Battleground Pacific Read online

  I wheeled around to face my parents—unbelieving, almost afraid to touch such a gift, lest it evaporate before my eyes—only to see their approving smiles as they nodded for me to go ahead and take it, love it, cherish it … it was mine! Dad must’ve knocked over a bank to get that kinda scratch!

  “Thank you, thank you thank you!” I said, jumping up and down, hugging my parents, wetting their faces with kisses. Miz Muggins, our old family dog, merely lay there, with her muzzle between her paws, looking up at us indifferently. It had been a long time since Muggins had been spry enough to wag and jump about anything.

  It was a miracle.

  I never asked my dad how he could afford it—but I never forgot that he did.

  That Christmas I went sledding the whole day, coming home only once to change my wet clothes, hanging my soaked socks by the stove and putting on fresh knickers. I must have been quite a sight, going up and down Donnelly Hill with my pals, spinning snow as we went, intentionally dragging one foot behind my sled when a buddy started gaining on me. The snow would pelt him in his face, blinding him, skidding him off into a spin!

  I didn’t have fancy winter wear, but with my old knit cap and my rough suede workman’s gloves, I was warm enough. To keep the water from getting through the holes in my shoes, I took some old burlap bags, put my feet through them, and tied them off at the ankles. I must have looked silly, though I couldn’t have cared less how I appeared, just as long as my eyes watered from the speed of flying down the hill in my gold and red chariot.

  Eventually some girls our age showed up, laughing and carrying on, as they are wont to do. We would speed up right behind them as we flew, and with one arm we’d take their sled and spin it! Around and around they went until they took a soft tumble in the powder. Then we’d go up and pretend we were sorry for doing it—but for some reason (a reason none of us knew at that age), we did it just to be close to them.

  That evening I walked back home under the moonlight with my best pals, Tommy Colonna and Billy Boscha, none of us saying much. The only sound was the crunching snow beneath our shoes.

  Presently Billy piped up and said something akin to what the rest of us were thinking.

  “Ya know,” Billy said, “everything was just peachy till those girls showed up.”

  “Ah, they were okay,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Billy changed his mind. “They were okay.”

  We walked a few more yards in silence, and then Billy spoke again.

  “Say, you don’t think they’ll be back here tomorrow, do ya?”

  “Probably,” Tommy said.

  “Yeah, probably,” I replied.

  “Well…” You could tell Billy was deep in thought. “If they come back … like tomorrow, say … whattaya wanna do with ’em?”

  I stopped walking, and everyone else did, too. “I dunno, Billy … spin ’em around like we did today?” I shrugged.

  “Yeah, that was pretty fun.” Tommy laughed.

  “Funny, too!” Billy laughed also.

  I was in agreement, and we resumed our walk, our gang relieved that it was finally out in the open.

  “I just never had that kind of fun before!” Billy smiled.

  I was eleven years old.

  *

  I’m fifteen.

  At the Brooklyn Star Burlesque, my brother-in-law, Bobby Rice, gets the bright idea to sneak me into the show. Mickey got married. Bobby eventually gets the Battle of the Bulge over in Europe.

  He stuffs a fedora down over my ears and turns up the collar of his long overcoat (the sleeves hang down well past my fingers); the final touch is the cigarette he puts in my mouth. Laughter.

  “One ticket, please,” I say, and I’m in. The doors open to the burlesque; my eyes are too small to hold it all in—a whole new world awaits me, and—

  *

  I’m sixteen.

  Gallons of blood pour out of a strung-up horse and onto the bricks as the men from the docks slice open the animal while it dangles over the pavement. I have never seen so much blood in my life.

  Van Iderstine, the offal docks, New York City. The whole place is a turd clogging the drainpipe. Tommy and I beat feet.

