Battleground Pacific Read online

  Presently, Hensen pipes up. “Say, take a look at those army boys.”

  Off the side of the road is an army bivouac area, a smallish campsite, about half the size of ours on White Beach. There are just a few tents erected, so it’s probably for a special unit, especially isolated like they are, out here on this desolate stretch.

  Splitting up, we sort of skirt around the camp, cautiously—each of us eyeballing whatever it is we hope to find here. There isn’t much, but there’s a jeep. The vehicle is parked out by itself, near a tent with its flaps closed. Suddenly I’ve got an idea. My grin grows as wide as the infamous Cheshire variety. I’m back in Queens and there’s no such thing as a war in the Pacific. I’ve never known combat. I’ve never killed a man. I’m only a kid.

  Keys in the ignition? Check.

  Nobody around? Check.

  Property of the United States Army? Precisely.

  And I’m gone!

  Boy, it feels good driving a car for the first time in … Jesus, I don’t know when. If someone had stepped out of that tent, while I was in the jeep, I’d have had my speech ready: “Oh, I was just gettin’ that homesick feeling—how it feels to ride in a car again, ya know?” Thankfully nobody saw me, and here I am skidding around to where Holland and Hensen are standing, their jaws nearly touching the ground at the sight of me in this beautiful piece of machinery.

  “Hey, fellas,” I say, pulling up in a cloud of dust. “Did somebody call for a cab?”

  And we’re gone!

  It’s a joyride up the West Road—a place that had caused us so much trouble in the past—through Sniper Alley, the whole megillah. Yet this time the only shots we take are from the eyes of angry GIs and marines as we pepper them with coral powder, zipping by as we are.

  “Hey, watch it, assholes!” somebody yells at us.

  Who cares? We’re whooping it up and laughing the whole way, stealing quick glances over our shoulders, seeing who’s receiving the butt-end of our joke. It’s a freedom. It’s freedom that, by God, we’ve earned! It feels as if we have eagle’s wings—and nobody clips the wings of those sovereign birds. They just fly, without a care in the world.

  By the time we pull into White Beach I’ve already got it in my head that we need to dissociate ourselves from the jeep—but fast!

  “Wow, look at this!” a marine says as some of the boys begin crowding around the jeep.

  I don’t want anyone to ask too many questions, so quickly I say, “Hey, yeah, why don’t you guys go take her for a ride?”

  Just as soon as two marines hop in the jeep, I grab Holland and Hensen by the elbows and navigate them into the crowd. “C’mon, let’s take a walk inside here. Mingle … mingle with the boys, huh?” So we mail into camp like we know from nothing. My accomplices know exactly where I’m coming from. If somebody gets caught with the swiped jeep, it’s not going to be one of us.

  Still, when the other marines take off in the jeep, Holland pulls me aside. “Look, Sterl, I didn’t wanna tell you then … but when we were at that army camp, I dunno, it must have been about … say, a minute, at the most … when you pulled up in the jeep … Hensen and I saw this army lieutenant get outta the jeep and go inside the tent. Yeah, he couldn’t have been in there a minute before you took the thing.”

  “No foolin’?” I ask.

  “Uh-huh, no foolin’.”

  I’ve got a knot in my stomach as big as a baseball, having come so close to being caught. If I had known then what Gene just told me now, I would have never taken the jeep. It would have been a hell of a thing to spend my last few days on Peleliu in the stockade (or whatever passed for one here), considering that Peleliu was a prison in its own right. Nevertheless, what’s done is done, and we had a great time doing it.

  I thought of Private Mercer, and how he’d spent his days on Pavuvu secluded in a tent and how lonely he had been in life. That wasn’t me. I wouldn’t spend my days on Pavuvu like a hermit, not after all this.

  Was it worth it?

  Let me think.

  *

  You bet your ass it was.

  *

  Click.

  The shutter opens, then closes, capturing one moment in time on a strip of celluloid.

  Taking a photograph is a wholly mechanical act, chemical in nature, yet not totally dissimilar to how the human brain traps within its memory stark moments of fear, love, pain, happiness, and beauty, if the instant is powerful enough to etch its way in forever.

