Battleground Pacific Read online

  “Yeah, he sure is a cute little fella. Say, kid, come over here and I’ll teach ya some English that’ll really get ya by.”

  The small boy walks over timidly, yet he knows I’m not going to hurt him.

  “Listen,” I tell him. “See that guy over there?”

  I point at Sergeant Wilson, Blowtorch Willy, and the kid nods eagerly that he understands.

  “Hey, you’re a real smart kid! Now, listen carefully, okay? You go over and tell that man exactly what I tell ya, and I’ll give ya some candy, alright? Okay? I’ll give ya some candy.” I put my hand up to my mouth, mimicking him, showing the kid that he and I are on the same page. “Now, listen, this is what you have to say…”

  I have to repeat it a few times for him to catch on, but eventually he has it down pat, and his eyes light up when he sees that he’s met with my approval.

  “Good. Now, go on … Candy! Candy!”

  The kid walks over to Wilson, who sits on his helmet only about twenty yards away, where I can hear everything they’re saying.

  “Hey, little guy.” Sergeant Wilson sees the kid and smiles. “You want some candy? Is that it? Candy?”

  The kid simply stands there, looks up at Wilson, and with a big beautiful smile says, “Fuck you, Wilson!”

  R. D.’s eyes just about bug out of his head, and I’m rolling on the ground in a fit of laughter.

  “What?” Wilson asks.

  “Fuck you … Sergeant Wilson!” the kid repeats, and Wilson laughs, too. Wilson sees me trying to hold my sides together, and immediately he puts two and two together.

  “Mace, you shithead!” Wilson’s eyes are watering from laughing so hard.

  “Fuck you, Wilson! Fuck you, Wilson!” the kid keeps repeating, laughing the whole time. I can only imagine, when the kid’s about to go to sleep at night, him lying in his bed, smiling, and softly repeating, “Fuck you, Wilson, Fuck you, Wilson,” his stash of candy safely tucked away somewhere, maybe underneath what passes for a pillow in these strange Asiatic lands.

  “Fuck you, Wilson.”

  Suddenly the sky doesn’t appear to be so non-American anymore.

  *

  Okinawa Shima, Ryukyu Chain, April 20, 1945.

  “Oh my God,” Whitby whispers.

  Oh my God is right. Dead civilians crowd our vision, in an open Okinawan field.

  One little girl has been shot to death. Her half-lidded eyes are yellowed in the whites, the result of urine leaking into her bloodstream as she died. In the four-year-old’s tiny grip is some sort of wooden toy—a top, or a spool that had been her toy in life.

  Close by, a woman lies on her stomach—probably the child’s mother. Her arm reaches out toward the baby girl, fingers splayed wide, as if she were trying to protect her dead child while all light faded forever in the slow ebb of death. The side of the woman’s face is mashed to the ground. An almost black pool of blood has thickened below her pursed lips.

  Similar scenes play out all around us as we wade through about forty dead Okinawan adults, children, old men and old women, scattered across the field.

  There was nowhere for them to run.

  Otherwise, without the flock of dead innocents, the surrounding countryside is beautiful. There are rolling hills and clear skies, which gently send a light breeze through the tall grass. The temperature is moderate—even chilly at night. They’ve issued us zipper jackets, almost the Eisenhower model, because of the change in climate. There are even trees. Real trees, standing, without being shot all to hell by constant bombardments and strafing aircraft (no, the planes here target moving objects).

  This is nothing like Peleliu.

  “Holy shit. Wouldja look at this?” PFC Eubanks looks green, his face confused. He doesn’t catch on very quickly, even in the face of a couple of elderly women lying side by side, literally torn apart by high-caliber ammunition.

  I look up at the soft blue sky, and it doesn’t take a strong imagination to envision what happened here. I can almost make out the outline of the fighter plane, swooping in, .50 caliber guns spewing lightning, breaking into the pack of Okinawan refugees, a chisel chipping ice. Dominoes fall. The dead Okinawans lie on the ground, all with the same forward motion, shot in the back. All of them have splotches of dried crimson decorating their pajamalike tops. Fear and surprise still tattoo their faces. Here and there, scattered among the dead are their belongings: baskets filled with clothes and crude household goods, lacquered boxes shattered by bullets and the impacts of their falls.

