Battleground Pacific Read online

  Atop Hill 140, not only are there no Japanese, but we were also told to relieve some marines on the hill … and when we get here, there is only emptiness and waste, no marines.

  A lone airplane, a U.S. Kingfisher—the type of small pontoon plane a battleship catapults off the back of its fantail—circles above us in near-silence. It’s a funny-looking little aircraft, with skinny legs angling down into big pontoons for feet, but it’s also majestic. It’s beautiful not because it’s a great bird of war, but beautiful because there are no Japanese trying to knock the little gnat from the sky. Such a slow target as that would surely be a luscious target, even for a lone Nip rifleman.

  “Say, would ya get a load of that guy? What’s on this jerk’s mind?” A marine nods up toward the plane. “Must be a big ship nearby or something, ya reckon?”

  “Probably,” I say. Then I see the pilot’s arm come over the edge of the cockpit. “Look at that! He’s waving at us!”

  There’s something curious about the pilot’s arm, though. “What’s that he’s got in his hand?”

  “What?” Marines look up and shield their eyes from the sun.

  “Shit! That’s a gun!”

  “What?”

  Before we can scramble, we hear the dull thud of a slug thumping the ground nearby, and then the pop of a small-caliber handgun.

  “Christ, the dumb sonuvabitch is shootin’ at us!”

  Thump! Thump! A few more slugs smack the ground, way too close to where they might actually hit somebody.

  “What’sa matter with this dumb fuck?!”

  “Hey, hey, we’re marines, ya stupid ass!”

  A few of the guys look like they are about to bring their rifles to their shoulders and shoot back at the Kingfisher, but they don’t, despite it taking all their effort to hold themselves back. We are simply so accustomed to retaliating when fired upon. At the same time, however, we also don’t want to kill anymore, especially an American. Besides, if we fire on the Kingfisher, who knows, he might call in a whole barrage of artillery from the ships, dead on our coordinates.

  Other marines jump up and wave their helmets, and we all shout as loud as we can for the pilot to peel off, we are not Japs!

  One more slug hits the ground before the pilot finally gets the message and slowly veers off, heading back over the water. I don’t feel sorry for the pilot, but I’m sure the guy felt like a real heel when he realized he mistook us for Nips.

  “Goddammit!” Jimmy throws his helmet down in disgust. “As if we didn’t have enough!”

  Jimmy speaks for all of us—even Charlie Allmann, who doesn’t have anything to say. I don’t think Charlie has fired his weapon the whole time we’ve been here. Charlie Allmann, from Colby, Wisconsin, just sits on the coral, his face in his hands, preferring the darkness to whatever runs wild in the real world.

  For the marine in combat, however, ignorance is the closest shot toward the victim known as bliss.

  *

  When we come down from the hill, the evening of the twelfth, we hear that our company commanding officer, Captain Andrew “Ack Ack” Haldane, was killed earlier in the day. Bang! He took one right through the head like Levy.

  I don’t think very many marines know what really led up to Haldane getting killed. We hear all sorts of scuttlebutt, but since every marine claims he was right there when Haldane bought it, the picture is a little unclear.

  The word is Haldane was on an unfamiliar ridge with a few of the sergeants, trying to register in a machine gun over difficult terrain, when he poked his head up—only for a second to get his bearings—and a Nip rifleman just drilled one through his cranium.

  It sounds about right.

  Since D-day we had already lost a lot of brass. Lieutenant John “Moose” Barrett, from 1st Platoon, bought it early in the fight, our own Lieutenant Bauerschmidt, up on the Five Sisters, Lieutenant Hillbilly Jones, and Captain Smith, the L Company CO, got it—and now K Company’s CO is killed as well. I might sound callous, but in light of all that, how am I supposed to care? It’s sad, sure, when any marine is killed; nevertheless, once it’s done, there’s nothing more that anybody can do about it. Even if I had known Haldane well, my tears wouldn’t bring him back to life, as if we were living in some sort of fairy-tale world. I met the captain once, and he was the sort of guy who seemed to genuinely care for even the lowliest marine. A marine can appreciate and respect that. On the other hand, it takes marines who are always hanging back by the company CP to really moan about a guy they’ve had a love affair with every day. I didn’t have that sort of luxury, so my eyes are dry.

