Battleground Pacific Read online

  *

  As I settle back into the mangrove, flares begin to shoot up and flutter down over the airfield, creating angular shades of dark and light against the blood hue of the sunset. The artificial light of star shells bends the sleepy glow of the sun in such a way that marines look grotesque and misshapen among the shattered screw-pine trees and crooked coral spines. The flares will go on like this all night, one right after the other, turning the air as bitter as the ground is hard—adding to our thirst in increments throughout the night.

  Yet for those of us who have made it through the day, there’s no guarantee that we’ll make it through the night. For as the final light ebbs, and the gloom sets in, it is written on every marine’s face that we are trapped here, lost here … and the Japanese are out there.

  4

  RUN!

  DAWN, SEPTEMBER 16, 1944 (D-DAY +1), 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Morning brought with it the eeriest feeling, watching the low mist float and gently sway over the ground across the airfield in front of us.

  When the mist arrived—as gray shifted to first light—marines began to rise in the wash of our new surroundings, slowly at first, only a few green-clad phantoms smudging the skyline with movement … and then a few more here and there, until finally most of us stood, becoming real once more in the morning light. Nobody had to tell us to awake. We hadn’t slept all night. We are simply there—in the moment: thirsty, filthy, sunken. Not a comb touched a hair; no water washed a face.

  “Say, Mace, what the hell ya think we’ll be doin’ today?”

  “Christ if I know. C’mere, ya got any water?”

  That was the whole conversation on everybody’s lips. Water. The lack of it. The love of it. The thirst for it. Marines, faces toward the sky, held their canteens bottoms up, jiggling the canteens from side to side, hoping that something would finally drip into their awaiting mouths, even though they knew damned well they’d already performed the ritual all through the night, with the same conclusion time and again. Nothing.

  The definition of desperation (or insanity) is to repeat the same thing over and over, expecting a different result every time. We were desperate.

  Both of my canteens had been empty since late yesterday afternoon—bone dry. My tongue felt like a cut of sandpaper, swathed in cotton balls. A stale, stanched sensation clicked in my throat; my tongue snapped like a rubber band in my mouth.

  We knew we were in trouble without water, yet I don’t think even Corpsman Chulis knew how much danger our young bodies were in. Moreover, nobody seemed to care. The Japanese were the issue, not whether we were fit to fight or not.

  Nevertheless, the facts remained: The body could lose more than sixteen ounces of sweat for every hour under the 100-degree sun. Most of us had been without water for the last twelve hours. That makes at least twelve pounds of water our bodies conceivably lost since we reached the airfield. My heart raced, my eyes were so dry it almost hurt to blink, and I no longer had the urge to urinate.

  In any other place we would have been in hospitals.

  “You’d think they’d get some goddamn water to us, huh?”

  “What the hell is goin’ on here, for chrissakes? They knew this place didn’t have any water!”

  “Are you shittin’ me? They don’t care about us.”

  “Hey, you think the Japs got water?”

  “Why don’tja go up there and ask the Nips for some water. Tell ’em we’ll bring it right back to ’em after we’re done with it.”

  Eventually someone said, “Hey, water!”

  “Water?”

  “Water, where?”

  We hustled over to where Billy Leyden and a few of the boys huddled around some sort of crater in the ground, a shell hole or a natural pocket scooped out of the earth. The hole was only about eight feet wide at the top, and as it got deeper, it funneled down, an inverted cone, where the water sat in a tight pool at the bottom.

  There weren’t many of us there, trying to get at what water we could: Gene Holland, Billy Leyden, Orley Uhls, Frankie Ocepek, Sy Levy, Jack Baugh, and I all attempting to fill our canteens and gulping water out of our helmets. This must be what heaven is like in hell, I thought.

  For a second I stopped short of taking a drink—but the animal in my brain told me otherwise. Though it was true that the water was a grayish puddle, the kind that was ready for a bag of Portland cement if you were laying a sidewalk. Plus some sort of jungle crap appeared slick atop the pool …

  “Who gives a good fuck?” I said. “I’m drinking it!”

