Battleground Pacific Read online

  Walking down the metal stairwell inside, it was difficult to keep our balance, with all the extra weight we carried; you had to watch your steps, as the staircase led farther down into the ship’s lungs, eventually opening up into what amounted to a large steel belly, full of growling amtracs, reeking of exhaust fumes. It was noxious, almost gagging; I could feel the inside of my nose and the back of my throat sting with the choking vapors.

  Here, the amtracs grind their treads back and forth on the steel deck, squeaking and squealing as they align themselves to load up with marines, the echoes of things banging against the metal of the corridor’s sides, voices trying to be heard over other voices, worried glances, hand signals, pallid faces; we walk into the rear of what appears to be the second amtrac that’ll leave the great bow doors. The driver cranes his neck and looks back at us, maybe counting heads … who knows what he’s doing.

  Sy is a few marines ahead of me as we settle into the tractor. I catch his eyes. “Three days!” I shout and give him a thumbs-up. “Three days!” I don’t know if hears me or not; nevertheless, he returns my thumbs-up, affecting a wan smile as he does so.

  Three days. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, not caring how foul the diesel smoke is.

  Three days. Rough, but fast.

  That’s what they told us, anyway.

  On the way over to Peleliu, Billy Leyden and I were walking topside of the LST when all of a sudden P. A. Wilson came around the corner of the LCM, almost bumping into us.

  “Hey, hey! Where’s the flood, Wilson? The war’s that way, buddy!” Billy pointed and chuckled.

  Wilson stopped. “You mean you guys haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?” I asked.

  “What Rupertus said! C’mon!”

  I looked over at Billy. “Who’s Rupertus, anyway? One of the Marx Brothers?”

  Billy winked. “I think that’s a general, Sterl.”

  I knew exactly who General William H. Rupertus was.

  “Okay, Wilson.” I crossed my arms. “What did Rupertus say?”

  “Okay … Okay, he said this whole operation is only gonna last three days. He said rough, but fast, but only three days, like Tarawa.”

  “Hey.” I beamed. “I’m beginning to like this general of yours, Wilson. What else did he say?”

  “Well…” Wilson thought on that a moment and shrugged. “The only other thing he said was that we’re gonna be in the first wave.”

  “Ah, see?” I threw up my hands and looked at Bill. “See? Just when ya get to know a fella, and ya start liking the guy, the next thing ya know the sonuvabitch starts stabbin’ ya in the back! Now, isn’t that the way it always goes?”

  *

  The doors of the LST are just beginning to open, and a thin wedge of white light slices into the dark hold …

  Then the doors open a little wider; I slide my hand back and forth on the receiver of my BAR. Holding my BAR, I think, Is this thing all I’ve got to keep me alive? My eyes are just beginning to squint at the bright light. Pupils constrict.

  Everyone’s nervous; you feel as if you’re about to jump right out of your skin. The sounds grow louder as the LST doors break open wide, white as snow. Until finally the great gate opens its full width, blanching the entire corridor with the absence of all color. Full blind. This could be the last day of my life …

  Exiting the LST that day, on our way to Peleliu, was a new birth. Reborn.

  Most men are only born once. Having never experienced war, they are never faced with the rest of their lives seen through the optic of furthest extinction. For until a man embraces the culture of death, he’ll never fully live the life he’s always wanted to live.

  *

  September 15, 1944. D-day minus 12 minutes. 8:20 A.M.

  In just a few minutes I’ll be on Orange Beach 2 …

  “Heads down! Heads! Down!” the driver of the amtrac bawls. I really can’t hear him; nevertheless, we don’t need to. Everyone gets the gist when we see his outstretched arm moving in a downward motion. We’re about halfway to Peleliu.

  Just as my head goes down, I gaze up and see that we’ve pulled right alongside an LCI (Landing Craft, Infantry). Even the sailors on the deck of the LCI scramble around, taking cover. Immediately I know why.

  Fhsss! Fhsss! Fhsss! Fhsss! Fhsss! Hundreds of rockets begin shooting from the LCI, from box-shaped installments on both sides of her hull and on her deck. The 4.5-inch barrage rockets launch out in an arch, sizzling, hissing, flying toward Peleliu as a last measure to pepper any Nips who still might be on the beach waiting for us to land. The rockets themselves are only blurs, but the streamers coming off of them are white-hot comets that could fry a man alive.

