Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  He could see that Louise was disappointed too. She hoped that he would be drawn to Kay, he suspected. Perhaps she thought he would be good for her daughter, but neither he nor Kay liked each other. They both addressed almost all remarks to Louise. He found Kay self-engrossed and pedantic, as if a few weeks of college had given her insight into every subject raised. My professor says, was her constant outcry. She had none of her mother’s charm, none of her warmth or her wit.

  Once his Shanghai uncle had told him, when he was flirting with the daughter of a Turkish attaché, to look at the mother to see how the daughter would turn out in a few years. Kay should be so lucky. Now he understood Louise’s guilt over her daughter. Whatever Louise had done, she must judge insufficient, because look at the results.

  After that, although Louise invited him to the movies with them, on walks, skating at an indoor rink and out to supper, he begged off until he saw Kay shipped back to school. The operation known as Flintlock was fast approaching and he would be in for another bout of crisis at OP-20-G. Before then, he persuaded Louise to come up for a genuine Shanghai feast. He bribed Rodney into disappearing for the rest of Sunday by taking out all their mutual garbage and cleaning up the kitchen and bathroom.

  Louise came, Louise ate and enjoyed but was not conquered. All he could get off were her shoes, but persuading her upstairs alone with him was a great step forward, he told himself. It was only a matter of time. She liked his company, and he had as yet no rival. Gentle persistence would win her. A lust as great as his had to prove catching.

  MURRAY 2

  A Little Miscalculation of the Tides

  In the hospital, the doctors decided that Murray had hepatitis—not apparently the worst kind, but bad enough. Still it was curable and not a million-dollar wound. They would not send him home, assuring him he would be fine in two or three months.

  He was sick and feverish and weakened. He turned out to have parasites as well as the fungal infection. Nonetheless, he liked being in the hospital, where he refound himself, as if he were waking and discovering he had dreamed himself to be someone entirely other. He read; he enjoyed reading; he could prefer one book to another, judging, comparing. He began to have ideas again, thoughts focused beyond the moment, beyond anxiety. He could contemplate something more than filling his belly, discharging his ragged bowels and trying to catch a safe snooze. He could think of Ruthie without reaching for his cock. He could be silent when the other men would let him be.

  Unfortunately, the doctors decided all too soon he was sufficiently recovered. He did not feel well. He could scarcely remember what it had felt like to be entirely without pain, to walk easily, to run up a flight of steps without dizziness, without nausea.

  In the mysterious ways of the Marines, he was not returned to his old outfit, but posted to the 2d Division, 8th Marines, who were almost all San Diego boot camp marines, not Parris Island like his old outfit. He felt mistreated, shoved among a lot of guys who knew each other. The 2d Division was based out of Wellington, New Zealand, where he’d been in the hospital, so maybe they had just decided not to bother shipping him any farther. He reported to Camp McKay and his quiet time was over. A lot of the men had been in New Zealand awhile, so it felt like home to them. They had friends, they had girlfriends, they had taken up the local slang and called each other cobby. He felt as much an outsider as he had in boot camp.

  He was assigned to a tarpaper hut heated by a kerosene stove. He still became easily chilled. Some men here had been on the Canal too, and still had malaria. At least he had been spared that, thanks to the Atabrine that gave him a yellowish cast and had probably masked the hepatitis from the corpsmen—what the Marines called medics—on the Canal.

  The major in command of his new outfit believed in hiking. They went on sixty mile and eighty mile hikes in the mountains. The first time, Murray couldn’t make it. His feet had softened up in the hospital and soon began to bleed. In the Marines, nobody was ever supposed to be weak, even two days out of the hospital, and he was punished like a goldbricker. Still, a lot of men dropped out, because so many had been sick.

  The scuttlebutt was that they were going to retake Wake Island, where marines had been captured. Murray’s strength was seeping back. At least the climate in New Zealand was bracing and healthy. He made friends, one of the other Parris Islanders who had ended up in this outfit, Jack Robelet from Maine, and the only other Jew, Harvey Meyerhoff from San Diego, who had joined up because he thought of the Marines as a local service, with the boot camp only a few miles from his parents’ gas station.