  These were the items they cared for in life. Precious things to them then, yet now just as meaningless as a rosary around a marine’s neck, or a Bible in his breast pocket.

  Never, not even for a second, does it cross our minds that the Japanese did this. The Japanese have only one purpose in the air, and that is to get to our ships. There’s no way a Nip pilot would fly halfway up the center of the island, all the way north, just for a little target practice, and then have to whip across the island again in order to get at our anchorage.

  PFC Harry Bender, a replacement on Pavuvu, had told me that one night, shortly after we landed on Okinawa, marines had spotted something moving around beyond our perimeter. The marines opened fire. The report came back that the night’s haul had been two goats and three civilians.

  That about sums it up.

  There had been a lot of death on Peleliu, but I had never seen anything like this. This isn’t war. This is something else entirely. On the other hand, you come to expect ghastly shit like this—just not happening to civilians. These dead Okinawans are our mothers and brothers, sisters and fathers—wrapped in a different skin, yet no less important—otherwise they would have never been born.

  “C’mon,” I tell my fire team. “Let’s head back and let Stumpy know about this.”

  What can the CO say? Nothing. What is he supposed to say? Nothing.

  It is what it is.

  Stumpy Stanley merely sends us back out to round up another group of Okinawan villagers and bring them back to the stockade we set up on the island.

  As for the villages themselves, they are quaint but stupid looking—very foreign to the American eye, trained, as we are, to look at skyscrapers and El trains, paved roads and manhole covers. The villages are nothing but squat, thatch-roofed houses, attached four or five down a line, with a few isolated homes set off to the side—organized by local rank or station in life. The road to every village is merely a dirt path, connected to other dirt paths, which spiderweb the whole island. If there were any cars on the island (there are not) they wouldn’t be able to navigate the skinny roads here. Instead, the most prevalent means of transportation around the island is raw foot power. If there is any sophisticated means of communication between villages, we’ve never seen it, either. Which is a good thing …

  When we arrive at the new village, there’s no indication from the locals that they are aware of the slaughter of their kinsmen, just a short mile away. In fact, it’s tough to know what the Okinawans think of marines, who’ve suddenly appeared on their soil and taken over every aspect of their lives. On the other hand, we’ve been told they’ve endured the Japanese for years now, so I guess, to them, it beats the alternative. The Nips have even taken the sons of Okinawa and conscripted them into the Japanese army. That accounts for the total lack of men our own age among the villagers. What’s left of them is who we saw dead in the field: women of all ages, children, and old men, too infirm to fight. However, some Okinawans, we’ve heard, are sympathetic to the Japanese. That’s why, no matter how docile or appeasing the Okinawans seem to be, we keep our guard up, in case any of them start any shenanigans. We carry our rifles at the ready. Besides, how could they give up their home and way of life to round-eyed foreigners, to be corralled like barnyard animals, and not feel some sort of intestinal emotion? Maybe the alternative is much worse than we think. Or maybe, just maybe, the Okinawans know something we don’t.

  The Okinawan, when the chips are down, probably doe
sn’t care who wins the war—just as long as he is left alone, in peace.

  I don’t think there’s a marine among us who doesn’t wish just that, if it means getting off this island and going home, in one piece.

  Some patrols, like this one, are easier than others.

  The other day we were on a full company patrol, which wound its way through an abandoned Okinawan village, and my boys, in Fire Team 3, were the very last group of marines in line.

  I don’t know what made me do it. Perhaps a marine gets used to violence, and any respite from it just doesn’t feel right. You get used to the pattern of the puzzle, the feel, the touch of it, and when one of the puzzle pieces comes up missing, you just let it go and fall in love with the new pattern.

