Battleground Pacific Read online

  A few of us have found a place in the shade where we can sit for a while, smoking, eating, simply waiting for more orders to come down the pipe—hopefully something that brings us close to the rear, because coming out of those empty cliffs was just too creepy; we’ve earned a break. Nonetheless, sitting on our butts like this, it almost feels as if we’re “Marine Raiders,” too. It’s a nice respite, despite the heat and the shouts of our mortar fire slapping into the cliffs.

  You’re not outta the woods yet, Goldilocks.

  About fifty yards away, the 1st Platoon is set up by some tanks, and they appear to be simply idling there as well.

  Quickly, a jeep drives past us and then careens off to the right, headed in the direction of 1st Platoon.

  “Say, that was a major in that jeep, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep. Headquarters, looks like.”

  It’s Major Clyde Brooks, USMC, in the jeep; what he’s doing here nobody will say, but we know the score better than anybody. HQ doesn’t go anywhere near the front lines, but it seems that some of the major’s little chicks got their feathers ruffled and Brooks is here wanting us to find the fox who did it.

  That’s the stupidity of how Hillbilly Jones and McClary get killed. All because of a couple of stupid shits with jungleitis, wanting to prove the improvable, as gung ho marines.

  “Come on, you guys, get your shit together.” Sergeant McEnery walks up to us, his tommy gun slung over his shoulder. “Lieutenant Jones asked for a little support over there. Sniper’s got this place crawlin’.”

  Holland looks like he’s about to pass out over this order. “Oh, Christ, Jim! Because of those assholes from headquarters? Let ’em get killed, serves ’em right!”

  “Gene…” McEnery doesn’t know what to say. You can tell Jimmy doesn’t believe in this mission either. “Gene, just get your weapon and come on.” Jim walks off.

  Holland looks at me as if I can do something about it. “Ya know we’re not goin’ to see a single fuckin’ Nip up there. You know that, right?”

  So 3rd Squad sets up about thirty yards from 1st Platoon and the tanks. We pretend to look for “snipers.” Pretend because Gene is right. Just like the day when Teskevich was killed on the tank, there’s no way of telling where the Japs are hidden along the road and in the cliffs. The Nips only shoot in the daytime, when the sun is too bright, and you can see neither their muzzle flashes nor the smoke spewing from their rifles.

  “Hey, what is that guy doin’?”

  Amazingly a marine climbs atop one of the tanks, potentially exposing himself to a Nip riflemen.

  “I dunno,” I say. “Must be a mortar spotter, but the marine’s gonna get himself killed if he don’t watch out.”

  No sooner do the words come out of my mouth than the marine falls from the tank.

  Dammit! It is a sick sight to watch. I look for even the smallest puff of smoke anywhere in the vicinity, but nothing.

  Then, to our surprise, the fallen marine gets back up and starts climbing up the side of the tank again, waving off the corpsmen who had collected by the tank’s treads.

  “Hey, maybe he just fell off on his own the first time.” I’m too far away to really tell.

  “Either that or this is one loony marine.”

  The marine is only atop the tank’s turret for about two seconds, tops, when he topples again and hits the ground in a small fan of coral dust. He doesn’t get back up. And here I am rooting for this guy, as if he had a chance in hell, after giving himself the best seat in the house.

  All for nothing. If a single Nip is killed up here it’s only because one of the mortarmen or one of our tanks got lucky. Otherwise, the only dead Japs in this area are the skeletal remains of the ones they bulldozed to the side of the road two weeks ago.

  The real irony, on the other hand, is that if our illustrious Marine Raiders wanted souvenirs, they would’ve had to rummage through the skeletons of the dead Nips who had already been picked over by marines who had come this way dozens of times before them. The little turds from headquarters would have come away with nothing at all. Nothing for nothing. Now there are two more dead riflemen, who reached up for a hook in the sky and tumbled back to earth for a big nothing.

  There is nothing more for us to do here. We simply leave.

  Walking to the bivouac area, we hear that Lieutenant Jones was the marine who was killed on the tank, and some kid from the 1st Platoon, McClary, bought it in the same area, either right before or after Jones. Somewhere along the way they bring Hillbilly Jones’s body down to the aid station, shortly before we walk up. We had already lost our lieutenant. Now it’s the 1st Platoon’s turn.

