Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “What might be wrong, little Ruthie?” His voice was caressing, as it used to be when he wanted something. He continued to block her way. “We haven’t had a chance to talk. You never came to see me in the hospital.”

  “Why, Trudi told us all about you. I have a job at Briggs, you know.”

  “Why didn’t you come, even once?”

  She could have honestly said that between working and school, Ann Arbor was out of the question, but it had never occurred to her to go. “That was Trudi’s to do.”

  “Because you have your own boyfriend. Now you don’t think of me at all, is that it?”

  “I think of you as my friend’s husband and our neighbor, Leib. How else would I think of you?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, hard. “The way I think of you. Always. Day and night. I’ve never forgotten you.”

  “You should have.” She jerked away. She would have liked to force a passage out of the room, but she did not want to try to squeeze beside him. “Why are we having this conversation? I don’t like it. I don’t need it.”

  “I do, I need it. I need you.” He tried to draw her closer, but she held up the book between them.

  “Leib, those kind of tactics didn’t work when we were going out. What makes you think you can strong-arm me now? I don’t want you in my bedroom.” Using the book as a wedge, she tried to slip past him.

  “But him you wanted. That little fink.”

  “You have your wife and I have my fiancé.”

  “He’s not your fiancé, he’s your lover. Trudi told me. You let him do what you never let me do.” His voice rose in genuine anger. “If you’d given me what you gave him, I wouldn’t be married to Trudi. I’d be married to you!”

  “I don’t want to be married to you! What I do with myself is none of your business! Leave me alone, Leib. You keep bothering me, and I’ll tell the whole family. You better believe me.”

  “I’ll tell them about how you spread your legs for your college boy.”

  “Tell them. It’s none of your business. You can’t push me around.”

  “If you’d given that to me, I’d have married you. He didn’t, he wouldn’t.” His face contorting with bitterness, his hands closed tightly on her back and hip. The warmth of his body burned at her. “What makes you think he’s going to bother after the war?”

  “I trust him. That’s why I could do it with him. Because I trust him. I never trusted you and you know why. Because you’ll try to force your wife’s best friend when she’s out of the house.”

  He stepped back, raising his hands from her ostentatiously. “Force you? Bullshit. I thought I’d show you what it’s really like. I don’t have to force anyone and I don’t have to beg for it.”

  “Good.” She marched past him out of the room and on through the house, clutching her book. She decided to trot out to the front porch and sit there, in full view of any neighbors around, where he could not molest her. “You stick to what’s yours. That doesn’t include me.”

  “If you tell Trudi, she won’t believe you. She’ll believe me,” he said, grinning but still angry, limping heavily after her.

  “I have no intention of telling Trudi, because there’s nothing to say except you tried to make a fool of yourself and a whore of me.” She marched on, reaching the living room. If he grabs me, I’ll scream, but who’ll hear?

  He did not chase her, limping slowly and dramatically after. “You made yourself that for the college boy. I’m telling you, I’d have married you. Didn’t I marry Trudi? I come through. I’m the one you should have trusted. You’ll turn to me, Ruthie. This foot hasn’t finished me. I’m going to make it big. I’m not going back to the line. I’m not going to be a lousy working stiff, a loser. You’ll end up turning to me, because you’ll have to.”

  Sitting on the porch staring at the wavering lines of her text, her heart still beating too fast in her throat, she wondered how he could ever imagine she would come to him. Let him tell himself what nonsense he pleased, she would avoid ever being alone with him in the house again.

  MURRAY 3

  Return to Civilization

  Saipan was a different sort of island than Murray had seen in the Pacific thus far. It was not a flattened bagel like Tarawa atoll. It was not jungle like Guadalcanal. It was more of a little country, a fair-sized island with a city and pleasant-looking villages. They had landed in an area of beautiful sandy beaches, lined with the usual coconut palms and adjoined by terraced sugarcane fields, but the civilized beauty of the place did not occupy his attention long. That first night they were shelled by artillery that commanded their shallow beachhead with maddening accuracy. All night long the shells came in among them, while from the quality of screaming, he tried to guess who had been wounded by the last shell but not blown to shreds.

