Battleground Pacific Read online

  I’m two feet in and I’m about to kill a human being. To kill him. My facial muscles ache from the force my teeth put on my jaws. These legs of mine are crap; they are made of elastic.

  Three feet in and I’m a marine. A blunt fact.

  Four feet in and …

  “Mace! Forget it, it’s one of ours!” somebody yells. “Come on out o’ there!”

  I’m out! I went in the tortoise and come out the hare, sprinting back, relieved that it isn’t a Jap gun in the undergrowth, but pissed that I had nearly shat myself in the process.

  With no time to compose myself (yet steadily cursing Vincent under my breath), they tell us to move up again, into the mangrove I had just exited. Just a swift push through the tangled brush, and then out the other side into another small clearing dividing two hedges of scrubwood. We find ourselves in an open spot.

  “Down!” hisses a scout who’s not too far from me, sending all of us shooting for cover. Heads on swivels, it takes nothing flat to see what the scout sees. Almost in front of us, only two hundred feet, and slightly to our left, some Japs are in the mangrove, wheeling a 75 mm fieldpiece partway out of the underbrush, like the hood of a Buick halfway out of a garage. We can’t see the Nips, but we damn sure feel the ominous weight of the cannon’s barrel: the potential for cyclopean fury, boring at us with its lands and grooves, magnified, as if the business end of this fieldpiece can reach out and shake my hand all the way to hell.

  The natural instinct is to beat feet—all assholes and elbows—but we stay put. The gun isn’t firing. Gnawing on bottom lips, eyes asking what to do next; time feels heavy and soggy—seconds are syrupy. The truth is I don’t think the Japanese know we’re here. They are probably setting up to take more shots at the beachhead.

  Beside me Sergeant Hank Boyes continues to look over his shoulder. I wonder what Boyes got cookin’. Then suddenly a lightbulb flicks on beneath Boyes’s helmet. News flash!

  “There’s a tank back there somewhere, I think,” Boyes says, cocking his thumb toward the beach, shooting glances to the Jap gun and back at us. “I’ll see what I can do. Hold tight.”

  Watching Sergeant Boyes vanish into the undergrowth behind us, I peek again at the still silent gun, expecting it to erupt at any moment. Then the sight of Charlie Allmann, to my right, catches my attention instead. Where the hell has he been? I think.

  Not long after, we hear the first rumblings of a tank approaching from behind us, steadily growing louder. A tank can be a beautiful engine of metal-on-metal, steel wheels gnashing and pig iron groaning. It crashes though the foliage only a few feet away from Charlie and me, puffing up coral dust as it grinds. The Sherman flattens the mangrove halfway to pulp and storms into the clearing with Hank Boyes riding atop the turret, Hank resembling an ancient cavalry trooper of old, General George Armstrong Custer, or the like.

  I don’t hear what Boyes calls down to the tanker, inside the turret, but whatever it is the Sherman digs to a halt about 150 feet from the Nip gun and lets loose with its 37 mm cannon, throwing an orange shout of fire at the Jap gun, incinerating the mangrove around it. Then another wham. Then another. The blast is incredible when you’re so close to the tank that you smell the heavy grease inside the tank’s tracks. Each time the tank fires, it rolls up a few more feet and burns up whatever life once lived on the other side of the scrub.

  Just like that the deal is done.

  Boyes hops off the tank. We look at him and he shrugs his shoulders. Nobody says anything and nobody has to. The fact that this is a rough moment, a rough landing, for Pete’s sake, is not lost on anyone, especially on Boyes, as he merely gives us the proceed-with-caution hand signal. We start to move forward. Slowly we move, weapons at the ready. The Sherman is already out of mind. Its job is done. For now, my eyes are solely glued to where the Jap 75 had once been, though where now simply sits a charred-out divot in the foliage like a black tooth in the gum line.

  Inside the scrub trees and mashed vegetation, the odor of scorched plant life is acrid and pungent. Yet above that smell of the smoky scrub is a stench I have never smelled before. I don’t even see the Nip bodies before an almost sweet, evil version of cracked pork touches my nose, as I feel a sharp pull in my stomach.