  Everyone grinned from ear to ear, passing up sloshing helmets; there were sighs and thanks-be-to-gods. Oh, it tasted like nine kinds of hell—very much like swigging down chalk. Nevertheless, with each grain that went down, with each grit, I became more sure that this was the cleanest spring that had ever touched my lips.

  There was never very much water in the pit to begin with, so by the time we finished, the only thing left in the bottom of the hole was a thick muddy sludge, not fit for anyone.

  The ironic thing, however, was that not long after we had as much of that soupy stuff as we could take, they brought up jerry cans of water that came out of 55-gallon drums they had rolled off the LSTs.

  It wasn’t fresh water in those cans, though. We later found out some goldbrick marines hadn’t washed the aviation fuel out of the drums when they were originally filled with water on Pavuvu. I spit the crap out before it even had a chance to splash my throat.

  “What the hell is this? This ain’t friggin’ water!”

  No, it wasn’t—and a string of curses went up among the ranks, punctuating that fact.

  A lot of guys drank the fuel-flavored water anyway. Most of us didn’t have much of a choice. For today we may die …

  After all, we had already made it through a night that was nearly as deadly in its own right. For just as the daylight hours of our first day on Peleliu were brimming with pandemonium, the witching hours also cradled their own chaos during the infancy of the invasion.

  *

  There had been a deep dark night of no sleep. Our eyes bulged and burned, transfixed on every stitch of inky gloom in sight. Keyed up, if a marine slept, he was either inhuman, dead, or a rear echelon shitbird. Maybe all three.

  It was just that way.

  There was also very little radio communication across the entire line—that is, if you could call it a line at all. We were more like the spotty growth that passes for pubescence on a young man’s face. In other words, in one patch of mangrove a collection of marines was moved by Lieutenant Colonel Lewis E. “Lew” Walt’s people back to their outfits; then another cluster of marines would move up to where the rest of their squad was situated in the scrub. All night it went on like this, until our lines at least had some semblance of order (although from an aerial view, our perimeter probably appeared more like the bottom half of a grin, with a few teeth missing along the way).

  Had the Nips known we were so off-kilter, those gaps between the cuspids should have been soft enough spots to infiltrate our lines and do some stiff damage—but the Japs didn’t know. The Japanese were probably just as frightened as we were, confused and far away in their mountainous perches. I’m sure the Nips watched the star shells blanch the skyline and drift across the airfield the same as we did. Distrustful.

  “Is that K Company up there?” a voice called from the darkness, not too far from where we hunkered in the mangrove. My eyes squinted as they adjusted between the harsh artificial light of the star shells and the natural soot of night. Between the two extremes, I barely made out the soft movements of a few dull figures approaching, gently crunching the foliage as they came.

  Some nearby marines answered. “Yeah, K Company! That’s us, over here!”

  Suddenly a lone K Company man arose, stepping between us and the converging figures, just a few yards away from Levy and me. The lone marine challenged, “Hey, hold it up! Hold up … who are these people?” I couldn’t be sure, as he
was just a charcoal smudge in my line of sight, but the lone marine sounded like PFC Underwood, a runner for Captain Andrew Haldane, our company CO. Whoever he was, he made a good call. “Make sure these guys identify themselves properly, okay?”

  The marine was right. Somebody creeping up on us like that could have been the emperor and all his flunkies, for all we knew. Lucky for us, and them, too, that the figures were merely a few more of Lew Walt’s men, making their Samaritan rounds.

  Otherwise, besides some sporadic gunfire and the occasional shelling, the only action all evening was the sounds of marines trying to peck out chunks of coral rock with their spades, attempting to make crude foxholes in an unyielding surface. A fruitless and fear-induced endeavor—over three hours of whacking the coral with a shovel would produce a dent worth only about two inches of land. A size just enough to spit in, if our mouths weren’t too dry to do so.

  It seems that it is the marine’s everlasting burden to wage war against the elements, within and without the presence of our enemies. In the case of Peleliu, even the ground detested our very presence on earth. So we did the only thing we could. We bitched and realigned ourselves in our own private pockets of hell, waiting for the mist to come, without knowing why we waited.

  In fact, none of us knew what we were doing.

  As for the island itself?

