Goodbye, Darkness

by William Manchester

  In our island war the fighting never really ended until all the Japs had been wiped out. That morning the enemy was still trying to force a passage across the mouth of the Ilu, and when five American tanks tried to descend the slopes of the Ridge, all were knocked out by Jap antiaircraft guns which had remained behind for just that purpose. During the confusing night melee, individual Nips had found their way through our lines. A jeep inching back toward Henderson and carrying five wounded Marines, one of them Red Mike's operations officer, was raked by a Nambu; there were no survivors. But the outcome of the battle was unchanged, and the losers faced a terrible prospect. Kawaguchi had to lead his men, staggering under their packs, back through the dense rainforest to the headwaters of the Matanikau, into deep, humid ravines and over towering cliffs, accompanied all the way by swarms of insects. Japs had malaria, too. They had also run out of food. And no doctors or rice awaited them. They fed on roots, leaves, and grass; they tore bark from trees; they chewed their leather rifle straps, and some, delirious, raved or stumbled into the swamps to die. “The army,” a Japanese historian sadly notes, “had been used to fighting the Chinese.”

  Slowly the Marine perimeter grew, until it was seven miles wide and four miles deep. Now American ships brought men and supplies every day; since the Canal lacked a harbor, dock complexes were built at Kukum and, to the west, Point Cruz. The sensible course for the Japanese would have been to throw in the towel then and evacuate the Canal. But having won so much in the early bloodless months of the war, they simply could not believe that they must forfeit this island where they had spent so many lives. So they kept withdrawing troops from Papua to strengthen the forces here. Now that Henderson had become a hive of U.S. warplanes, including F4U Corsairs, the Tokyo Express no longer dared to venture out in daylight. Jap transports lay up in New Georgia and the Shortlands between dawn and dusk, bringing in reinforcements and heavy artillery each midnight and returning to Rabaul with the wounded and sick. One week a full division was landed at Cape Esperance, accompanied by ambitious battle plans from Tokyo. On paper they were impressive, but they were too complicated for the climate and the terrain. In heavy rains the jungle was completely impassable. Regimental commanders lost battalions, battalions lost companies, companies lost platoons, platoons lost squads. Lacking Atabrine, their quinine requisitions were huge. They ran out of it. Then they began running out of everything.

  Meanwhile the Seabees completed another airstrip, “Fighter Two,” at Kukum. Tulagi became a base for PT boats, including the boat that had brought MacArthur out of his Corregidor trap and PT-109, skippered by young Lieutenant (j.g.) John F. Kennedy. Carlson's Raiders arrived, spreading their gospel, then new, of “Gung Ho” (“Work together”). Carlson recommended long patrols, to be conducted, of course, by intelligence men. Ultimately his Raiders circled the entire island. The Second Marines landed, then the Eighth Marines, and then — the first affirmative action by the U.S. Army here — the Americal Division. The doggies were rich in candy bars; the Marines were rich in souvenirs. Bartering began, with so many Hershey bars or Butterfingers exchanged for a samurai sword or a Rising Sun battle flag. Later I acquired a little cache of mementos: a Jap helmet, a sword, and a meatball banner. I mailed them home in the only wooden box I could find; it was an awkward size, so I used packs of Chesterfields as ballast. The box reached my mother at the height of the home front's cigarette shortage, and she, thinking that was why I had sent it, merely acknowledged the souvenirs while enthusiastically thanking me for the Chesterfields.

