My instincts told me that Lefty Zepp was a poor insurance risk, and that the open ground below Yaetake was to be avoided at all costs, particularly by him. I had made that clear. He had stared moodily over my head. We had often argued about courage. I told him that short of turning my back on the Japs and showing a clean pair of heels, which would merely make me a more conspicuous target — in combat he who fights and runs away may not live to fight another day — my actions would be governed solely by determination to survive the war. He said he wanted to live through it, too, but he wouldn't mind coming home with a Silver Star or even a Navy Cross. I quoted someone to the effect that a man wouldn't sell his life to you, but he will give it to you for a piece of colored ribbon. The whole panoply of military glory, I argued (and still argue), is a monstrous deception. I felt (and still feel) that one of the most effective ways to end war would be to strip the military of its anachronistic ribbons, uniforms, and titles. Ban medals, I said; put infantrymen in blue denim, make generals “superintendents,” colonels “supervisors,” and sergeants “foremen.” Then, I said, the martial drive would slacken everywhere. Lefty was beguiled but unconvinced. I could see that he still wanted to greet his father as a certified military hero. So I ordered him to lie low at Yaetake, avoiding, above all, Easy Company's sector. And the son of a bitch double-crossed me.
The rest of us were huddled around a situation map in the ravine below our main line of resistance, trying to match the map's coordinates with a new batch of aerial photographs for a group of officers. The diversion was welcome. For over four hours we had been toiling like convicts in a Georgia chain gang, straining to haul heavy mortars and 37-millimeter guns up an almost perpendicular slope of shale and scree and small rocks, all unstable and treacherous. The few patches of earth were muddy and slippery: more dangerous, really, than the stones. At one point Horse Goltz — his full name was Horst von der Goltz, and I've never met an unlikelier Prussian — had clumsily skidded above me, and his bayonet scabbard had opened a nasty gash on my cheek. Now I was up to my stacking swivel with officers waving glossy pictures at me and demanding that I tell them what this lump and that line meant. Dusty Rhodes was my most skillful interpreter of aerial photographs, and I had just begun to wonder where he was when I heard a thin, breaking, unmistakable shriek from above: “Corpsman!” The word was voided into the hush. Rip looked at me. His face was fisted. He breathed: “Lefty!” Then Dusty came scuttling down wide-eyed. I asked shakily, “What's the word?” He said, “Lefty's hurt bad, they said a sniper.”
At that time wounds, not to mention deaths, were still a novelty for us, and we didn't know what to do. In fact there was nothing we could have done. We stood around, hands on hips, avoiding each other's gaze and peering up to where, we knew, Easy Company held the line. They handed Lefty down, their hands held high to pass him overhead, but we heard him before we could see him. I had read an article about how the wounded never cry. It was a lie. Zepp was sobbing. Whatever his wound, I couldn't believe it was mortal. If it was, I thought, there would be no point in moving him. I didn't know then that our line had just pulled back to the reverse slope, that it was move him or leave him, and there was no choice there, because the Marine Corps always recovers its dead and dying, not for their sakes but to hearten the living.
The sobbing stopped, and then we saw him. The back of his blouse, splotched with great batwings of sweat, looked normal, but his legs were spread as wide as the hoist allowed, and his groin was one vast bloodstain, crimson bubbles forming and breaking on his thighs. Then I saw the loose lolling of the head, and I knew. As he came closer I saw that his features were untouched. The lips were parted, almost swollen; the neck heavy. His eyes looked astonished: how could they do this to a Harvard man? I felt a surge of pain, grief, shock, loss. My wrath came later, when Barney found out that Lefty had been standing in full view of the enemy, studying the Jap lines through his binoculars. But there was no rage at the time. I thought of four things all at once: he was nineteen years old, he would never sing “Fair Harvard” again, I would have to write his father, and I didn't have his father's address. But just then I couldn't move. I thought: Dulce nec decorum est pro patria mori. If anyone had hummed the “Marines' Hymn” then I would have pistoled him.