  Peleliu is a small crap island in the Palau island chain, roughly five hundred miles east of the Philippines, five miles square, and composed almost entirely of an off-white coral rock, speckled with dense mangrove, ranging anywhere from ankle-high scrub to thick jungle marshes. Furthermore, it appeared that the Japanese garrison had used every inch of its terrain to their advantage. High in the Umurbrogol Mountains (Bloody Nose Ridge), the Japs had dug into natural pockets of ridgelines, caves, and escarpments as places of defense. What’s more, the Nips had constructed pillboxes, tank traps, and artillery emplacements that covered the whole island with deadly fire.

  The Japs had an airfield, too.

  The rumbling among the ranks was that we had to take Peleliu because of the airfield there, as well as the other airstrips on the neighboring islands of Angaur and Ngesebus. Japanese air superiority could’ve put a serious dent in MacArthur’s bid to retake the Philippines. In other words, if the Nips had control of the airfields, they could fly their planes into the right flank of MacArthur’s Army Corps, beating the holy hell out of them. That was the scuttlebutt, anyway, but the infantry didn’t know for sure.

  As for me, I’m only a marine rifleman, a big nothing, and decisions to take these islands, one after the other, had very little to do with me. Nobody asked my advice about going to Peleliu. I had only two jobs: killing Nips and staying alive. Anything other than that put me on a pay scale that my BAR didn’t qualify me for. Besides, those who called the shots had been soldiering longer than I’d been alive; so to think that I might have been there unnecessarily or for something less noble than winning the war didn’t ever enter my mind. As in any other job, you do what you have to do and then you go home. You might not like your job, you might not like your boss; nevertheless, you signed on for it, you volunteered for it, you get paid to do it. That’s the story.

  That morning the Japs began shelling the airfield again, right when the sun came up, making it difficult to spot their muzzle flashes flaming off the side of the ridges, not far from the other side of the airfield. We twisted up inside: A tense pulling in the center that gives every indication that our higher level of thinking has now made peace with the more visceral aspects of our selves.

  Sure, if the Nips want the airfield so badly, why are they putting friggin’ holes in it?

  Hoisting our gear on our backs and returning to our small groups of fire teams, squads, and platoons, we anxiously watched as our navy boys delivered in mail of their own, salvo upon salvo, against the rock face of Japanese-held soil. Great pom-poms of white smoke, with undertones of orange, absorbed into the cliffs—giving us hope that we were giving the Nips hell—yet I don’t believe there was a fool among us who didn’t know that it was the stones crying out for blood, instead of the Japs.

  It wasn’t an artillery duel, but it was a constant. As if last night’s relative quiet had been only a dream, despite the total lack of sleep.

  When you wake up on the other side of death, marine, will that be a dream, too?

  I highly fucking doubt it.

  *

  “Alright, Third Platoon, we’re gonna make a run across that airfield,” Platoon Sergeant Spiece says in a flat tone, while catching the eyes of a few scattered squad leaders here and there. “Second Battalion will be on our left; we’re goin’ to the right. We’ve got the shorter run, but you never know what’s gonna happen.”

  Now he’s gone. No questions. Nothing. There certainly isn’t any Marine Corps magic surrounding Spiece’s briefing; he leaves the last minutes before kickoff to each marine and his own thoughts.

  Me, I’m scanning the surface of the airfield, watching the intermittent Jap shells wreck hell out there.

  The whole airfield is a piece of crap. Here and there you can see the detritus of war: deboned Nip planes, which appear to have been scuttled only a few weeks prior, some sort of squat concrete hut in the distance, and a smattering of cheapo Jap tanks, which look more like Model-T Fords than machines of war. Yesterday evening, the 1st Regiment gave a real spanking to the Nip tank corps on the island, and what remained was just what I was sighting in. If I had wanted to see better junkyards, I could have simply paid a visit to the Bronx, never having to cross the equator for my troubles.

