by Harry Mazer
Then our whole replacement company climbed up in back of the trucks, wherever there was a place. And we were off, down a dusty dirt road. It was good to be moving again. The breeze felt good. We passed neat farms, cultivated green and yellow fields, rice paddies, and little curving bridges. We saw Okinawans in the fields, and they waved to us. If there were battles going on, it wasn’t here. We passed villages and the shrines where they kept the remains of their dead in curving stone structures.
It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes, and we were on the other side of the island, looking out at the ocean again. We passed a cemetery sloping down to the edge of the water with what seemed to be thousands of crooked white crosses. It was our cemetery.
A veteran sitting near us crossed himself. He’d been wounded at Peleliu. His name was Dudley, a tall, easy guy, not that much older than Ben and me, but he talked to us like a big brother. “You’ll do okay,” he told us. Like most of the veterans, he didn’t talk much.
We drove south along the edge of the water. In the distance there was a growing rumble like the sound of ten really busy bowling alleys. The sky was heavy. Clouds hung low over the ocean. There were fewer farm fields here and more hills, and more and more tanks and military equipment along the edges of the road and tucked between little knobs of hills.
As we bounced over one of our rough bridges, I looked down and saw a girl lying at the edge of the water. I saw her bare legs and her long black hair floating on the surface. I kept looking, waiting for her to move, wanting her to move. Soldiers died, not girls. I looked back, but we’d already gone past her.
The rain began when we reached battalion headquarters. Men, jeeps, trucks, tanks, and supplies were everywhere. Everyone was milling around. There didn’t seem to be any order, and it didn’t look like anyone was in charge.
We stayed close to Dudley. The three of us and a guy named Jake, who Dudley knew from before, found an abandoned half-standing canvas shelter and got it propped up. Jake went and scrounged up some sweet potatoes from someplace. We got a fire going and huddled under the canvas eating potatoes and canned rations. Except for the rain and the unending boom of guns, it was almost like we were on a camping trip.
That night I slept off and on through squalls of rain. Ben kept sliding into me, waking me up, and then I’d think of where we were, the thousands of miles of water we’d crossed, and this little island I’d never heard of before. I listened to the rain and the muffled rumble of guns and wondered what came next. I was just glad Ben was with me in all this.
In the morning we lined up for oatmeal and coffee ladled out of garbage cans. I went off to fill my canteen, and when I came back, Ben was gone. Dudley said Captain Weaver had come by looking for a couple of riflemen. “He grabbed Jake, and then he got your pal.”
I wanted to go looking for Ben. Maybe I could change places with Jake, so Ben and I could stay together. “Forget it,” Dudley said. “You don’t want to do that. You’ll find your pal later. Or you won’t.”
I reported to headquarters after breakfast. “What’s your name?” Captain Weaver said. He had a long, sad face, like a picture of Abraham Lincoln, but without a beard.
“Pelko, sir.”
“I’m your CO.”
“I know, sir.”
The captain went through some papers. “Okay. Follow me, Pelko.”
He brought me to where there was a bunch of unshaven, muddy marines sitting around, wrapped in their ponchos.
“Rosenthal,” the captain said and nudged one of the marines. “Come alive, Rosie. Here’s your new rifleman.”
So that’s what it was going to be, I thought. Just like Ben always said, the way things were was the way things were.
“What do you mean, my new man? I’m not in charge of anything.” He had a bony nose and weary, red-rimmed eyes. He looked like a big parrot.
“The platoon is yours now, Rosie.”
“No, no.” He pulled his helmet down over his face.
“I’m not kidding, Rosie. There’s nobody else.” The captain didn’t get mad, didn’t pull rank. He was nice and even. “Steiglitz is out of it. You’re my senior man now. If it’s not you, what am I supposed to do, put this kid in charge?”
“Do I get a sergeant’s stripes?”
“Guaranteed.”
Rosenthal winked at me.
“Do whatever the sergeant tells you to do, Private,” Captain Weaver said. “He knows everything.” Then he left.
Sergeant Rosenthal looked me over and shook his head. “You’re so clean,” he said. “You have a watch on you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sir me. I’m no sir. Just wake me up in forty minutes.”
