by Chris Lynch
I can’t tell about everybody else, but my heart is banging away as if I have my own drum corps accompaniment working from within my chest and on out through my ears. I have my machine gun up and ready as I scan the small strip of sand that leads immediately into a jungle dense enough to provide its own permanent nighttime. I’m expecting, as I think we all are, some kind of hostile greeting for our party, but there is nothing coming, not a shot, before our guys start filing in along the narrow paths that lead to the island’s interior. I’d almost rather be shot at than enter the thick of the place this quick and easy.
We are orderly, as precise as well-drilled marines should be while we march in step, in rhythm, in lines that cut right into the trails.
“You all right, buddy?” I say to Klecko, who is just ahead of me and utterly silent. “Zachary?” I say as he just grimly forges ahead.
Then, his one remark as we submerge ourselves in aromatic vegetation and walk through the door separating day from night: “Ants. Just like I said. We’re ants.”
Ah, he could always make me laugh. Right now it’s a relief to hear any small such thing to connect us to that world and who we really are. When it gets so tense and creepy silent, I fear I could forget.
I squeeze my M55 Reising submachine gun as I step higher to keep from tripping up in the dense undergrowth. I make a rapid mental circuit of my gear belt, taking note of where everything is: canteen — since my mouth is already sandpaper-dry — ammunition, and especially my knife.
The trail of ants stretches from our lead man, who’s now a couple hundred yards deep into the heart of Vella Lavella, all the way back to the LST, where troops are still filing out and tons of supplies are being unloaded. Then the thick Solomons air is ruffled by the first distinct rumblings of aircraft approaching from the forward distance. Those first rumblings then grow to a terrible roar as the planes close in at an alarming pace. The peace is finally good and shattered by the screech of the whistle signaling everybody to head for cover.
We look like a desperate marine version of a Hollywood dance number gone very wrong. Every man dives headlong off the narrow footpath and into the thick brush on either side. Left-right-left-right-left, we seem to hurl ourselves in an alternating sequence as if we’ve planned it that way.
But we did not plan anything beyond answering the whistle by hurling ourselves as forcefully as possible, face-first and out of harm’s way. That proves plan enough, however, as the machine guns of the fighter plane tear up the path, all the way up his head-on approach. The strafing passes us just as we’ve leapt, so close I can feel the fabric of my pant legs flapping with the whoosh of the bullets buzzing by while I’m still in mid-dive.
Before we can catch a breath, a second fighter comes right behind the first, swoops down even lower, and peppers the earth all around us with hundreds of rounds that are heavy enough to create a miniature earthquake in the ground we’re all clinging to.
I think I’d be petrified even if they left the bullets out of it. The sound of those brutal birds bearing down on you and causing your internal organs to vibrate and bash into each other is probably enough to kill people who don’t happen to be US Marines, right there on the spot. We are one of the rare outfits that trained often with live ammo, but even all that cannot prepare a guy for the force generated by an enemy dive bomber bearing down on him, engines roaring and guns banging loud and relentless.
Never felt anywhere near so puny and helpless in my whole life. And we’re just getting started.
“You all right, buddy?” Klecko says from his spot flat on the ground six feet ahead.
“I believe I am. You?”
“I think so. But man, if that racket doesn’t stop a person’s heart cold, I don’t figure there’s gonna be anything else we can’t shake off, huh?”
“You probably don’t want to start letting yourself think that way,” Corporal Havlicek says. He’s on his feet now, standing over Klecko but watching the dogfight taking place over the beach. The two Japanese bombers clearly want to see pieces of LST scattered across the Pacific before they leave again. The boys on the ship are giving them everything they’ve got, pounding away with the thunderous antiaircraft guns, which don’t score but do drive the two bombers off their course and into a big sweep of a second approach.
Corporal Havlicek marches past me on the path back toward the beach. Sergeant Silas is right behind him and the rest of us fall in.
