by Chris Lynch
Everybody loses weight here. The food is not enough and everything else is way too much.
Havlicek grunts. “You have to tell me if anything is really wrong, okay?” His stare, straight into my eyes and trying to look beyond, is both really nice and really uncomfortable.
“Of course, corporal,” I say, and he nods politely and takes his dubious expression to go check on the next guys.
And of course I won’t tell him, and of course lots of things are wrong. The fever, the rash everywhere, the headache that is my new best friend. I am weak, and want to throw up all the time; I bruise too easily and sometimes I bleed when there isn’t even a cut. Blood just sort of rises to the surface of my skin and exits the wreckage of me.
But everybody here has all that, so what business have I got to go bellyaching about my bellyache? This will all be over soon, and everybody can get right then.
Nobody’s going anywhere without me.
My buddy points at my face. “Got a little nosebleed there, buddy,” he says, looking far more panicked about it than I would think necessary.
I laugh and wipe it with the back of my hand, which looks like it’s bleeding most of the time anyway.
“You sure you’re okay?” he says.
“I am okay, Zack. But I have to admit Tinian is tough. This is the worst one yet, don’t you agree?”
This worries his face more than the blood did.
“I probably would agree, Nicky. If we were still on Tinian. We left there five weeks ago. This is Peleliu.”
This information does not help me at all. I feel panicky, and can feel the desperation sweat rolling down my face. I get light-headed.
“Yeah, I know. Of course I know where we are. I was just saying that Tinian was the worst so far, even worse than Peleliu, so maybe that’s a turning point and things are looking up finally.”
He nods, nods some more, and then, unfortunately, speaks.
“Nothing in human history was worse than Peleliu. Did Tinian have the cannibals, Nicky? You remember the cannibals, of course. The captured marines we found carved into chops and steaks and cutlets? The fake surrenders? Do you remember how we lost Bryant and Westphal? The surrenders who had explosives taped all around their waists? Sure you do. We took Peleliu all right, but we gave those guys and a lot more in the trade.”
“Zack, stop it. I’m not quitting.”
“I know what you’ll remember. Remember when we landed on Saipan, after the first slugfest for the beach? When we moved our way up inland and …”
“… baseball fields,” I say, seeing them clearly now.
“Baseball fields, right. How could baseball fields be here? How could the game be here? How could people who played baseball, people who went to the trouble …”
“And they were not bad fields …”
“They were not, that’s right. Remember how they made you feel, Nick? Remember how you —”
“I did not cry. You made that up.”
“Okay, anyway, we were there, all that time, together. And I was leaning hard on you then, because I needed to. That’s what buddies do.”
“It’s what they do.”
“What the buddy system is for.”
“Yeah, it is. But we got through, and now we are here.”
“Here, yes. Remember the landing here, how much fun we had? Remember the tank crews caught on the coral, sitting ducks, then drowning right there in the tanks as they went under? Remember getting to the beach, so many dead marines and the land crabs already eating the bodies, swarming all over them, those land crabs …”
I cannot fight the nausea if he doesn’t stop.
“Stop, Zack. Stop it. We said we would be inseparable, and we will not separate. Never to sever. You told me nobody would ever separate us — including me.”
He does not debate any specific point. He probably knows he doesn’t have to.
“It’s my turn,” he says quietly. “You’ve been carrying me since Tails. Don’t you think I know that? We have killed people in caves by every method available to us, short of the flamethrower, so I think you’ve accomplished everything you can.”
I remember now. God, I remember and I am remembering every single one as they file past me like a newsreel of my own personal horrors. Throwing grenades into caves and tunnels when we didn’t know who was down there. Blasting them with gunfire because no one would answer when we gave them the chance and they didn’t take it. The locals, the families weren’t even Japanese. Of course they didn’t answer; they thought we were as bad as the other guys were. But we weren’t. Until, then we were.
I think I want to talk, think I want to answer, think briefly that I can do it, but in the end I am just shaking my head at him, just shaking no, no, no.
And just in time, naturally just in time, Zachary Klecko reaches out and grabs me as I fall, collapsing forward. I plant my face in his hard chest rather than into the dirt I was headed for. He holds me tight and supports me because my legs are doing no such thing. And because maybe it is his turn.
The next time I open my eyes, I’m in a hospital, and Klecko is on Iwo Jima.
“Excuse me, please?” I say to one of the many nurses sprinting from patient to patient.
“Yes, hi,” she says. “Sorry, I don’t mean to neglect you. But as you can see, there are cases here that are a lot more urgent than yours.”
“But I can’t see anything but a lot of chaos and running around,” I say. “That’s the thing. Can you tell me how I got here, when I got here, why I’m even here? Did I lose my legs?”
She scowls down at me. A military nurse is probably the only person in the world who can get angry at somebody who asks that question.
“No,” she says. “Why even ask me that?”
I point to the corner, to what looks like a laundry bin. Except for all the bloody arms and legs protruding up out of it. Like a desperate rabble is down beneath begging for help.
The nurse barks, like maybe she’s the boss, “Can someone please remove the limb basket? I did ask for somebody to take care of this before. Honestly.”
