Battleground Pacific

by Sterling Mace

  They only wanted Bob to come home. His wife. His two little girls.

  How can pigtails ever be so pretty when Daddy’s in a grave on Okinawa?

  How can a kiss ever be so warm when the husband’s lips are blue-hued and cold?

  I’m sure a thousand thoughts were screaming through Whitby’s mind as I tried to comfort him—it’ll be okay, Wimp, it’ll be alright—yet Bob was done, at no fault to Bob.

  Bob simply wasn’t there anymore.

  “Hey … hey, buddy.” I tried for a smile. “Why don’t ya go back and see Chulis, huh, pal? He’ll know what to do to get ya outta here. You don’t need to be here anymore, Wimp. No more, okay?”

  Whitby’s eyes asked me if I was telling the truth. The truth is, if ever there was a case of combat hysterics, combat fatigue, Bob was surely showing all the signs.

  Swallowing hard, Bob closed his eyes for a second while wiping his runny nose with one grimy dungaree sleeve and then the other, making dark snot-streaks on the herringbone cloth. I thought I heard him give a small chuckle, but maybe not. His efforts didn’t do anything to clean his face, but at least, I’m sure, it made him feel better, as he made the walk to the rear area with a face that wasn’t swollen red from sorrow. I don’t think any act could have saved Bob’s dignity, though. To be labeled a combat fatigue case was akin to crapping out from heat exhaustion on Peleliu, but you simply can’t go on when the mind and body refuse to function anymore.

  Facts are facts. Wimpy got stung with the same shell that left two gaping holes through my ears. It just so happened that the round that ended Bob’s combat effectiveness was fired from a pen, and not a Nip counterbattery.

  That was the last time I saw Robert Whitby, too. He walked away.

  That left only me and Eubanks from our fire team—and I didn’t know where Eubanks was, or even if he was still alive.

  It was only when Whitby was out of sight that I allowed myself to fall into the bottom of the foxhole and rest my head. My melon still felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through it. I was a real Phineas Gage. Never quite the same after nearly getting my ass hauled away. If I could have laughed, I would have laughed about survival, a game of craps, and the many spinning wheels of chance, rolling through my brain.

  The only one laughing, however, was some crappy lieutenant—the same Lieutenant Johnson, in fact, who made us get off the horses when we first arrived on the island.

  Exactly when the incident happened with Johnson, or how long it was after Whitby left, I couldn’t tell you—only that it was before the attack, and it ended up being the last measure of me saying good-bye.

  “Did you dig that foxhole?” The lieutenant stands above me, looking down at me in my hole. His hands are on his hips, and the fact that he carries only a .45 on his cartridge belt tells me that this guy isn’t planning on fighting the Nips anytime soon.

  I stick my spade in the mud. “Yes, sir.”

  “Nice hole,” he says, looking away and out over the gray expanse of sky. When he looks back at me he has a real shit-eating grin on his face—the kind of smirk a terrible child wears while lighting a cat’s tail afire. “Too bad you’re gonna have to move it, Mace.” That last word came out disgusting and dripping with vinegar. The leering curl of his upturned lip sparked a flame in the center of my forehead, deep within the tissue where wise men dare not venture. I wanted to kill that man. He wore marine dungarees, had round eyes, an apple-pie name, and a light-skinned face; nevertheless, if he had stayed there one more second …

  “Anyway, we’re movin’ out,” he says, sauntering off, on his way to polish his hard-on for being so clever.

  The truth is, I wouldn’t have done anything to him, because the truth is … I was already done. It just took a head full of barbed wire and a jerk like Johnson for me to finally see the truth. I was done when the Nip artillery nearly wiped me out, only I just couldn’t fathom it. Or, rather, I couldn’t believe that I had something physically screwed up inside my skull. It was always the “other guy” that got wounded and evacuated. Not me—especially considering everything I had been through to date.

  Chulis saw it in my pupils, though. They constricted and dilated without any external stimuli. “Mace, I need you to go back to the battalion aid station and get your noggin checked out. You’re damn lucky to be alive, pal.”

  Instead, I hung around.