  You just want them to do their jobs. C’mon, babies, please do your jobs!

  Even as we pass the LCI, our journey still seems to take forever. Endless. We stay with our heads down, now blind to anything ahead of us, weapons and packs being pushed up to our chins as we crouch; the 37 mm cannon crowds us, as some of the guys in our amphib straddle the thing, attempting to stay balanced. Something large screams overhead; I place my fingers in my ears, grimacing at the din … when suddenly the amtrac lurches and bumps against something, losing traction. Water sprays in and guys duck, some of them with their arms folded over their helmets.

  I spy the driver of the tractor frantically jerking at the gears; all the while the amtrac is protesting and moaning, grinding metal. “We’re not going anywhere!” somebody shouts.

  We hit the reef! I knew it. My stomach flips as I watch the driver looking back over his shoulder, parallel parking the Alligator. We’re sitting goddamn ducks out here!

  “Hey, hey, hey! What the fuck’s goin’ on!” marines yell at the driver.

  “Get us outta here!”

  The driver pulls off the coral, takes a shot at the reef again, and with one more tilt we’re up and over it in a matter of seconds.

  The thing is, the amtrac driver does an excellent job, but nobody ever thinks about the driver and how the poor sucker must be just as scared as we are. He goes through all of his practice runs with perfect precision, yet the reality of the situation is—like for all of us in the boat—when you do it for real, what are you going to do?

  The last thing you want to do is rattle a guy any more than he already is.

  We’re on the water and we’re going in, and my breathing comes out hot and unnatural. Quickly I swipe the sweat from my eyes. Blinking fast. We’re going in and I want to take one more look.

  I take my last look at Peleliu while still in the amtrac, and the only thing I’m drawn to, as I look over the side, is the white water at the beach’s edge. White! It’s so white and still (as she lay in her casket at our home in Queens), untouched by marines. It’s yet to be stirred by the treads of our amtrac … or any other beast of war.

  “One minute!” the driver yells. “One! Minute!”

  That’s our cue. We all turn around to face the exit ramp.

  Then I say to myself something that I’ve told very few people in my life, save for my mom, upon my return from the war.

  I say to myself, “Sister Dorothy … be my guide.”

  Be my guide.

  3

  HELLZAPOPPIN’

  NOTHING EVER PREPARES YOU FOR the rest of your life. It’s inevitable that you get there; it is a certainty that you will; yet when you do, you rarely think, This is it.

  The split second after the U.S. steel of our amtrac grinds against the foreign sands of Orange Beach 2, and before the ramp drops, I think to myself, This is it. My fingers try to claw their way into the anatomy of my BAR. My groin pulls up in a knot. Knees slightly bent now, down goes the ramp!

  Nobody says anything: You get out of there; you get out of the amtrac! Combat infantry.

  McEnery is out first, and he slices off to the left, his shotgun in hand. Confusion is king of this castle, and I look to the left but don’t see anybody. No marines at all, only this mongrel dog on the beach: wet,
shaking from tail to muzzle, vibratory. The dog’s eyes are insane. He shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here. A machine gun opens fire and fizzes me up like a bottle of soda pop. “Jesus Christ!” Guys are spilling out of our amtrac, escapees from a madhouse.

  I sprint off to the right of the tractor. Where the hell is this fire coming from?

  Ocean spray pelts my dungarees.

  Just a few steps to my right is another amtrac, and I duck behind it, sighting in, trying to get my bearings. In front of me marines dart up the beach, their footfalls fanning tufts of sand behind them. High up, black smoke fights with the Pacific blue sky. Darkness wins—God’s sky no more—and this machine gun runs its steady beat; steady, steady, keeping time with my trip-hammer heart.

  The only thing between the sand and the sky is a clutch of ratty trees and low scrub, whittled thin from days of bombardment, appearing like a skeleton’s fingers, brittle and blistered, as anemic as I feel inside.

  Then suddenly I feel naked, ass in the breeze. The amtrac I’m using for protection lurches forward, and it’s gone, just as quickly as I’m moving again.