  They are stage props, the dead Japanese. Not real. Mannequins in a shattered shop window. One is draped over the muzzle of the fieldpiece, his uniform in tatters and split at the seams from the force of the blast. His back and head are angled toward me, flopped down and saggy—a curious pose for a stage production of Hellzapoppin’ at the Winter Garden, back in Manhattan. I can almost hear Olsen & Johnson, the laughter bouncing through my memory, singing those revue songs, morbid on the spot, like “Blow a Balloon up to the Moon” and “It’s Time to Say Aloha.”

  The first dead Japanese I’ve seen.

  There are more dead Nips tossed around the cannon wheels, and a couple more are chewed up toward the rear of the big gun. Still, you don’t stop and gawk; you merely take it in and keep walking, watching the flies descend on their afternoon meal.

  I look away and then move closer to the tank as I let myself become more aware of my surroundings. The din of heavy combat in the direction of the 1st Marines still comes in thick as we step high and pick our way through this mangrove crap in a ripsaw skirmish line.

  It never ends.

  To our right, in another clearing—the largest we’ve encountered so far—we find a blood clot in the artery of the island: a festering field where about twenty-five to thirty Japanese bodies are massed.

  “Sonuva … bitch,” a marine from the 7th mutters quietly, but I don’t turn to acknowledge him. I only have eyes for disaster.

  The Japanese corpses have congested this open area with open wounds, glossy red tripe boiling from naked bellies. Those arms and legs that are still attached are curiously bent akimbo. Flexed fingers, like a beggar’s claws, seek in vain to snatch their departed souls from the air, as blue and black lips puff on brown faces. Eyeballs are deflated, dehydrated, collapsing in on themselves. Exposed bone shows pinkish white. While some merely appear to sleep, facedown and flyblown, they are craving for dirt—all torn asunder on the butcher’s block of war.

  “Are they all dead?” Levy whispers to me. I haven’t seen Sy since the amtrac, and boy am I glad to see him.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I reply. What the hell happened to these Japs? My mind goes back to the Corsairs we saw flying over, tearing up something in front of them. Maybe. Who knows.

  We walk gingerly, picking our way through this blood harvest. Jim McEnery turns around and says calmly, “Make sure they got flies on ’em. The suckers could be fakin’.”

  Flies. They are everywhere: a clogged-thick buzz of maggot seeding, a swarm feast on Peleliu. Somewhere there’s a God, but not right here.

  “Hey, Sterl!” Levy breathes coarsely, excited. “I think this one’s alive! No flies.”

  I take a few steps back from where Levy points at a corpse with his M-1. Squinting, I try to make out what he sees—but it’s not much.

  “C’mon, for chrissakes, Sy.” I lean in toward Levy’s ear. “He’s got no head.”

  There is a splash of embarrassment on Sy’s cheeks, but he needn’t be ashamed. Not here. Not like this. Not with caution flashing out snapshots of mortuary creatures before our eyes.

  Then the smell of these Japs—the high coppery tang of dropped blood and the low odor of feces. There is panic carved on the faces of both the living and the dead.

  Another Nip catches my eye. He has no flies on him either. Lying facedown, he resembles a windmill, arms and legs splayed out. He just seems too natural with not a drop of harm on him. Pop! Pop! With my BAR I put two rounds in his back. Quick and anxious, I don’t even think about it before I do it. I am my fear, and I startle myself by pulling the trigger. Whether the Jap is alive or dead, however, doesn’t matter; this is the first time I’ve ever fired my weapon, and all I needed was to let the horror out.

  “Is he dead, Mace?�
� McEnery asks. Right now, I could run right over Jimmy, trying to get the hell out of here.

  Keep moving. That’s what we do.

  We move and it feels productive. We stop and it seems as if we’re bathing in quicksand. Even if there’s safety in numbers, it certainly does not feel like it, exposed as we are among the bony trees.

  The sun is still a cigar burn in the dome of the sky when we reach the southern edge of an airfield. Rows of marines, lost and disbanded, stagger throughout the underbrush, peering wide-eyed across the expanse of flatland that makes up the airstrips. Beyond the airfield, in the close distance, are rows of ragged and cleaved cliffs, peaks, and awful ridges that look dull and irrational beneath the 100-degree heat.