  “Well.” Gene eases himself down beside me. “Shame about Haldane, ain’t it?”

  “Sure is,” I say. “A swell marine.”

  Gene thinks for a moment and then says, “Hey, don’t that make Stumpy our new CO?”

  “Christ, you’re right.” I let that digest. It’s sort of funny. “Well, at least the thing about Stumpy Stanley—he don’t have a chance at gettin’ it if he never gets outta the goddamn CP, huh?”

  Gene whistles. “Ain’t that a fact.”

  It is a fact. A much more acceptable fact would be not losing any more marines, rather than just knowing whose voice was going to be the next one to lead us from the comfort of a foxhole and a spam-can. At least Haldane wasn’t that sort of marine. He’s just a dead one, is all.

  Semper Fi.

  *

  On October 15, 1944, after thirty days of combat, K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, was finally taken off the line, holding the distinction of being the last 1st Marine Division unit to see combat on Peleliu.

  Since October 12 we had played witness to massive bombardments of the cliffs in the Umurbrogol Mountains, napalm runs by our navy and marine planes, and the destruction of countless Japanese weapons, supplies, and corpses, in the attempts to lay waste to the last Nips still holding out on Peleliu.

  “Hell, this is what they should’ve done in the first fucking place!” Bomb it out. Destroy it. Kill the earth.

  Hollow-eyed, we watched the shelling belt into the terrain, in sheets of fire so hot you couldn’t imagine anything could live through such a conflagration. Numb and uncaring, our nerves no longer winced as witnesses to the pain.

  In a dreamlike trance, if they had asked to us to march into the belly of the cauldron to our front, we would’ve had no qualms about doing it.

  What’s one more flame to marines who are already creatures of ash and soot inside?

  Instead, they pulled us off the line. We headed to a newly constructed bivouac they told us was dubbed White Beach.

  So they marched us just a short stroll from the area with the fortress, around the bend and onto the West Road, then another hundred yards down and to the right, between the West Road and the Pacific Ocean, and there was White Beach. It was as lovely to us as the name sounded.

  The whole area was about the size of two tennis courts, with a smattering of palm trees—a few of them standing and a few of them fallen and twisted from taking some shells at one time or another—the entire scene surrounded by clean beach sand. Pretty as a picture.

  As we came down to White Beach, however, there was nothing pretty about us.

  Our faces were grimy and caked with sweat, dirt, and flecks of coral, as well as being heat-blasted from explosions and the rays of the sun. Light to heavy beards itched on our faces, clotted with filth and sand fleas. We were sunburned and raw on our shoulders, in the crooks of our elbows and knees, and on our feet. Our boondockers were shredded in the leather and shaved off at the soles, to the point where they were almost disintegrating. Some of us no longer even had dungaree jackets, but for those who did, their jackets were begging for the fire. Most of our dungaree pants were torn at the knees and split at the bottoms; our leggings were either missing or plastered to our legs like casts. All of our dungarees were tinted white with perspiration and coral dust. Not only were they stiff to the touch, but they also inflamed the skin beneath them, rubbing the
legs sore, inciting ingrown hairs on the tops of our thighs, where the material rubbed the flesh—scraping like sandpaper anywhere that was tender and apt to fester. Scabs fell off and then grew back again, never quite healing because of the constant cycle. Our hands ached and were cracked at the knuckles. Overly long fingernails were chipped and packed full with black matter. We had smoked too much and eaten too little. We were at least twenty pounds too light. I could feel my ribs, even beneath the herringbone of my dungaree jacket. The only things clean and in good order about us were our weapons. Those we kept immaculate. Our weapons were our livelihood. Not our bodies, not our clothes, not even our minds—only our weapons.

  It was odd, but when we arrived at White Beach, it appeared that some of K Company had been there for a few days already. There were familiar marines walking around White Beach with clean dungarees, shaved faces, and fresh smiles.

  I didn’t know what to think.

  “You see this crap, Mace?” Frank Minkewitz asked.

  “No,” I replied. “I don’t see nothin’.”