  Back in the early 1920s, hundred of thousands of flashbulbs went off, some of them simultaneously, as cameras around the United States captured still images of thousands of American male infants within the camera’s eye. Proud parents arranged for these photographic sessions, wanting their new baby boy’s photo to sit upon the mantel, or by the bedside, as a display of love and warmth and of memories that will forever shine, as long as the living eye is around to behold them.

  Nobody knew, nor did it ever cross their minds, that in twenty years’ time the photos would remain, but the infants emblazoned on the paper would have vanished completely from the earth beneath the undertow of a war that took memories as much as it took lives.

  Memories and lives are the same. For after the lives have passed, so go the memories, if there is no longer anyone around to remember whose photo they’re looking at.

  We did what we did on places like Peleliu so that at least the memory of freedom would live, if not the real artifact in time.

  So when they took us down to Purple Beach, before we loaded up on the Sea Runner for our trip back to Pavuvu, a simple photo was taken.

  First Sergeant David Bailey in our company had the idea to take a photograph of us for posterity. He took the now semifamous photograph of what remained of K Company. Out of 235 men who landed on D-day, September 15, 1944, only 85 of us remained by the end of October. A rotten casualty rate.

  That’s not the photograph that tells the whole story, though.

  There was at least one other photograph taken that day.

  Bailey lined up the remainder of the 3rd Platoon and snapped a quick photo.

  Click.

  Out of thirty-nine riflemen in the 3rd Platoon, across three squads, only nine of us remained unscathed: R. D. Wilson, Orley Uhls, Gene Holland, Jim McEnery, Sterling Mace, P. A. Wilson, Roy Kelly, Frank Minkewitz, and Jack Baugh.

  Also in the photograph was the remainder of the machine-gun squad assigned to our platoon and George Chulis, our corpsman. That’s it.

  Most of us smile. Make of that what you will. Perhaps we’re pleased to be getting off the island. Maybe our smiles are what civilized men are supposed to do when a camera is pointed their direction. Smile.

  Or maybe we’re laughing at a mysterious joke; one whose punch line will be forever shrouded within a piece of celluloid and time—our eyes gazing back across the span of years separating our moment from yours—a clear instant in our lives between those who know and those who know not.

  That the truth is, the survivors of Peleliu had it easy … while those who died there did not.

  *

  I’ve never seen anything this beautiful in all my life. Above me the tapestry of night is perforated by millions of points of light, winking, twinkling, like diamonds scattered across the firmament by God’s great hand. Not the God we met on Peleliu’s scorched shore, but the God who made the calm Pacific Ocean, the effervescent scent of a lightly salted breeze, and the constellations, so very near, yet so very far, as if I can just reach out and touch them, coming away with a fistful of stars.

  I lie on my back, aboard the Sea Runner, as the sky appears to rotate, very slowly … very, very slowly, the billion luminous pinpricks reflecting in my eyes—and in my ears there is the sound of waves gently lapping the sides of the ship, as she cuts through the water on our voyage back to Pavuvu, and the soothing sounds of David Rose’s “Holiday for Strings,” lilting out of the ship’s speakers, wafting toward my open mind—a record the ship’s disc jockey plays to ease th
e savage soul.

  Only now, allowing myself to be hypnotized by the show of sky, am I able to reflect—not upon the dead, or those who fell by the wayside, but upon my own well-being. I made it. I really made it. I’m alive and I didn’t break. If it’s selfishness, then so be it. If I can’t stand to hear the guys talk about what happened on Peleliu, or who got killed, or how bad it was there, then I merely have to crack open the night for solace, for forgetfulness, for nothing at all.

  It’s as if I’ve waited twenty years for this very moment.

  I’ve never been more ready my entire life.

  This is it, Sy.

  This is it.

  10

  TRUE CONFESSIONS

  Combat plays a more significant factor in

  developing an anxiety state than in the other

  types of psychoneuroses. It is not satisfactory,

  although obvious, to assert that a soldier

  develops a combat anxiety from fear of

  battle. Nearly any battle-hardened soldier

  speaks freely of being “scared like hell” prior

  to and in combat. Fear is a natural component

  of battle … The possibility of concussion with anxiety added

  must be considered. Perhaps there have been

  cases of brain concussion with anxiety symptoms

  diagnosed only as anxiety states, because

  a majority of anxiety cases give a

  history of blast exposure.