  Talking to one another in shaky tones, we are scared. Not scared because the airfield is imposing, but petrified because the air seems to have been gagged of sound. Near silence. The juxtaposition is stark, the cacophony of our early day’s run versus this present moment of quiet.

  The Japanese have quit firing in our area. Only from our far left come the scant, sporadic thumps of munitions going off—probably mortars.

  “Hey, Sy,” I say hoarsely between nervous puffs on my cigarette. “Why do ya think the Nips have stopped shooting at us, huh?”

  Levy doesn’t look at me. His eyes, instead, are focused on the flat airfield in front of us.

  “I don’t know,” Sy says. “Maybe they’re tryin’ to catch us out there?” He motions with the end of his M-1.

  When he looks back at me I know he’s right. We look again, together. The airfield doesn’t appear very hospitable. In fact, the flat features of the airfield seem a lot like the hardpan of the Nevada desert—the kind of no-good terrain where a would-be traveler could find all sorts of snakes, scorpions, wasps, and jackals.

  Presently Schwantz and Van Trump appear.

  “Where the hell have you guys been?” I ask.

  Van Trump shakes his head. “Shit, tryin’ to find you guys! This goddamn place is a mess. Had some of the boys from the 7th Marines right up our asses the whole time, all the way up here. So I don’t even know if we’re lost or they are—or who the hell knows what’s goin’ on! You seen Zero?”

  By that he means have I seen Lieutenant Bauerschmidt.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Christ! And McEnery?”

  “Yeah, he’s around here somewhere. Say, how about the rest of the fellas? Machine guns? Mortars? Sergeant Palmisano? You seen any of them?”

  “You kiddin’?” Schwantz chimes in. “They’re probably still tryin’ to pick their way through this crap like the rest of us! But hey, if you hear anything about getting some water up here, you let us know, okay, Mace?”

  “Yeah, sure … water.”

  After a while, Van Trump and Schwantz return with Charlie Allmann, just as the sun begins to dip a little in the sky. Evidently they’ve been planning something and they’ve come to recruit me to go along with it. I’m sure Van Trump hatched the idea, but it doesn’t matter. We talk as if I have a choice in the matter.

  The plan is to walk onto the airfield and take a peek at what appears to be a crashed Hellcat on one of the strips. A “curiosity mission,” if you will. The Hellcat must be the plane we saw take a hit and nosedive onto the island as we stood on the LST this morning.

  Reluctantly I agree, but only because I’m a part of the fire team. Besides, most of the action seems to be coming from the north of us at the moment. I honestly expect someone to bawl us out for going out there, but as we take the first tentative steps out of the mangrove, nobody cares. All eyes merely watch as we slip out of the foliage and onto the open ground. As soon as my boondockers touch the concrete, the creepiest feeling sprouts wings in the depths of my stomach—moths aflutter, beating madly and trying to escape. Something is on the outside looking in on us, but I ignore the early warning sign inside my guts, giving in to the face of young bravado instead.

  Beneath our feet, the coral pebbles crunch against the first flat-packed land we’ve come across since the landing. The quiet is even more disturbing as our fire team, rifles poised for use, turns and looks, side to side, swiveling around and looking some more—halfway expecting a sneaky yellow bastard to come storming at us, jabbering his jabber, his bayonet thirsty for Yankee blood.

  Maybe this is a bad idea, but it’s too friggin’ late: We’re already out in the open and we’re not taking any fire. So, okay, good.

  What we find, on the other hand, is not quite as bad as a Nip high on murder—but it is a close second. The first dead American I’ve seen.

  Everything on the Hellcat (if you could call it a plane anymore) is pushed up, toward the tailfin, buckled and twisted from the impact of hitting the runway nose first. Both wings are barely attached by scraps of metal, and they’re pointing at the ground, in a V, all odd angles and scorch marks on once proud metal. The engine appears to have bounced backward, shoving almost all the way through the cockpit, barely leaving enough room for the pilot to repose in his fractured coffin.

  Since the crash has forced the fuselage to ground level, we’re all able to peer into the smashed cockpit, looking down into the tomb that had once housed a gleaming American specimen, ready for takeoff.

