet I don’t have time to wonder as four more of them come zipping toward me once again, a sickly déjà vu.

  Go!

  This time, though, when I squeeze the trigger, the whole night lights up in blinding bursts of red and white, pumping the magazine of tracers through my BAR—just the opposite of what I wanted to do. I had put the pack of tracers there for the sole purpose of not touching them, but in a dumb-ass move that’s exactly what I grabbed! Oh, but it fires up the Nips, alright: They fall under the stage lights of their lives in dramatic fashion, one atop the other, their pajamas smoldering from getting torched by the phosphorous tips of the tracer rounds. They must be boiling inside. All but one Nip. Despite the stars in front of my eyes, I see him veer off to the right and into a little bush only about eight feet away from me.

  Holy shit!

  I’m really shaken up now, not only because there’s a live Nip a few steps away from me, but also because it was quite a shock to see those tracers shoot out like that.

  He’s hiding in that bush, my mind whispers.

  They had told us to keep a full magazine of tracers ready, in case we ran across a drum of gasoline we had to torch up or something (I might not have been paying attention during that lecture). Anyway, these Nips got the rounds instead.

  Quietly, I move into position facing the Jap in the bush, positioning my left knee on the ground, with the BAR propped on my right knee: My aim is squarely fixed on where I think the Nip should be.

  Just.

  Right.

  There.

  I don’t want to move much, let alone breathe … but then there’s Charlie Allmann. I forgot all about him during this fracas with the Japs. Leaning over ever so slightly, I can barely make out Allmann’s face in the darkness. He’s still under the poncho, so I take my hand and get it close to Charlie’s face, pointing at the bush, and in a voice lower than a whisper I tell Allmann, “He’s right there, Charlie. He’s right … there, so keep quiet.”

  Yet I don’t shoot right away. It’s fire discipline. What if he’s a little off from where I’m aiming and he gets away because I pop off too soon? All I need … all I need, you sonuvabitch, is a noise. C’mon, make a sound and tell me where you’re hidin’. Let’s hear ya, big boy. C’mon, c’mon, don’t let me down, ya slant-eyed fucker. I’ve got all the time in the world. Time to kill. The funny thing is, I know I’ll get him. I don’t think for a moment he’s going to nail me. If he’s looking for a place to smack his grenade, then he’ll give himself away for sure. Probably the worst thing that can happen is that he’ll jump out and scare the crap out of me. So all I need is that one sound … and he gives it to me …

  It’s only a small scuffing noise, yet just enough for me to know that my aim was dead on the whole time. I squeeze the trigger even before the scuffing noise has faded into the night. All twenty rounds in 2.5 seconds (I don’t even recall slapping another magazine in after I’d spent my tracers). No matter, this Jap is now a figment of his own imagination, as if he never existed. Mist and nothing more.

  I hear a small voice at my elbow, from underneath the poncho. Charlie Allmann.

  “Did you get him?” Charlie asks meekly.

  What a stupid question.

  My breath is coming back to me. Oh, Christ! Maybe I’m more shook up than I realize.

  “I’ll show you in the morning, Charlie.”

  I’ll show you in the morning …

  Good night, Charlie. Good night, Peleliu.

  *

  Daybreak comes, and the Nip bodies are lying out here for everybody to see. They look like dancers who have collapsed after a long night of revelry. Yeah, dancers, sure. I had them doing the Big Apple, alright. That must be spilled wine all over their tuxedoes.

  Every marine is too busy with his own worries to worry about mine. No one says, “Hey, good job, Mace.” Nobody marvels, “Wow, that’s a whole lot o’ Nips you killed there!” Maybe nobody notices, because that’s not the way things happen in real life. We’d all seen the films Wake Island and The Flying Tigers before we entered combat, and any illusions of how we imagined battle to be
were dispelled as soon as a marine took the first bullet. There’s none of this shouting loud orders in combat, or dodging bullets, or waving the boys on. All of that is pure fiction—and there’s a reason that the marines who win the big medals are mostly dead when they get them. You’ve got to do something either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to get one. Just doing your job doesn’t count.

  The marines pay me fifty-seven dollars a month, so that’s three dollars a day, plus all the chow I don’t eat, for the nineteen days I’ve been on Peleliu. So for every Jap I kill, I estimate that each of their lives is worth less than one cent in American money. That’s eight cents for a loaf of bread back in Queens. That’s American wartime economics at its greatest.

  I’m more curious, however, about the Jap I killed in the bushes, as I slowly make my way over there.

  I only have to part the scrub a little to see the Nip propped up in the thicket.

  First I only see his right cheek; his head is bowed as if in prayer. His torso is doubled over in the middle, a mangled mess of blood, meat, and dry tripe, where he took all twenty rounds straight to the breadbasket. He clutches a grenade in each hand, a grim testimony to plans gone wrong. This Jap doesn’t wear the black pajamas like his buddies. He’s got on the typical Japanese khaki, browned over where his blood has stained through. It’s not until I move around him, to the other side of his body, that I notice the left side of his face—the side his heart’s on—is a sky blue, where the unoxygenated blood became trapped in there, exactly at the moment my bullets pinched him in half. He died instantly. Not that I care either way, though. He’s only a study. I can see how taking a full magazine of .30-06 will kill a man, just like that, but what of his brethren? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a Jap in captivity, wounded or otherwise, since I’ve been on this island. There’s a fundamental difference between the way an American dies and a Nip cops it. It’s as if the marine, while shot up and bleeding from every orifice, will cling to life with everything he has—hoping against hope—yet the Japanese would rather lie down and die, quietly, than give in to the natural will to live. This is the enemy we live and die with on this sorry island. He has a different concept of heaven and earth, and he’d rather take the former and rot on the latter.