The Liberators

by Chris Lynch

  When we’ve finally inched our way all the way back, Klecko and I are uncommonly gratified to see the place that has been our bedroom for the past week. As we are about to descale, we find one more surprise. On each of our racks is a personalized certificate, intricate and momentous like a real university degree. It denotes our graduation, our crossing a symbolic line in addition to the geographical one. From no place to someplace.

  From the pollywogs we were to the shellbacks we’ve become.

  In its way, it feels as significant to me as my Sharpshooter medal and my wings.

  “I didn’t know anything about this tradition, did you?” Klecko says, trying to wriggle out of his outfit while admiring his certificate at the same time.

  “No. But that’s because we were not a part of that tradition. Until now.” I wave my paper proudly in the air.

  “Y’know, fellas, that’s really swell,” comes a voice snapping from one of the lower racks. “But could you shut up now so the rest of us can get some shut-eye?”

  The rest of them. I look around to see the bunch of guys, brave and certified marine paratroopers, all with green hair and several with mermaid tails still attached as they huddle under their blankets trying to get back to human blood temperature.

  We don’t go to Guadalcanal after all.

  We go to New Zealand, for another two months of training. Then we’re moved to Camp Kiser, New Caledonia, for a further nine months of training.

  We’re trained now. We are trained beyond belief. Every man in the battalion has by now mastered every weapon in our arsenal. We’re to the point where in an emergency situation any one of us could go down and be replaced by somebody else without even being missed.

  “I’d miss you anyway, Nardini,” Klecko says.

  “I appreciate that,” I tell him as we step out onto the sunlit deck. “I was just meaning to say that they’ve got us so finely tuned that I can hardly even think of myself as myself anymore. I think of myself as one component of a much bigger, beautifully designed machine. Like a Cadillac, maybe.”

  “Or an ant colony,” Klecko pipes up.

  “Well, or, yeah, I suppose like an ant colony. That works. But don’t you feel like that, too? Like you could pick up any weapon on the battlefield and jump right in feeling like an expert?”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, I know twenty-two different horrific ways that I never want to use a Ka-Bar knife, for one thing.”

  “Right, you don’t want to. But you’re glad you know how to, for when the time comes, are you not?”

  “Absolutely, for when that time comes.”

  And that time is coming now.

  That’s probably why we’re jabbering the way we are, out of nerves, fear, and adrenaline, and all the banked-up, torqued-up, trained-up mania that is finally going to be unleashed on the enemy. Now. Now, now. Now.

  We’re aboard an LST — that’s Landing Ship, Tank — steaming toward the coast of Vella Lavella in the Solomon Islands. As the name suggests, this vessel can carry a bunch of tanks, as many as eighteen, and deposit them right onto a beach if conditions are right. It can also do the same for a whole lot of troops, which it’s doing right now. One-third of the Second Parachute Battalion’s 650 troopers are on board, along with tons of supplies, ammo, smaller vehicles, and larger artillery. The rest of our troops are spread among several smaller vessels in our convoy. Even from the inside of the big beast, this is a fairly awe-inspiring ship. A few of the guys from my squad and I are just coming out onto top deck, where we hang at the rail along the port side of the bow. Looking that long way down to where our steel hull is crashing through the choppy waters, I can only imagine how terrifying it must look to some unfortunate Japanese infantryman crouched in the bushes when a thing like this breaches like some futuristic mechanical whale and throws itself onto the land right in front of him. When this thing comes crashing into the shore and the giant front ramp drops down to unload all this angry firepower, it’ll have to blow the beach defenders into a helpless panic.

  I’m certainly hoping so, anyway, and I say as much now.

  “Not me, not at all,” says JoJo Bryant. He’s the other light machine gunner in our squad. The four of us — Klecko and his assistant, plus Bryant and his assistant gunner, Bailey Westphal — have become a kind of squad-within-a-squad during our endless and intense months of training.