  The pilot is scrunched forward at his middle, leaning over what used to pass as an instrument panel. His head has an unnatural cant to it, tilted like the RCA Victor dog’s, and I can’t help but wonder if the pilot—at this very moment—is somewhere hearing “his master’s voice.” His Master’s voice.

  A wide ooze of jellied blood hangs motionless from his mouth. Deep lacerations are present on his hands, bone deep. There’s no way I dare gaze into the face below his flight helmet to see if it looks as bad as his Hellcat. This is way too close to home. It’s sick enough as it is. In fact, to merely touch him is a deadly proposition in itself.

  The Japanese have done something bad to the pilot. Bad.

  It’s PFC Schwantz who sees the Nip trick first.

  Attached to the pilot’s flight suit is a booby trap: a string of grenades, affixed to a thin wire, which holds the grenades together like a strand of lights adorning a Christmas tree. One pluck of that string and you’d be playing the harp with St. Peter for eternity. I grit my teeth and force myself to look away. Those sonsabitches.

  In fact, we all back off when we see the pilot rigged up for death. Everyone save for Van Trump, who’s still eyeballing the cockpit for some reason. I simply can’t believe any of this. None of this is real. Not this morning. Not now.

  What the Christ is Van doing, for God’s sake?

  Van puts a leg up on one of the angled wings and tests the bent metal against his weight. The wing proves steady enough for Van to pull himself up against the fuselage. He looks as if he is about to climb into the cockpit and sit in the pilot’s lap. However, Van Trump doesn’t go that far. Instead, he runs one of his arms into the cockpit and fingers around in there for a few seconds.

  I wince and take another step back, fully expecting the explosion that’s going to tear the top of Van’s head off.

  When I glance around, the airfield seems somehow smaller in magnitude, closing in on all sides. Moreover, I can feel them—a thousand Nip eyes, glaring down on me … only on me. If it’s only my imagination running wild, common sense still tells me that at least some Japs are watching us. That even if we’re out of rifle shot, the Japanese are soldiers, too, and they’d be stupid not to have the airfield observed around the clock. The Nips must wonder what we’re doing out here. Or they’re anticipating the same explosion I am.

  When I look back toward the plane again, Van has his arm out of the cockpit, but he’s still up there examining something, as if he’s a pathologist who’s just discovered that the cause of death was signing up for flight school. Then, slowly, his arm goes in a second time … very slowly … but this time Van comes out with something in his hand, all without disturbing the trap the Japs had laid for us.

  Dropping down from the wing, Van Trump stro
lls up to us, grinning, as he brandishes a .38 caliber revolver he fished out of the dead man’s holster.

  “A chicken in every pot, fellas,” he says with a wide smile. “C’mon, let’s head back before it gets dark.”

  I let out a long sigh. I hadn’t realized that I’d been holding my breath nearly the entire time we’ve been out here. Lucky sonuvabitch, Van.

  Walking back, it is still hellishly hot, despite the sun beginning to crank down for the evening where the ocean meets the sky on the other side of the island. This place could have been beautiful once, I think—but there is little time to reflect.

  I could have thought about how close I had come to being killed since this morning, but I don’t. I could have wondered if the Nip I’d shot in the back was already dead before I pumped two rounds into him, but I don’t care. If I had known at the time, I could have thought about Larry Mahan and how he was killed, taking one in the chest, as soon as he got out of the amtrac. Or how his buddy, Corporal Clement Hicks, got his hand blown off, right next to Larry, when they hit the beach together. But I am oblivious to it all … and I’m all the better for it.

  What I think of, on the other hand, is two more days. If I can make it through this night—God knows what will happen tonight—I will only have two more days of combat, and then it’ll be back to Pavuvu … or better yet, Australia. Anywhere but here. Only two more days and “There’s not a Jap alive on the Island, let’s go!” Just two more. My God, Pete’s hit!

  Two more.

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

  Two.

  “Is he dead, Mace?”

  Yet just as I’m blinded to the fate of Mahan, I’m unaware that it won’t be until October 15 (D-day +30), after almost a month of constant battle exposure, that K Company will finally come off the line.