That’s fine by me, too. Who am I to argue with the sun and how it rises or sets?
That’s all I need to see. No need to rifle around in his pockets for souvenirs. Besides, if this Jap has photos of family or children in his pockets, the sight of living things might make me feel something. I don’t want to feel anything. It’s better that way.
As I walk away, though, something glints in the morning sun and catches my eye. Something shiny, a glimmer, coming from one of the other Nips I shot during the night.
This Jap’s elbow is crooked so that his arm sticks nearly straight in the air, and on his wrist is the shimmering object that attracted my attention. It’s merely a wristwatch—yet a very curious one, at that. The only problem is that he’s still got the live grenade in his grip. In fact, all the Nips I killed last night didn’t drop their grenades as they fell. Curious. They simply clung on to them, as they phased into the next life.
Squatting down to get a good look at the watch, examining it from all angles, I start to plan. How am I gonna get that friggin’ watch off of this guy without setting off his grenade? Even without the grenade in his hand, I certainly don’t want to touch him. They’ve all got flies rubbing their legs together on their dead flesh—and who knows what other creatures are hatching their larvae inside them.
Even so, a wristwatch, a fellow can always use.
After a few minutes, I manage to attach a little twine to the watch, then scoot back on my heels a ways, until I run out of line. Careful … careful, now … Tugging lightly on the string, I try to make the Jap let go of the bomb. Yet he’s not having any of it. This Jap likes the watch too much or he’s going to blow us both up either way.
After about a minute or so of this pulling and tugging, however, I’ve had enough and I merely get up, reach over, and snatch the watch off his wrist and slap it on my mine. Stubborn bastard!
No wonder he liked it, though. The watch is probably cheap as hell; nevertheless, it has a lid with a clever little design at the locking mechanism, with a nice clean face and American numbers that really pop out. Written right across the top is SEIKO. It’s a military watch, though, for right on the cheap leather band is the star of the Japanese navy or army. I couldn’t ask for a better souvenir without sifting through his garments or looking for a thousand-stitch belt. Besides, we are leaving already, and at least for now, I’ve done my duty.
“C’mon, Mace, we’re pulling back a little.”
“Sure,” I say absently. “One sec.”
Before I trot off to catch up with the rest of the guys, I take one final look at the scene of last night’s massacre.
I did all that. It’s normal. I don’t have to look at the corpses for long to know that normally the last thing on somebody’s mind after killing a dozen men would be getting some breakfast.
I’m hungry as hell, though.
Where’s the breakfast?
9
A CONSTELLATION OF GHOSTS
“… AND THERE’S A SOLID LEFT hand to the body by Louis, and Conn takes it, rolls off the ropes out into the center! But Louis did not follow up the punch! A bit more action in this round than in the previous two! Conn strong with a left hand into the body!…”
We’re outside a tent in the bivouac area, and they’ve got a spam-can (one half of a military two-way wireless radio) in the tent, and we’re all lying around listening to a broadcast of the Joe Louis and Billy Conn fight in New York.
The heat is still unbearable, which makes the fight a fever dream rolling in on an alien shore. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about anything anymore.
“… Conn is very wary in there! He’s gotten wary all of a sudden!…”
This is the point where every day it’s two or three marines getting killed, and I just don’t want to hear about it. Then when you think it’s all over, it’s one more marine dying.
PFC Alden Moore, KIA.
PFC George Parrett, KIA.
PFC Clarence Morgan, KIA.
“… There’s Louis getting away from a left jab shot at his chin by Conn! Conn, his guns down by his side. Time’s running out in this round…”
*
The day before, the Louis and Conn fight we were coming down from the Five Sisters, making the thousand-yard trip out of Death Valley and back toward the bivouac area near the airfield.