  “Psychoneuroses, Combat-Anxiety Type”

  Capt. Robert B. McElroy, USMC

  American Journal of Psychiatry, January 1945

  Okinawa Shima, Ryukyu Chain, April 1st, 1945, Codename: l-day (love day).

  The amtrac driver shifted gears on the tractor while taking a quick peek between the two shields in the front of the boat.

  “Lucky bastards!” the driver said between smacking lips. His jaws looked like something mechanical, maybe a nutcracker, chewing a stick of gum, much faster than a human should be able to chew.

  “What’s that?” I called up, barely able to hear anything over the thumping engines of the tractor. The last gear the driver hit really made the tractor skim faster across the ocean.

  “I said, you’re lucky!” The driver leaned closer to me. “The landing’s unopposed!”

  “The hell you say!” I said, unbelieving.

  I looked over the side of the amtrac, and out there was the largest armada of ships I had ever seen. They stretched out as far as the eyes could see, to all sides and beyond. Closer to the point, there was the occasional geyser of water that splashed up between some of the amtracs coming in. Someone was shooting at us.

  “Suit yourself!” the amtrac driver said. “You’ll be walking ashore!”

  We did, too. We walked ashore, as if it were only a training exercise, leaving our makeshift ladders in the amtracs.

  “Wow. Wouldja look at this?” PFC Eubanks said, grinning. This time K Company was in a much later wave, and there were already tanks and bulldozers, scores of troops, and hundreds of tents being erected by the time we got ashore. Fighter planes zoomed above us by the dozen, making a lot of noise, yet their guns were silent—nothing to shoot at. We could see marines in skirmish lines, sixty yards ahead of us … and then another group of marines, another sixty yards in front of them.

  Marching single file, we looked back at the bustle of activity on the beach, in awe. Even as hectic as any landing was, marines were relatively languid in moving the huge artillery pieces out of the LSTs, along with crate after crate of munitions, rations, water, fuel, jeeps, and medical supplies that heretofore had no use.

  The truth is, unlike before Peleliu (when they flat-out lied to us), as we prepared for Okinawa, the brass basically informed us that we were heading into a meat grinder. All things considered, I don’t know what I preferred, the truth or the lie. Having already been on Peleliu and Ngesebus, I was pretty much scared shitless about the Okinawa landing. Everybody was. Not only was Okinawa Japanese home soil, where we expected the worst; moreover, the navy constructed ladders that we were to use to scale a big seawall right off the beach.

  “As soon as you hit the beach, you can expect knee mortars, and heavy Nip artillery, and when you get up the ladders, expect intense machine-gun fire, sweeping the seawall across the landing zone. So, do not stop. Keep moving, as you were trained, and you should be just fine,” they briefed us.

  Just fine, huh? Just fine? We looked around at one another, dumbfounded. What the hell did I miss, what with all this talk about mortars, artillery, and machine-gun fire?

  The ladders themselves were a joke, too. They were simply made of two 2 × 4s, the thin sides out, with smaller planks nailed to them as rungs—exactly the kind of ladder Bruno Hauptmann used to snatch the Lindbergh baby. I don’t suppose the craftsmanship of the ladders mattered, though, when all I could imagine was marines’ brains smeared atop the six-foot seawall while scores of empty helmets littered the sand, rolling down the beach.

  When we landed, however, instead of a seawall, there was only rubble, where the navy had really pounded the beach, reducing any surface higher than a marine’s knees to powder.

  Off to the side, a camera crew was setting up their gear, and in their midst was the actor William Lundigan, another California type turned marine.

  “Say,” Eubanks gawked. “I seen that guy in that Dodge City picture … and what was that other one? The Fighting 69th, too!”

  “Hey, Hollywood!” Some marines whistled and shouted, giving the young actor their approval. Lundigan simply nodded back good-naturedly, then resumed his job with the camera team.