  Leaning my M-1 against the wall of my foxhole, I climbed out and gazed at my surroundings one last time—watching the marines, here and there, slosh around in the muck, observing them across a panoramic view that used to be my home, too. The sky was hard, with white marbling grained across it, white clouds that didn’t stand a chance any more than I did. And their faces? There were less than a handful of marines who had made the Peleliu landing—Orley Uhls, Blowtorch Willy, Hank Boyes, Roy Kelly—and fewer still who served on Cape Gloucester. The rest of them, even if I knew them once, I didn’t know them then.

  Even Gene Holland was gone.

  Right around V-E Day, shortly after Garner Mott was killed, some guys from headquarters came down looking for Gene. When they found him, they plucked him straight from his foxhole and led him away.

  It seems that Gene had a buddy in HQ, and right after we returned to Pavuvu, Gene began to work some angle to get himself out of the rifle squads. It took a while for those strings to pull, but once they did, Gene’s ass was out of the bind. Gene walked away.

  He ended up driving a jeep for the rest of the campaign.

  He didn’t even have to steal the friggin’ thing to get it.

  Yeah. I chuckled. Once you look around and all of the marines you previously knew have vanished, that’s the sign that either you’re a slow learner or there’s simply nothing left to learn.

  I had lived the Pacific war.

  Bainbridge Naval Hospital, Port Deposit, Maryland, August 1945.

  “Good morning, Corporal,” she said.

  The nurse stood at the foot of the hospital bed and plucked the chart from a hook attached to the bed frame. She didn’t look at the young man sitting on the edge of the hospital bed. Instead, with a detached gaze that only comes with treating hundreds of battle casualities, she merely glanced over the chart as if it were her own reflection in the mirror. The young marine knew what came next: a series of questions from the nurse—the same questions, in fact, he’d heard, seemingly a thousand times over, since he had been hospitalized, a skipping record of the same old song.

  These days, however, begging for a different tune, the marine found himself embellishing the answers, just to break the monotony—amusing himself in the process.

  “Do you have any ringing in your ears or loss of hearing?” the nurse began.

  “What was that? Come again?” The young marine held a cupped hand, palm out, to his ear.

  “I said, do you have any ringing in your ears or loss of—” The nurse finally glanced up at the marine, her eyebrow cocked upward, not amused.

  The marine grinned widely. “Nah, nah—my hearing’s fine. Thank you for asking, though. But maybe someone oughta take a look at my eyes, maybe? I almost thought you were gonna crack a smile, for a second there.”

  She resumed, unhearing. “Any problems sleeping? Insomnia?”

  “Nope, slept like a baby.”

  “Headaches? Blurry vision?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about a burning sensation while urinating?”

  “No thank you. I think I’ll pass.”

  “Any bowel problems? Constipation? Loose stool? Blood in the feces?”

  “Only on Peleliu.”

  “Excuse me?” The nurse looked up again, this time with genuine curiosity. She hadn’t heard of Peleliu either, it seemed.

  “I’m sorry.” The marine answered her question. “No, nothing like that. You would’ve had to have been there.”

  “Okay … and how about any anxiety? Nervousness? Tremors in the extremities, hands, legs, muscle tics?”

  “No, ma’
am. Everything’s in clover.” He smiled again. He also knew what the last question was going to be. It was the final joke in every regular morning Q&A session. It wasn’t as if the question didn’t have a measure of merit to it. It did. Nevertheless, the sheer ridiculousness of the query to any marine who had been in combat—who had killed and seen his buddies killed—would have been hilarious if it weren’t so sad …

  The nurse peered once more at the chart.

  PATIENT: MACE, STERLING G.

  BRANCH OF SERVICE: U.S.M.C.

  RANK: CPL.

  D.O.B: 02/02/1924

  PRIMARY DIAGNOSIS: PERFORATION OF THE EARDRUMS, BILATERAL, Acute.

  SECONDARY DIAGNOSIS (IF APPLICABLE): PSYCHONEUROSES ANXIETY, Benign

  She resumed. “Have you had any violent thoughts? Thoughts of harming yourself or harming others?”

