Battleground Pacific Read online

  Anyway, we wanted a piece of that action. Instead, before being dropped off at Pavuvu, we made a five-day stop at New Caledonia—my first look at any overseas destination.

  New Caledonia was a dump.

  Our stay there started off nice enough, with its beautiful crystal blue water, and the gleaming pilot boat that met us out in the harbor, giving us the impression that better days were ahead of us after thirty days at sea. When they unloaded us on the dock, however, New Caledonia’s true nature showed itself, in that the waterfront was full of filthy concrete buildings and dirty garbage-infested roads, lined with sickly coconut trees.

  As they trucked us into the mountains, we were shocked by the natives—swarthy, dusky-looking characters, seemingly incapable of standing erect; all they did was squat by the sides of the roads. I don’t think I ever saw one walking; if one did, he was probably the mayor of the village or a local king or something. What’s more, the brass told us not to venture too far from camp, because a nearby leper colony had already infected a couple of sailors. It was said that the poor navy guys would have to spend the next several years in quarantine, their maritime careers ending on dry land, among the fine inhabitants of New Caledonia.

  “Say, Bill.” I smirked at PFC Billy Leyden. “If this is New Caledonia, I’d sure hate to see what Old Caledonia looks like!”

  To top it off, our camp was situated in the high-altitude peaks of New Caledonia’s mountains, a height that gave us flatlanders from New York a series of headaches the whole time.

  In fact, our little group of four was comprised of nothing but New Yorkers.

  When Larry Mahan and I departed San Diego for overseas duty, we became good pals with a couple of other young marines: PFC Seymour Levy, a seventeen-year-old from Brooklyn, and PFC Billy Leyden, an eighteen-year-old from Valley Stream, a little town just outside of New York City.

  Sy Levy was a tall Jewish kid, well built and nice looking, with thick dark hair. Despite his age, he was a pretty tough marine. You could always find him in a white T-shirt, his pants rolled up two or three rolls since his dungarees were too long, always exposing his socks above his boondockers. He never made religion a topic. Even though Sy was a nice Jewish boy, when it came time for supper, if Spam was on the menu, Levy wouldn’t put the spoon down.

  Billy Leyden was another kind of guy altogether—a typical New Yorker, with the gift of gab, full of ideas, always looking for a new angle, smart on his feet. He was tall, energetic, and outspoken, with wavy hair and an infectious smile. He had a real eye for the ladies, too. There was no one like Billy. Even at eighteen, he could have sold a Cadillac to a bunch of blind Amish.

  So, after the big letdown of New Caledonia, Pavuvu didn’t seem so bad after all. At least we were off that horrible ship, the SS Mormachawk. Not only was it a piece of junk that appeared to be a holdover from the Banana Wars, but also, about a day outside of California, we hit a storm so bad that we thought we were goners before we even started.

  Pavuvu? Yeah, right! Semper Fi!

  We arrived at Pavuvu during the night. The next morning they walked us down the gangplank with only the clothes on our backs, helmets on our heads, and seabags over our shoulders. We didn’t even have weapons. The closest I had come to a weapon in the Marine Corps was at the rifle range in basic training, and then later at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where I was stationed for six months in 1943.

  It was at the Brooklyn Naval Yard that I first met Larry Mahan.

  Our job at the naval yard was the highly classified, top secret duty of guarding the dockworkers’ payroll. That duty entailed carrying shotguns and Reising submachine guns. The shotguns were okay, but that Reising was so cheaply built that I was afraid to touch the damn thing—it seemed like it would go off at any second if you just looked at it funny.

  Back on Pavuvu, however, the lack of weapons meant more than we knew.

  We didn’t know it then—as we milled around the dock, waiting for someone to tell us where to go and what to do—but if you didn’t have specialized weapons training, in, say, flamethrowers or machine guns, the chances were pretty good that you’d be a rifleman. End of story. Even though I had scored high on my mental aptitude tests in basic training? Rifleman. End of story.

