Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “I forbid it,” he said loudly. “I mean this.”

  “Father, I’m way overage. This time it’s not my duty to stay, but to go.” The clichés of wartime dripped from her tongue grey and fatty as melted lard, but she would not be shamed into dispensing with them.

  On January 31 she left. The Professor had stopped speaking to her and did not see her off. Mrs. Augustine drove her to the station. Bernice had written last week to Jeff at his military code address, but judging from the letter that had arrived Saturday, he had not got hers yet, although he had received the cookies and the woolen muffler she had knit for him: a useless gift as he was obviously in North Africa from hints in his letters. Well, she would write him from Houston and she would have plenty to tell him, for a change, something more exciting than the chrysanthemums have been killed by the frost, or the last red-winged blackbirds have gone south. Something more than nature notes and the sardonic comments on her life she could never resist.

  Mrs. Augustine kept beaming at her. “Have a good time, dear Bernice, and be proud of yourself.” The day before there had been a storm, but the tracks had been cleared and the morning glittered like freshly washed cut crystal, the Waterford goblets she was leaving behind. Ahead of her was Texas, land of the six-gun and the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, and planes, planes, planes. Mrs. Augustine stood on tiptoes to give her a brief but firm kiss on the lips, handing her her lunch in a tea towel. “Good luck!”

  MURRAY 1

  One More River to Cross

  Murray was shipped to Samoa to reinforce the 7th Marines, who were supposed to be transferred to New Zealand. On September 14 they sailed out of Espíritu Santo on five transports accompanied by two supply ships and a cruiser and destroyer escort. Soon afterward they came under attack from submarines and bombers.

  They arrived at dawn four days later on a long island that rose to a jagged ridge. The shores—studded with twisted metal wrecks of ships and planes—offered spacious, elegant groves of coconut palms, but the breeze off the land was sour, fetid. It smelled like the icebox when his family came back from vacation and discovered they’d left food inside to spoil. They landed without difficulty and were marched inland. The men who greeted them or more often did not bother to acknowledge their arrival were another matter. Murray did not want to stare, but he could feel the reaction of the men around him, and it was no different from his own: horror. Are we going to look like that? The marines who had been holding the beachhead on the island were filthy skeletons. They were hairy, skinny, stinking: the gutted hulks of young men. The island was called Guadalcanal.

  The perimeter of the airfield, cratered with shell holes, was littered with the burnt-out planes, smashed palms, wreckage that had rotted so fast it could no longer be identified. The ground was deeply pitted by nightly bombardments. There was no back to the lines, no rear, no rest area. Wounded and brought back out of the line, a marine was as likely to die of a violent attack in his hospital bed as back in his foxhole. They held a small area and held it hard. Every day and every night they were attacked. Usually the Japanese destroyers came down the slot between the islands and shelled them at leisure; during the day, Bettys, the Japanese bombers, came over and dropped on them. After the first night of casualties, they became grim and businesslike fast.

  There was no such thing as a night’s sleep. If there was noplace to go on the island to get away from the war, and anyplace he stood might be the subject of attack at any moment, neither was he safe in his waterlogged foxhole by night. Every night Louie the Louse came over to drop green flares and an occasional bomb. Every night Maytag Charlie came over to toss impact bombs from his twin-engined flying boat, circling around above them. There was no method to the bombing, completely random in the dark. It meant he never slept through half a night.

  The Japanese usually attacked at night, anyhow, and that was the commonest time for shelling. In addition a sub called Oscar lay off the shore and waited for the little Higgins boats they used to cross to the installations on the offlying islands of Tulagi, Savo and Gavutu, where marines were garrisoned. Occasionally Oscar lobbed a few shells at the field too.

  At breakfast on the third day they were given Atabrine and also issued three condoms, which caused a lot of bitter mirth because none of the marines had seen a woman on the island. Most of the men would not take the yellow pills of Atabrine, because rumor insisted it made a man impotent. Murray figured that from what he could see of malaria, endemic in the marines there, it would be smarter to risk the Atabrine, so he took it, although his buddy Manella told him it would make his prick shrink to a baby’s. There were so many walking malaria cases, no one could be excused from combat unless he was running a temperature above one hundred three.

  They were always wet. Everything was always wet. Water seeped into the foxholes. It rained every five minutes anyhow. The local skies could drop a foot of rain in two hours. Everything he touched was spongy, rotten, moldy. They all stank. Because of the constant shelling and bombing, there was never a time he could take all his clothes off and dry them out, so by the end of the first week, he had the crud, a fungus infection that they all shared. His balls, his ass, his feet were raw. He was learning to shake out whatever he had put down, because scorpions and centipedes liked to crawl into anything dark, a shoe or a pocket or a pant leg.

  Even the ground stank. He lived in a constant cloud of mosquitoes, and soon he had a fever like everybody else: not malaria but one of the hundred diseases the mosquitoes pumped into him when they sucked his blood. The medic gave him pills but admitted no one knew what it was. Murray shook in the late afternoons as his fever shot up, leaving him weak.