  Though Vandegrift eventually commanded forty thousand U.S. troops, though U.S. air power reduced the Express's flow to a trickle, and though Jap artillery was overwhelmed by our batteries of 75s, 105s, and Long Toms, the enemy clung stubbornly to the west bank of the Matanikau. Four separate battles were fought for this awful river. The most memorable fight was over a log crossing called the “Jap Bridge.” Major Bailey was killed there, and Sam Griffith was wounded in the shoulder by a Jap marksman. (As he staggered and fell, Griffith, ever the professional, shouted, “Good shot!”) Finally, on November 1, three Pioneer bridges were thrown over the river, and after that, attrition slowly sapped Japanese force and whatever morale was left. By the first week in February that was zero. In a three-night minor Dunkirk, the last eleven thousand Nips were evacuated from Cape Esperance. The long Japanese southward drive had been stopped. Between New Guinea and the Canal the myth of Jap invincibility had been gutted. And the price paid for Guadalcanal had not been excessive by standards of the Pacific war. During the six-month struggle for the island, 4,123 Americans had fallen. On Iwo Jima 25,851 Marines would be lost in less than four weeks, and the price of the eighty-two-day fight for Okinawa, the greatest bloodletting of all, would be 49,151 Americans. Vandegrift's casualty lists were less than half of MacArthur's on Papua. Papua was MacArthur's bloodiest campaign in the battles which led him back to the Philippines; after Buna, his nimble genius began to bypass enemy strongpoints, leaving them to wither on the vine. The real ordeal on the Canal had been psychological and malarial; when the army relieved the Marines, 95 percent of the original landing force was hors de combat, mostly by fever.

  After the battle, Guadalcanal became a staging area for other troops. By then the island's name had entered the mists of legend. The New York Times called the Canal “one of the decisive struggles of the war in the Pacific,” and after the battle Hanson Baldwin, the paper's military analyst, wrote jubilantly: “The future is ours to make.” One of Hirohito's ablest strategists, Captain Toshikazu Ohmae, concluded that the situation had become “very serious.” Guadalcanal met the standards, set by Winston Churchill, for great battles which, “won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres in armies and in nations.” President Roosevelt, citing the First Marine Division, said that its men “not only held their important strategic positions despite determined and repeated Japanese naval, air, and land attacks,” but also drove the Japanese “from the proximity of the airfield” and “inflicted great losses on them.” FDR concluded: “The courage and determination displayed in these operations were of an inspiring order.”

  But Southey may have been right: all famous victories may be meaningless. One difficulty is that, in looking back through the lens of time, we are constantly revising the definitions of proper nouns, both history's and our own, giving more weight to this battle, less weight to that. We balkanize the past, too; my recollections of the Canal are as fragmented and jumbled as the jungle I toiled through. And if you were hit in the skull, like me, you are never going to get the shattered pieces of remembrance just right. In addition, I have repressed what war memories I do have for so long that I have no way of knowing how distorted they are now. That, of course, is why I have come back to the islands.

  It is the early evening of November 19, 1978, and I am hiking from Henderson Field to the Ridge, wearing khakis and my old Raider cap and carrying a flashlight, my notebook, and a small pick. I pause at a large sign:

  LEVER PLANTATIONS

  NO TRESPASSING

  Behind the sign is a barbed-wire fence — better barbwire than the Marine Corps had then — but part of it is flattened by twisted, rusting old Marsden matting, easily stepped over. A slope of three-foot-high kunai grass, caressed just now by the rough hand of a rising wind, leads me to the ultimate knob on the Ridge. There a simple bronze plaque marks the site of Red Mike's command post. Running through my mind is the tune of “Remember Pearl Harbor,” but the words are the words we sang then:

  We'll remember Colonel Edson, how he led us to the fight,

  We'll remember Major Bailey, how he fought with all his might …

  Overhead the sky is a gunmetal gray. A light rain is falling. The Ridge curves southward like an incomplete question mark. Beyond it, the blue-green heights of the Grassy Knoll are shadowed by patches of fog, while on each side of me, the Ridge's slopes lead down to the rainforest where the Japanese massed for
their attacks. Tropical trees there stand at least 150 feet tall. Smaller bushes lurk around them, like shrunken whores in doorways.