  Nothing, he thought, crouched in his shallow foxhole in fetal position, nothing made him feel as helpless as lying under an artillery barrage. When they came ashore, he felt naked crossing the reef, exposed, a target in the slow amphtrac lumbering along while shells and machine-gun bullets wiped them out. But then he was at least moving with some kind of chance to fight back or reach cover.

  Under shelling, it was all luck, an ant trying to cross the kitchen floor before his mother stepped on it with a curse. He lay and heard the womp womp sound of incoming mail and prayed it wasn’t aimed at him. Let me live, he wished, and sometimes wondered why. Maybe because the dismembered scraps of the men he had known turned his stomach. He and Jack were supposed to observe the system of each sleeping half the night and watching half the night while the other slept, but in their foxhole as the artillery shook the ground, neither slept. Phosphorous shells whooshed over and then somebody screamed. They fried men crisp. Howitzers with their up and down groan. Some bigger mail chugging through the air.

  For some reason the brass had not figured out they were going to be taking civilian prisoners on this island, where a native population lived along with an estimated twenty thousand Japanese civilians, including families that had been on the island since Japan had taken it over in 1919. From the first day they were finding civilians and passing them back to rough stockades where there wasn’t enough food or water.

  There was heavy house-to-house fighting in the city, while they took villages and swung around to the north. Where the hell had all their planes gone? They had no air cover. It seemed like all the flying bastards had taken off and left them to their fate. By the fourth day of heavy fighting, the island was cut in two and then they got their new orders: the 8th Marines, along with an orphan battalion which had been stuck onto them until their numbers could be made up out of new marines from the States, were to take the fucking straight up and straight down mountain that dominated the landscape, the volcanic pillar called Mount Tapotchau. Take it? Murray didn’t believe they could actually climb it. “What are we fucking supposed to do?” Jack asked. “Use ladders?”

  Even the foothills were steep, rugged and covered with brush, with jagged canyons opening suddenly beneath their feet and caves offering perfect cover for the Japanese.

  Gunny Reardon, who had recovered fast from his wound on Tarawa, nudged Jack with his elbow. “The gooks get up and down, don’t they? Saddle up.”

  That was one of those Marine phrases, like calling floors decks, that Murray always winced at. Saddle up on what? One of those evil-looking land crabs? He was above them now, above all the flowering trees of the undulating south of Saipan. This was hand over hand climbing. Every so often Murray would almost black out in the afternoon when his old fever liked to start cooking. Jack would have to help him along.

  They heard there’d been a big battle at sea between the Jap planes and the Americans, and the Navy pilots were calling it a turkey shoot. Certainly there didn’t seem to be more than a handful of bombers left, hardly a nuisance. Big coastal guns from the neighboring island of Tinian lobbed shells at random, mostly blowing up buildings that were still by some accident standing after the heavy f
ighting down below, cratering the sugarcane fields or splintering some palms. They were slogging up the mountain inch by inch, handhold by handhold. Sometimes the beauty of the scene below them soothed him like an icy cloth on his forehead. Sometimes the green rolling hills and the sea cobalt out where the big ships lay, milky green over the reef, appalled him. The serene light, the flame trees brilliant with blossom, the brightly painted sea felt obscene.

  “Sure,” Jack said. “One of those Chamorros told me that Jap couples used to come here on their honeymoons. Like Niagara Falls. Watch it!”

  A burst of machine-gun fire raked the slope, pinning them down in the lee of an outcropping. They looked at each other and decided silently to stay put. “Jap in a cave,” Jack said, risking a quick squint up. “Let them bring up that kid with a flamethrower.”

  “He got it already.”