  The Marine Corps rifleman. Every marine wanted to be like him. No marine wanted to be him. We were unique in our class and phylum. The lowest common denominators. Yet a whole operation—from the simplest maneuver to the grandest assault—revolved around the man and his rifle. We were the first ones in and the last ones out, viewed with a mixture of awe and pity by the other servicemen in the armed forces. Walking contradictions, paradoxical constructs—the pride we held as members of our unique fraternity was tempered solely by the maxim we whispered among ourselves: “They Don’t Care About Us.” They Don’t Care About Us—a half-truth summed up in just a few words. Our sole potential was killing a lot of Japanese. God, we loved the Marine Corps!

  After we spent a while grab-assing at Pavuvu’s receiving dock, eventually some veteran NCOs came down and reined us in, escorting us to a large bivouac area—nothing more than tents, furnished only with cots on a sandy floor. Strictly the bare minimum accommodations, which told us that we wouldn’t be staying there long.

  The NCOs sounded muster and gave us our new assignments.

  When they called Mahan and Leyden, they paired them off and marched them out in separate columns of new arrivals, leaving only Levy and me out of the original four. It didn’t take them long, however, to inform Sy and me that we were now a part of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. As it happened, Leyden was also assigned to K/3/5, only he was in the 1st Platoon, while Levy and I became riflemen in the 3rd Platoon. That was a nice luxury, since we all arrived together and we didn’t know anybody, save for Mahan and another new arrival, PFC Eugene Holland (who we later found out was from Long Island, just north of where Levy grew up). Mahan, however, was designated to an entirely different company: L Company, which was just one street over from Company K.

  It was while we were in those tents, with nothing to do, that things began to get a little bizarre. A tad uneasy. In just a short while the division vets began to trickle down to our area, in twos and threes, so they could take a gander at the newest arrivals.

  It was a strange feeling to be ogled like that—almost like an auction. While some of the vets of Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester simply came down looking for old pals, others meandered around, their sole purpose to regale the new guys with their bullshit war stories. The saltier the better.

  “Hey, fellas, wanna see somethin’ great?”

  A short blond-haired marine sauntered up to Sy and me. The marine was shirtless, his body tanned, almost baked by the sun. One look at him and I could tell this marine had been on the island for a long time.

  “Here, take a look at this.” He smiled. Getting close to Sy and me, the marine took from around his neck a necklace, and at the end of the necklace was a sack, which he proceeded to open. I don’t know what Sy and I expected. A magic trick or something, maybe dirty pictures, we certainly weren’t anticipating what came next.

  It only took half a second to register what I was seeing. The sack was full of gold bits, some of them roughly in the shape of teeth, but most of them just tiny, thin sheets of yellow, bent out of shape after being yanked from the mouths of dead Japanese.

  “So, whatcha think o’ these, boys? Pulled ’em out myself!” The marine ran his fingers over them so we could see every little piece, his eyes darting between Sy and me, trying to elicit a reaction from two marines fresh off the boat.

  Presently Sy spoke up. “Yeah, those sure are … great. Boy, I bet there’s a coupla hundred bucks’ worth in there.” Sy smiled, uneasy.

  Suddenly the marine looked hurt. He sealed the bag up with one quick pull of the drawstring. “More like a coupla thousand!” he said, eyeballing us suspiciously. “But don’t none of you boys be gettin’ any funny ideas, ya hear? You’ll get your own gold soon enough�
�or if ya don’t, you can bet the Nips’ll get you first!” With that he grinned again and walked away.

  We all heard stories of the Japanese having gold-crowned teeth, and that much was true, but the misconception that marines were excavating whole teeth from the mouths of Nips was an exaggeration. Maybe some were, if the tooth had enough gold on it, but to rip the whole tooth out, root and all—well, a marine would have to be a real cripple to do something like that. My feeling was, if these marines who took the gold hadn’t been in the service, they would’ve been juvenile delinquents back in the States, stealing hubcaps or swiping purses.

  I pulled Levy aside by the elbow and got close enough that only he could hear me. “Jesus Christ, Sy, who’d we fall in with? A buncha friggin’ cannibals?”

  Maybe not quite, but after a while it became apparent that we weren’t exactly tentmates with the Edisons and Einsteins, either.