  We'll remember the sergeants, 'cause they always led the way,

  And we'll remember Pua Pua, when we're back in the U.S.A. …

  I spit on my hands and swing the pick, once more mutilating this little acre of God. Presently I have hacked out a foxhole. It is shallow but snug; a fallen log bars the wind, the hip hollows fit, and the prospects for a comfortable night are a distinct improvement over those in the last hole I gouged out on this island, on a similar ridge three miles west of here. I had never spaded earth so easily. In a few minutes I had a deep, wide shelter, large enough for me and my gear with room to spare. I fell asleep feeling smug, sublimely unaware of catastrophe ahead. The reason the earth had been so soft was that I had been burrowing into the natural drainage line of the slope. At 3:00 A.M. a deluge awakened me, and I nearly drowned. In fact, I almost lost my weapon. Now, over a third of a century later, I avoid gullies. A man my age must be cautious, and I have decided to spend the night on the Ridge, listening once more to the sounds of the rainforest.

  We'll remember the Raiders, how we marched into the fray,

  Yes, we'll remember Pua Pua, when we're back in the U.S.A.

  Mosquitoes appear. This time I am protected from diseases by hypodermic shots, and once I have smeared Cutter ointment on my skin the bugs withdraw. The rain stops, then the sun vanishes behind an archipelago of crimson clouds, leaving the hogback to darkness and to me. There is a stillness without echo. The night is soft, the stars slightly misty. But then, almost abruptly, the Ridge becomes a noisy place. Sound travels far here; I can hear the cries of children in a distant village, though I cannot tell from which direction they come. A dog yelps. Nearby, crickets and tree frogs chirp, and the medleys of birds grow and grow louder. They run up and down the scale, jabbering a double-quick cadence.

  And then it starts to happen. Quietly, stealthily, imperceptibly, terror begins to creep across my mind so that, poring over my notebook by flashlight, I am taken quite unawares. New sounds, just now penetrating my consciousness, are impossible to identify. Down below, where the Japs formed for their assaults up the slopes, something is going huk-huk-huk. Something else is whickering, like the braying of a gigantic donkey. Most disconcerting is a kind of cosmic gasping. Its breath goes hhhhhhh hhhhhhh hhhhhhh and then hhhhh hhhhh hhhhh, and it is coming up after me.

  Raiders, rally to me!

  A nearby twig snaps. Common sense tells me it can only be a land crab, a lizard, or a wild rabbit, but my whole body goes rigid. The panting is coming closer. I want to flee, but my muscles won't respond. The thing is down there in the kunai grass, temporarily muffled by a rock. The gasping has stopped, to be replaced by a snuffling, a squeal, and sucking sounds. Now it is thumping to one side and then the other, trying to smell me out, whining impatiently.

  Raiders, Raiders! Rally to me!

  In that instant the thing catches my scent and I catch its scent. The malevolent panting has begun again, hhh hhh hhh hhh hhh, and it reeks of sweat, cordite, urine, and old leather. Then it arrives, clawing at the edge of my foxhole. I cannot look up. I can feel it hanging over me. My eyes are squeezed shut when a flash of light, bright enough to reach my pupils through my eyelids, pinks them. My lids flip open. There is nothing there. And there is no sound. Then the birds resume their crying, the dog barks, the children shout. Nothing has happened. Doubtless I am the victim of a nightmare. Yet my khakis are soaked with perspiration.

  I am past shame, grateful for deliverance, but baffled by what to do. Returning to Henderson in the dark is out of the question. So, I think, is sleep. But I am wrong about that. I am fifty-six years old, this has been a strenuous day, and I have just had a strange shock. I roll over on my back and study the Southern Cross, its stars partly obscured by tattered clouds. I drop off. This time my dream is familiar. It is of the old party and the Sergeant. There is a difference, however. When the old man arrives he finds that the Sergeant has been there some time — his boondockers have plowed the mud — and he ignores his visitor's presence. He has the half-pathetic, half-comical look of a concentration camp victim, bereft of dignity. Atabrine has turned his skin yellower than a Jap's. His uniform is just hanging on his emaciated frame, and it is stained with what, at a closer look, turns out to be blood. He is in a towering rage, though clearly not at the old man; he doesn't even glance in that direction. Glaring elsewhere, he shakes his fist at the darkness in pitiful fury and swears savagely. At first he appears to be angry with himself. Then the truth becomes clear. I know his problem. He is furious at Lefty Zepp, the first of the Raggedy Ass Marines to die.

