Neither his grandfather nor any other American is rolling over in his grave on Iwo Jima. The American dead were disinterred in the 1960s and returned to American soil. Their ghosts don’t haunt the Iwo Jima battlefield. Nor do the ghosts of the Japanese. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m Irish enough to be able to tell when none are around. The island is grim. Thoughts of its history are frightening. But Iwo Jima isn’t spooky. I found the same notion in James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. At the end of the book the narrator visits a military cemetery. He encounters a black sailor who has volunteered for caretaker duty.
“Isn’t it strange,” I asked, “for colored men to like work in a cemetery?”
My guide laughed gently and easily. “Yes! Yes! I know jes’ what yo’-all means,” he said. “All dem jokes about ghos’s and cullud men. But what yo’-all doan’ see,” he added quietly, “is dat dey ain’ no ghos’s up here! … dey is only heros.”
Pardon, for the sake of the thought, Michener’s insensitive language. He was a pre-postmodern man. And so was General Kuribayashi. In his last message to Imperial General Headquarters he said, “Even as a ghost, I wish to be a vanguard of future Japanese operations.” If so, he’s haunting a Toyota factory.
General Kuribayashi sent his message from a cave in a ravine at the northwest corner of Iwo Jima, an area that the Americans called Bloody Gorge. The Marines of 1945 were plagued by the manifold bolt-holes, peek holes, and gun ports concealed in the narrow jumble of rock and brush.
I went to Kuribayashi’s final redoubt with a Marine sergeant major and his Japanese counterpart. The sergeants major are friends. They are authorities on the history of Iwo Jima. Together they gave lectures to the young Marines and guided the hikes around the island.
I couldn’t see the entrance to Kuribayashi’s cave—even though his descendants had marked it with a statue of a Shinto goddess. The sergeants, on their bellies, led me inside. Kuribayashi was a wide man, five feet nine and two hundred pounds. Getting him into his headquarters must have been like opening wine when the corkscrew is lost. Thirty feet down, the roof, walls, and floor of the cave flared like a panic attack. We stood in a large, hot, stinking chamber with dead men’s belongings all over the ground.
By early March Kuribayashi had only fifteen hundred men. They were all in one square mile around Bloody Gorge. Tens of thousands of Marines were on the island. The American Pacific command declared Iwo Jima “secure” on March 14. Yet the fighting continued for twelve more days. In the “mopping up” on Iwo Jima, 1,071 Marines were killed. As of my visit to Iwo that was fewer Americans than had died in the conquest and occupation of Iraq, with its 167,000 square miles of territory and its army of half a million men.
We’re coming to the end of the long, dark modern age. Slaughters of unnumbered human beings continue, but not among people who knew Spencer Tracy. Warfare persists, but the scale of battle is returning to something that the author of the Iliad would recognize. Maybe someday each combat casualty will rate the kind of mourning that Achilles did for Patroclus, except on television, and the saga of every Jessica Lynch will be an Odyssey or, anyway, a cover of People. There never will be peace, but we can have wars where, when we talk about our soldiers, we say, “Dey is only heros.”
Peace Kills Page 18