Two mortarmen laid Lefty's body under a grubby little tree apart from the map conference, which, to my amazement, was still going on. Then, as naturally as though we had planned it, we went over one by one to say goodbye. Pip was wiping his eyes on his cruddy sleeve. Knocko Craddock looked like a movie drunk, his every movement exaggerated, the arm-waving, falling-away motions of a man pretending to be plastered. Barney had a heartbreak look, his face in shadow. The rest followed, all in or near tears. If Samuel Eliot Morison had seen us then, he certainly wouldn't have thought of us as “tough guys” who “asked for nothing better than to come to grips with the sneaking enemy who had aroused all their primitive instincts.”
I was last. I didn't know what to do, so I walked over and knelt on one knee. Lefty's skin, normally olive, looked like ivory. I remembered the words of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: “Oh God, how alone the dead are left!” though I thought how lonely the survivors were, too. Eventually, I realized, a chaplain would arrive, but Zepp had had no religion, or had renounced the one into which he had been born. The best I could do was a few lines from A. E. Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young”:
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town. …
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead …
I couldn't remember the rest of it. I leaned over and kissed him full on the lips. Then I looked down at his gory crotch. In some obscene, unspeakable, vicarious but identifiable way, I felt that I had lost my virginity after all.
Descending the Ridge now in 1978, I maneuver my rented four-wheel-drive Toyota eastward on the island's one road — it was dirt in 1942, is paved now, but is as bumpy as ever — and park beside the Tenaru. Walking along the stream's bank, I catch a sudden glimpse of Jacob Vouza, who, thanks to Queen Elizabeth II, will soon become Sir Jacob Vouza. He sees me coming, and we trot awkwardly toward each other, two old warriors spavined in every joint. We embrace; he leads me to his village, and I wait outside while he changes clothes in his thatched hut — he insists he must don his uniform for the occasion. Overhead a flag ascends a flagpole. It is the same flag which he carried as his safe-conduct thirty-six years ago and which nearly cost him his life. If it is floating over the village, Vouza is home. When the British returned to the Solomons after the war, this custom annoyed them, but no one dared tell the old hero to replace the Stars and Stripes with the Union Jack. Sir Jacob was, and remains, the most popular man on the island.
Our reunion is no stroke of fate. An old-boy network still operates in the islands, mostly comprised of Australians, and Martin Clemens, now retired and living in Melbourne, has sent word to other former coastwatchers and senior islanders that I will be coming. Vouza is in his late eighties, and I decide it would be unwise to ask him to accompany me during my entire tour of the Canal. Instead, another native, Jackson Koria, will accompany me. Like Vouza, Koria worked for the Japanese as a laborer during the fighting and relayed information to Vandegrift's G-2.
It is difficult to describe the adoration these men feel for the United States. Several months earlier, when the Solomon Islands archipelago became the one hundred fiftieth member of the United Nations, with its own flag (bright blue, green, and yellow), motto (“To lead is to serve”), and national anthem (“God Bless the Solomon Islands”), the British ceremoniously handed the reins of authority to the prime minister of an elected legislature. A British band played “God Save the Queen.” There was a ripple of polite applause. Then a native band played their new anthem. The applause was louder. Finally a band of American bluejackets swung into view playing
the “Marines' Hymn.” Every Solomon Islander was on his feet, roaring approval.
Vouza emerges from his hut. He wears a skirt instead of trousers; otherwise he is attired in the dress uniform of a Marine Corps sergeant major. His Silver Star is pinned to his blouse. He carries an engraved sword presented to him by the Marine Corps. As I photograph him, he asks me where I keep my dress blues. It is an embarrassing question; how can I tell him that long ago I discarded my blues, my khakis, and my greens — that my faded Raider cap is the only piece of uniform I kept? I change the subject. Elsewhere
Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza, 1978
I have been told that there is now a strong Japanese presence in the islands, and that one Japanese, a Captain Honda, is particularly enterprising. I ask Vouza about all this. He stiffens; the Nips are here, all right, but he never speaks to them. So I change the subject again, suggesting that we revisit the mouth of the Ilu. That pleases him. After lunching on cool, delicious chunks of papaya, we stroll along the river's bank, watching cattle and children bathe. Surprisingly, one of the children is wearing a pair of tabi, those World War II Jap sneakers which separated the big toe from the others, like the thumb in a mitten. It is incredible that they should still be in use; my boondockers didn't make it past the fifteenth year. I start to ask Vouza about them, then remember that the Japs are still a touchy subject with him. We arrive at the sandspit where so many men died and stand in silence. I think of Private Schmid, fighting on though blinded. I also think of Vouza and what he did that terrible night. Beside me he is erect, at attention. I compliment him on his military bearing and promise to remember him to his friends in the States. He says, “Tell them I love them all. Me old man now, and me no look good no more. But me never forget.” I say, “You no old man, Vouza. You healthy, strong. You live long time.” He relaxes and smiles.