  Whatever the case, I took a tiny ball of composition C explosives, stuck it just under the thatch of the straw roof, lit it afire with a match, and walked off. About the time we got three hundred yards down the road, Whitby happened to glance over his shoulder and said to me, “Say, Mace, what the hell is that?”

  I looked back in the direction he was motioning to see a great spiral of black smoke coming from the village, bubbling over the horizon, like tar in the sky.

  “That?” I only gave it a second’s glance. “That’s beautiful country, Bob. Beautiful goddamn country.”

  For all I know, I burned the whole village to the ground.

  I don’t know what made me do it. I don’t know why I didn’t feel anything.

  Anyway, now we have a new clan of villagers to worry about.

  Weisdack is gathering them up. “Alright, you guys, c’mon, you’re comin’ with us. Get your shit together.”

  Of course, they don’t understand a word he’s saying—and we don’t understand them, either. They babble continuously, as if they’re reading from a script. Who the hell has that much to say in one sitting?

  “Yeah, okay, sure, just … okay, okay, sure, you can bring that … and that too, sure.” PFC Eubanks is obliging a very old, bent Okinawan man. Eubanks looks at me, rolls his eyes, and carries on with the old man. “Just … for chrissakes, hurry it up, willya?”

  The whole village (what there is of it) is in a minor commotion as soon as we enter. They get the picture. All except for the children, who gawk up at us, as if we are invaders from another planet. The smallest children peek out from behind their mothers’ pajama bottoms. They are cute little dumplings, all wide-eyed, with perfectly round cherubim faces. My thoughts drift back to the Nip with the moon face on Ngesebus, and how I blew up his world by blowing out his mind. Closer to the present, I think of the little girl lying in the pretty field, with a hole the size of a man’s fist in the middle of her back.

  My reverie is broken by a small tug on my dungaree jacket.

  Before me, a middle-aged woman motions for me to enter a hut with her. Following her in, I can see the room has the same bleak look of all the other Okinawan homes. Everything is drab, with brown walls, and some sort of particle board flooring. All cheap stuff, but evidently she wants to gather up a few more of her meager belongings before we leave.

  We’ve been on the island for close to a month already, seeing very little actual combat, so with women on the island, most of us have been looking for a little action of a different variety. We pass any broad on the road and make a circle with one index finger and thumb, then stick the other index finger through the hole, creating the universal sign for screwing. That really cracks us up.

  Alone in the house with this Okinawan woman, I show her the clever little hand signal. Just joking, of course. She doesn’t act shocked or anything; she merely looks at me and pats herself up and down her body. What the hell? She pats herself again, without saying a word. I’m about to gesture that I don’t understand, but then it dawns on me. She’s saying she’s too old!

  “Oh, no!” I laugh. “Hey, I was just foolin’, lady.” I smile at her in a way that I hope shows her I don’t mean her any harm. “C’mon, let’s get your stuff so we can get outta here.”

  Finally, once it appears we’ve gathered up all the locals, we begin walking them back toward the rear area, and hopefully out of harm’s way.

  Whitby and I are in the front of the train, yakking about something, while Weisdack and Eubanks bring up the rear, when suddenly somebody else pulls at my jacket. Yet it’s not somebody else. It’s the same woman who approached me earlier, and once again she’s signaling me to follow her.

  “Oh, brother.” I lean over to Whitby. “This one’s gonna cause me trouble, Wimp.”

  “What kinda trouble?” Bob asks.

  “Ah, hell, I made a gesture to her earlier, just clownin’ around, and now I’ve gotta follow her and see what’s goin’ on. Hold up here, willya?”

  Whitby stops the column from moving any farther, and I follow the lady down to the ass-end of the train, just where the trickle of civilians are making their way out of the village.

  “Okay, lady, this is about enough. C’mon, what the hell d’ya think you’re do—?”

  The two of us of stop short in front of a pair of old Okinawan men. With their gruff expressions, and their arms crossed against their chests, these guys look as if they really mean business—like cigar store Indians, if we were casting for Hollywood extras. In fact, they almost appear to be twins—a couple of ancients standing there sporting black pajamas, with practically identical dirty black fedoras. It feels as though I’m standing in front of the review board.