  Got to get off the beach! Quick time, my legs are pumping and I’m treading coral dust where the beach begins to rise. Move up. Other marines are doing the same thing—scrambling, falling, a wild-eyed run—but I only catch them in my peripheral vision. They are ghosts to me. None of them are real until I jump into a shell hole holding six marines.

  Who are these marines in this hole, all bunched up? They are sinning. You don’t bunch up. You never bunch up. They grip their weapons like primitives, fetal positioned, never daring to look over the rim. If a shell lands near these marines they’ll be pouring them out of their boondockers—guts, like stuffing, rolling down the beachhead. You don’t think about things like that; you just move.

  I jump out of the hole, running low, as echoes of gunfire suck the air and explosions wrack the earth; yet I can’t tell how close or how far the lead is flying, because there’s a jackhammer banging away behind my eyes, making my vision shudder. The world is having a seizure. Up, then down again, I run and then fall; I see some mangrove and I low-crawl to it. Fast! A welcome shelter; I scramble against a notch in the thick foliage and prop my back against it, trying to see who’s who, or who to follow, or where everybody is.

  There’s sweat, stinging, blurring the eyes, as a new wave of amtracs lumbers onto the beach, but I only see them through the shimmering heat. The sun is a needle’s point of light; we insect invaders sizzle and pop beneath its hateful rays.

  God, it’s hot. It’s a heat that doesn’t leave you alone. The sun is my enemy. The enemy is my enemy. The sand is my enemy—between my teeth it grits, in my ears it sits, in my boondockers it grinds. Has it fouled my weapon? I don’t know. The heat is my enemy; so I dig for one of my canteens, and to my surprise half of the bastard’s already been drained and I don’t even recall drinking it. That’s the kind of shift into chaos, phasing out of awareness, that is powerful enough to melt the hands of time.

  So I take a few more draws off the canteen, but when I start to get up, I’m pulled back to earth again.

  “Shit!” My gas-mask pouch hangs up in the mangrove. Of all the things the marines could have issued me, I’ve got a gas mask! Like bringing a wedding cake to a funeral.

  Move up, move up.

  Untangling myself, panting, I leave the mask behind and scooch my way into more of the thicket, being careful not to snag my BAR as I go in.

  In the mangrove are several marines. All of them look around, side to side, behind them, in front of them; their cheeks are already marked by rivers of sweat making clean lines through the dirt that’s powdered their faces. Faces drawn down in worry. We are a shifty, sketchy tribe. Jitterbug movements, all together like rats in a sack. Why the hell aren’t we moving? These trees—we hide behind rows of toothpicks, the timbers are so shredded and shorn of foliage.

  A marine close to me says, “They’ve got brown uniforms, brown helmets, wraparound leggings, and hobnail shoes.” He’s describing the Japanese solider. I don’t know why he’s telling me this. Perhaps the word has been passed down the line, but I haven’t seen a Nip yet, and I probably don’t care what a Jap looks like, as long as he’s not looking at me.

  Move up. We creep ahead maybe five feet and somebody yells, “Hold up!” Before I know it I’ve already gotten behind some crumpled shrubs in the mangrove.

  “They’re shooting low! They’re trying to hit us in the legs!”

  “Corpsman!” goes the call.

  “Who got hit?” Somebody got hit. You wait, breathlessly waiting, wanting to dash away, to scamper. That’s what we want to know, an immediate answer to who’s bleeding out in the mangrove. Frantic seconds. Necks crane quickly, low and at strange angles, telepaths, ears to the jungle telegraph, seeking to ascertain the origins of the shots. Fat chance, though—there’s gunfire, explosions, and tremors everywhere. Random shots sound like tearing paper, knifing through what few leaves remain.

  A marine hustles over to us through the garbage green undergrowth. “It was Flowers,” he says, skidding back into his position. PFC Leroy Flowers, the company runner. We look around nervously, gazing anywhere but into the eyes of one of your buddies. Pops of small-arms fire still flirt around the area where Flowers was hit, but we pretend to forget.

  There are mumblings and typical Marine Corps bullshit as I shift my gear around on raw shoulders. Sticky scavenger bugs drown in pools of sweat on my hands. There is movement. There is only one way out of this world.

  Then I hear this booming voice—a locomotive breath, coming through the scrub behind me, followed by peals of Japanese mortars perforating the marines who are still floundering on the beach.