  They were taking heavy casualties, but Murray did not feel it the way he had on Tarawa. For one thing, often it was the guys who were new to combat who bought it in their first couple of days in action. In a way, he felt as if there was no point getting too thick with the replacements till they’d been on the line for a while. It seemed like a waste of time to get to know somebody who’d likely be dead before nightfall. Thus neither Jack nor he had bothered to learn the name of the kid with the flamethrower. The Japs liked to pick out guys with visible equipment; it attracted their attention. Some of the guys who’d been using equipment awhile were canny, but new operators tended to get blown away.

  “Who’s got it now?” Jack asked. He took a sip from his canteen. “We’re getting low on water up here, you noticed?”

  “Think I’m getting some private pipeline? You bet your ass I noticed.”

  That night Seabees brought them up water and chow and then got stuck spending the night during the usual after dark attack. The next day, the 29th Marines swung around the back under cover of a smoke screen while their group attacked frontally.

  They were attacking across a small dip in the otherwise steady rise of the mountain when Murray moving in a low crouch stumbled and fell. When he saw what had tripped him up—the bloody intestines of a Japanese soldier wounded in both legs who had committed hara-kiri, and that he himself had slid into a puddle of blood and shit, he vomited.

  When Jack edged back to help him, a shell hit spraying shrapnel for the most part harmlessly over the top of the dip. Murray was pressed into the ground with the breath knocked out of him. For a couple of minutes, he thought he was all right until he began to feel the pain in his left shoulder. One piece of shrapnel had torn into him. “I’m hit,” feeling the blood soak out.

  After a while, a corpsman came up to work on him. Jack waited with him. The corpsman said, “It’s not bad at all. We’ll get the bleeding stopped and dust it right now. But I can’t pull you out of the line for this.” The corpsman had him bandaged up in ten minutes and moved on.

  He felt weak and what he wanted to do was sleep, but the gunny stood over them. “Get moving.”

  They took the peak. Then they stood on the top of the whole island and looked down on the fighting below. They were out of it now. The rest of the 2d and the 4th with a battalion of infantry from the Army between them had moved past and they were pinched out of the line. “Too fucking bad,” everybody agreed and collapsed. Most of the 8th and the 29th were moved back behind the lines into reserve, but their companies and some others were left to hold the peak along with artillery observers. Murray’s shoulder was stiff and sore but had not got infected, which he considered miraculous. On Guadalcanal, he would have had eight kinds of fungi growing in it by now.

  They stank, all of them. Camping on the mountain, they looked like the worst hoboes he had seen come out of the freight yards to beg handouts in the depth of the Depression, scary gaunt filth-encrusted men his mother had warned him never to speak to. Her heart would not let her refuse them food, but their fierce need and their scabrous appearance terrified her. If she could see him, she would shrink from him. She would scream.

  His shoulder throbbed, and it was hard not to flop over on it during his sleep and then wake. Jack was writing letters home, but Murray could not bring himself to move. He lay in the sun on a black rock just shaped to his body. The sounds of shelling rose, the sharp crackling fire of rifles, the roar of the BARs, the small percussions of grenades and the bangs and thuds of the different-sized shells. They had taken their mountain and now they rested on it, and he was glad and stripped to his physical existence, too worn to think, to worry. They chatted, they reminisced.

  “I take a canoe up the river and it feels so good. No noise with a motor, I just glide sweet like a duck through the water, like the keel is greased I go. Then I find someplace on the bank and I haul out and just sit there happy as a turtle and I fish. I smoke and fish,” Jack said.

  How could Murray share in return his happy moments in the stacks of the library at Wayne? He dug into his childhood and brought out a river of his own. They decided together that Gisele and Ruthie were very special women, truer, gentler, harder working than any others. Murray shared his regret for not marrying when he had the chance.

  When he had been hit, somehow he had lost his Zippo lighter, not the shiny ones guys had before the war, back when he didn’t smoke, but the dark unpolished metal ones they were issued. He would have to get another, but in the meantime, they shared Jack’s. The only bad part of being up on the mountain was that there was little shade and little water, but he’d rather be hot and dry and watching from the sidelines, a perfect balcony seat.