We were slugs in marine uniforms: Listless, bone-weary, heads lolling on our shoulders—I’m sure that some of us were walking in our sleep. You could take a look in your buddy’s eyes and there was no life in them. The tiny capillaries in the eyes became magnified. They bulged out as if they were stuffed with every nightmare we had seen on this island to date. So if the eyes are the windows to the soul, then there was no soul in there either. We sacks of bone, blood, and muscle, we’re merely going through the motions of living … and it will happen … something will inevitably stop that activity, too. It was only a matter of time; and time was running out …
Just over the last rise in the coral I heard an explosion and saw the smoke, only about thirty yards away parallel to me and three other marines. Then came a clamor and a call for a corpsman, yet our company kept moving. Nobody stopped, just those in the immediate area.
“… There’s Louis taking a left jab on the chin, and LOUIS IS DOWN FROM A RIGHT CROSS TO THE CHIN! CONN FLOORED LOUIS, WHO GOT UP WITHOUT ANY COUNT! LOUIS GOT UP QUICKLY! Here’s Conn driving a right to the chin! Again, Louis has been on the floor! Time is running out in the round, about twenty-five seconds remaining!…”
Some guys began stripping the body of whatever marine was killed over there: Gear, ammo, socks, his souvenirs, whatever they could use.
I hailed a Marine who had just come from that area. “Say, who got it back there?”
“Oh, yeah, some Polish kid and Baxter.”
“Nippo?”
“Yeah, Nippo. Mortar round came right in and splat! Killed Nippo and wounded the other guy. A real mess.”
I didn’t look back. I simply kept walking.
Besides, I don’t think there’s anything left to say.
“… Conn, coming in on Louis, and Louis driving a right to the chin and Conn scoring with a left high on the head! Here’s Conn taking a left hook to the chin and driving a right to the jaw of Joe Louis! And the fireworks, so much talked about, are here!…”
*
October 6, 1944.
We’re at the bivouac area listening to a fight happening so far away. The fight is a real treat, despite the feelings and thoughts of home it gives you. I can’t help but think of how we used to sit in parked cars in front of Ben Goldman’s candy shop on 124th Street and listen to boxing on car radios. They are pleasant thoughts, but not ones I want to have here where I can be killed.
“… Louis scores with a left hook on the chin, a right over the head by Conn, who’s very wild! And now they go into a clinch, one of the few clinches in the fight so far. Time almost up in this round, Conn short with a right hand … the bell…” Zztt!
Some marine walks up and snaps off the spam-can. First there’s a shocked silence, then the whole audience yells about it.
“Hey, what the hell’s goin’ on here?”
“Yeah, buddy—what’s your fuckin’ problem?”
“Turn it back on, dipshit, we’re gonna miss the friggin’ fight!”
“Hey, keep your shirts on, ya dopes,” the marine says to us. “There is no fight, okay? This whole thing—”
“The hell you say!”
“—the whole fight is a sham,” he continues. “Coupla guys in L Company are just foolin’ around with a spam-can of their own. One of ’em’s callin’ the fight an’ the other one’s hissin’ into the can like it was crowd noise. Saw ’em on the way up here.”
We laugh and shake our heads in disbelief. Not even a good time is what it seems on Peleliu.
“Well, I’ll be a sonuvabitch!”
“Hey, yeah, whatcha think of that, Mace, sounded good, huh?” Gene Holland grins at me.
>
It’s the first good laugh I’ve had in days. “Yeah, right, only wish I had thought of it first, not a coupla limpdicks from L Company. Had me fooled.”
McEnery walks up with a big smile on his face. “An’ ya know, I shoulda known better. Goddamn Conn and Louis both joined the friggin’ service! Ain’t a chance in hell they’d be fightin’ each other.”
“No foolin’, Jim?” Gene looks up.
“Yeah, no shit. That’s gotta be the best chisel ever, fellas.”
It was, too. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but for now this is just what we needed: Fun-loving American ingenuity at its slyest.
*
Our artillery has been pounding into the Japanese-held cliffs for hours now: the Five Sisters and the Five Brothers, heading up the mouth of the Horseshoe, shooting the heavy stuff right down their throats. The earth warbles beneath our feet. With each shell that lands in the battered cliffs, large black spirals of smoke touch the sky, accented by fiery orange balls of flame in the center. Jagged chunks of coral and dust rain down in the air, only to be lifted up again by the next explosion, and the next, and the next. The debris from the explosions never seems to touch the earth. The finer particles just hover there, where they can’t seem to make up their mind whether to float like clouds or settle into the valley.