  “You know,” I told Eubanks, “that Lundigan fella is really from Syracuse, New York.”

  Bob Whitby smiled at me. “This is great, ain’t it, Mace? Looks like a real piece of cake.”

  “Yeah, looks like … maybe something like that. Hey, you just keep your head screwed on, alright, Wimp?”

  I couldn’t help being apprehensive. Too many things just didn’t add up. The anticipation of combat is nearly as intense as the genuine article.

  I’m sure that if the Nips had let us have it right then, the marines unloading the boats and stacking the boxes would have grabbed their carbines, but none of the brass would have actually called them up to use them. Each man to his own job—so you can be damn sure it would be the riflemen at the vanguard of the attack.

  The press, or marine film crews like Lundigan’s bunch, would start rolling film and snapping photos, but more often than not, the pictures they’d send back to the States would be of the carbine-wielding ammo carriers at the back of the train. Like any smart guys, the photographers wouldn’t run right into the teeth of the action if they didn’t have to. In fact, the only shutterbug I knew who did ended up KIA on Peleliu—him and his camera both.

  Every so often they’d hand out some copies of Stars and Stripes, and we’d read the caption at the bottom of a photo with a marine in it: MARINE IN ACTION ON IWO JIMA. Then you’d look closer at the picture and there’d be a crate of tropical chocolate beside him—further proving that like most captions in life, this one only contained a fragment of the full paragraph.

  Things never add up. War was like that.

  They called the whole Okinawa invasion Operation Iceberg, for reasons that I couldn’t comprehend. Though the climate was cool to the skin, and the countryside reminded me of northern Connecticut, there wasn’t anything icy about it, except for maybe the chill that ran up my spine.

  Just a little ways up the beach, in a shrubby area, we happened upon a whole platoon of Japanese who had taken a direct hit from a navy 14-inch shell. It had landed right on top of them; those poor souls were mutilated beyond recognition, not even appearing human anymore. The Nip platoon was now two thousand pounds of carnage—stacked, spread out—hacked meat, chicken parts, pork carcasses, sides of beef, looped intestines, and a few odd organs, all mixed in together, raw to the smell; you didn’t want to ope
n your mouth for fear that you might taste the stench. The only things that told you they were once people were a few scattered bits of tan clothing, a couple of shattered helmets, and their rifles—which weren’t really rifles anymore, they were pipes; the wooden stocks had been sheared clean off by the impact of the explosion.

  I had never seen mutilation like this, not even on Peleliu. I had never seen an unexploded shell, either—but there it was. It scared the hell out of me.

  Right in front of the chewed-up Nip platoon, burrowed two feet into the dirt and sticking out another three feet, was another navy 14-incher. What made it so menacing was that we didn’t know if it was a dud or if it was going to go off if somebody bumped into it. If the round had turned sixteen Japs into some sort of potato salad, what would it do to just a few of us? We’d be mist. They might find enough of us to stuff in an envelope to send back home. Imagine, the only letter I wrote home from a combat zone has me stuffed in it. Sonuvabitch.

  “Say, Wimp?” I called.

  “Yeah, what’s goin’ on?”

  “C’mere and take a look at this, willya?”

  Bob walked over. “Yeah, sure, what ya got?”

  He stopped in his tracks and merely stood there, his eyes confused, squinting, trying to make out the pieces—trying to make sense out of what his brain didn’t want to register.

  “Wimp?”

  “What? Huh?” He looked at me, an amnesiac. He didn’t know who he was anymore, either.

  As I walked off, I simply cocked my thumb back over my shoulder, leaving Whitby where he stood. “Piece of cake, Bob,” I said.

  They called it L-day, or Love Day, the day we landed on Okinawa. It was also Easter Sunday, as well as April Fool’s Day. It was the sort of landing any marine could only dream of. Yet there we were. It was real. We only heard a few scattered shots here and there. Nobody knew where they came from. I ran into PFC Harry Bender, who witnessed two little dead girls not far from the beach. Harry said he had lost his breakfast, right there, at the sight of them—and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Later on, the scuttlebutt came down that some major was killed, but again, we didn’t know how it happened, or even who he was.