  “Me neither,” says Westphal. “We’ve waited long enough. Time to get ours.”

  “I gotta agree, Nick,” Klecko adds. “We didn’t do all this work just to scare the enemy away. I hope they stay right where they are and fight us.”

  “We’d only have to chase ’em down, anyway, even if they did run,” says Bryant. “Because it ain’t like they’d be running all that far, going home, giving up. These guys have no intention of quitting, no matter how scary we look.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I say.

  And of course I do know. I know what everybody else knows, that the Japanese are fighting our guys all the way to the bloody end. Reports are coming back from across the Pacific that we’re getting all we can handle and sometimes more than we can handle. They fight ferociously, craftily, and to the death. We are not to expect many surrenders, under any circumstances.

  “And besides,” Westphal growls, “we owe these boys for everything they’ve done. And we owe it to our boys to give the vicious little monsters what they got comin’ to them.”

  Now, Westphal is among the most intense and motivated people we’ve got. He has been itching to sink his choppers into the Japanese for a long time, and if for some reason this mission got canceled at the last minute, I could see him making the trip by himself, swimming all the way if he had to, with his gun in his teeth. But he also pretty well speaks for everybody when he says we owe them. We owe them for Pearl Harbor and the sneakiness of it that still leaves a sharp bitter taste at the back of every American serviceman’s throat. We owe them for the relentless way they’ve marched across the whole region for several years now. They’ve expanded their empire and swallowed up other nations as if they want to show the Nazis how it’s really done.

  We’d been hearing about all that in the news and then from our own briefings for long enough that we figured we knew it all.

  But then we got to New Caledonia. It was there we joined up with our brothers of the First Parachute Battalion, who had arrived at Camp Kiser straight from being relieved off of Guadalcanal.

  And if we’d thought we knew it all, about how the war was going, and about the Japanese, then the guys of the First made it clear we didn’t know anything. Meeting up with them after they had lived through everything we had not was an eerie experience. It was sort of like encountering an older, more knowing, more beat-up, and angrier version of ourselves.

  They had the same training as us, were as skilled and fit, and so had every right to believe they were as tough as we felt we were. But they had been through Guadalcanal. That meant they had lost one-fifth of their men in two months. They had contracted malaria and jungle rot and dysentery. They had killed the enemy in all kinds of ways — long-distance rifle fire, close-up machine gunning that would cut a guy practically in half. Bayonet. Ka-Bar knife across the throat from behind.

  They’d also had front row seats at the banzai attacks, where whole companies of Japanese infantry would suddenly rush all at once, screaming and with bayonets raised. Half of us thought those suicide tactics were just myths until we heard firsthand. Now they are our nightmares. It’s not just the bloodcurdling sound of the thing, although that would be enough. It’s that, when you see it, see them coming faster, closer, there’s the awareness that they don’t care about dying, not one bit. And while it may not be a strategically wise move to run straight into gunfire, you can’t help thinking about what one of these guys will do to you if you’re the lucky loser whose gun jams at the wrong time.

  Or so they tell us. We are lucky, Second Battalion. We can learn from the experience, without having to get it the hard way.
>
  We even got our own infusion of iron-rich, combat-tested blood. The First Battalion, shot up and laid low as they were, had a lot of realigning to do among their companies and platoons. So somebody had an inspired idea — sounds like a Colonel Krulak move, to be sure — of encouraging some shuffling of personnel between the two battalions. Not a lot, but enough to give a green platoon like mine a permanent battle-hardened presence. Someone who’d been there and could share the knowledge he’d paid dearly for at moments when we would need it most.

  There were plenty of guys ready to tell all in the chow line. But that might not be quite enough to keep some of us from getting killed in a foxhole or on a patrol on account of the man with the experience being already in the latrine when he remembered, “Oh, just one more thing, but it’s crucial that you keep in mind …”

  It was strictly voluntary, of course, because nobody wanted to separate guys from their squadron buddies after all they’d been through together. Sadly, it was to our benefit that Guadalcanal had already separated a good number of men from their buddies, and from life on planet Earth.