  At the aid station I see Corporal Ted “Tex” Barrow, from Kemp, Texas, standing over a dead marine reposing on a stretcher at the side of the aid station. The dead man is covered with a poncho.

  “Say, Tex, is this Hillbilly here?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know.” Tex shrugs. “I guess so.”

  I reach down and lift up the poncho at the head of the stretcher, exposing only the face of the dead marine underneath. It’s Jones, alright. I stand right behind his body, looking down at his face. His face is perfectly set in an attitude of calm and ease. There’s not a blemish on him, yet his skin gives off a clammy sheen, as if the last beads of sweat his body produced had not finished drying in death. The only thing I’m really drawn to, though, is that his nose appears slightly skewed—broken at one time, perhaps playing football or boxing in high school.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” I say, to no one in particular.

  I don’t know why I felt compelled to lift the tarp. I just did. It could have been me lying on the stretcher, gazing down on myself, dead, and I would have felt just the same. Nothing.

  *

  Now, you can do a lot with the wooden coffins they use to transport dead marines in, besides burying them in the 1st Division cemetery on Peleliu. In the case of the outpost off the West Road, they’ve turned several of these coffins upside down and then, with a circular saw, cut three holes in the underside of each box, packing dirt around the sides of them so the smell won’t leak out, and voilà! A place for marines to take a crap. That’s not where the amenities end, either.

  After we come around a little bend on the West Road, on the Lobster Claw of the island, we see part of the 3rd Platoon already situated in a small patch of jungle on our left, where the army had cleaned out a place for themselves weeks before. The marines there are even making pancakes, sitting around drinking clean water and waving. Then, fifteen or twenty yards past them, we come up to another cleared-out area with a high hill to our right, and in a wide open space farther to the right of the bend, and up a little rise, is a fortress (or, not to give the wrong impression, at least it seems like a fortress to me).

  This fortress is at least seven and a half feet tall, with wooden posts holding up a sandbagged top, and below that is a square-cut hole in the ground, about seven feet square and six feet deep. So if we jump into the fort, it looks like we can hold off the whole Japanese army with a bunker like this. It has an entrance, which you don’t have to go through to use, and a machine-gun emplacement, which covers the whole area perfectly. To the sides are ready-made foxholes, and then down a little slope there looks to be a spot where the mangrove has been bulldozed out, nice and clean. They could have parked four of five trucks in this large, sheared-out area abutting the jungle. That’s where they set up the three-holed crapper made out of coffins.

  “Holy shit!” Corpsman Chulis says. “Did we wake up on another island or somethin’?”

  “Wow! Wouldja look at this? Didn’t I tell ya no more fightin’?”

  We settle in. Jimmy and I go into the fort, where for the first time the coolness of the earth and the overhead sandbags impart the closest thing to real shade we’ve felt since we’ve been on the island. Everywhere else we’ve gone we’ve merely experienced subtle increments of hot and hotter.

  McEnery takes off his helmet and props his tomm
y gun in the corner, and immediately he lays claim to one of the cots in the bottom of the bunker by stretching his stinking body out on it.

  He closes his eyes and lets out a long sigh. “Oh, this is so good.”

  Taking off my helmet, too, I lean up against the inside of the bunker and rub my fingers through my hair, shaking out the crap: bits and pieces of foreign matter that’s been lurking near my scalp for days now. The skin on my head feels slick with a thin layer of some sort of gunky matter.

  I look at Jim. “Yeah, but ya know, Jim, if we’ve got a bungalow like this…? Imagine what kinda CP Haldane and Stanley and them got.”

  “Ya know, Mace”—McEnery lolls his head toward me and opens one eye—“imagine if you talk too friggin’ much.”

  A real funny guy, that McEnery.

  As I’m about to leave, Jim calls out to me. “Oh yeah, and if you see that Greek, Chulis, tell him to come on down, willya?”

  “Sure thing, Jim,” I say. “I’ll tell him you’ve got a football game goin’ on down here and he gets to play center. That should do it.”