In the Toyota, Koria and I cross a new, 150-foot bridge across the Lunga and another, longer span across the Matanikau. In 1942 it took two months for nineteen thousand Marines, with Chesty Puller cracking the whip, to reach the far bank of the Matanikau. Today it is a ten-minute ride from the airfield, now called Henderson International Airport. The bridge is one-way because, you are told, the Marines only went in one direction — forward. This harmless fiction is succeeded by surprises on all sides. A Catholic cathedral stands on one bank, a Chinatown on the other, and, in the place of Kukum's Fighter Two airstrip, a nine-hole golf course. That is only the beginning. The end is the town of Honiara. No Guadalcanal veteran will recognize the name. Honiara rose after the war, and takes its name from the native naho ni ara, meaning “facing the east and southeast wind.” It occupies the site of Point Cruz, a complex of concrete docks we built to replace a coconut plantation. (More money for the soap company.) The town is now the capital for the Solomon nation's fifty thousand citizens. In it are two air-conditioned hotels, one of them owned by Chinese; there is another Chinatown in the capital; and the Chinese restaurant Lantern serves the best food on the island.
But it is the Nipponese who are most conspicuous. Young Japanese who hadn't even been born when the battle raged here come on economic missions, examining the Solomons' rich mineral deposits, testing its palm oil, netting its skipjack tuna, bargaining for the Canal's rice, sugarcane, cattle, papaya, and pineapple, and asking penetrating questions about the threats of natives on Malaita, one of the richer islands, to secede from the federation. Older Japanese arrive each year to pray at small shrines for the souls of their husbands and brothers who died in the fighting. Executives from huge Nipponese conglomerates sit around tables in the hotels, drinking cold Kirin beer and studying maps of the islands. They make me feel uncomfortable. But then, so does the sign reading “Jackets and Neckties,” the menus printed in Japanese as well as English, the taxi stand, and the well-stocked bar. Heavy with survivor's guilt, I tell the waiter: “You catchum me one fella Scotch on rocks.”
The following morning I call on Captain H. Honda in his office at the Taiko Fisheries Company. He is younger than I am, and looks younger still, a short, slender, but sinewy man with neatly parted black hair and eyes like green marbles. But he was old enough to volunteer for the kamikaze corps in 1945. He was turned down, and I, hoping to find common ground, congratulate him on his failure to pass the kamikaze examination. It doesn't work. His smile is so thin that he stops just short of baring his teeth. And to my surprise, after all these years I find my own hackles rising. The sad truth is that there can never be peace between men like this man and men like me; an invisible wall will forever separate us. To make the interview as short as possible, I confine myself to one bland question, asking whether he thinks that the new Solomons nation can become economically independent. He shakes his head. Papua, yes; the Fijis, yes; the Solomons, no. The problem, he says, is oriental imperialism. Bougainville, the richest of the islands, has been annexed by the Papuans. But the Papuans are victims, too; West Irian, the western half of their island, has been seized by the Indonesians. These issues have never been raised in the United Nations. Imperialism, it seems, is a crime in the UN only when the imperialists are white.