  Corporal Havlicek is our good fortune that came out of a lot of bad. Formerly of the First, he is now our assistant squad leader under Sergeant Silas. He has a very quiet way about him even though sometimes it seems like he’s always talking. There is no way he’s much older than us, but there is also no way anybody in this platoon will ever stop regarding him the way we do now — which is as a revered and reliable elder statesman, someone we just know will have the answer when we have a question, and will provide it with no bunk whatsoever attached. Even Sergeant Silas treats him like this, and the only time anybody shows even a hint of discomfort with it, it’s not Silas but Havlicek who gets a little embarrassed. He’s the opposite of all those blowhard non-coms who have to bellow out their importance because otherwise it wouldn’t exist. Havlicek has this habit of looking down at the ground when he gets too much raising up for his liking. He waits for it to pass, then looks up when we’re all on the same level ground again. He’s talked about level ground a lot, by which I think he means below level ground, by which I mean marines laid low and left on Guadalcanal.

  It is the first instance I have seen in my time with the US Armed Forces where rank is not monumentally important to the people involved. And while I may still be a very green marine, I do know I should not expect to see it again.

  But even officers have to respect the kind of perspective a guy gains when he fights for months in the stink and the muck side by side with his platoon buddies and then returns to camp as a Platoon of One.

  He takes every opportunity to school us on what to expect. He’s been doing it right along, but as we come closer to live action, he becomes more direct, more urgent and instructional. It’s as if he’s caught the scent of the battle zone, and the smell brings back more and more specific detail — information that he is determined to impart to us before it’s too late.

  “Our enemy is fond of night movements, and they’re very good at that.” Havlicek is addressing us four machine gunners at the bow of the LST. We are approaching the coast of Vella Lavella, and he has come to retrieve us and get us lined up down below to disembark, but not before sharing some final words of wisdom. “You’ll gun down scores and scores of them one day, wiping out half their force in a long day’s fighting. Then the next morning they’ll have mysteriously spawned replacements for most of their casualties, like they were growing these guys in a garden somewhere deep in the jungle. We have to be ready for stealth, because when they’re not making fearless but stupid and suicidal banzai charges, they’re laying low and silent in every cave and crevice, under every log and up every tree. They consider capture to be dishonor and humiliation and prefer death, especially if they can take some enemy fighters along with them. To a Japanese soldier, death is the only proper end to a fight. Make sure it is his death, not yours. And that sounds obvious, but nothing about these guys is obvious. Half the time you won’t see them. They will be three feet in front of you, but all you’ll see is a rock, a palm frond … or a nest of Japanese riflemen in a pile, already shot up to pulp by a patrol ahead of you. Then you see the muzzle flash …”

  “Good advice, corporal,” I say as I fall in line behind Klecko and Klecko falls in behind Havlicek.

  “Yeah,” Westphal says from the rear.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Bryant says from right behind me.

  The voices are all sincere, but they are distant. I imagine the guys are preoccupied with the beachhead, as the ship grinds in over the sand and coral, making a frightening growl right beneath the whole lot of us.

  And I would also bet they were still hung up on the part of the conversation where the word banzai made its appearance.

  As the men and machines of the Second Parachute ready for their amphibious assault, the sounds of all the steel gears and chains and plates grind and roar and shriek with effort. It is noise that could be used as its own weapon against less stouthearted warriors than the ones we are about to meet. The last few moments before the drawbridge lowers last ages and ages. Too much. Too much time to think. The nervous chatter of the troops has been replaced with nervous quiet as we do all our chattering and screaming anticipation within the walls of our toughened and fearless marine skulls, behind hard, stoical marine sneers and snarls.