  When the cops nabbed them, Petey Masciale and Doug Lutz must have squealed on us. Five of us had broken into a boat in Amityville. Billy claimed it was his aunt’s boat, but it was no more his aunt’s boat than it was his grandfather’s submarine. So when Petey and Doug didn’t return to our “borrowed” boat after swiping some baked goods, Billy, Tommy, and I headed for Eastport, the duck capital of the world, where all the roads are paved with duck shit. Then on to Van Iderstine, with its fat-rendering factories for dead animals.

  Then home.

  Mom says, “Joe Stanworth is looking for you, Brother. You better go out the back door.”

  Joe Stanworth, the cop who also moonlighted as the local baseball umpire. Everybody knew Joe, that great big sucker—standing six foot four, at least.

  I start out the back door, but Mom calls back, “Oh no, here—he’s pulling up, you might as well face him.” Joe pulls up in his 1937 four-door Ford, and I know I’ll be sitting in the back of it soon.

  Joe rounds up the rest of the gang and says, “If I ask you a civil question, I want a civil answer!”

  What the hell’s a civil question? That became the gang’s inside gag, until …

  Probation.

  Probation or the CMTC. I chose the Citizens’ Military Training Camp, in Fort Dix, New Jersey, even though I wasn’t seventeen yet. They let me slide.

  The summer of 1940. The bayonet course, shooting the ’03 Springfield rifle, marching, walking through the tear-gas room, eating army chow, falling in. They even let me shoot left-handed at the range.

  *

  I am seventeen.

  Spring grass and freshly squeezed sunshine, muted earth and raw calf leather—these are the sights and scents of boys playing baseball in the ’30s and ’40s, the golden age of a sport that became the bluster and shout for a nation that had little to cheer about. I pitched a mean game-of-my-life or two before the home team bore arms and swung for foreign fields.

  The roar of the crowd.

  I was Carl Hubbell on the mound, zipping the ball over the plate, really zinging it in there—“Steeeeryk!”

  Even if there were only one hundred people in attendance, to me the crowd was deafening. The cheering crowd didn’t stop when the game was over, either.

  When you’re a young man, athletic, in perfect health, with a gleam in your eye and a swagger in your step, the cheering crowd is always present, filling your head, lifting you to new heights. Getting up in the morning—the crowd roars with approval. Eating your breakfast—they clap with excitement. Passing an exam at school—they applaud as if you just pitched a no-hitter. Their adoration provides buoyancy. Call it confidence, call it imagination, call it youthful vigor, or even call it arrogance; no matter, the Depression-era kids needed that fighting chance to prove ourselves in any field of play, whether it was in the classroom, picking cotton, or carrying a football across the goal line.

  The roar of the crowd.

  While in combat, the ovation remained strong, even if it had quieted down to but a murmur. It enabled us to ride the crest to victory, unwavering, never faltering.

  In glory they fell, many young lives, yet with the silver cheer of a nation’s approval ringing brightly in their ears. The touchdown. The home run. In Elysian Fields they turned around and faced the crowd, streamers falling, all eyes on them, smiling in the sun, as the writers in the press box gleefully typed out the circumstances of the play: the crack of the bat, the arc of the basketball, Ace Parker and the forward pass. Laughing in the sun. Their parents would read the headlines, in the form of a telegram, yet they would never understand that there was so much more to their babies’ deaths, beyond those short, clipped words. So much more.

  Many years later, I could still hear the applause, the shouts, and the excitement—just as loud as it was on the day
that changed our lives forever.

  Football season, 1941.

  “Say, Mace.” The coach walked up to me. “When we use that play you made up on them today—that one—swinging around the left with the halfback pass … boy, we’ll have ourselves a ball game!”

  “Sure, Coach.” I beamed. “It’ll be great!”

  “You betcha.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Go get ’em!”

  Hitching my football pants up, I resumed throwing a few balls around with the guys. It was a crisp, shiny December afternoon, the field crunchy with tiny icicles in the grass, the air brisk but not frosty enough to keep the spectators away. The game was scheduled to start in twenty minutes, and the cars were just pulling up and parking along the sidelines.