The hope is that when we go up the cliffs again, we’ll go up walking on Nip corpses.
We move up the Horseshoe, the infantry at a snail’s pace, staying well behind the barrage and the tanks ahead of us. If there was ever a time to be a combat fatigue victim, this would be the perfect time to do it. It’s nerve-scathing, to be sure. I can almost see the air move in great heated shocks toward us, giant ripples in a pond, a palpable rush of wind. It must be a souvenir hunters’ paradise up the cliffs, because all I can imagine is our bombardment rattling the gold teeth right out of the Japs’ jaws.
Allmann says something to me, but I can only see his mouth move; I can’t hear a thing he’s saying.
“Whaaaaat?” I ask. I can’t hear myself either.
The eyes water at the constant hum of the largest tuning fork in the world being set off by my ear. I grit my teeth and it hurts to do so. It’s better to let the mouth hang slack rather than create a conduit for the noise to rack the body. I even let my BAR rest as gently in my hands as possible, despite the desire to hang on to it for dear life.
By the time the artillery stops, however, the tanks start firing into caves—or anything that looks like a cave (you can never be too sure), and although the tanks are not nearly as noisy as the heavy stuff, they still grate on the senses.
Our job is to cover the tanks in case the Nips try any funny business. If they come out and make for the tanks, we shoot them. If they head higher up the cliffs, we shoot them. If the Nips get cute and try charging us, we laugh—and then shoot them.
Thank God there’s not a Jap in sight. The demo marines and flamethrower operators are rushing up in short spurts, doing their jobs, sealing or searing up the caves, and then they move back again. All the while we have our weapons trained on the porous cliffs for any movement. It’s actually amazing to watch all the marines work in perfect conjunction. It’s a symmetry that would make me proud, I’m sure, if I weren’t too occupied with my own job. First the artillery and mortars tenderize the area, then the tanks concentrate on smaller pockets, as the demo teams and flamethrowers seal up what’s left, and all the time they are getting covered by us, the riflemen. It works. If there’s a single marine casualty, I don’t see one. Conversely, I don’t see a single dead Nip either. Yet that’s the thing about this whole operation. I know we’ve killed loads of Japanese. In fact, the whole island reeks of the dead more than ever. Their bodies are everywhere, still piled up in putrefying heaps. Where they come up with these figures of 75 killed this day, and 111 killed this day, I don’t know. None of us have seen a bespectacled marine going around with a little notepad and a stub of a pencil tallying up the Nip dead. Even if such marines exist, when all the Nips look the same, how does he know he hasn’t counted the same one twice, or even a dozen times, as the Japs change from blue to black under the hardness of the sun? Moreover, when we seal up a cave, how do you know how many Japs were in there—if any? I’ve never seen marines unsealing a cave to find out.
The truth is, I don’t think they know much about this island. Not when we landed. Not right now. Not what the future will hold. It’s been the longest three days in the history of mankind—and if they don’t know about the five skeletal remains of marines going up the Five Sisters, how the hell are they going to know when to get us off this island?
*
On the move again. Somebody with stars on his shoulders must have hit the map room, because we’re doing something we’ve never done before. This time we make a short move up the West Road and then a sweeping turn, the whole regiment, toward the east side of the island.
Add this marching to the list of miseries on already miserable bodies. I remember how the 1st Marines looked to us when they staggered onto Purple Beach. Like a rattle of rats. Now we look like them, but rolled in flour, dusted over by the coral on the road.
“Say, Gene,” I say, “ya know where we’re headed?”
Holland drops the canteen from his lips and wipes his mouth with a grimy shirtsleeve. Screwing the top back on, he squints up at the sun and then looks back at me. “No, I don’t have a fucking clue where we’re goin’. Do you?”