When Sergeant Rosenthal woke up, he went to talk to Captain Weaver. He came back with some more men, including Dudley, and we all loaded into the back of one of the trucks with some other veterans and green recruits like me. One of them, a big kid that everyone called Tex, couldn’t stop talking. “Where we going? What’s it going to be like? What do I have to do?”
“What you have to do is take it easy,” Dudley said. “Save your breath.”
I had all the same questions, but after that I kept my mouth shut.
“Does it always rain here?” a skinny kid named Joe Scanlon said. He was from around Boston somewhere. He had that accent.
“No, it never rains,” Hartmann, one of the veterans, said. “You guys brought it.”
The road was a muddy mess, and the truck slid from side to side, sometimes going deep in mud, then grinding forward. When a truck up ahead of us slewed sideways, we were all stuck. “Everybody out,” Sergeant Rosenthal called. “Shake it! Let’s move.” He was in a hurry to get wherever we were going. And now we had to walk.
We were all loaded up with our rifles, cartridge belts, and extra ammo. I noticed that Hartmann had grenades hooked to his shirt, and I did the same thing. Another thing he and Dudley and the other vets had were two canteens each. Hartmann, who was a big guy, had the BAR, the Browning automatic rifle, over his shoulder. He gave Scanlon the tripod to carry.
“Loosen those chin straps,” Sergeant Rosenthal told us, and pointed to the way his chin straps were flapping free. “You got that on tight, and a shell lands near you, the concussion will tear your head off. Now,” he continued, still instructing us new men, “we move single file. No talking, and stay on the path. You don’t know where the mines are.”
We moved steadily along, mostly going uphill. All I could hear was the creak of our equipment and my own heavy breathing. The trail got steeper, and we were holding on to roots and stumps of things, when shots rang out. Dudley yanked me down. “Sniper,” he said.
We were all crouched down. My heart was going a mile a minute. Everything happened really fast. I saw Rosie point to something, a thicket above us, and then he heaved a grenade and we were all firing.
Then it stopped, and Rosie said, “Stay down.” I was gripping my rifle so hard my fingers ached. After a while Grasso went up to check. He disappeared.
We waited. There was a flurry of shots. Then Grasso reappeared, rifle held high. He came scrambling down the hill. “Let’s go,” Rosie barked.
We slogged on and came out at the edge of a huge muddy field. Everything was scorched and torn apart. The men we were replacing seemed to appear out of nowhere, coming out of the ground and moving past us, a long, weary, silent line.
The enemy was out there, somewhere. I wasn’t afraid, but I was shaking. “Let’s move it,” Rosie said. He wanted us in the foxholes, two men to a hole, a green man with a veteran. “Pelko, you’re with me.” He gave the password and warned, “No talking, no lights. After dark, anything that moves, you shoot.”
The hole we were in was a little forward of the others. “We’ll take turns guarding,” Rosie said to me. “You take the first watch.”
Without thinking, I started to light a cigarette. I needed something.
“Put that out! They smell that, they’ll come crawling this way like rats to
cheese.”
I pinched out the cigarette and put it back in the pack. “Sorry.” I jammed my cold hands into my pockets.
“Don’t say sorry. Sorry, you’re dead. You gotta listen. You hear anything, wake me up. And don’t fall asleep on me or we’ll both have our throats cut.” He wrapped himself in his poncho and was asleep in a moment.
I sat with my knees up, my rifle under the poncho, a grenade within reach. I was wet, but it didn’t matter. I opened a K ration, but I couldn’t eat.
Star shells were exploding in the sky, lighting up everything as they slowly descended on their little parachutes. Every time one of them burst, the field lit up and shadows moved through the bushes. I saw shapes. I saw movement, what looked like a dog, and then not ten feet from me, I saw a helmet rising from the ground.
“Rosie,” I whispered.
He sat up and we listened. Rosie had his KA-BAR in one hand and a grenade in the other, but it was nothing. He said, “That’s okay,” and motioned me to lie down.