  Now we’re in trouble. Unchained and fraught with turbulence, the Jap artillery striking the airfield gives the scene a tilted nuthouse shimmy. Warbling and swerving, a drunken fuss of coral powder, rank ash, and cordite fumes, the garden in front of us is in full bloom. The heat amplifies, the heat inflates, the heat—a dry aching thing—the heat casts upon each marine a private rainstorm of electric sweat, spreading out blanket patterns of perspiration in the pits and crotches of salty dungarees. Only 8:30 A.M. and already the oven door of Hades has broken open, set in motion, open … open …

  They give us the signal and we move out of the mangrove and onto the open airfield. My first steps are horrifying. We are a barbarian horde of globes and anchors, jazzed by brutality, beginning our charge at two speeds: fast and faster!

  To my left I spy the 2nd Battalion making their push, rifles at high port, much like the British going across the desert in the Middle East.

  “Hey, wouldja look at those guys!” a marine remarks, gaping at the same thing I am.

  “Jesus! You’d think they’re real marines or somethin’!”

  “Tallyho, lads! Jolly good job!”

  Wham! One shell drops to my left, and bits of coral zing past and sprinkle our backs—seasoning the meat. I close my eyes and open them again, quickly, just to make sure I’m still here, as smatterings of shell fire pitch the earth at angles too steep for the eyes to rein in. We’re running! For although this rain of ruin hasn’t increased since the early dawn, nonetheless, trapped in the middle of it, all bets are off, as if every Jap gun on the island sees you as a little yellow duck in a shooting gallery, rusted on its track, not making very good sport of it.

  Run. Then down. “Hold it!” goes the cry. When I ram the deck, I hit that sucker hard, shaving raw spots in the skin beneath my sleeves. It’s all so fast. You’re down as quick as you can. C’mon, c’mon, what’s the holdup? Up … now!

  Back on my feet, the fiery air sits low in my lungs and sags there making each (run) breath a little harder to (run) exhale. A stitch immediately cracks into my sides as I run (run) … Wham! Fifty yards away, another shell spins the earth off its axis; and I look to my left again, and down—just a … what is that? There’s a hole in the runway; a perfectly cut hole, three feet across and four feet deep, only a few inches from my left foot. In the bottom of the hole (I see all of this in a fraction of a second) is a dead Nip, wadded up,
a piece of scrap paper, thrown in the wastebasket. Crumpled. This is some man-made hole, a forward observation post or something, and this poor bastard got the rough duty the hard way.

  “Get down!” Smack! Again, we’re raw steak on the tarmac. We stop because someone’s hit.

  Looking, looking … only my immediate surroundings are clear, as straw-colored sheets of haze and heat from the earth blank out most of my vision. A marine lies flat on the strip close to me, making like a beached fish, pulling for air, his chest a squeezebox. He lolls on his pack; it’s impossible for him to turn over. It’s the heat. The goddamn heat! A sun victim. Go!

  To my right are several more heat prostration casualties, plastered on the airfield. Running by, I see their faces. Shivering and exhausted, with mottled gray and red visages, coated with particles, and particles of particles; the pallor in their eyes stands out against the lividity of their skin. I think I see one of them cry (or is that sweat?)—either way, there is anguish.

  Wham!

  Every time we stop, Nippo Baxter goes into action.

  Eagle-eyed and always alert, Nippo has a real knack for sniffing out Nips and their prized possessions.

  Here we are, spread out, melted butter on the airfield, hearts pounding in the sides of our necks, hoping like hell the Japs don’t light our asses up—and then there’s Nippo from Yazoo, breaking off from the pack and scrounging around the airfield as if he were hunting ’coon, foraging for something to pilfer. That dumb shit is gonna get himself killed! Yet whether it’s ignorance, bravery, or just plain going Asiatic, Baxter is a fine scout, who …

  Charlie Allmann is beside me, both of us wading through the sloppy air, heads down, with bits of debris bouncing off the tops of our helmets; everything seems so … Wham!

  I begin to see where we’re headed; there’s mangrove on the other …

  Don’t look …

  Wham! The big stuff coming in is way behind …

  Behind us several more shells fall, but I don’t look back. I’ve reached the relative safety of the mangrove on the other side of the airfield. Really, the terrain is more of the same gnarled coral crap; yet even this scant vegetation is a comfort, appearing more like the place where we started, versus all that open ground.