We just reach the jungle’s edge again when the shock of daylight is overruled by a far bigger shock to the senses. Two more of the dive bombers come screaming over the back of us, with two Marine Corps Corsairs right on their tails, blistering them with machine-gun fire that is too relentless to escape.
We watch the whole show unfold, as guys scramble madly to get off the ship. The two later bombers veer off out over the sea, taking the two Corsairs with them. One of the first bombers almost clips a Corsair’s tail as he comes scorching back in, through an explosive shower of antiaircraft fire. He ignores it as he homes in on the ship and drops his package. It looks like a big black oil drum, and it is so unlike a torpedo or anything you expect to see a warplane dumping, that there’s a strange, static moment of nothing as the thing descends. The bomber has already banked and headed out of there before the oil drum finally crashes down on our LST.
It is no oil drum, of course. It’s a five-hundred-pound bomb, and the explosion is so massive it knocks most of us right off our feet from more than a football field away.
I’m sitting flat on my backside as I try to take in the sight of the ship breaking and burning. The backdrop to this grisly picture is the final scene of the Corsairs finishing off the two bombers. Our guys do everything but follow the two flaming Japanese aircraft all the way into the water to see to it that they’re gone before pulling out of their dive and swooping back this way. They make one pass over the wreckage and mayhem and then scorch off across the sky toward some other crisis they might actually be able to do something about.
Because this is not it.
We stay down for cover long enough for the threat to appear over for the lucky ones like us. Then the sergeant gives us the word to head down closer to the scene.
The awesome, mighty giant that just so recently coughed us up onto this sand is now a colossal heap of blown-apart metal and men, fire shooting straight up ahead of black smoke, making me think about how they talked in church about the soul escaping the dead body.
The personnel who were close to the ship have been thrown high and far and in every direction. The guys who were almost away, still hustling down the ramp, were unluckier still. I’ve heard people use that term “blown apart,” an exaggeration that has meant lots of stupid things. But the guys too close to the explosion got blown apart. We can see it before we can believe it, limbs, pulpy pieces of stuff that have to be human, were human seconds before, flung like pig slop across the beach and into the water. The guys from the ramp came apart in bits that were actually still on fire as they sailed. The guys inside …
We don’t get any closer than fifty feet from the wreck. The Navy corpsmen are doing what they do and it is now for us to stay out of their way and do what we do.
“Let’s march, marines,” Havlicek calls out after waiting long enough for Silas to not do it. Couldn’t blame the sarge for lingering. Couldn’t blame anybody.
We listen, and obey orders. That’s something we’re renowned for. Back in file, stepping sharply, we take to that same trail we were taking, to go do the job we’re meant to be doing.
Picking up right where we left off, just like nothing ever happened.
“Now, where were we?” Bryant says right behind me, with an edgy growl-laugh after.
“Who cares?” I say, pretty much the same way. “Where are we, that’s what I’m wonderin’ about. And where are we goin’?”
Vella Lavella turns out not to be the big debut a lot of us were hoping it would be.
The answer to my question about where we are
going, at least in the immediate and literal sense, is Barakoma Airfield. We aren’t here to capture it, because that has already been done. The Japanese had occupied the island early in the war, and three years later our military bosses suddenly decided they would quite like to have it back, as part of some bigger scheme. So take it back is what our boys did, with the assistance of the New Zealanders, and to my surprise they are all still hanging around the place, instead of the hordes of furious Japanese I was expecting to meet.
So we are here simply to act as guards for Barakoma and the modest area of land we possess around it. That’s all. There are still pockets of Japanese troops holding out and hiding out here and there on the island, but you wouldn’t even call it resistance. Aside from constant dogfighting in the sky — which is the case all over this area of operations — the only small portion of Vella Lavella that anybody is even bothered to fight over is the tiny little airstrip.
