Battleground Pacific Read online

  We walk a few more yards, and eventually I ask Junior where his squad is.

  “Beats the shit outta me,” he whispers. “Back on Pavuvu, maybe, playin’ softball. They asked me to go out to left field, and I guess I went too far.” Junior stifles a chuckle.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I whisper back. “Well, go link up with ’em or somethin’. Besides, I thought you were here to kill Nips.”

  “You seen any Nips?”

  “Nope.”

  “I rest my case,” Junior chides. “Anyway, it’s too damn dark to find anybody, so I found you instead.”

  With that I have to fight back a laugh of my own. Junior is trying to be clever—and he is a clever kid. It’s just that, deep down inside, perhaps I want Junior to be another Larry Mahan or Seymour Levy, but Junior isn’t. Junior Hudson is just another well-meaning kid, with a joke and a smile, who found his way into this war because of a brother he’ll never see again and a sense of righteous vengeance that followed suit.

  I won’t be the kid’s dead brother.

  All through the night it’s more of the same. “Move out!” “Hold up!” That’s all we hear for God knows how long. Eventually we’re told that the Nips are going to make a landing on the coast, and we’re out here to make sure they die before they hit dry land. Five hundred Japs. Maybe that many. Four hundred. Three hundred. That’s probably closer to the truth. Blind man’s bluff. Just knowing that we’re groping around in the dark makes this a deadly game of chance. I think I see the white echoes of a battle raging, somewhere off in the distance, with the muffled toy-gun pops of machine guns and rifle fire—so far out, I don’t know if it’s real or just the afterimages of the crap we experienced in the last couple of days. Nevertheless, the word comes down that the 1st Regiment wiped out an outfit of Nips trying to make the landing we were sent to oppose. Good. Better them than us.

  On the other hand, if we knew the dangers that faced us with the coming dawn, we would rather have had the safety in numbers the 1st Regiment enjoyed, instead of hanging our keisters in the breeze.

  We got lost.

  Just before dawn we discovered we were about sixty yards from where we were supposed to be in order to get back to the company lines. If that doesn’t sound like much, imagine being under the safe canopy of night, only to have the sun creep in, lighting us up for the whole Nip army to see.

  That sun is a slow bastard when you’re just sitting around watching it come up, but when you’ve really got somewhere to be, the sun rises nearly as quick as flicking on a light switch.

  “C’mon, c’mon, you guys, move! Let’s go. Get up that friggin’ hill!”

  At a mad dash, we weaved, climbed, and crawled up a thirty-foot hillock, which appeared to be safe, having at least a few trees to shield us from the imminent light. When we reached the top, huffing and puffing, we bent over at the waist, our hands on our knees, looking out upon the flatland before us. “Jesus! How’d we get so lost?”

  Gene Holland caught my gaze, and he just shook his head, as if to say, This is really screwed up, Mace. Or perhaps I only imagined that’s what Holland was trying to convey. After all, how was I supposed to read through the red of those puffy eyes, baggy under the lids, stark against his ashen skin?

  Somebody was running this show—somebody got us lost—but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you who it was now that Lieutenant Dunlop had been evacuated.

  Okay, okay … think, Mace, think!

  Out there, below us and off a ways, I barely made out the company command post, secreted behind a tree-lined area, similar to the one we were perched on. The idea was, if we could make a run for it, we’d be safe. Except that it was too late. In less than thirty minutes the sun had risen in the east, and already we were bathed in sunlight. “Oh, for chrissakes!” I squinted up at the sun and my eyes felt burned through by the haloes ringing the ball in the sky.

  For a moment my body merely relaxed in soft resignation to what was coming next. If I could have laughed, I would have. We anticipated the sound of the Nip shells coming in, even before they fell.

  When the Jap rounds slammed into us, though, the last thing we did was resign.

  Boom!

  Boom, boom!

  Boom!

  “Shit!”

  “Somebody get on the can and get us out of here!”

  Already, marines were shimmying back down the opposite side of the small hill, in the hope that they’d be too far down the slope for the Nips to see them.