  Today’s game was scheduled to be between my team, the Glen Morris Bonecrushers, and the City Line Leafs, in the 140-pound class, Queens/Nassau League.

  There wasn’t a lot of local interest. It was strictly kid stuff. Most of us didn’t even have any true football gear. Our pants were simply long knickers, stuffed with towels or rags to give some padding. For a belt, I had cut up an inner tube into strips, tying one around my waist, at least creating the illusion of Red Grange or Jim Thorpe. It didn’t quite wash, though, since most of us didn’t own our own helmets either. Even so, we played hard and made some real games of it.

  I was a pretty good ball player. On offense I played right halfback, and on defense, as skinny as I was, I was a linebacker. Good enough, at least, that when we played the Question AAs, the Questions asked me to play linebacker for their team, too. I played one game for the Questions, and we got pummeled by the Baisley Park Skulls. Ouch!

  Suddenly something caught my attention—a sizable crowd hanging around the row of cars—so I quit tossing the ball with the fellas.

  “Hey, Mace, throw the ball!”

  “Wait a second,” I said, inaudible to my pals, my eyes squinting at the people running up to the cars. “Here.” I lobbed the ball back and trotted over toward the sidelines.

  A few of the cars had their doors open, their radios synced up to the same station, and though the message became clearer the closer I got to the automobiles, still an air of confusion hung in the static. People got out, paced around, hats tilted on the backs of their heads, hands on their hips, shaking their heads—looks of concern hung on all faces.

  “Hey, what’s goin’ on over here?”

  “Shhhh!” came the reply.

  The radio continued: “… the attack was apparently made on all naval and military activities on the principal island of Oahu. The president’s brief statement was read to reporters by Stephen Early, the president’s secretary. A Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor would naturally mean war. Such an attack would naturally bring a counterattack, and hostilities of this kind would naturally mean that the president would ask Congress for a declaration of war. There is no doubt, from the temper of Congress, that such a declaration would be granted. We return you back to New York, and we’ll give you later information as it comes along from the White House. We return you back to New York…”

  A great silence hung over the crowd. I was waiting for one of the adults, maybe Coach, to come up with some words of sanity. Instead, one of the men asked the question that was on everybody’s mind: “Say, where in the hell is Pearl Harbor?”

  That was about the gist of it. Where in the hell is Pearl Harbor? Nobody had the foggiest that 108,504 U.S. servicemen would have to die in the Pacific Theater of Operation to answer that question, to make things right.

  As for me, while the young men from the Bonecrushers and Leafs ran off to immediately join the navy, all I could think about was Tommy O, our Japanese classmate and batboy for the John Adams HS baseball team, and how he was such a fantastic kid—always smiling, always going out of his way to help. Surely Tommy wasn’t capable of bombing anything—not even trigonometry. Neither was Sumiko Yamaguchi, a darling of a Japanese girl, a senior at school, who made straight A’s and was as sweet and quiet as a field of daffodils.

  Who are these Japanese people? Not anyone I knew, that’s for sure.

  In fact, the only thing we knew about war was from the veterans who served in the World War. They hung around the veterans’ hall all day, piss drunk, yelling at us kids to get the hell away from them. “You little bastards! Get the hell away from me!”

  There was something odd in their demeanor, but what it was was a complete mystery. It was something both sinister and sad, hollow and reluctant.

  Perhaps they were merely living as if they really should have died.

  As for me, all I knew was that life began to move a great deal faster from that moment on.

  It moved faster and faster until my world grew white with blindness as the LST doors opened and deposited us on the Pacific Ocean, racing toward Peleliu, and what remained of the rest of our lives. Then it moved quicker still.

  *

  United States Marine Corps Recruiting Station, 290 Broadway, Manhattan, New York, early December 1942.

  E

  F P

  T O Z

  L P E D …

  “Okay, son, now cover your right eye and read the chart for me, please.”