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they told us to draw hammocks and set them up between the palms so that we would have a place to sleep. When that was done they lined us up and issued us clean dungarees, boondockers, and a ditty bag, which contained simple toiletries. However, I had a little extra in my ditty bag. Someone had placed a corncob pipe in there—identical to the one that made Olive Oyl go nutty over a diminutive sailor.

  “Say, what the fuck is this?” I pulled out the pipe.

  “Eh … well, I’d say that it looks like a pipe, Mace.”

  “Oh yeah, ya think it does, do ya, Holland? That’s why they put mugs like you inna rifle squad. A regular goddamn Edison. I know it’s a friggin’ pipe, but what’s the fuckin’ thing doin’ here?”

  “I dunno.” Gene smiled. “Maybe they took one look at ya and figured you was a pipe smoker.”

  “Ha. Ha. Screw you, Holland. You just make sure your hammock isn’t anywhere near mine tonight.”

  We laughed. We bathed in the ocean. We donned our new dungarees and boondockers. We shaved and ate. We put our immaculate weapons away where we didn’t need them.

  It’s amazing what a little good treatment would do to the frontline marine. It was as if somebody reverse engineered a weapon, so instead of pulling the trigger and killing us, it brought us back to life.

  For the rest of our time on White Beach, I carried the pipe in my mouth. I never smoked it—hell, I had never lit a pipe in my life—but it was goofy and I liked it. Whoever decided to put the pipe in my ditty bag had no way of knowing, but just that simple thing, that one little thing, was enough to bring a skinny twenty-year-old marine back from everything that hurt so much about war.

  *

  The last days of Peleliu, for me, ended with a grave marker, a stolen jeep, a photograph … and a fistful of stars.

  After a while, just hanging around White Beach, we began to grow a little bored.

  I’ve heard it said that the experience of the combat infantryman is one of boredom, followed by brief moments of intense slaughter. Then the cycle repeats itself until you’re KIA. That might be the experience of other battles, but Peleliu always kept us jumping—until the very end.

  They had told us a couple of days after arriving at White Beach that we were now waiting for a ship to take us back to Pavuvu. This was fantastic news. They never should have told us that, though, because the more we sat around doing nothing, the more we got antsy. The more young men get antsy, after escaping something as hard as death, the more they are likely to ramp up and stretch their legs.

  “Say, Gene, whattaya say we get out of here and go do somethin’?”

  “Do something? Like what?”

  “I dunno … Like go see Levy at the cemetery. Anything to get the hell outta here. Maybe go scrounge up a meal of somethin’.”

  So Gene and I begin walking. Eventually we’re able to hitch a ride on a few trucks, until we make it all the way south, between Orange Beach 2 and the airfield, where they set up the 1st Division cemetery.

  We’re greeted with rows upon rows of white crosses, all laid out neat, in perfect straight lines. The outer edges of the cemetery are still a bustle of work, however, as fresh holes are dug, Marines are being placed into new graves, and all the while boys from Graves Registration are using rakes to smooth the spaces between the graves, keeping a tidy look around the area.

  It’s a lot to take in. Gene and I walk the paths between the graves, gazing at the various names etched upon the crosses, neither one of us saying a word, both of us adrift in the heat of the day: the same sun these marines died under, the same sky, the same ground they fought for, and now they own this coral rock in ways they never thought they’d own anything in their lives … much less their deaths. This ground is rich with the blood of proud American sons.

  I stand over Sy’s grave, trying to keep the thoughts at bay. I know he’s down there, wrapped up in a bag or something, sightless, unmoving, unfeeling. Brooklyn. He’s from Brooklyn, the same place my folks are from. I look around the island, beyond the barrier of crosses, and I’m disgusted with the place because it’s nothing like New York. It’s nothing like anything we’ve ever known. We’ll leave here knowing that we left a whole lot of marines behind who couldn’t have cared less about coming to Peleliu.

  At least they didn’t die for nothing. People do that—“die for nothing”—back in the States all the time, but they’ll care about these boys of Peleliu forever.

  All I can do, rather than dwell on it all, is look down at Levy’s grave and say, “Well, this is it.”

  It’s the same words I waited my whole life to say, right before the ramp of our amtrac dropped the day we arrived here.

  This is it, Sy.

  So why am I not satisfied?