A more junior-looking nurse rushes up and shoves the basket away while I could swear a few of the hands wave me good-bye.
“Okay,” the nurse says. “First, I hope it will be a bonus now, to know that you still have legs. Unfortunately you also have dengue fever, malaria, and the early stages of some jungle rot that will look more hideous than it actually is, so try not to look at your feet and ankles for a while.”
“Fine,” I say, “the thing is, when do I go back and link up with my squad?”
She looks at me in the sad way a healthy person in a hospital bed doesn’t wish to be looked at. “Ah, darlin’, just sit still and the doctor will talk to you about that.”
I sit still, and eventually the doctor talks to me about that.
I spend six weeks in the hospital before being released. Around the same time, my guys spend almost as much time on Iwo Jima before being released.
I feel so much stronger than when I fell into my buddy’s arms on Peleliu. I feel rebuilt by the incredible medical folks, and recharged over the fact that I’m going back to my team.
We reunite in time to board a Landing Vehicle, Tracked (LVT), affectionately called The Water Buffalo. It’s April Fools’ Day, 1945.
“Corporal Havlicek!” I shout when I see him. He comes straight over and gives me a strong, lean hug. He’s never done that before.
“Didn’t expect to ever see you again,” he says. “Not after what you looked like.”
“Just needed some rest,” I say. “That’s all it was. Doctors said I must have been brutally overworked by the non-coms running my squad.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s what they said,” he says, laughing. “I am famously responsible for more of the carnage winding up at the hospital than any bombs, bullets, or bugs. I’m sure they’ll eventually send me a bill. The important thing is, you are fit and back in the fight.”
“Yes, sir, res
ted and ready. We’re back together now, gonna take Okinawa, and pray that the Japanese see some sense before we have to go knocking on doors on the mainland. Where are the other guys?”
He nods, tips his head at a sideways sympathy angle.
“There have been a lot of challenges, Nick.”
Havlicek never once came close to calling me by my first name before. I thought I would like it. Right now it gives me the chills.
“Been challenges every step of the way, corporal. So, where are the guys?”
“They’re on Iwo Jima,” the voice says right into my ear.
I jump with the fright. When I turn to see that the voice belongs to Zachary Klecko, I also see that his face has changed, again, or more, but he is a different guy from the one I got separated from.
I pretty nearly launch myself as a human rocket, to hug him.
He feels a little stiff, but not too bad.
“I sorta missed having you around, Nardini,” he says. “Seems like they took good care of you, though.”
“They did. I’m good. I wish I could have been there on Iwo to help you guys, though, Zack. I should have been there with you.”
He holds up a hand. “No. You were weakened to the point of uselessness by the diseases. You’d have been less than no help if I had to hump up and down Iwo with you strapped to my back the whole time. Not that I wouldn’t have done it, though. Anyway, I didn’t really need any help.”
I laugh, for the first time in a while.
“Cleaned up the whole island by yourself, did you, Zachary?”
“Not quite all by myself,” he says grimly.
“We’re the only ones who came back, Nick,” Havlicek says solemnly. “We are the demolished demolition squad. Silas was the last.”
“He was a good man,” I say.
“He was,” Havlicek says. “And for a sergeant, that may well have been a first.”
I laugh, but not like I can feel it. I look back to my buddy. I never should have let anybody separate us.
“Zack?” I ask tentatively.
“Zeke,” he says.
“What?”
“Zeke. Call me that. The guys, the new guys in the battalion, they eventually worked out my initials, started playing with them, and eventually I was Zeke. ZK, right? Zeke? Well they gave me that name and I’m Zeke now. So call me Zeke, and not any of that old stuff, right? From now on. Right?”
I look hard at him for the gag. Nothing.
“Right,” I say. “Of course, Zeke, absolutely, whatever you want, buddy.”
“Now,” he says, putting up his hands for me and Havlicek to grasp, “let’s go finish off little ol’ Okinawa and finally get to the real business of invading that Japanese mainland, huh?”
We all clasp hands and bear down on Okinawa ahead, and the end of resistance once and for all.
“I’m doing this here for friendship,” Havlicek says, squeezing and waving our hands back and forth above us. “And for respect. But Nick, I can assure you that after Iwo Jima, your buddy here is the only person looking forward to fighting the Japanese on their home island.”
Klecko coughs out a bark of a laugh and throws down our hands. “I didn’t say I was looking forward to it … and I’m sure I’m not the only one, anyway.”
“Let’s just fight Okinawa like we never want to fight again, then,” I say.
“Let’s,” Havlicek says, and turns away to talk to another corporal who’s clapped his shoulder.
“Oh, and guess what?” Klecko says when we’re alone on a crowded Water Buffalo. He sniffs me in an obvious way that accuses me of being hospital clean.
“What’s that, Zack?”
“Zeke, I told you. I’m Zeke, remember?”
“Sorry, Zeke. So, what?”
“I finally got to use a flamethrower. A lot. You missed it, but that’s okay. It was incredible. I’m now the number one expert chef in the field of Japanese barbecue.”
I stare at him with his unfamiliar and strained smile. The smile-like thing I offer in return feels just as unnatural.