  Of course I was pissed off. Zepp had been inexcusably insubordinate. I had ordered him to avoid high ground and especially to stay away from Easy Company. Forgiveness is very hard when someone you love gets killed doing what he has been expressly told not to do. Everybody in the line companies knew Zepp had been at Harvard. They all resented his sleepy, amused, almost insolent eyes, and the way he looked at you when he had scored a point: as though you had just said something disgusting, or had what was then called B.O. But Easy Company's Topkick was among those who had been suckered by Zepp's swagger stick, binoculars, hand-made boondockers, and fancy pistol. Back at New River the Top had been flimflammed into saluting him, and when he found out Lefty was only a Pfc, he was furious. That wasn't my problem, and at the time it didn't seem to be much of a problem for Zepp. But in combat dislikes can be mortal. Easy Company wasn't going to look out for Zepp's ass. And in his distinctive outfit he was sniper bait anyhow. Our officers wore no insignia of rank. They knew enemy marksmen would be looking for our leaders. If a Pfc could dupe a First Soldier, he could certainly gull the Japs and draw fire. I made this point a hundred times with Zepp, but he either promised to leave the Abercrombie and Fitch gear behind when he went on the line, and then forgot to do it, or he gave me a tortuous legal argument about an enlisted man's right to private property. It was what you would expect from a Harvard man.

  Later I wondered whether Easy Company knew that Lefty was a Jew. I don't think so. He didn't look Jewish, or what we thought looked Jewish. His black hair was thick and curly, but he had kept his boot-camp crew cut; it just looked like a tight cap. His eyes were slanted, his lips were thin, and his cheekbones were high, almost oriental. He was also wiry and well muscled. The race question had been raised point-blank in the section — by Bubba — and Lefty had flatly denied being Jewish. He said he was Armenian. He told Izzy Levy the truth but swore him to secrecy. Izzy didn't relay it to me until over thirty years later, when we ran into each other in Chicago. I was surprised. I had thought deception beneath Zepp. Except for his adolescent voice he emanated an invulnerable aura of self-confidence. His movements were always economical and precise; I was sure he would be an impressive physician. And his mind was first-rate. Neither Barney nor I ever beat him in chess, not once. He had joined the Marines on impulse after seeing John Payne, Randolph Scott, and Maureen O'Hara in To the Shores of Tripoli, a gung-ho movie that conned a lot of guys into boot camp. He wrote his father every day, and every day he got a letter back, despite the fact that doctors on the home front, with most of the younger physicians in uniform, were carrying enormous practices.

  To civilians, men in combat dress look as alike as weeds in a patch, but a botanist can sort out the weeds, and a sergeant, if he is any good, should be able to sort out his people. This is something training cannot teach. It must be intuitive. The best NCOs are sensitive to the peculiarities in each rifleman's character, how he will react under pressure, what can be expected of him and what can't. To my surprise, I had found that I could do it. I could even make a fair guess about the special skills of men in other outfits — from the crouching walk of a machine gunner, for example, or the crablike movements of a mortarman. In the jungle I also learned that my timidity was actually an asset. Because of the beatings I had taken as a boy, I had be
come a master of evasion. And I was seldom startled. If I was about to be cornered, if danger was close, I knew it before anyone else. Most wounded infantrymen experience a lull, a dead instant between the time they are hit and the moment the shattered nerves and torn muscles catch up and start shrieking, but with me it was the other way around. I was like the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, who began to feel pain before she was hurt. And because I was young and frightened and had youthful reflexes, I responded instantly to those flickers of warning. It was a sense I cannot define, a kind of pusillanimity on a subliminal level.