  I terrorize my own self with thoughts as I batter that landing ramp down with my mind. We were told by numerous First Battalion vets that the Japanese are not much more likely to take prisoners than they are to become ones. But on the odd occasions when they do, the results are … unpleasant.

  More than once, a marine from the First started a story about finding the body of a captured buddy, and then couldn’t finish it. And since they had managed to tell us about beheadings, I could hardly imagine what they found unspeakable.

  If this ramp does not fall open within four seconds I’m afraid I will in fact start to imagine the unimaginable unspeakable. Whether these tales were designed to make us well educated or well terrified, I can report that they accomplished both. At least in my case.

  I wouldn’t blame those guys if they had come limping back to New Caledonia feeling like they’d already done a whole war’s worth of their part. If it was me, I think I’d be happy to just lie in a hammock in the Solomons sunshine for a while rather than do any more training, learn any more art of warfare. Yet they have matched our energy and determination at every turn. During these last few months we’ve pushed one another further and higher, meaner and harder, through hand-to-hand … to-hand-to-hand combat drills. We practiced the things we now knew we had to master, like jungle fighting, night operations, and amphibious beach landings in rubber craft and flat-bottomed Higgins boats. We continued our practice jumps as often as we could get the aircraft to jump from, but that, frankly, was not often enough. The Marine Corps itself has far too few planes of our own, and we have learned that the rivalry between us and the Army was just as real as the banzai attacks and potentially just as lethal. They managed to lend us the transport aircraft we needed just enough times that we made twenty or so jumps the whole time we were at Camp Kiser. That included six nighttime jumps, which were exciting and more than a little unnerving as we leaped, literally blindly, into the unknown.

  More and more, the planes we needed were assigned to resupplying hot spots like Guadalcanal, so opportunities dwindled. The final jump we made, it was clearly an inexperienced and disinterested pilot they sent to take us out, and the result was a disaster. He flew us toward the drop zone from an awkward approach, came in too low and too close to the highlands. Guys wound up landing hard, landing hurt, landing nowhere near where they were supposed to be and in many cases nowhere near each other. The final jumper was a private first class whose first or last name was George and was so shy I never heard what his voice sounded like. The Army pilot was so confused and hurried that he was pulling up and gaining altitude before George could make a proper exit. So the kid just dove out of the plane be
fore it could get any higher.

  He slammed into the side of a jagged cliff almost as soon as his chute opened, and they said his body was already lifeless as it bounced and flopped and jackknifed and skidded along several hundred feet of raw hillside.

  This somehow, through Army logic, must have proved that their planes should be doing other things. Because with the death of Private First Class George, we never saw another Army aircraft on New Caledonia.

  Colonel Krulak, our commanding officer, seemed to sense a turning point in this, and probably even before this. Because he trained us on land ever harder, harder and harder, as if we were commandos. We might sometime be dropped into a battle zone from the sky, or we might get there via land or sea. But Colonel Krulak was making sure that once we got there we were going to be prepared to work behind enemy lines, to operate as guerillas, to act as advance scouts on reconnaissance patrols, to fight as attachments to a division, or to fight without any attachments to anybody. We would be experts at packing our own parachutes, and at driving the Ka-Bar between a man’s ribs with the right placement and force to ensure maximum blood loss and swiftest death. The colonel had every one of us ready to kill with a gun, or a grenade, or a rock, or a thumb dug in deep behind an eye and into a brain, if necessary.

  To do basically anything, if necessary.

  We might or might not be paratroopers, but we would definitely be raiders.

  So we are ready. We’re ready for this, and we’re ready right now, and it’s only the refusal of that big slab of steel to open up and slap down in the water that we need to fear at this moment. I fear also that I might now scream and holler from the sheer unbearable crazy of it all, and forever mark myself as that guy among true marines.

  When the LST finally opens with a great grinding thud onto Vella Lavella and the bow of the ship is replaced by the golden road before us, we march down the ramp and up the beach looking like a seasoned bunch of career marines who know just what they’re doing and who fear no one.