Kind of makes me sad to think about it. How militaries come in warring like madmen over some tiny plunk of a place in the great wide ocean, a perfectly nice little island that’s been sitting there minding its own business for thousands of years. Then, at some point they’re just gonna throw it away again like it never mattered anyway. It’s stupid, of course. There are a lot of things happening and gonna happen that deserve my sadness more than Vella Lavella.
Anyway, we marines of the Second Parachute Battalion didn’t fight for it, either. This was no raid, no invasion, no assault-by-sea. We are to babysit the airstrip until it’s somebody else’s turn. And we are to go on regular patrols just to make sure the random armed-and-dangerous Japanese fighter doesn’t get frisky thinking that nobody’s paying any attention. And we wait, still wait, for somebody to ask us to join in the real fighting. The stuff we trained for. The stuff that matters.
“Everything matters, though,” Klecko points out when we head out on our evening patrol. It’s a four-man detail with Bryant and Westphal along for the comradeship and the guns. We have done several of these, and though I know better, I can’t help letting my focus go soft some of the time. Vigilance is key to not getting killed, especially at the quietest times. But there are only so many tours you can make of one very small volcanic islet without it lulling you somewhat.
Unless you are intrepid Private First Class Zachary Klecko, USMC. Gotta give him credit, the boy lulls not. He is unlullable, and treats every twig on the jungle floor and every tropical flower blooming horizontally out of a hill as if it just might be the one that is hiding that soldier. Hiding the soldier who is holding the grenade that just might have our names on it.
“It all matters, sure,” I say, clapping my buddy on the shoulder. He is startled up out of his night-patrol crouch, and wheels on me in a way I hope no enemy ever does.
“Don’t do that, Nardini, all right?” he snarls at me.
“Sorry,” I say, truly sorry when I see how bothered he is. The other two dissolve in a flurry of laughs that flies right off on the soft evening breeze when he glowers at them.
“Eighteen guys got killed coming here,” Klecko says as he resumes patrolling. “Our guys, our battalion. That’s got to matter, doesn’t it? So maybe you don’t get why we’re here, and maybe I don’t, and maybe none of those dead guys exactly knew, either, but so what. You’re either all in or all out, dontcha think? If you’re only gonna go along with the orders you completely understand you’re not much of a marine, then, are ya?”
We are standing at one of the highest points on the island, a clear patch that allows a great view pretty much all the way back to Hawaii on a good day. It’s already too dark to see much, with these south central Pacific sunsets that drop on you like a curtain ending the show for today. We’re set to descend down the back side of our patrol area, back into the forest of true darkness, but we can pause and take a few more swigs of mountaintop air before we do.
“Ah, you’re right, Klecko, man,” Westphal says, offering a tap of the barrel of his gun like a toast.
“Yeah, of course you are,” Bryant says, adding his gun nozzle to the toast.
Feeling pretty clearly isolated now, I rush to add my gun to what now must look like four guys holding up an automatic weaponry Christmas tree on a peak for the whole world’s pleasure.
“Right,” Klecko says, breaking up the party and leading the way down, “for example, if I needed to understand what the brass were thinking all the time, then I sure wouldn’t be going to war with this mangy little thing, would I?” He’s waving his Reising M55 submachine gun over his head, and all of us, carrying the very same weapon, groan and laugh at the same time. “Come on now, Nicky, remember summer camp. I swear to you we could have made these things ourselves, at Camp Agassis, when we were nine.”
He has got a strong point, which is why we are all laughing along as he says it. To be fair, we are built to be a lightly armed, nimble, and creative invasion force. Quick hits, getting behind enemy lines, taking beaches but not keeping them — that’s what we are all about. Then we hand over the keys to the Army, infantry guys with the heavier armaments, and head off to our next hit-and-run conquest.
I know before I even try that he won’t be buying any debate, but I give it a try anyway.