  Replacements grew antsy from just waiting around and cooling their heels, so a group of them started picking up coconuts, digging into them, shaking them, really yucking it up.

  That’s when the diarrhea parade started.

  The young hero marines, hot off the Mormachawk, shimmied up trees or took coconuts from the ground and proceeded to demonstrate the science of unlocking their treasures. Guys argued: You had to do it this way, or that way, but the end result was the same. They really broke their necks for an hour just trying to get the husks off. Then, when they had finally managed that trick, what was left was only a little cannonball thing. Not worth a damn. Still, they’d take the hard ball between their knees and try to bore it open with a Ka-Bar for the milk inside. I didn’t even bother, because as soon as you put a knife in my hand you could bet your ass I’d cut myself. These guys, though, were thrilled to get whatever meat they could from the native vegetation—most of them grinning from ear to ear, chewing on the green meat and sipping the milk.

  Presently, it took everything they had to keep their smiles on, when their guts started bubbling and churning. They’d look at each other with worried eyes and … zing! Off one ran to the head, about sixty yards away.

  Everybody laughed to beat the band, even some of those who’d drunk the milk but hadn’t felt the effects of it yet—but eventually it caught up with the whole lot. It went on like that all night, you’d hear marines go “hup!” and then sprint like the wind, a steady relay of marines with the runs.

  In the morning it was comical to see all the paper scattered across the field, in between the tents and the head, where the marines ran out of time and couldn’t make it. Someone had found a Life magazine so they could wipe their asses, and from the scattered pages of the book you could make out how far each marine made it before he splattered. One poor sucker left his page right in front of the head’s door. That was as close as he got, before … whammo!

  Needless to say, when they ordered us out for battalion muster that morning, about half the replacements were a little the worse for wear.

  “Welcome to Pavuvu, shitbirds.”

  All in all, though, our stay on Pavuvu wasn’t that bad, despite the constant heat, the inability to bathe properly, the never-ending work parties, and the reputed suicides of homesick marines. Sure, marines complained about the land crabs. There were thousands of land crabs! Of course, if a Marine had any smarts, he would learn after the first time he found a land crab in his boondockers to check for the pests the next time he put his shoes on. The crabs were a minor nuisance.

  Marines also bitched about the rats on the island. There were thousands of those, too, but the rats didn’t do much of anything. A marine would probably gripe about a naked broad jumping out of a cake, if the cake was chocolate and he had his heart set on vanilla.

  Marines are expert bellyachers. Real professionals.

  About the rats, you heard them playing on the tops of the tents at night, jumping and gliding down the tents’ slopes, like children on a playground slide. If a human came around, however, the rats would scatter. All you had to do was skirt around them. No bother. Nevertheless, the rats were cured by the hundreds when nests of them were found among the rotten coconuts. They’d call in a flamethrower operator, and he’d torch the whole brood with a couple of sprays from his weapon. Fiery rats could be seen running everywhere. Just not for very long. In a minute or two, the rats would simply run out of gas and merely lie there smoldering—the stench of burning hair and little rat claws lingering in the air.

  The only Pavuvuian wildlife that really got to me was the coconut ants.

  The ants lived in the coconut trees, so small, yet so smart, viciously waiting for a marine to lean against a tree, or to scale up for a few coconuts, before they’d pounce on the poor guy. The ants wouldn’t bite your arms, or legs, or your back. No, these ants were more brazen than that. They had one target and one target only—a marine’s testicles! There they would cling, tighten up, and pinch the hell out of your balls, in all the spots where their little bodies lay. Down the tree you’d come—zip!—dropping your dungarees right where you stood, in fits of agony, pulling the ants off your nuts, one pest at a time.