  *

  By early afternoon Jimmy and Corpsman Chulis are piss drunk from a bottle of sake they were adventurous enough to drink. We passed up so many of these corked bottles of sake on the island, because the brass told us not to drink them. The scuttlebutt was that the Nips had poisoned their liquor, claiming that we Americans were nothing but a lot of bloodthirsty drunks, imbibing anything fermented, be it grain, rice, potato, or catnip, if you could get enough sauce out of it. That, of course, is a lie (for everyone except Jimmy and the Greek). Nevertheless, poison or not, the last thing we need is to go on a bender with the Nips breathing down our napes.

  We’re safe here, though. It’s real good. It’s even real funny when McEnery and Chulis begin dancing together.

  Arms locked, legs flying, up and down the two drunks bend and gyrate. Whatever half-in-the-bag dance they’re performing is a wild mixture of the Greek Kalamatianós, the Russian Cossack dance, and the plain ol’ American Turkey Trot. Around and around they spin, sake sloshing out of the bottle they pass between themselves, while Chulis punctuates the dance with roisterous attempts at carrying a melody between slobbery lips.

  “Jesus, Sterl, look at ’em go!” Holland beams at me.

  “Yeah, ya know what I think, Gene?” I’ve got a smile of my own. You just can’t help it, even here. Everyone is grinning, except for maybe Allmann—who wouldn’t know a smile from a bucktoothed Chink.

  “I think we’ve been on this island for too goddamn long, Holland!”

  It’s a real riot until the shit hits the fan.

  “Hey, Nips! Nips!” One of Pappy Moore’s marines comes running up the slope toward us, trying to pull his dungaree pants up, looking as if he’s about to trip on the pants if he doesn’t get them over his hips quick enough. He’s sprinting from the direction of the shitboxes.

  Instinctively I reach out for my weapon, as if my BAR’s right beside me—but it’s not. It’s in the bunker with all my other gear. Dammit!

  Another marine runs up to the guy who sounded the alarm and holds him by the shoulders. “Wait, wait, wait … hold on, hold up, buddy … what’s goin’ on? Nips where?”

  The first marine bends over double, with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “Down there,” he says. “I was … I was, ya know, takin’ a crap, when alluva sudden I hear this moanin’ … and Christ! I look around an’ there’s a live Nip right behind me—in the mangrove—just layin’ there moanin’ an’ groanin’. Scared the shit outta me!”

  At this a couple of marines chuckle and wink at each other.

  The second marine asks, “He still there?”

  “Hell, I hope not!” the first marine replies, rebuckling his belt. His cheeks are clearly flushed with excitement as well as a little hint of embarrassment.

  Soon two armed marines cautiously head down the slope. We don’t have to wait long until they return with one of the most pitiful sights I’ve seen on Peleliu.

  They’ve got a Nip with them, one marine carrying him by the back of his black pajama collar while the other marine totes him by the waist of his britches—or, closer to the fact, the two marines carry what amounts to a human matchstick, swathed in tattered raiments.

  “Hey, put him over here. Over here,” a marine says, and they drop the Nip in the dirt right by our fort. Everyone crowds around just to steal a peek at him.

  The Jap is more than a mere curiosity to me, however. To me, he’s the first live Japanese I’ve seen that isn’t trying to kill me … and I’m not trying to kill him. In fact, he’s a human being, despite my mind telling me otherwise. I see him and immediately realize he’s on his way out of this world.

  As a matter of fact, he’s the most emaciated, sickly-looking thing I’ve seen in my life. From his close-cropped hair, pushed down on his forehead, to his obsidian marble eyes, he lies there, in an awkward heap, bent in ways that would make a contortionist tremble. I can only imagine what’s going through his mind, how we marines must appear horrid, hovering over him as we are. For God’s sake, his muscles appear to be mere tendons; his bones have a fragile birdlike quality beneath his paper-thin skin. It’s a wonder he can even move, though he manages to bring his fingers to his lips, miming that he wants a cigarette. His face is asking and anguished. His eyes never appear to blink, and his mouth hangs slack, showing off a perfect row of yellowed Asian teeth.

  “Oh my God, what do ya think happened to this guy?” a marine asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Looks like he wants a smoke, though.”