  Harvey had sandy wavy hair, light brown eyes and a nose that swerved slightly left from an accident in a high school wrestling match. He spoke in a nasal voice with a slightly melancholy air, a spaniel who had learned to mistrust but found it against the grain of his good nature.

  Jack was short and sleek, otterlike. His hair was dark, his eyes dark, his complexion ruddy. He was brighter than Harvey but less educated. He had grown up bilingual, his parents speaking French at home but school conducted entirely in English, in a town where the lower classes were solidly French. He had expected to go to work in the paper mill where his father worked, but what he loved to do was play the fiddle. He could also whittle dogs, cats, a mermaid, a man in the moon with Harvey’s leftward leaning nose. Jack was the youngest of the three, as Murray at twenty-two was the oldest, but Jack seemed older than Harvey.

  Jack had married a girl named Gisele who looked enough like him in photos to have been a sister or cousin. They corresponded in French. Gisele had a job in a shoe factory, making boots for the Army.

  Murray had worked hard to establish those two friendships fast, because he couldn’t survive without buddies. As a Jew, as some kind of intellectual, he would be the butt of every sadistic joke if he stayed aloof. Jack for all his small size had a reputation for being fast and hard in a fight and for attracting girls without apparent effort. At the local dances, women always found him. Murray had only to stand with Jack and pretty soon women were flirting with him too.

  The first time he had to make a decision was after a dance near Camp McKay. He kept thinking he would just let the evening drift a little longer, because it felt good to be with a woman, even a plain young woman who laughed too much. He ended up in bed with her. It was fast and furtive, in her friend’s house. He had to be back at camp by curfew. The next day, he waited to see if he would feel guilty, but he felt nothing in particular, except that he had had a mildly good time. He saw her a few times more and then they were shipped out. They were taken to the New Hebrides to practice amphibious landings. Except for that time hitting the beaches, they spent eighteen days on the transports, jammed in.

  He had a dream one night that he came home, and Ruthie was an old, old woman, skinny as a bag of bones with long stringy white hair. It scared him more than his nightmares of combat. Some of the guys in his outfit had got married in New Zealand, including Sergeant Reardon, but none of those women touched Ruthie’s hem. Then he had that nightmare.

  He believed she was faithful to him, but every time a guy in his outfit got a Dear John letter, he’d wonder if he was taking too much for granted. He also wondered if he should have pressed her to have sex with him, considering that if she did it with him, maybe she would then do it with somebody else. In the hospital, he had felt confident, but now he felt less sure of her, less sure of his judgment in choosing her.

  The campaign sounded straightforward. It was not to be Wake Island, but some little bitty island Betio that was part of an atoll called Tarawa, wherever that was. The brass was always picking some dot on the map to jump on. Every one of them seemed to be boiling with Japs, so it didn’t seem to matter. This one was supposed to be a healthier climate than the Canal, but hell had a better climate than the Canal. It was described as two miles long and half a mile wide, an island that they could swarm over and clean up in one day.

  The Navy was blasting the shit out of the Japs, a bombardment that wouldn’t leave
a structure standing, and then they would just waltz in and mop up. No jungle here. It sounded almost too good to be true. For three days the ships and the carrier based bombers had been pounding the hunk of dirt and coral rock. Their mission was described to them in their briefing as a police action. They were wakened in the night for a breakfast of steak, potatoes and eggs. Then before five A.M. came the signal, “Land the landing force.” Murray followed Harvey and Jack over the side into a Higgins boat. Then they transferred into an amphtrac, an amphibious tractor.

  For what felt like hours they circled in dim choppy water. There was a wave ahead of them. They were the second wave, if they ever got going. The Japs were shelling heavily, so another round of bombardment and another run of the dive bombers off the carriers sent shock waves through the air.