Returning to my hotel, I pass the local movie theater, a converted Quonset hut — the current flick is “It Happened One Night” — and meet Bill Bennett, an old coastwatcher wearing a First Raider Battalion T-shirt. Bennett and another Australian at the bar don't share Honda's pessimism, though they warn me not to be fooled by Honiara's fashion shops and the current island craze for Adidas footwear. Outside the city, Guadalcanal is still primitive. Although there is electricity here in the town, elsewhere, save for a few generators, light is provided by kerosene lamps. To be sure, the Seventh-Day Adventists have built a high school, Planned Parenthood has established a lively chapter, and the local hospital — still called Hospital No. 9, as it was in 1942, for sentimental reasons — is first class. But the government is weak and few islanders are interested in, or even aware of, their independence. “Oh, yes,” says Bill's friend. “I forgot to mention that before leaving the British built a mental hospital.” I say, “We could have used it.”
My tour of the island convinces me that the Canal is still essentially pristine. On Red Beach I find the remains of a floating pier and two amphibian tractors, overgrown by vines and covered with nearly four decades of rust. Otherwise the fine-grained gray beach and the stately palms are much as they were on August 7, 1942. At Henderson Field the black skeleton of the old control tower is untouched. Cassia grows in a half-track near the airstrip. Since the field is now surfaced with concrete, natives have liberated strips of Marsden matting and use them for fences. To the west are the Japanese shrines — they are the same, I shall find, on all the islands: six feet high, four sided, with Japanese characters on all sides. I also discover several U.S. Army markers, but almost none erected by the Marine Corps. Here and there one comes across the fuselage of a downed World War II plane; invariably the interiors reek of urine. Near the Kokumbona River I trace the contours of old trenches and foxholes wrinkling the ground, though my own elude me. Except on the Ridge and the Ilu sandspit, all other landmarks of the past, including the Jap Bridge, have been reclaimed by the jungle. This is even true at Hell's Point, a stockpile of unexploded ammunition still marked out-of-bounds for anyone straying near it. There are overgrown Hell's Points all over the Pacific; they are the war's chief legacy to natives. I point to the warning sign, nearly obscured by vines, and tell Koria that this is a barren wasteland, that is will always be dangerous. He nods grimly and replies, “Mi save gut”: he understands it well.
After the Allied victories on Papua and Guadalcanal, Japan's great 1942 offensive spluttered and died. In Tokyo Hirohito's generals and admirals assured him that they could hold the empire they had won. Until now American strategists in Washington had tacitly agreed; their plans for the Pacific war had been defensive; they had wanted only to hold Australia and Hawaii until the war in Europe had been won. But MacArthur, Halsey, and Nimitz were aggressive commanders. They had shown what their tr
oops could do. In the southwest Pacific they were determined to seize, or at least neutralize, Rabaul. MacArthur could then skip along New Guinea's northern coast, moving closer to his cherished goal, the recapture of the Philippine Islands. And the U.S. Navy could open another offensive in the central Pacific. The split command worried the Joint Chiefs, and to this day historians wonder whether it was wise. MacArthur wasn't interested in the central Pacific, while Admiral King was convinced that Japan could be defeated without an American reconquest of the Philippines.
Actually the two drives became mutually supporting, each of them protecting the other's flank. Nimitz, King's theater commander, diverted enemy sea power which would otherwise have pounced on MacArthur from the east, while MacArthur's air force took out enemy planes which could have driven the Marines from their island beachheads. Their strategies differed — MacArthur's was to move land-based bombers forward in successive bounds to achieve local air superiority, while Nimitz's was predicated on carrier air power shielding amphibious landings on key isles, which then became stepping-stones through the enemy's defensive perimeters — but that was because they were dealing with different landscapes and seascapes. For a man in his sixties, MacArthur was extraordinarily receptive to new military concepts. Not only could he adopt the amphibious techniques developed by the Marine Corps; he went one step further by waging what Churchill later called “triphibious warfare”— the coordination of land, sea, and air forces. At West Point the general had been taught army doctrine: rivers are barriers. At Annapolis, midshipmen are told that bodies of water are highways. MacArthur combined the two brilliantly.
His GIs never liked him, of course. He was too egotistical, they thought, and too unappreciative of them. He was that and more — perhaps the most exasperating general ever to wear a uniform. But his genius quickened the war, foiled the enemy, and executed movements beyond the imagination of the less gifted soldiers who scorned him.
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