  This is ridiculous! I’m about to lose my patience, except that the two little girls standing to the sides of the elderly men pique my curiosity. The girls can’t be more than sixteen years old, if that. It’s impossible to guess their ages, however, being that the natives of Okinawa are so tiny. Whatever their ages, it doesn’t take me long to ascertain that they are somehow a part of this equation.

  As the lady jabbers to the wooden Indians, I catch on to what she’s saying (at least I think I do).

  “This guy here wants to get laid, and I told him I was too old. So why don’t we satisfy him by giving him the girls here, and maybe he’ll leave us alone.”

  When she stops speaking, I look back at the Okinawan centenarians, and they glare back at me. They seem so pissed I can only imagine what they’re plotting against me. Kicking my balls in, roasting me over a fire, using my eyes for fish bait. I never wanted any of this. I don’t see how a human being could contemplate such a heinous act. The little girls’ faces wear the glaze of such serene innocence and beauty that to even entertain the thought—even for a second—of spoiling such precious gems would bring down the wrath of something far greater than two old farts in fedoras.

  I wave my hands down. “Forget it! Forget it!” I try to laugh it off, placing a hand on one little girl’s shoulder, patting her arm like the child she is. These people are fuckin’ bananas.

  “What was that all about?” Whitby asks as I arrive back at the front of the line.

  “Wimp—you’ve got kids. You don’t wanna know. Trust me.”

  “Well,” Bob says as he scratches his head under his helmet, “looks like you’ve got some kids of your own now, Mace.”

  “Whattaya mean?”

  Bob chuckles.

  Behind me, walking just a few steps in my shadow, are the two little ones, flashing me the sweetest smiles this side of eternity. They know what I could have done. They know that they were the sacrificial lambs. Now, though, Whitby is right. “Look what the stork brought!” he says—which suits me just fine. To these little girls, I’m the greatest. They don’t need to know that I’ve killed men. They don’t need to know that I’ll do it again. To me, the little girls represent all the cleanliness in a world that was dirty enough to send us all to hell at speeds much faster than it is humanly possible to keep up with.

  As for the older Okinawan women, they are a different story. Every so often one of them derails the train when she has to use the facilities. Except there aren’t any toilets out here, so the Okinawan woman squats right where she’s
at and sprays the ground for all to see.

  We can’t get back to the company CP fast enough.

  As we bring the last of the villagers to the stockade, one of the rear echelon flunkies spies me out and walks up to me.

  “Say,” he says, “my buddies and me were wondering how you guys keep all these people in control like this. That’s a lot for four marines to handle, ain’t it?”

  “Oh, no,” I say. “Ya just talk to them.”

  “No foolin’? Boy, that’s great!”

  “Yeah, watch this.” I turn around, raise my arm, and start unloading the best nonsense language I can conjure up, and the villagers simply get up and start following me. The natives don’t have a clue what the hell I just said, and neither do I; nonetheless, this rear echelon guy’s jaw drops, and he turns around to his buddies. “Hey, get a load of this! This guy really knows the language!”

  Yeah, I think, this knucklehead will probably go home and tell his pals how he captured a bunch of Nips by talking them into submission. All he’s really done is guarded a few cans of Spam against a horde of hungry riflemen.

  Semper Fi, stupid ass. I hope your pecker drops off from screwing all those Okinawan hookers.

  At the stockade, there are groups of Okinawan women, of all ages, who make gestures and signs of sexual innuendo to any passing marine within fifty yards of them. Which pretty much means they gyrate all day long—except when they stop to pick the bugs out of each other’s hair. These are prostitutes, hunkered down behind the wire stockade fence, leaning down one in front of the other, so her sister can sift around her scalp, picking the fleas out, or whatever vermin she’s been cultivating in there.

  Seeing something like that should kill any rifleman’s desire to hold court with the local tail. Or at least that’s what one would think—though I have a feeling, the longer we stay here, some of the more adventurous marines might take a stab at the night with a lit candle.

  It happened the very next day, in fact.