  For chrissakes, sister, where have you been? Don’t you know there’s a war on?

  “Nope.” I smiled quickly (maybe too quickly).

  There was nothing to smile about.

  Home was just another four-letter word, if your heart was nowhere near to it.

  If you’d been in combat you resented a question like that, because that line of questioning made it sound like they were peering into your skull, examining for bats in the belfry.

  I may have gotten my bell rung, but it didn’t turn me loony like some of the poor guys in the nuthatch ward. One of those men, in particular, was a singular shade of insanity that really turned the heart into a frown.

  “Jesus, wouldja look at this friggin’ guy! All day like this, huh?” Private Richard La Pierre looked back at me in amazement.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Every time I walk by this door the same thing.”

  “Jesus!” Richard peeked again through the little glass window on the door.

  Behind the door was a small room, with a single hospital bed pushed up against a wall. Otherwise, the room was totally bare: four walls and a single occupant—just a kid, a few years younger than us, a navy guy whom the hospital had put there for the safety of himself and others. The rumor was, the kid, like Larry Mahan, was the son of a prominent navy officer.

  Dressed only in the loose-fitting hospital-issue pajamas, the kid in the room would stand on one foot, all day, and snap his fingers. With each snap, the kid would pirouette like a ballerina while letting out a hearty “Whoooohoooo!” appearing pleased with himself no end.

  Richard was still shaking his head in disbelief.

  I knew crazy. Screwy things happen in the world all the time. Back in basic training, there was a real obese marine (heaven only knows how they let him in the marines in the first place), Private Quinn. Quinn would cry all the time; he really had a rough time going through the rigors of Marine Corps training. He always talked about going back to Queens, and eventually the marines granted him his wish. Quinn washed out of Parris Island, went back to New York, and then, for no particular reason, killed his grandmother one day.

  “Yeah,” I said, taking a final glance in the window. “It’s a sad case. Almost makes ya not wanna laugh, the poor kid.”

  Richard chuckled. Private Richard La Pierre, from Maine, was in the 6th Marine Division and, like myself, had been to Okinawa. A bad case of jungle rot on his feet got him evacuated, but not until after he saw some of the bitterest fighting Okinawa had to offer.

  “Whoooohoooo!”

  “What the hell ya think happened to this fella?” Richard asked as we walked back to our ward.

  “Beats me. Kid like that gets on one of them tubs, too many days at sea … gets in with the crowd down in the boiler room … the next thing ya know the boat starts swayin’ back and forth like…”

  “Yeah.” Richard laughed. “Then the fellas cross the equator and never come back!”

  “Sure,” I said. “On the LST, going to Peleliu, some jg lieutenant, or an ensign, or whatever … on the boat, right? Everyone knew it. This ensign would follow marines around like they shit marble. Nobody said nothin’ about it. Maybe on the sly, is all. Sure, he was a limp noodle. Something fruity like that, anyway.”

  “Ya don’t say, huh?”

  “Yeah, c’mon, you know. The same shit. Me and my buddy Tommy Colonna was at Camp Lejeune, on leave, right? Couldn’t find a hotel, so we rent a room at somebody’s house. We’re hitting the rack, and the next thing ya know some GI comes in the room, starts making these … I dunno, sexual overtures, or whatever he’s got planned for us. Tommy tells this soldier, ‘Hey, get the fuck outta here, or I’ll put my foot straight up your ass.’ Just like that.”

  “Geez, those friggin’ guys,” La Pierre said.

  “Hey, ya know, whatever turns ’em on—but they sure as hell weren’t fuckin’ wacko, like this poor kid.”

  Bainbridge Naval Hospital, Port Deposit, Maryland, August 14, 1945.

  If you’ve seen enough combat, the chances are you’ve seen it all.

  Even if you try to blank out all thoughts—even if you think you are watching the scenes of war impassively—the eye still catches it all, from the subtle nuances to the gross exaggerations of everything before you. You see a single drop of blood on a leaf. It’s so bright against the chlorophyll green, but you don’t give it a thought. Instead, the mind internalizes it, waiting for the opportunity to pour itself out in the form of tears, anger, shame, or triumph—those, or a whole range of emotions that haven’t been named yet.