“Lightly armed, Private Klecko … a mobile and nimble invasion force —”
“Does this look like any kind of force to you?” Zack says. He takes his M55 and starts swinging it around and around over his head. The firearm is distinctive for, among other things, having no solid, wooden stock like most submachine guns. It has a sort of outline of a stock, molded out of what seems to be a heavy-duty coat hanger. My buddy Klecko, the gunner to whom I am just an assistant, has slipped the wire-frame stock around his wrist like a bracelet, and is giving it enough propeller motion that he could soon start gaining altitude.
The guys, of course, love it, and are cracking up, following along in the big gunner man’s wake.
I don’t even know why I look in the direction I do then.
I don’t know how it catches my eye, why it ever would, even if I were paying strict attention like we should do when on patrol. I am certain I would never catch something like this, so small, so blended into the growth around the base of that tree, if I were looking hard and trying to catch such a thing. A sandal, so perfect for the job of blending in that it could have been made out of the bark of the very tree that shields the man who wears it.
PrrrrRuttaTuttaTuttaTuttPrrrRuttaTuttaTutt
The smell of the smoke, off the gunpowder and the flash-heated oil from the gun — because I do take superb care of my weapon whatever it is — instantly adds its tang to the special particular scent of this bitty island, this clearing in this jungle on this dot in the crazy vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Instantly it adds, and instantly it changes it. Changes the scent into something entirely different now.
Westphal is the one who first approaches the body. He creeps up on it slowly, one extended ballet step forward followed by another and another. We have heard all about the booby-trapped bodies of dead Japanese snipers. They are only too happy to die if they know their American killer will be following right after them. We all have our sad M55s poised as we fan out around Westphal, covering his back, as well as the tree branches above him, and every flicker of insect business on every leaf all around him. Westphal finally pokes his gun barrel into the dead man’s side, pokes him, pokes him harder, then uses the gun as a lever to pry him partly away from the ground. Have to make sure there are no smaller and more-alive assassins underneath ready to finish the job.
“I think we’re clear,” he says, which is the word that lets the rest of us stop scouring the area like a team of lightly armed owls.
“You sure he’s dead-dead?” Bryant asks for all of us, because stories are rampant of Japanese dead on the field who turn out not to be dead-dead. Who then spring up to knife a clueless and careless GI to death-death.
“Pretty sure, yeah,” Westphal says. He leans toward our former enemy and repeat
s the same prying move, using his gun barrel to lift and then this time turn the guy over. Or more accurately, he turns the guy’s top half over. The guy lies there, facedown but with his hips still aimed toward the sky. This is my first real look at him, and it’s only too obvious. There are pulpy pieces of his tissue sprayed in a random pattern behind the body; his midsection was essentially torn away by the steady and concentrated slash of bullets I laid back and forth across his body. The blood is pooling, the insects of the forest are gathering, and the scent of Vella Lavella is changing again.
Bryant suddenly starts gagging, runs to a cluster of trees where he pukes like a flamethrower. I walk closer to the man, the man I just killed, the first man I have killed.
His feet are very sad. It was those feet in those sandals that caught my eye to begin with. Well, one of the feet, extending just an inch or two too far beyond the tree’s few visible roots. Small mistakes in this. Small mistakes will be enough.
His feet in those sandals are at an awkward, unnatural angle to each other, and it’s upsetting me. I know that his upper body is at a far more unnatural angle to the rest of him and that should be the disturbing thing, and I don’t know why but that isn’t of interest to me. Both feet are pointed a little inward, while his legs are splayed as if he is in mid-stride of a very pathetic run. The toes peeking from his left sandal are pointing back over where his right shoulder should be. His right foot is locked in a painful-looking arrangement, pigeon-toed and twisted almost backward at the ankle and digging into the forest floor.
Bryant has just about finished heaving and is headed our way when I go over and realign the man’s feet in his very modest sandals. I face them the right way and then tuck them close together. I stop to look him over, and someone has realigned his other stuff, too, and I didn’t even notice.