  At least they had enough food. Besides the raging dysentery, the reason the marines who’d been here since early August were so skinny was that they’d been hungry. If they hadn’t scored Jap supplies, they would have starved. They had been living on Jap rice, dried fish heads and beer. With the Japanese navy controlling the waters around the island and sending in fresh troops and supplies, and with the Japanese air force attacking with more planes every day, Murray foresaw with a fatalistic chill how easily they could be sealed off and starved.

  They were sent across a local river to attack. The Lever Brothers coconut plantations that lined the coast gave way to jungle. Murray’s images of jungles came from Tarzan movies, or featured Dorothy Lamour in a sarong under some scenic palms with a nice sandy beach where gentle rollers coasted in. Here the trees, vast edifices of eucalyptus, ipil, banyan, towered a hundred feet or more, but he quickly learned not to lean on one without testing it first. Trees as big through as trucks could suddenly keel over in a strong wind, in spite of how the monsters were surrounded by outlying suburbs of knees and roots that made going treacherous. Everything was rotten and the soil itself felt spongy except where coral outcroppings slashed at them or where jungle gave way to openings like miniature prairies, golden in the distance, where kunai grass with blades sharp as cutlasses loomed over the heads of patrols.

  Climbing over the trees were vines, creepers, lianas, strung crazily and intertwined between hummocks of fiercely competing vegetation. Everything was wet, because this was true rain forest. There was a rainy season, and the rest of the year for a change, it rained. They hacked their way through a labyrinth of creepers, brush, ferns taller than his head. They couldn’t see past the impenetrable green veil they were attacking. Whatever they touched bit or stung. There were wasps as big as his palm. Leeches dropped on them from the trees and sucked their thin feverish blood. Spiders crawled up their dungarees to leave bites swollen to the size of golf balls. Everywhere white ants swarmed whose acid bite burned like hot coals. The only mammals they saw were rats, who infested the base and were reputed to eat the corpses. Out here life was lush but alien and hungry. He could understand becoming an ascetic, he could understand wanting to leave the sick, scabby, fearful dysentery-racked body behind.

  The war was already changing him, although he hoped the chang
es were temporary because he did not like them. He had always had contempt for fatalists, but he had become one almost immediately on the Canal. If your number came up, if the bullet had your name on it, if your luck ran out; they were all fatalists in the ranks. Everyone had personal superstitions, a few buddies. Everything else belonged to the other place. Home. Back there.

  They hadn’t penetrated far into the jungle, although that little way had taken them hours, when they hit the first enemy outpost. Pinned down by fire, he couldn’t tell what to shoot at. It felt to him as if they were surrounded, but he lay on his belly and did what everybody else did. Often in training Murray had doubted he could actually kill another human being, but if this was going to be combat, firing into green chaos, he was unlikely to damage anybody and wouldn’t find out if he did. In the first two engagements, Murray never saw a live Jap, although as they moved forward over the captured outposts, he saw plenty of dead ones. At first he stared at the bodies, trying to comprehend death. Most of them were just kids, thrown down and savaged randomly. One gaunt kid who looked sixteen was bleeding from a severed artery in his groin. The corpsman with them tried to save him but couldn’t, while they all stood around. Murray felt cramped by pity as the blood spurted out. But after one of the corpses rose up and knocked off two marines with a grenade, and another corpse tried to shoot him with a pistol, Murray lost interest in the philosophical side of death, and they all began routinely to bayonet the fallen men, dead or wounded. Their officers told them to take prisoners, but the Japs didn’t, so why should they? It was hard enough to look out for yourself.

  By the third day they finally reached the stream they were supposed to cross, the Matanikau, and tried to take the ford. The Japanese were well entrenched there and they could not force it. In three days of heavy labor, of exhausting dawn to dark traveling, he figured they might have advanced two miles. This time he could see what he was shooting at and what was shooting at them. There were lots of Japanese dug in on the west side of the stream with light but effective artillery in well-concealed positions.

  The commander called in an air strike, but after it was over, there seemed to be just as many Japanese and just as many shells and bullets coming at them. He kept thinking, Suppose they drop one of those bombs on us instead, as guys told him had happened in early fighting. Instead of being killed off by the bombing, the Japs seemed stronger than ever when the planes left. They started their own attack.

  A shell landed so close to him he was covered with hot mud and clouted in the head with a rotten log that dumped stinging ants all over his back, although he did not dare move to deal with them. The man to his left was hit in the chest and taken off coughing blood. Murray felt sick. He found he had wet himself in the impact, but they were all so stinking, covered with the foul mud, he didn’t think anybody else could tell. To wet himself like a baby. He felt ashamed. He wondered if he would crack apart under this strain. Maybe he was just no good when it came down to it.

  Then the Japanese came at them over the river. Murray wondered again if he could really kill anybody, but as the enemy came slogging through the sluggish waters of the river screaming like cats in heat and tossing grenades, their bayonets fixed, Murray shot as true as he could and the man he had in his sights fell before he could get his grenade off. He felt weak with a combination of relief and the ebbing of adrenaline rush, but then another wave started across, leaving him no time to congratulate himself. If he got somebody in his sights, he shot. It was like paying his money and taking a turn to hit the moving ducks at the state fair, except that these ducks were blasting holes in men all around him.