  “Negative.” The marine on the radio looked at us. “Request denied to return to company area. CP says to sit it out.”

  Sit it out?

  Here’s the conundrum: If we hadn’t made the call to the CP, but instead just made a mad dash for it, not only could we have given the CP’s position away, but also our own marines could have lit us up. They weren’t expecting us. Moreover, if the Nips had us zeroed in, which they assuredly did, our chances of survival were better under the shelter of the small hill than on the dead ground between us and the CP.

  The only option was to stay put, no movement whatsoever, and the Japs might get the idea that there was nobody atop this hill—that we escaped, or we weren’t worth the ammunition. Fat chance. So we wiggled as far down the backside of the hill as we could. If the Nips stopped lobbing shells on us in the next few hours, we’d know it was safe to move. We’d know we were okay. Just don’t friggin’ move.

  So we sat. There was nothing left to do but wait.

  I took a seat, rifle cradled across my arms. I had been up all night, I was hungry and exhausted, and even the familiar marines looked like strangers to me now.

  Off in the distance I saw a Sherman tank, throwing some rounds out toward the Japanese lines. Things like that were normal, everyday things you see in a combat zone. You spy something like that and you pay it no mind. The tankers were doing their job, and I was doing mine. Except, for some reason, I stayed focused on what the Sherman was doing—or, rather, I was just glazing over, and the tank just happened to be in my line of sight. There was a marine walking atop the tank, a few other guys standing around the tracks, while other marines appeared to be carrying crates of ammunition, or maybe some chow. The whole scene was a little over a hundred yards away, so I couldn’t tell much, not that it mattered.

  Then this airplane flew in from the right, gliding silkily in, smooth and sleek. I couldn’t make out the markings, yet I felt it was one of our planes, because this one zipped in from the seaward side of the island, and Nip planes, when they’re out at sea, they stay out there—shot down, or crashed on the decks of one of our ships. At any rate, what happened next was so bizarre that it bordered on the surreal.

  The plane was only fifty feet above the ground when she dropped her tip-tank, dead atop the Sherman tank.

  Whoosh! A flash fire engulfed the Sherman as the tiny figures by the tank began scurrying around—only they looked like they were running in slow motion, little trails of themselves flowing out behind them.

  Because the scene was too far away for me to hear the sounds, while you’re drowsy the effect was a little too unreal for me to make sense of it. It was a little like staring at a photograph of people you don’t know, and expecting to have some sort of emotional attachment to the chemical-soaked paper.

  Whatever possessed the pilot to ditch his tip-tank over the marine lines was anybody’s guess. Maybe he was in trouble, but Jesus—what a way to do it!

  When we finally got the word to make our run for the CP, it sure as hell didn’t take us long to get there. What’s more, we couldn’t have been more pleased that we came out of that trap relatively unscathed in the process. Only just as soon as we arrived the call went up to move out.

  “Hey, fellas, nice of you to join us. Now let’s get your stuff together. We’re goin’ back on the line.”

  To the 3rd Squad, it felt like we never left the line.

  *

  May 6, 1945, Asato Gawa, Shuri Line.

  The rain falls. It alway
s seems to fall these days. If it’s not raining, it’s sprinkling. If it’s not sprinkling, it’s misting. If it’s not wet, it’s not normal.

  I open a can of C rations, and the rain dances in it. My feet are puffy albinos, pink under the nails and sopping up moisture. We smoke under our ponchos, we eat under our ponchos, and we try to sleep under them, too. The front line is a poncho city—each a private shelter, erected in honor of keeping home and dry. Asylum and safekeeping, however, are just an illusion, abetted by the fact that everybody is hiding beneath one. Hiding something. We all hide something. It’s better to keep your eyes open, and your paranoia sharp, or you’ll die under a goddamn poncho. They’ll wrap you up in the sucker and ship you off on a jeep, stacked with the other poncho-clad marines.

  Yes, it’s much better to see it coming, rather than being killed by what lurks in the spaces between things.

  A machine gun rattles off to my left. Tat, tat, tat tat … tat, tat, tat tat tat! Instinct jerks my head in that direction to see what’s going on.