  A guy up the line, a few people in front of me, began reading the eye chart. I commenced to concentrate, to memorize, listening to the letters and repeating them in my head, focusing on their sequence.

  I was pretty good at keeping figures and patterns in my head, but this part—the military physical—made me nervous.

  “That’s fine. Now cover your left eye, please,” the doctor intoned at the front of the line. When the physician was satisfied with the reading, he would send the person up ahead for the next phase of enlistment, and the line lurched forward once more, the next guy filling the spot vacated by the one who just tested.

  “Next!”

  One more guy and then I’d be “next.”

  By the time I made it to the head of the line, I was finally able to peek over the shoulder of the guy in front of me to read the chart, stealing quick glances, trying not to appear too obvious.

  The chart wasn’t blurry. It looked perfectly clear. Even so, I knew that when it came time for me to read with my right eye alone, I’d be doomed. I didn’t have any depth perception.

  In fact, at the onset of the war, in 1941, I had applied for the navy, because my buddy Sonny Campbell had joined. He sent me a photo of himself dressed in his navy denims, holding a rifle to his chest, so naturally I thought I’d look pretty smart in the same getup.

  Sonny was killed in the boiler room aboard the USS Hornet off the Solomon Islands.

  I failed the navy eye test.

  Amblyopia was what I was diagnosed with when I was six years old. In common parlance, they called it a “lazy eye”—even though my eye always appeared normal and never looked off toward the Joneses. It was merely a curvature in my right eye, which caused me the embarrassment of wearing eyeglasses at an early age.

  The truth is, I don’t think the glasses did me much good. It was sports—I excelled in just about all of them, baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—that forced my eyes to work together, so that my left eye compensated for my right eye’s deficiencies. Nevertheless, sports had nothing to do with standing stationary in front of an eye chart, attempting to read off a series of letters with a bum headlight.

  The U.S. Navy caught it right away.

  The United States Army didn’t even get the chance. I got so fed up in the waiting room that I fished my paperwork from the bottom of the incoming tray and never looked back.

  So there I stood in line waiting for the Marine Corps eye exam, trying my best to get into the service any way I could before they drafted me.

  This was my last chance to serve my country.

  “Next!”

  I walked up and gave the doctor my slip of paper. He attached it to a clipboard and then wrote something down.

  Not looking up, he said, “Alright, please cover your right eye and r
ead the chart for me. Left to right, please.”

  Instead, I covered my left eye, looking hazily through my right, and began spouting off the letters from memory, before I could forget them. That was the plan. To see if I could trick them up.

  “E,F,P,T,O,Z,L,P,E,D,P,E,C,F,D—”

  “No, no, son, you’re supposed to start with your left eye and then test the right one.” The doctor finally looked up.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Should I do it again?”

  “No. That’s alright, that was fine. Just cover your right eye now, so that we can test your left.”

  Let me tell you, I read all the way to the bottom of the chart as quick as an auctioneer.

  The next thing I knew the Marine Corps was swearing me in.

  I was only eighteen years old.

  *

  I am eighteen years old.

  “I’m a shitbird from Yemassee!”

  “You’re a what?” the drill instructor calls back.

  “I’m a shitbird!”

  “A shitbird from where, goddammit!”

  “From Yemassee!” the new recruit says. The new “boot” staggers around the barracks with a bucket over his head, his words ringing out dull and metallic inside the pail. It’s pretty comical (only if it’s not you with the bucket on your head). “A shitbird from Yemassee!”

  Evidently we’re all shitbirds on Parris Island, South Carolina. Everywhere you go it’s shitbird-this and shitbird-that. Shitbirds grow wild out in the marshes that surround the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Jerkwater, USA. You’re a shitbird when they shear the top of your head so you look like a scalded dog. You’re a shitbird for being in the front of the line, and a shitbird for standing at the rear. You’re a shitbird for not shaving your face, even though you haven’t got a hair to shave. You’re a shitbird.