  That’s how those tiny, itty-bitty unassuming little tree ants were analogous to the Pavuvu experience as a whole—pulling the ants off your nuts, one pest at a time. Every day, the same routine: Breakfast in the morning, a work party during the day—moving rocks around from one spot to the other—then lunch, then some sort of lecture, then moving some coconuts from one spot to another, and then finally we’d have the nights to ourselves. If we weren’t too beat to take them in, there were movies in the evening at the battalion and regimental outdoor theaters, always the latest pictures—Bathing Beauty, with Esther Williams; Going My Way, starring Bing Crosby; Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Those films were the highlights of our stay on Pavuvu. We whistled at Esther Williams stepping out in her radiant bathing suits (I nudged PFC McNevin—“Boy, how’d ya like to have a dame that could hold her breath for that long, George?”), and we always cheered for the villains in every picture. The more devious the villain, the better. Otherwise, Pavuvu was drudgery of epic proportions … pulling the friggin’ ants off … one at a friggin’ time.

  They say adversity builds character. Pavuvu didn’t build character. It built characters. Plural. A person’s little quirks and tics that would go unnoticed in civilian life would become intensified under the South Pacific sun on Pavuvu, turning normal Joes into a menagerie of mental defectives.

  The boys called it “going Asiatic,” but I think it sank a little bit deeper than that.

  The American serviceman in the Pacific, unlike his counterpart over in Europe, had a tremendously difficult time acclimating himself to an edge of the earth that was entirely dissimilar to anything he’d known or dreamed of. This wasn’t France or Germany, and we didn’t need to fight over in Europe to know the difference between a hedgerow in Holland and a jungle on Peleliu.

  Simply stated, the Westerner wasn’t built for those islands out there. He wasn’t built for the islands in here. It wasn’t the abject isolation or the view of the same old horizon day after day that emptied you. Nor was it the multifarious diseases: malaria, yellow fever, ringworm, dengue, dysentery, scrub typhus, jungle rot, filariasis, ad nauseam. Instead, it was the ambience of those islands that would sink into your pores, something beyond parasitic, a living vortex that tried to make the marine a part of her green and sandy world, despite his inability to sift through her jungles—a constant push and pull, within and without the battles in which we fought.

  You adapt but you don’t.

  Like that kid Private Joe Mercer. Mercer lived the real Pacific war.

  At the end of K Company’s street, about sixty yards from where anybody lived, there was a rough patch of unused land, full of uneven grass and palm trees, isolated between our 3rd Regiment, the 1st Marines, and Motor Transport.

  And on that lonely piece of ground was a pup tent. And in that pup tent was a Marine. Nobody spoke to him. Nobody knew him.
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br />   We could see him out there, sitting cross-legged in front of his tent, listening to the swishing breeze sighing through the palm fronds, idly gazing at the clouds through ice blue eyes, occasionally rubbing his sun-bleached reddish blond hair. His unassuming features wore a mask of utter indifference—resignation, total complacency. He was a marine with nothing. A marine with nobody.

  “Boy.” Levy shook his head. “I wonder what that guy did to deserve some shit like that?”

  Sy and I stood at the end of the company street, looking at Private Mercer, Levy expressing the same sentiments that had been voiced a hundred times over by every marine who passed that way.

  “Dunno, Sy.” I took a drag from my cigarette. “Whatever it was … it must’ve been the worst.”

  “How do ya figure, the worst?”

  “Think about it.” I cocked an eyebrow. “A guy sitting out there … months on end, all by hisself? They ship him out here an’ throw him out like that? So maybe prison’s too good for him, they figure. He has to wait it out, they figure. Nah, this guy? They want this guy to disappear. Maybe he gets outta this place”—I shrugged—“maybe he don’t.”

  Sy laughed. “Hell, Mace, I think you need to put down the Dick Tracy funny papers!”

  I laughed, too. “Yeah, maybe—but it doesn’t change that guy’s predicament, does it?”

  At that, we looked out at Mercer again. Silent. Mercer didn’t bat an eye.

  Like “Old Man” Haney. Haney lived the real Pacific war.

  Mahan came over to our tent just to shoot the breeze. Joking. Smoking. All of a sudden Larry sees Gunny Elmo Haney coming out of his tent. “Jesus Christ!” Larry exclaimed. “What’re you guys keeping over here, a Civil War relic?”

  “Ah, c’mon!” Levy slapped Larry on the back. “We brought your granddad over here, and that’s all the thanks we get?”

  “My granddad? More like my goddamn great-great-granddad!”