  A marine gives him a cigarette and lights it for him. The Jap takes two puffs off it, drops it aside, and then goes through the motion of asking for another one. So we give him another one … and then the same thing: Two puffs and he drops the smoke. It’s a curious thing to do; we don’t care. We squat around him, and everyone genuinely feels sorry for him. We even want him to pull through.

  The only thing that we can gather is that this Nip had been hiding out in the mangroves since D-day, just waiting to take his shot, but for whatever reason, his chance never came. So as the days went by and the area got cleaned out and situated, the Jap just lay out there, scared or ashamed to go back to his unit, content to die at the edge of the mangrove, until we came along and rescued him. Fat chance of a rescue, though.

  After we’ve ogled the Jap awhile, the highest-ranking officer remaining, Lieutenant Charles “Duke” Ellington from the mortars, comes over to see what’s going on—to figure out what to do with the Nip. Ellington brings with him an interpreter, but from the looks of things the interpreter doesn’t get two words out of this sorry creature.

  “Well…” Ellington sighs. “Let’s at least get the poor devil off the ground and get him on a stretcher or something.” Evidently Duke hears that McEnery has a cot, so he goes over to the entrance of the fort and calls down for Jim to bring up a stretcher.

  Duke waits for a few minutes, and when nothing happens he goes back to the bunker and asks again.

  This time, though, he gets a curt answer from McEnery. “No.”

  Whatever is going through Ellington’s mind at the moment, he doesn’t show it. Basically, Ellington was just told to go to hell by a sergeant. Yet, in a situation like this, there’s not even any face to save. What is Duke going to do, run Jimmy up on charges and take him to the brig? Over a Jap who’s probably going to die anyway? Besides, the fact is, with Bauerschmidt killed, Rigney killed, and Spiece wounded, Jimmy is the highest-ranking marine the 3rd Platoon can find. Just a sergeant, and most of our fire team leaders are gone, too.

  Duke’s no dummy, and as the leader of the mortar platoon, he realizes he’s out of his element among riflemen—it’s simply not worth it. Still, Jim was insubordinate. Yet they take the Nip away, as is, no questions asked.

  “Boy, that McEnery’s got some nuts talking to Duke like that.” Jack Baugh shakes his head.

  “Yeah, and if Duke knew
he was drunk, he would’ve run Jim up on a drumhead, nuts and all.”

  Later we find out that the Jap died on his way to the company CP. He must have been ready.

  We really hated to hear that.

  *

  Back on the line. October 12, 1944. D-day +27.

  When you’re a kid, they make you read in the history books about all these famous battles that ended in big cavalry charges, great bloodbaths, and climactic clashes that changed the course of wars and indelibly changed the lives of the men who fought them. Names like Waterloo, Thermopylae, the Little Big Horn, and Yorktown ring down through the ages as final conflicts, which ended with such big bangs that little men with pen and paper have spent their whole lives edifying the sacrifice, the glory, the human tragedy, and the necessity of the thousands of men who fought for their lives in those battles. Their guts spilled out on foreign soils, gagging on their blood, dying in their own excrement, the men who fought those battles never knew that their lives would one day be reduced to mere words in a schoolchild’s eyes—and in turn, those children themselves would one day fight in battles with equally strange names, like Tarawa, Guadalcanal, and Ngesebus.

  Peleliu does not end with a bang. Instead it dies with a whimper. There are no great defining moments, no last Banzai charge from the Japanese, and no bloody stories to tell. History is doomed to fail itself.

  In fact, we’re on the line on October 12, 1944, when Peleliu has been deemed “secure” by the brass. In effect, they say it’s over. Yet we’re still here.

  The truth is, if there is any last bang to the battle of Peleliu, it is for our company CO, Captain Andrew Haldane, and the poor suckers like us who have climbed one last hill on Peleliu only to face death in a very different way. It’s as if they had to invent a new way to kill us when the Japanese were not enough to finish the job.

  This dung heap, Hill 140, is the last dumb analogy to how Peleliu ended for us in the middle weeks of October 1944. We climb, climb, climb … fight, fight, fight, only to reach the summit of the biggest gag since “Three days and this will all be over.”