“Yeah … I do. We’re gonna hit those ridges from the north. We’re goin’ south. Sure as shit we are.” I adjust the strap of my BAR on my shoulder, trying to find a spot that’s not raw.
“Yeah? So where’d ya hear that dope?” Gene is a smart marine, a good guy and a quick study—not much goes over his head—but Gene’s also been trying to work an angle to get out of here without letting his buddies down.
“No dope,” I say. “We’ve been bustin’ our balls up against the same crap every day. Same results. Fuckin’ Corsairs droppin’ that napalm shit all over the Nips. What’ve we got? Artillery, navy … tanks? Nah, we’re coming up their asses this time an’ see if they don’t feel it.”
Gene chuckles. “Oh yeah? Ya think they’ll feel it?”
I’ve never been a know-it-all, nor one to spread half-baked scuttlebutt. Nevertheless, call it simple, or even unoriginal—whoever or whatever I am—I always figured that if I just do my job in combat the rest will take care of itself. So far I’ve been right. At this moment, despite that I don’t want to reexamine the concept of hope, I have almost a sixth sense that things are going to be over soon. I don’t want to dwell on it. Anyway, if it takes ramming our way up the backside of the rising sun so that we can watch it set? Then that’s what 3/5 will do to make it happen.
“Oh yeah? Ya think they’ll feel it?”
For a moment I think about it and then get back with Holland.
“Hell, if they don’t feel it, Gene, we sure as hell will.”
*
Nobody’s home. The back door is wide open, and that’s what’s really scary.
Up there on the ass side of the cliffs I finally realize the ultimate paradox of combat: When you’re surrounded by the enemy, you feel alone as can be. Yet when there’s nobody home, it suggests that all their guns are pointed straight at your heart.
Cautiously we move from cave to cave, our weapons scanning the mouth of each hole in the rocks as if it’s filled with a thousand Nips. Occasionally a marine pops off a few rounds into a cave entrance, jittery, unbelieving that we’re actually alone up here. It’s nerve-racking just to know what could happen, but the dead Nips in the area let us know exactly what did.
We’re in a graveyard of what the battle used to be. We dug the graves, but we don’t know who to fill them with.
“Where do ya think the Nips are, Jim?” I ask McEnery. McEnery has the same look of cautious confusion written on his face as the rest of us (what remains of the squad, that is).
“Dunno,” Jim says. �
��Not here. But still…”
He doesn’t have to finish. I know what he’s thinking. Either things are as they seem and there are no live Japs up here, or they’re all over the place and this is a trap. That’s the rub: We don’t rely on our intellects or gut feelings. Neither do we hang our helmets on the five senses. We live only in the “but still…” realm of thought. It’s not a realm civilians would understand. Not unless they’ve been here—and they haven’t. I’m not even going to explain it.
That’s when I realize that this really is over. We’re not going to lose any more marines. We’re going to make it.
*
All except for Lieutenant Hillbilly Jones and PFC Chas McClary.
We’re close to the West Road, and it seems that some rear echelon shitheads from company headquarters got a case of “jungleitis” and decided it was safe enough to go souvenir hunting close to Sniper Alley. (Jungleitis only affects those marines who’ve been sitting on their asses behind the lines too long. With their ears to the grapevine, when they hear it’s safe to come out of their holes, they get the itch to venture out into a combat zone, so that they can regale their sweethearts and folks back home with daring stories of how they slew a Nip to get his sword, or a Jap flag, or photos of the dead man’s family. Or maybe it’s that they don’t want to feel as worthless as they actually are, when it comes to proving what salty marines they are. Whatever the case, jungleitis is a common affliction toward the end stages of any battle.)
Soon there comes a cry for help.
“Say, what do ya think those jokers are up to?” Allmann points out a couple of marines running back from the West Road in a cloud of dust toward the bivouac area. These marines are unarmed, and they appear comical the way they’re really moving, taking constant looks back over their shoulders the whole way.
“C’mon, Charlie, show some respect, willya?” I rib Allmann. “That’s the Marine Raider Battalion, fresh off patrol. They just, ya know, do everything really fast, those guys.”
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