  “There’s not a Jap alive on the island, let’s go!” the stocky marine shouts. It’s the voice of Lieutenant Colonel Austin “Shifty” Shofner. The only true marine sermon I’ve heard since enlisting—some gung ho muscle speech that inspires us, though it makes me wonder … if there are only dead Nips on this island, then who the hell is shooting at us, Snow White and the Seven Midgets?

  Still, it’s exactly what we need to get moving forward.

  Half-step, whole-step, then half-step, our swaying through the mangrove is discordant music, accompanied by a flock of F4U Corsairs above us, tacking out machine-gun rhythms at some unseen objective to our front. They are beautiful gull-winged birds of war: crying blue angels, shitting out their wrath on Japanese hide. The sight of them brings with it a little bit of courage; I almost want to scream with pride, but they are way the hell up there, and here I am, a mere pimple in the armpit of the Pacific. I could be squeezed like a boil and have my eyes run out, and those fighter jocks would never see the difference from their vantage. Just another marine.

  Soon, however, we’re told to take ten. We stop in a half-closed-in thicket, a small clearing, and I realize that in all this time we’ve only come about fifty yards from the beach. The hammering on the coast is still thick and congested, but in this moment, our moment, marines let their helmets fall to the earth. We sit and sag; Zippos snap open, and we light our first cigarettes since landing. Men sigh, but few words are spoken. Marines squat with their rifles propped on knees, while others sit with their weapons in their laps. It’s the only nervous comfort we can afford ourselves as I take a seat on a burned-out stump, still warm from the preinvasion bombardment. Pete Candella comes up and sits next to me. The front of his blouse is inked dark with a V-shaped pattern of sour sweat, just like the rest of us.

  With his dark hair and freckles, Pete looks just like that kid, Alfalfa, from the Little Rascals. It seems as if Pete’s about to say something, as he wipes his arm across his brow, but that’s when the world erupts.

  An explosion, only fifteen feet in front of me, punches me off my seat, and I hit the ground in a heap, lungs purged of breath. Eardrums go numb as all sound is bled from the air, while this sickly black wisp of smoke belches and descends on us like the soiled hand o
f death. Yet I’m aware of Pete yelling out. Boondockers and leggings become blurs around me as I get to my knees, my heavy pack careening to one side, then the other. I shake my head to clear it … and this commotion! It’s the essence of confusion. I catch sight of Pete and he has a hand over one eye, dark streams of blood cutting ruby ribbons around his clawing fingers—a groping fist that’s trying to hold the geyser in. My God, Pete’s hit!

  Someone hails a corpsman. Quick.

  “Where’s he at?”

  Bandages, gauze, hemostats, morphine syrettes, tape, and tourniquets—Corpsman Chulis is a miracle because he always seems to be there whenever he’s called, although he’s more of a marvel because he makes so much work with what little he has.

  Now he’s working on Pete, and I’m looking to see if all this is real. It’s amazing how you can wish all you want that something isn’t true, but when you really want something to be real, it never seems to be. That’s how I feel when a Nip machine gun starts chattering off to our right.

  Another jolt—and then bang! Marines disperse and hit the deck, the brims of our helmets creasing the turf, praying this Jap gun doesn’t rake across our bodies. Beside me Corporal Vincent turns to me and says, “Hey, Mace! Go in there an’ find out what the hell’s going on an’ take care of it!” I think to myself, Why the fuck do you pick me? How the hell does he pick me, for chrissakes?

  Nevertheless, I’m going to walk through the fire because he said to do it. That’s my job. This nineteen-pound BAR weighs more than the Brooklyn Naval Yard, and I’m lifting myself off the mangrove, bent at the waist, walking as if the ground is made of precious china. Blinking rapidly, pulse racing, respiration off the chart—this Jap must be a few feet beyond the vegetation, the shots are so close. So loud.

  I head into the undergrowth, and all I think about is how I’m going to react when I get through the brush. What if this Nip’s got a bead on me already?

  You’ve got to think, Sterling, just think and be steady.

  I’m about one foot into the scrub and I’ve got the safety off my BAR. Always off. Putting a little pressure on the trigger, I wish I had something to wipe the perspiration dripping from my eyelashes. I’m aware of the sound the leaves make as they swish the top of my helmet, even below the racket of the machine gun’s bark.