  Because, no matter how much combat you’ve seen, when the end is nigh, it’s difficult to believe that you’ve reached the closing chapter, the last page, the final sentence … the concluding period. We look into the faces of the dying and see myriad expressions—the greatest of which are the quick lapses into disbelief right before the final breath hitches and then evaporates into the air. In the faces of the dead, there is often a ghost of a smile that lingers on the corners of their lips, and we tell ourselves they look so peaceful. Yet at the same time we try to choke down the more serrated thought, What the fuck could he be so happy about, dead at twenty-one?

  The poor guys never knew it was the end, even when the end was all there was to know.

  So when the end came for me—like any combat veteran who had seen it all—I didn’t know it, nor did I believe it. For how is any hardened marine to know that his last battle is not one fought over a piece of turf; instead, it is one that is fought with memories and misgivings.

  “Say, Mace!”

  “Huh?” I looked back at Richard La Pierre.

  He laughed. “What were ya doin’, fallin’ asleep on me?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I was thinking about going down to the mess hall an’ seein’ if soup’s on.” I was lying. Richard caught me deep in thought, and whatever I was thinking La Pierre snapped me out of it.

  Richard nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I was sayin’. C’mon, then. Sittin’ around like this will drive ya nutty, like that poor friggin’ kid, ya know?”

  Sitting in the hospital ward was just a part of the same old routine. La Pierre’s bed was right next to mine, so it was convenient for us to simply sit on the sides of our beds and while away the time with countless BS sessions. It was something very akin to reading an outdated newspaper, over and over again, because it is the only one you have. Eventually the articles become so familiar that you only read about a quarter of the words, because you know all of the stories by heart—just like I had only heard about a quarter of what La Pierre was saying before I drifted off into places unknown.

  Really, you just followed the routine. After sitting a while, you go outside and smoke a few butts, you go back inside and sit, then go back outside and smoke. You do all of this in between meals; often, like right now, food sounded like the best plan, though you’d have to beat the navy chowhounds to the punch. The navy boys were used to good food, so the swabs were always the front of the line. They overpopulated us marines by at least four to one. At that moment, the ward was brimming with navy guys, loitering around, like me and Richard.

  J
ust as Richard and I were about to get up, however, a small commotion was heard at the nurse’s desk, at the center of the ward.

  I looked over my shoulder, in the direction of the nurse’s desk, but I couldn’t make out too much. A young nurse, perhaps a little younger than me, had both hands clasped over her mouth, and I heard a tiny gasp (yet I couldn’t tell if it the sound had come from her).

  “Whattaya think that’s all about?” I turned back around and asked Richard.

  “Ya got me,” he said, craning his neck, trying to look around me. “Maybe that young one dropped a bedpan?”

  “Nah, I don’t—”

  Then a cheer came from the same direction. The same kind you’re used to hearing on the Fourth of July.

  “Okay, what is this?” La Pierre said as he stood.

  In a rush, some of the swabbies made their way to the nurse’s desk.

  “THE WAR IS OVER!” somebody shouted. Just like that.

  I barely noticed Richard La Pierre plop back down on his bed, his hands in his lap.

  The war is what?

  It seemed like everybody began talking at once.

  “Hey, looks like the war is over!”

  “Yeah, the doctor just came down and told us the news!”

  “Wait, wait! When did this happen? Really?”

  “A bomb! They said it was a bomb they dropped on Japan! Can you believe that?!”

  The navy boys hugged one another and smiled. There was laughter aplenty. But I couldn’t get up. It was as if I were a part of the mattress, the bedding, the flooring, the earth.

  Tears of joy were shed as some of the navy guys that weren’t too infirm to dance started to Lindy Hop in the center aisle.

  As the world suddenly slowed and tuned in to a lower frequency—a vibration nearly too deep to hear—I felt my head turn involuntarily in slow motion toward Richard (so slow that the individual blinks of his eyes seemed to take an eternity to complete). I saw four years fly by, in the wink of an eye, with an exclamation mark floating free, in space, without a final sentence to attach itself to.