Zeke wants me to hear his boasting and give him a shocked reaction.
Zack wants me to hear something else, and give him something better.
We can do better. I don’t have the right words, but I hope my slow, sustained nodding tells him we can do better, we will do better.
The slaughter rule.
“Why don’t they just quit?” I scream to be heard by my friend as we again pour round after round after round into a bunker built into the side of a small, bald hill in the middle of this sad, sandblasted landscape.
We stop to reload and listen for anything. The smoke from the guns is the only bearable smell and it lasts only an instant.
There is no new noise from the bunker. Since we’ve been assaulting it for nearly an unbroken hour, no noise is good noise.
“They should have the slaughter rule like in baseball, where if the score is thirty to nothing after three innings they just call the game over.”
“If they did that,” Klecko says, “they would have called the game over when they saw us sailing into the harbor.”
He’s right about that. The fleet assembled for this assault totaled over thirteen hundred warships. I remember looking back briefly from the beachhead and thinking we had so many ships in this thing they could supply us just by lining up from here to San Diego and passing everything along hand to hand to hand.
The shelling of the island in advance of our landings has left an already barren volcanic rock almost a moonscape. Most buildings and vegetation are already laid waste before we go to work on them.
The effect is like if you took one of the early overgrown, overgreen islands — Bougainville, maybe — and skinned it like a rabbit, the way a guy pulls the pelt up and over the animal’s head and leaves it inside out. Like we just reached right down the island’s throat and pulled it inside out and what we got was Okinawa.
We land over a half million troops, which is more than triple the population of the island in peacetime.
Peacetime. What a thought.
But none of that is enough to convince these fighters to give up. Nothing is enough.
Our swift and satisfying victory on Okinawa takes three months. It costs 50,000 Americans killed or wounded and 100,000 Japanese, and satisfies nobody, really.
We are at Camp Tarawa in Hawaii, preparing for the unthinkable invasion of mainland Japan, while US aircraft set city after city there alight with incendiary bombing raids that still don’t persuade the enemy to surrender. That willingness to dig in and die has us all second-guessing. Even my tireless buddy has had his head turned.
We’re enjoying comfort and civilization like we haven’t known for some time, headed from our dry bunks to eat our hot breakfasts when he says, “If they were willing to defend a couple of nothing rocks like Iwo and Oki as if they were saving their own mothers from the lions, what will they do on home soil?”
“You’re saying what every man here is thinking, pal,” I say.
We’re still thinking it, staring into our eggs, when the announcement comes over the loudspeaker that an American B-29 Superfortress has dropped the largest bomb ever seen, on the city of Hiroshima.
We are eating again three days later when the system blares out news of the second atomic bombing, on the city of Nagasaki.
Two bombs, and that’s what did it.
Turns out both missions were launched from the airstrip at Tinian.
“So, we did our part when we secured the island for the airstrip,” Klecko says, eating a lot more robustly this time. “That’s what all that fuss was for to take that nasty, grubby little place.”
“I guess so,” I say, suddenly unable to eat anything at all. I put my utensils down on my tin plate, sit back in my seat, and rest my hands in my lap. “Then what about all the nasty, grubby places we took since then, a whole year’s worth of fighting? Was it even necessary? Maybe we could have stopped at Saipan and Tinian, and got the same re
sult we have now?”
There is a clear and distinct message in my friend’s refusal to look up, in his aggressive scraping of a tin plate that has no food left on it. “Can’t we just be glad it’s over, Nicky?”
You would think so, wouldn’t you?
As it happens, we do make it to the Japanese mainland. We are part of the occupation force, assigned to one of the POW recovery teams tasked with liberating the prisoners from the camps and getting them back on the road home.
I look forward to this job, which promises to be the first truly positive and rewarding assignment in memory.
However, ten minutes after walking through the gates leading into Kamioka Branch Camp, all I want to do is walk back out again.
“We killed guys who still looked better than this,” Klecko observes as we round up hundreds of former fighting men wearing nothing but shorts or strips of white sheet fashioned into something diaper-like. Their heads look, to a man, like oversize doll’s heads wedged onto bodies that couldn’t possibly support them. The ribs visible all around us look sharp enough to cut our hands if we touch them, which I am not anxious to do.
“Hang in there, buddy,” Zachary Klecko, my Zachary Klecko, says when he figures me out. “These boys need us, and they’re gonna get us, right?”
“Right,” I say, and take the hand of one wobbly bone rack who is too weak to make it up the ramp onto the transport truck. He stalls, and I escort him. As I ease him into his seat, I have a hand around his rib cage. Feels like I could close my hand completely around it.
I pass Klecko helping the next man as I walk back down the ramp to fetch another one. This one isn’t even trying. I cannot see his face because his head is slumped, but I can see his torso and arms covered in open sores, lacerations, and bruises from beatings.
Kamioka was a forced labor camp. This guy apparently required a lot of forcing, right till the end.
“Come with me, sir,” I say, grabbing both of his hands.
He looks up and into my eyes from a spot six thousand miles away.
“Have you seen Theo?” he asks in a rasp. “Have you talked to my brother, Theo? Is he all right?”