  “Hey, buddy,” I call to one of the Graves Registration marines.

  “Who, me?” He stops what he’s doing and leans on his rake.

  “Yeah, come over here. Look, this guy … this guy is Jewish. What’s he got a cross for? Shouldn’t he have a Star of David over here?”

  At first the GR marine doesn’t say anything. He simply gazes around the graveyard, as if he heard a ghost calling his name.

  He looks back at me. “Well, umm … we don’t have a star like that. I don’t know, buddy. I mean, what do ya want me to do about it? I just work here, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.” My eyes meet Holland’s. “Let’s get the fuck outta here, Gene.”

  Forget it about it, Sterl. Sy’s only goin’ to be here temporarily, anyway.

  Gene and I leave for Purple Beach, not looking back across the cemetery. I did what I came for, and once I had seen Levy off, that’s all the satisfaction I needed.

  On the way to Purple Beach, we have to cross the airfield. This time, the airfield is chock-full of American planes, spread out, so that if the Nips came by on a strafing run they couldn’t hit our planes in a straight line. Moreover, the planes are all parked on a newly repaired airstrip, which shows no sign that we’d ever had the hell shelled out of us when we made our run across it a month ago.

  “Hey, how’s it goin’, guys?” a young pilot greets us.

  Gene and I stroll over to a lanky blond-haired pilot who’s sitting by the runway eating his lunch. This pilot looks like he can’t be more than twenty-three at the most.

  Gene says, “Okay, I guess. Looks like we’ll be leavin’ this place soon.”

  “Yeah,” I say to Gene and the pilot. “Place looks a lot different from when we took this damn thing.”

  The pilot drops his spoon in his can of food and looks at us slack-jawed. “You mean … is that right? You people have been here since D-day?” he asks.

  “Yep,” I reply. “Say, tell me, you made any runs at Babelthuap?”

  Babelthuap is the largest of the Palau Islands, a place we’ve heard is brimming with Nips—a place none of us marines want to go. With all the brass jerking us around, w
ith talk about going back to Pavuvu, and so far none of it has materialized, it wouldn’t surprise us if Babelthuap is the next item on the menu.

  “Have I?” The pilot laughs. “You kiddin’? Place is almost finished. Lemme tell ya somethin’ funny. The Nips, they’ve got this tower over there, right? Glass windows. A radio tower or somethin’. Anyway, boy, we come flyin’ over and shoot the hell outta them glass windows. Then, and get this—we come back, right? And the sonsabitches have put the glass right back in the windows! So we just flyyyy back over and tatatatatat—blow ’em out again!”

  We all laugh. “Yeah, that’s great!”

  I think the pilot notices us staring down at his food. I don’t even realize I’m hungry until I’m caught eyeballing his food, embarrassed.

  The young pilot puts a smile on his face again so that we won’t feel bad as he holds out a gallon can of something.

  “Hey, fellas—you guys want the rest of this? I’m, umm … I’m really not hungry. It’s not much, but it sure is tasty. Chicken and gravy.”

  We thank the pilot and part ways. Now we have something to eat on our way to Purple Beach. Sure, they’re feeding us on White Beach—already we’re starting to regain some weight—yet the food on White Beach is a part of the same problem, the monotony that made us want to get out of there in the first place.

  Purple Beach this time around doesn’t look anything like it did when we were there the first time. Now Purple Beach looks like a navy paradise: Ships moored up everywhere, LSTs snug to the beach, a veritable swarm of swabbies, all ranks, milling about, laboring on their ships, huddled in circles playing cards, smoking, probably yucking it up over some photos of geisha girls they’ve traded for.

  I’m not sure the navy guys take much notice of us, but we sure feel out of place.

  Eventually, after we hang around awhile, some sailors take us aboard ship, where we end up with a lunch of Spam and dehydrated vegetables.

  We thank the U.S. Navy and begin our trek back to White Beach, meeting up with Hurricane Hensen along the way. Hensen gives us some cock-and-bull story that he got lost and he’s been looking for K Company this whole time. Look, the feeling is, you don’t have to lie to us. Just tell us you’ve been loafing around for a few days and we’ll believe you; otherwise you can dispense with the bullshit. It’s not like Gene and I are exactly toeing the company line either.