  In the dim light, they stared at the long low shore. A long pier and a shorter one stuck out. Coconut palms bent in the blast from the bombs. Most of them had already been broken. Murray could not see one intact building. It looked as if the Navy had done its job. As the amphtracs finally started in, however, it became clear plenty of Japs were still dug in, somewhere below that bomb- and shell-pocked surface.

  The first trouble was that the tide was supposed to be high, but it wasn’t. They couldn’t float over the coral reef that stuck up like fangs. The amphtracs crept through the water and then crawled over the reefs, awkwardly lumbering under the increasing but still spotty fire from shore. Whatever the Navy had hit, there were intact emplacements gunning for them. As time passed, as the cumbersome amphtracs dawdled along awkwardly, the Japanese fire grew fierce, concentrated, accurate. Shells were landing in the water around them, close enough to soak them, close enough so that the lieutenant took a piece of coral in his cheek that bled like a gusher. With the shells bracketing them, they all figured the Japs could improve their aim and get the next one on them. In the little boat, the smell of shit was strong. Scared shitless was no empty phrase in battle. His stomach burned as if he had drunk acid. Why couldn’t the damned amphtrac move faster?

  This was his first landing under fire. He wished they were back in the pack that would come later in the boats, once they’d cleared the way. He figured being in the second wave, they’d get it bad.

  A couple of destroyers were laying down a smoke screen but it was blowing away and smoke from shelling hung in the air instead. The lagoon was choppy, eighty-eights landing all around them. About half a mile out, the shore artillery opened up, and as they came farther in, they came under the machine guns. As they came closer yet, the amphtracs waddling like ducks in slow motion over the sharp angles and abrupt drops of the reef, everything began to hit around them including mortars. Ahead of them the first wave of amphtracs was going aground. Behind them came another wave. He couldn’t make out anything in the smoke, the water exploding, coral hunks flying, and he wasn’t about to stick his head up to see anyhow, but the shells rattled his bones.

  The man between him and Jack had his head blown half off. He lay between them with his blood soaking into their boondockers, while someone wedged in just behind in the twenty-man boat was screaming in pain or terror, who could tell in the deafening noise and the smoke haze and the pounding of the guns? They were soaked from the seawater and soaked with blood too. The driver had been killed and his replacement was wounded.

  As their amphtrac finally grounded, they were ordered out and went into the crotch-deep water. They headed for the pier that stuck out from the beach on coconut legs, not much shelter but all that he could see as he dove for it. Someone landed right behind him: Jack. They huddled, stealing glances toward shore, but the Japs were well protected. Now that they had landed, what in hell were they supposed to do? Harvey was clinging to the next post with Rinso, a corporal. The water all around them was riffled with the crisscross of machine-gun bullets.

  Amphtracs were blowing up or grinding to a disabled halt on the reefs or in the shallows. Each wave was getting more concentrated fire. As he lay beside Jack in the slender protection of the coconut column, they saw that the marines in the Higgins boats were really catching it. The boats struck bottom on the coral, wedged there vulnerable to fire. The men had to clamber out, eight hundred yards from the beach in water up to their chins and go wading without cover into the increasing fire. Men kept dropping. As each boat wedged or foundered, men jumped out and were shot.

  Maybe he was lucky to have been in the early wave, where at least they had been brought in most of the way to shore. If anything, the Japanese fire was hotter now. The air zinged with metal. Some boats landing out there on the reef were being wiped out to a man, whole boatloads killed within minutes. He wondered why they didn’t all sit down, start weeping and refuse to move. He saw his bed in his mother’s house vividly, the dark blue blanket, the bird’s-eye maple headboard. He wanted to crawl into that bed, right now.

  The shallows were a red clay color from blood. Things hit him in the water, nudging like fish, and he shoved them away furiously, a bled white ragged arm, a lower leg, a haunch. Right off the end of the pier an amphtrac went up in flames, probably hit in the fuel tank, and the men leaped into the sea with their clothes and hair burning. The hideous smell of roasting flesh and charred hair blew over him and Jack. The lieutenant and Sergeant Miller were yelling at them to start advancing.