  They heard that the Army and the Marines were almost at war down below. The Army hadn’t advanced with the Marines, but had dug in and waited for the Marines to do all the work, leaving their flanks exposed forward, where the Army in the middle was supposed to be. Marines called soldiers doggies and affected to despise them, just as the Army considered the Marines low-life. In this operation, however, tough shit to the Army, for they were under the command of a Marine general for once, Holland Smith.

  That night a huge banzai was launched below. Thousands upon thousands of Japs came streaming through the lines. General Smith had warned that a banzai attack was imminent, but the doggies had not closed up their lines and the Japs just blasted on through, cutting them to ribbons and sending stragglers storming into the hills. Up on Mount Tapotchau, they could tell the Japs had broken through the lines below but they could only see exploding shells. Jack muttered, “It sounds like the Japs have got back as far as the Tenth Marines Artillery—looks like a bloody mess down there.”

  At dawn they watched through glasses trying to figure out what the hell was happening. Their shared nightmare was that the Japs had many more troops than they were supposed to have and had launched a major offensive. Even Sergeant Zeeland was edgy and remarked how few bodies they had found the first days when they were advancing. The glasses went from hand to hand. Zeeland grumbled, “Tell me what I’m seeing. I’m going crazy.”

  Jack looked astonished that the sergeant would admit there was anything he didn’t know backwards, but he lifted the glasses and searched where Zeeland was pointing. “Marie nous sauve,” he said. “It’s the charge of the cripples!”

  When Murray focused the glasses, he saw what everyone was looking at. A line of wounded men, of amputees leaning on sticks, of men with arms in slings, in tattered bandages, with heads completely bandaged so that they were blind and had to be led by the hand, were coming to attack, some armed, some holding bayonets mounted on sticks, some cradling what were probably grenades in arms embedded in plaster casts. They were moving up as best they could to join the banzai attack, which Murray could see had finally ended deep into Allied lines.

  He had no time to appreciate the view, because they were given orders to march down double time and join the mopping-up operations, back into the line to replace the casualties of the charge, which had decimated companies. When they finally got down the mountain, a matter of four hours instead of the three days it had taken
them to get up, Murray looked at the scene and could not believe it. The field in front of the 10th Marines Artillery gun emplacements looked like raw hamburger. Exhausted marines had fallen asleep on piles of corpses, because there was noplace free of maimed bodies and bloody slime. The mangled dead were piled on the mangled dead. Few had been shot. Most had been hit by shells directed flat along the ground like machine-gun fire, as the artillerymen fought for their lives. He thought not even at Tarawa had he seen so many bodies. There the bodies had floated in the surf and he realized in retrospect how clean a death that was, the blood draining out, the flesh washed. Here mud and blood and pulverized muscle and organs made a hellish stinking muck seething with flies. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine snow, nothing but snow. Then hearing a rifle bark nearby, he hit the bloody muck headlong.

  For two days they cleaned up pockets of stragglers from the great banzai charge, but it became apparent that that pile of rotting meat that was being bulldozed into trenches had been the army of General Saito. The general’s body was found near a cave that had been his headquarters by troops that were driving the few remaining Japanese soldiers into the extreme north of the island. After ordering the suicide of his army, General Saito had committed hara-kiri, then been finished off by an aide with a bullet to the brain.

  They moved out to assist in the final mopping-up way in the north. That end of the island was rugged terrain. Now that the charge was over, marines were saying how lucky they were it had happened, because the Japs could have gone on fighting from defile to cave to flinty hill all the way to the cliffs that rose sharply above the sea, cliffs of limestone and coral, jagged and straight down: Marpi Point. As the marines converged, Murray guessed there were fewer soldiers than civilians left. Mostly civilians were milling around the point, a lot of them women with children and babies in arms. The marines took up positions on the edge of the plateau.