I couldn’t sleep. It was a long, miserable night. The slightest noise sent my heart racing and every time a shell went over, my eyes shot open and I reached for my rifle. The shelling went on all night. Rosie had told me it was the ones that hissed that you had to worry about. But high or low, it didn’t matter, every shell seemed to be coming straight for me. You’re going to get used to it, I told myself. You’re going to do better. This is just the first day.
The morning was gray and wet. We all squatted down behind an embankment, waiting for Rosie, who had gone to talk to the captain. Tanks and men streamed past us, crossing the field. The air rocked with explosions and the boom of mortars. “What would you guys like for breakfast?” Dudley said, breaking out the K rations. “We have cheese and crackers or … crackers and cheese. Tex?”
“You got something hot?” he said.
“How about a cup of hot spit,” Dudley said.
Tex and Scanlon both laughed, but they looked gray, like they hadn’t slept much either. Scanlon kept feeling for the straps on his helmet, and Tex kept licking his lips. When Dudley flipped a box of K rations to me, I just shook my head. I was too tight, too wound up, to even think of food.
Rosie came back, and we moved out along a narrow cut through some low hills. I was charged up, my heart pumping, more alert than I’d ever been in my life. My eyes were everywhere. We came out on one side of a broad open valley. On the other side were some steep hills that looked like loaves of bread. “They’re in those hills,” Dudley said, “like ants in an anthill.”
I could hardly hear him. The air was exploding, bursting with noise and gunfire. We moved forward, crouched low, firing, darting from cover to cover. A tank was burning. Mortar shells came raining down. Shrapnel tore up everything it touched. It was almost like a battle scene in a movie, except for the bodies on the ground that didn’t move. I ran, tripped, slammed into things. The air was smoke and fragments and men screaming.
A shell exploded and flipped me over, buried me in dirt. I couldn’t see; I could hardly hear. I staggered to my feet. Where was Rosie? I began running and fell into a shell hole with Hartmann and Scanlon. Hartmann, his knee almost in my face, was shooting at a fortified Japanese bunker above us.
Rosie dove into the hole and told us that he and Dudley were going to work their way up around the side of the bunker. Hartmann got the BAR going. I raised up, pushed my rifle over the top, pushed in clip after clip. The barrel got so hot I thought it would melt. When I looked around, Scanlon’s face was covered with blood. A piece of shrapnel had skinned him.
Hartmann had to tell me to stop shooting. Rosie and Dudley had knocked out the bunker with a couple of grenades. It was over. The rifle was trembling in my hands. I didn’t know if a minute had passed or my whole life.
The next day it was the same thing. The Japanese were dug in everywhere, and we had to knock them out of each cave and tunnel. We started on the bottom of a hill, knocked them out of one hole, they barraged us with mortars and grenades, and we retreated, taking our dead with us. The next morning we went up again, and again we fell back, and we went up again.
We captured one hill, and there was another hill, and hills behind those hills, and more hills. And the officers urging us on, and us dashing from hole to hole, inching up like caterpillars or worms, till the lieutenant is dead, and the man next to me doesn’t move, and the man next to him is screaming.
I saw Ben one day, but he was too far away for me to even reach him. I wanted to. I wanted to drop everything and join him. But I couldn’t. I was here and he was there, and it would be like running out on my guys. And then he was gone, and all I could think was, Okay, I didn’t disgrace myself. I didn’t let Rosie down; I didn’t let the others down.
We kept pushing. Men were hit all the time. Bullets could kill you. Shrapnel could kill you. Sometimes just a shell concussion killed a man. I thought I was getting used to it, then Tex got it. He raised up for a better look, and a sniper got him right through the eye. Blood came rushing out of him. Hartmann bent over him and shook his head.
“Corpsman,” I yelled, even though it was too late. “Corpsman!”
Every morning I woke up and wondered if I’d be alive by nightfall. Every night I was too exhausted to care. It helped not to think about it. After a while, you didn’t have to tell yourself that. You didn’t think about it.
One day Dudley, Rosie, and I were hunkered down together in a hole, and a grenade came rolling over the edge and landed between my legs. I picked it up and flipped it out like it was a nasty bug. The explosion showered us with dirt. Afterward Rosie patted me on the back, and Dudley lit a cigarette for me.