  The machine gun spits its fire as I watch three pajama-clad people moving up and down one of the hills in front of our lines. It doesn’t make any sense, what they’re doing there. Maybe they’re Nips or maybe they’re civilians. Who knows.

  That’s PFC James Allen, a machine gunner in the 1st Platoon, about fifty yards to my left, letting loose on them with his gun.

  Allen is on the left-hand flank of the line, with the 1st Platoon, and I’m on the right-hand flank of our line, with the 3rd Platoon, on the sides of what amounts to a boomerang-shaped line. So that means that Allen and I secure both flanks. An evil position to be in. As the line moves farther forward, toward the bend of the boomerang—about two hundred yards to the front—the ground elevates a good fifteen feet, where they moved the company CP.

  Boy, it’s lonesome out here—and disconcerting as a sonuvabitch, seeing that nothing stands in the way between you and the Nips, except the crooked and chewed-up land, which has been pounded down to nothing but a muddy sludge.

  Tat, tat, tat, tat tat tat tat tat!

  From my foxhole, I see that Allen has a good bead on the figures in black, by the way his tracers fly from his gun. Up, up … up! go the rounds, in measured bursts. The figures try to escape the bullets by struggling up a small hill, but Jim keeps walking them up. Tat, tat, tat tat … tat, tat! Allen must have opened fire because curiosity got the best of him, or he’s privy to information that I’m not. I can just imagine his deep blue eyes, set off by his ruddy skin, an American mask behind his gun, as he walks that sucker up and finally catches one. Spat! The body crumples up like an ant’s carcass, curled in the middle, and slides back down the hill into a pool of brackish water. The other dark figures make it over the hill and disappear.

  Every once in a while that’s how we see the Nips—off in the distance one moment, but in the next second they’ve vanished. I take aim and fire off a couple of shots at one, but when they disappear like that, it leaves me wondering if they were ever there at all. There’s no telling if I killed one or even if it was just a civilian on the horizon.

  I’ve got mud on my face, because one of those big bastards—a Nip 320 mm mortar, a “screaming Jesus”—landed about thirty yards from me and threw crap everywhere. Swiping my hands on my dungarees, I only come up with more mud on my palms, and more mud, and more …

  The Japs send over everything they’ve got, periodically, to dust us over. That’s not all they do to screw with us. They affect our minds, doing it in stupid ways, too.

  “Corpsman!”

  It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? I can’t tell you how many marines we’ve lost in the last few days, but it’s a lot.

  A couple of flashes of green and brown run by, hot on the trail of a wounded marine.

  The scenery never changes. Marines always get killed like that.

  Like I said … stupid.

  A case in point: There’s a tank, about ten feet to my right, and eight feet above me, as the ground rises. The tank has been wiped out for ages, yet some new Jap spotter sees it sitting out here and lets loose five or six rounds on it.

  It’s absolutely insane how loud the rounds clang off the tank. This goes on for what seems like an eternity, until an old salty vet on the Nip side of the line informs the new spotter that Charlie Chan, or whatever his name was, destroyed the tank last week.

  Evidently, not all the spotters get the same memo, because the next day they are back at it again. Clang, boom! Clang, boom! Clang! I’m fed up with this crap.

  So between this and the rain and the phantom Japs and being on the line for days on end, it really starts to grind me. I gnaw my lower lip; I beat out rhythms on the forestock of my M-1—any juke or jive, swing beat will do, recalling how Joe “the Book” back in Queens would regale the young street-corner crowd about Cab Calloway and Gene Krupa, laying out with the cocaine. Then there was that little fucking organ-grinder monkey that Johnny Blade owned. I was walking home, and the little sonuvabitch ran and jumped on my back, screeching and screaming various simian obscenities—and there I was, pulling and tugging, trying to get that monkey off my back. I thought I’d have to run all the way home with him before he finally flew off and hightailed it back to Blade’s house. All of these hidden secrets in life, as I lie with my back to the rear of my foxhole, my ass in a pond of mud, while I simply adapt. A marine knows a few secrets, too. Although nobody back home would want to hear them. I adapt because there’s no other choice.