  Finally they were ordered to withdraw. He could not feel bad that they had failed to take their objective. He could only be glad they were turning back. As they followed the narrow trail along the river, the Japs hit them again and again with mortars. He hadn’t slept in three days. They had eaten little and that filthy and foul tasting. They all had dysentery. His fever was up and raging. All the time he was thirsty, with the sluggish brown river just to their west. He couldn’t even fantasize trying to drink that turgid stuff. Besides, he’d seen the crocodile that had carried off a wounded Jap at the ford. “Why the fuck do we want this place?” he asked Manella, who was the friendliest to him of the men in his company.

  “Hells too crowded,” Manella said. “That’s why.”

  “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, sending us in here,” Fats said. None of them knew each other well, because the new men like Murray had been added to an established regiment to bring it up to strength. “The brass don’t give a shit. It’s Bataan all over again. We’re going to die here.”

  “The guys say it won’t be like Bataan. They say if the Japs take the field, we’re all going up in the hills and live like guerrillas,” Manella said.

  Murray had his doubts they were equipped to live off this land. He thought that only a lizard would try. He tried to stand away from Fats, because he reeked of shit. Whenever he could, Murray smoked, because it deadened his nose. In the Marines he didn’t want a nose. When they sank onto the spongy rotten earth to rest, sometimes he thought of Ruthie and sometimes he thought of a long hot bath. He had lived over that time in the car and the next day in the park so many times, he was no longer sure exactly what had happened, like a photo fingered and folded until the image began to disappear.

  Manella poked him. “Sucker on my stacking swivel.” He had a leech on the nape of his neck. The men lay in a sodden heap under a banyan tree on the edge of a nasty mangrove swamp that would be even harder going, and like a troop of monkeys picked leeches and lice and spiders off each other. Their intimacy was that of shared pain, shared danger, shared discomfort. Men he would not have spoken to twice at home were his life now, his family; he was growing to sound just like them and to look just like them. They were a filthy, motley crew, although it would be a few weeks before they looked as wild, as skeletal and as mangy as the marines who had come to the Canal in the first wave.

  Murray took out his cigarettes. The condoms had turned out to be useful issue; they were the only thing that kept matches and cigarettes dry, and when he was lucky enough to have a chocolate bar, that was where he kept it safe. Now Manella was grooming him for leeches. The sergeant spoke to them flatly, with his usual contempt, and they shuffled to their feet. “Saddle up, boneheads. Into the boondocks.”

  Murray carefully pinched out his cigarette so that he could finish it later. As he stood, his sight riddled through with black spots and he swayed on his feet. Without waiting for his sight to clear or his nausea to pass, he fixed himself behind Manella and stumbled forward. It was a long way yet back to the perimeter, where instead of dying one by one strung out along the riverbank, they could die in the company of hundreds. At least there would be warm food, even if only the canned Vienna sausages and beans his body could no longer digest.

  DANIEL 3

  Daniel’s War

  Daniel’s focus was Guadalcanal and the Japanese headquarters at Rabaul. Deciphering was fast now, not only because they had made excellent progress on the Japanese naval codes, but because when the Marines had achieved surprise capturing the half-built air base they named Henderson Field, they had overrun the Japanese positions so rapidly that a codebook had been pulled from a fire unburned. Daniel now had the same book the Japanese used, where he had only to look up the code groups to translate messages.

  Not that the Navy seemed able to grasp the situation presented them. The sea off Guadalcanal was now called Ironbottom Sound because of the huge number of ships sunk there. Many were Japanese, but a great many more were American and Australian. The Japanese still owned the night. Even with the aid of the codebook, Daniel could not always tell what the Japanese were talking about. When they began to discuss rat operations, he had no idea what they meant, but soon it became evident that was the Japanese cover name for the night runs up the slot between the islands to deliver troops, weapons, supplies: fast in, fast out, stealthy und
er the cover of the night but armed with teeth.

  Every morning Daniel rose from his mattress heaped with pillows in the corner of the living room of the apartment he shared with Rodney Everly and took the first of his buses to work. Then he entered a different universe. The former girls’ school at the corner of Massachusetts and Nebraska avenues lacked screens on the tall windows, so insect life in semitropical abundance poured in to swarm around them. Daniel kept a bottle of citronella in his desk drawer.

  The real world he entered at work was that of intimate contact with the Japanese naval mind. He saw the war backwards from the way most Americans did. He had learned of the desperate improvised American invasion of Guadalcanal from surprised Japanese reports to headquarters. He learned of the sinking of American ships from the triumphant claims after battles, although they were learning that the Japanese, like the Americans, claimed far more than were really knocked out, always. They could check the American claims of ships torpedoed and sunk against the Japanese damage reports, and they could check the Japanese crowing against actual U.S. losses. Every pilot always thought he hit his target, but few did.

  His knowledge of Japanese continued to grow, which gave him a schizophrenic feeling of entering the enemy culture. He had to see the world as they did, or try to; it was deeply alienating and yet fascinating. He found himself not infrequently thinking in Japanese. The two cultures had extremely different premises, what they took for granted, what they thought you could and could not do in any given situation.