It never stopped raining. We were in mud all the time. We fought in the wet, slept in it, ate our soggy, cold rations in it. We lived with the shells and the mortars and the screams of the wounded.
One day I took a canteen from a dead marine. I didn’t know him. He wasn’t our company. I didn’t look at him, just unhooked the canteen from his belt and hooked it on with mine. Rosie saw me. “That’s okay,” he said, “but I don’t want you to get like Grasso.”
Grasso was one of the souvenir hunters. After battles they picked their way among the enemy dead, looking for stuff to send home. A lot of guys came up from the rear, enlisted men and officers. They ripped insignia from uniforms, pulled rings from fingers, even pried out gold teeth. Grasso had a sockful.
“If I’m here much longer, I’ll start doing that,” I said.
“No, you won’t,” Rosie said. “It’s a brutal business, but I don’t want you to be a brute.”
Rosie saved me. He saved me from getting too hard. I loved the man. I looked up to him. I would have done anything for him.
After ten days we were pulled back to regimental headquarters, where we’d spent the first night on Okinawa. We’d moved up to the front as part of a company of 250 men. Now there were only 50 of us still on our feet, not counting the ones with that blank, thousand-mile stare, who couldn’t fight anymore.
Tex was among the dead. I didn’t know anything yet about Ben or Roy or Andy. The first thing was to clean up. I hadn’t changed my socks in two weeks. I had my first hot meal, drank cup after cup of burning hot coffee. Then I went looking for my mail.
I had letters waiting for me from Mom, Bea, Nancy, and Helen. We were all sitting around on the ground, reading our letters and passing around pictures. I saved Helen’s letter for last. I read Mom’s letter and wrote her right back.
Dear Mom,
I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner, but we’ve been real busy. Don’t worry about me. Everything is going fine. I’m okay. Not a scratch. We got a little R&R, and I’m going to get a really good rest. I think about you and Bea all the time. I think about how much I love you both. I know that we’re all fighting for our country, but it’s for you, Mom. I can’t tell you too much, but we’re winning. So just don’t worry about anything. I’ll write you more later.
Your loving son always,
&
nbsp; Adam
(Pfc. Adam Pelko, Company P, Second Battalion, 28th Marines, First Marine Division)
Bea sent me a cute letter. She had made pictographs all through it, so instead of writing I, she drew an eye, and for see, she drew a wavy line that was supposed to be water. Then, at the end, she wrote, “I love you lots, Adam, bzzz from your sister,” and drew a bee for her signature.
It turned out there was no letter from Nancy, just a picture of herself in uniform. On the back she wrote, “Me! It doesn’t show on the picture, but I’m a corporal now! We’ll have plenty to talk about when we see each other again, which I sure hope we do soon.” And then she signed it, “Cpl. Nancy Carver, U.S. Women’s Army Corps.”
I passed the picture around to the guys. Grasso studied the picture. “What’s your girlfriend doing in the Wacs?”
“She’s serving,” Rosie said. He was lighting his pipe. “Like we’re all serving.”
“I wouldn’t let my girlfriend go in the Wacs,” Grasso said.
I took the picture back. “Number one, Grasso, nobody tells Nancy what to do. And number two, she’s my friend and she’s a girl, but I wouldn’t say she’s my girlfriend.”
“Friend, girlfriend, I don’t care what you call her, I wouldn’t let her in the Wacs.”
“Grasso,” I said, “you’re a chimp.”
“And you, Pelko, are a chump.”
I went off by myself to read Helen’s letter. I was almost afraid to open it. What if she was writing to say, Don’t write me anymore. What if she had a boyfriend? What if she’d just been acting nice because I was going overseas? Or maybe she’d found out that I’d lied about my age.
Dear Adam,
Thank you for your wonderful letter I’ve had you in my prayers every night. The first thing I did when I got your letter was look at a map. You’re so far away! I was amazed to see that the Pacific Ocean is bigger than the whole United States, and you’re out there! When I think of where you are and the danger you’re in … it’s hard for me to just write about ordinary things like myself. Next time expect a really long letter. I just didn’t want to wait another second to answer you. Please be careful and stay safe!