  You adapt but you don’t.

  The thing is, though, I’m breaking the cardinal rule, and I’m thinking of home.

  I can smile at something like that.

  That is, until I run out of things to smile about.

  *

  “Where the hell did you get that jeep, Corporal?”

  I’m standing in front of a lieutenant—I have no idea who he is, or what outfit he’s from. I’m simply stunned by his question.

  Here I am, covered in filth, with blood on the sleeves of my dungaree jacket, I’m unshaved, my helmet is at a cant, there’s mud bulging from beneath my fingernails, and the memory of sleep is solely a dream I had once upon a time.

  “I brought some wounded in on the jeep, sir … I—”

  “I didn’t ask you what you did with the jeep, Corporal. I’m asking you where you got the jeep!”

  There he is, his dungarees spotless, his pants neatly tucked into his leggings, his nails clipped, his teeth annoyingly white, his face so smooth I could count the pores on his chin, and beneath his cap I can see the finely trimmed sideburns of a newly minted haircut—something I’ve not had in a month.

  “I found it abandoned in an open field, sir!” I hope he caught the bite of venom in my voice. I really hope he did. The thing is, I’ve never disrespected an officer before, but right now I feel like punching this turd in the throat.

  After everything that happened today, perhaps I deserve that luxury.

  The day started off fairly quiet. Whitby and Eubanks and I were sitting in my foxhole and talking about—of all things—we’re talking about babies! Of course, Whitby has a couple of little girls whom he sometimes speaks about, and one of Bender’s buddies, Garner Mott, has a new baby boy, whom he’s yet to meet, baby Nicky Joe. Mott is always, always going on about Nicky Joe, passing the kid’s photos around, smiling and laughing about what he’s going to do whenever he gets home to his wife and boy. It’s great.

  “So, Wimpy, how much poop do ya think ol’ Mott’s gonna have to wipe when he gets to that baby o’ his, huh?” Eubanks grins wide.

  “Oh…” Bob rolls his eyes. “That ain’t nothin’ compared to washin’ them dirty diapers!” Whitby gestures with his hands, and I can see his mitts are grimy and cracked—nothing any mother would want touching her sweet infant’s powdered behind. Bob shakes his head and whistles. “I’m just glad those days are behind us, with my girls.” He pauses, and his smile fades a little. He’s thought of something he wished he hadn’t. Yet he s
miles big again, putting on a brave face. “Ya know … but then you look around … and see how much they’ve grown, an’ … and sometimes you just wish they were babies all over again.”

  We chuckle. Today the sky is as gray as always, but at least it hasn’t rained yet.

  “So.” Eubanks claps me on the shoulder. “When you have a kid, Mace, what are ya gonna name the little fellow?”

  “Me?” I raise my eyebrows. “Well, I think I’ll start off by eliminating Euban—”

  Snap!

  I look down at my poncho and suddenly there’s a hole in it that wasn’t there a second ago. Eubanks and Whitby see it, too, and we’re down in the foxhole, in the blink of an eye.

  “Christ, Mace, you alright!?”

  “Yeah.” I pat around my body a couple of times and then poke my finger through the hole in the poncho. I look at the boys, and their eyes are wide. “Sonuvabitch, fellas, that was way too friggin’ close.”

  “You’re not hit?”

  “Nuh-uh. No, I’m fine.”

  Strangely enough, though, everything is still quiet. We didn’t even hear the rifle shot, only the snap of the bullet hitting the fabric. Yet just a little ways off, and getting closer, we hear voices—American voices—and one of them sounds familiar.

  The three of us look out of my foxhole—perhaps appearing like a scene from Duck Soup—and it’s just who I thought it was. Major Paul Douglas and his entourage have shown up, with six marine bodyguards and a stretcher bearer in tow.

  “Major Douglas,” Whitby says flatly.

  I glance over to Bob. “What? You seen it, too?”

  “Shavin’ when all that shit was comin’ down?” Bob’s face appears grim. “You betcha.”

  “Well,” I say, “the way they’re headed, we’d better let them know they’re comin’ into a danger zone, or they’ll be sorry.”