  “Come on,” Sergeant Miller yelled. “No use standing here and getting shot. Let’s get ashore.” About a third of their men were down already. Harvey and Rinso were still huddled nearby, but another man who had taken shelter with them had been picked off. A shell would finish them all. Murray looked at Jack. Jack, whose face was still streaked with blood from the dying man in the amphtrac, shrugged at him. They flung themselves forward at the next column of coconut.

  They had been supposed to be landed on the beach itself. They had been supposed to be landed at high tide, when the boats could pass over the coral easily. There had been supposed to be air bombardment from the Army. There had been supposed to be such heavy big gun pounding that scarcely a Jap was left alive. Instead here they were landing wave after wave of marines to be cut down in water too deep to run through, too shallow for the boats to cross the reefs. It was a stupid fucking massacre and he was going to die right where he was. Except he might as well die drying off on the beach as wading in the bloody water.

  He was right behind the lieutenant when the looey got it in the chest and went down. The sun stood overhead like a crab on fire before they made it to the damned beach. It was hot. Oh, they’d been right about one thing: there was no jungle here. There wasn’t anything except a rain of metal death. No jungle, no swamp, no trees, no houses, no hills, nothing except flat death coming at him from everyplace. Not a scrap of shade or shelter except for a four-foot seawall where sixty other terrified marines lay and where Murray hurled himself to join them, Jack right at his side. Murray turned back shouting to Harvey who waved back and ran toward them. Murray was still facing Harvey when the shell hit. He saw Harvey come apart like a busted bag of groceries. He stared. Then he turned to the wall. His bowels gave way but there was nothing left in him.

  They were passing around what water they had. It tasted like paint. Some of the men were puking it back up, but he managed to keep it down. His mouth felt blistered with thirst. Something had cut his elbow. It hurt now, the wound inflamed by salt water. At first some guys always told you to wash out minor wounds with salt water, it would cleanse them, but after you’d been out here awhile, you knew better. A wound washed in seawater would get infected. The water was a soup of microorganisms, all of which seemed to like living in the blood. A coral cut could be particularly nasty, because coral could just take up residence in you.

  For a moment he grinned, lying there against a four-foot wall pinned down by fire with the bodies of the dead washing up like a bad fish kill in a river. He was doomed. They were low on ammunition already. The Japs were dug into concealed and buried emplacements and pillboxes. His group had little water, and he was lying th
ere worrying about would his elbow get infected. He’d be luckier than Harvey if he left an elbow to be sent home in a body bag. It was just another grand fuck-up that some bunch of generals and admirals had thought up in a haze of ego stoking. When he looked out to sea, he tried to avoid the smashed carcass that was Harvey. The lieutenant bobbed facedown in the choppy water, his body gradually working its way to shore. Sergeant Miller lay groaning on the beach. Two men tried to pull him to the wall. Both fell dead across him.

  The amphtracs that hadn’t been hit on the way in were taking back wounded and returning for another trip. By early afternoon, there wasn’t one left. They had all been wrecked. The tide was falling even farther now, ten hours after it had been supposed to come in. It had never really risen and now it was going out. The fourth wave had never landed. Nobody new was arriving. Murray whispered to Jack, “Looks like they’re calling it off. Are they going to dump us here?”

  “They dumped us here already. Shit, I suppose they’re waiting for dark. Or would that be too smart? Do you suppose that was high tide? If it was, we’re fucking screwed, because they’ll never get the heavy stuff in.”

  There was no way they could take those gun emplacements and dug-in pillboxes with rifles and a few grenades. It was a raw bad joke. They huddled there, the three men left from the twenty who had embarked in the amphtrac, Rinso who was a regular marine, Jack and Murray. The officers were dead. Sergeant Reardon had been taken back wounded and Sergeant Miller lay on the beach with his belly open.

  Rinso was the one to take command, being a corporal, but Murray was damned if he was going to stand up and charge. Onward the Light Brigade. They could stuff it. As the shadows lengthened, they had more water because several men died of their wounds. In a couple of places surviving officers led charges through or over the seawall and were cut down.