The Byrds of Victory

  In high school, I had plenty of friends and girlfriends to pal around with after the games. A girl named Antoinette Granger used to tell me I had “criminal green eyes”. I would sometimes go out with a girl after the games, and other times, different ones of us on the team got whiskey or beer. We drove around in the country with the windows down and talked about the game or what girls we were going with or whatever. The country smelled good in the fall when the crops were up and it was getting cool. We were all pretty tight—we had just won our seventh game in a row, I think—and stopped in the middle of a cotton field. A friend of mine, J.L. Dickey, laid down in the cotton while I sat in the car. The others were playing tackle and whooping it up farther and farther down the field.

  “What’re you going to do when you get out, Preach?” he asked me. They called me Preacher because I was always talking and trying to keep everybody fired up when we played.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess work in the shop.”

  “I’m going to college, why don’t you? Get a scholarship. You play good enough.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Ask around. I’m going to the University of Texas and get me a college girl.”

  “What would I take?”

  “Anything you can handle. Even a year or two would help you later on.”

  “Maybe somebody will make me an offer.”

  “Well, there ought to be some scouts at the bi-district game.”

  “If we get that far.”

  “We will. Nobody can score on us because we stop them so bad they don’t think they can do anything. They’re beat in the first five minutes.”

  J.L. was a farm boy who played tackle. Every game, he’d start by drawing a line in the dirt with his finger and saying, “Come across that line, I’ll tear your head off.”

  “I don’t know if I can quit football, J.L.,” I said. “I might go to keep that up.”

  “It’s just a fight to me. I want to win, but I’m glad when it’s over.”

  “I wish I could play every week the rest of my life.”

  “You ride one horse till it falls and change to another one. You can get as much out of something else as you do football. You just need to be good at it.”

  “Maybe something else will find me and I won’t have to look for it.”

  Something found me, but it wasn’t good. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor two months later, and I couldn’t wait for school to be out. I hitchhiked in a snowstorm to Amarillo and joined the Marines. I had been offered a scholarship in a way as our season ended. A scout from A&M was there, and I had the best game of my life. We played Melton. They had a field that was covered with gravel and sloped. I got off a ninety-yard punt downhill and blocked one of their punts and fell on it in the end zone for a touchdown. The scout told me to come to College Station the next summer and he would try to get me on scholarship because he had seen what I could do when the money was down. The old joke is that there is nothing between Amarillo and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence. I saw why the joke stays around. It was terribly cold. The wind blew like it wanted to kill you, and it would if you stayed in it long enough. I passed my physical, and we all stayed in a hotel downtown and got drunk the night before we left. It seemed like the only way to get warm. We took the train to Oklahoma City and were sworn in. The trip to California took three days, and as good a shape as I was in, I was worn out when we got there. We were taken by bus into Camp Elliott near San Diego.

  Our drill instructor met us, a big devil named Rendleman, lined us up on the asphalt just off the road and said, “You may be in the Marine Corps, but you are not Marines. You’re civilians. You will become Marines in the next sixteen weeks. You’ll learn how to fight, how to take orders. You’ll learn because I will kick your butt up between your shoulder blades if you don’t. This is war; it ain’t no time for jokin’ around. At the end of your training, you will march fifty miles in a day on a half a canteen of water. You will because Colonel Hodges will be in front leading, and I will be right behind if anybody slows down. You will hate my guts before this is over. But after this ol’ boy from Alabama, them Japs won’t seem too bad at all!”

  I knew we were in for it. I didn’t know how bad it was going to be, though. They literally tore us apart and put us back together. I thought I was in good shape, but I put on twenty-five pounds of muscle. They kept us going from five in the morning till ten at night and more than that sometimes.

  One night, the lights came on about three in the morning and Rendleman bellowed, “Fall out, fall out!”

  Everybody fell out, and him and one of his D.I. friends came through. “Sergeant Lester here don’t have nobody that knows what to do when the Japs come in on you. I bet him I do. You better not make me lose.” Everybody stood at attention, and they started around. “What do you do if you’re up against a cliff and a Jap is coming at you with a bayonet?” Rendleman hollered.

  “Shoot him, sergeant!” the first man yelled.

  “What if you’re out of ammo?”

  “Kill him with my bayonet, sergeant!”

  “What if your bayonet’s broke?”

  “Uh, I don’t know, sergeant!”

  “Stupid bastard,” Rendleman said, and he stepped in and knocked the breath out of the guy.

  This went on up one side of the barracks and down the other. Some said they would kill the enemy with their bare hands, but the D.I.’s said they were idiots and cussed them out or belted them in the belly or slapped them on the side of the head. They put a bucket over one man’s head and hit it with their swagger sticks while they questioned him. Rendleman hit me in the stomach, and I acted like it hurt less than it did.

  They got done with the last man and cussed him, and Rendleman turned to everybody and said, “You don’t know what to do? All right, I’ll tell you. Throw shit in his face! Don’t know where to get it? Just reach back, it’ll be there.” They laughed like it was the funniest thing they ever heard, and Rendleman said, “You boys better get some sleep. You made me lose my bet.”

  That son of a bitch ran us on the parade ground the next day until every man dropped. If anything had been wrong with anybody, they would have died. We started out doing ten-mile hikes on two canteens of water. They cut the water and added miles till we were ready to do the fifty on a half-canteen. Old Colonel Hodges was probably in his early fifties, but he led all the way. He wasn’t carrying a full pack and rifle, and he used a cane to mark the pace. But he was old to be doing that. I think we figured if he could do it, we could. He showed us what it was about. Like he said, you really can keep going simply by putting one foot in front of the other. Rendleman is the one I still don’t like. I can see where they had to prepare us, but I think he did a lot of things just for the fun of it, not to toughen us up or help us survive the war.

  From boot camp, I went home on a two-week furlough. I didn’t have a particularly good time. I asked Papa if I could use his car. He asked what I wanted it for, and I went walking to town. I went to the show with a couple of old girlfriends and around. It seemed like I was ten years older, and I couldn’t think about anything but the war and how it would be. I was walking the same old streets—Papa finally offered me his car, but I wouldn’t take it—but all I could do was try to get there mentally and get myself ready. One girl, a couple of years younger than me, asked me to go out. She must have liked my dress blues. I knew she was engaged, so I asked her, “What do you want to go out with me for? You know what I’m going to do.”

  “That might be all right,” she said, surprising me.

  “And it might not,” I told her, not needing any trouble with everything else I had on my mind. I was ready to go when the two weeks were up. I enjoyed the train ride both ways.

  It was not the first or second time I took a train to California. After my sophomore year in high school, me and a friend named Bud Jernigan rode the rails for jobs an uncle of mine could get us on the Southern Pacific Railroad in Sacramento. We went o
ut there and worked in the crews unloading box cars, had a good time and made enough to ride the bus back in August for football. We rode most of the way there on flatcars. Going through Arizona, we ran out of water in our water bags and canteens and were nearly dying of thirst. We saw a big irrigation ditch, one of those permanent concrete ones, about a hundred yards from the train, which was only going ten or fifteen miles an hour. We jumped off and ran as hard as we could at an angle to the ditch. We did belly floppers and got a big drink and filled up a canteen each. We took off running again at a ninety-degree angle and got back on the train where we’d gotten off. That was our last chance for water that day, so it shows you can do yourself a lot of good sometimes by being aggressive. In a seat this time in my dress blues, I thought about riding the rails and wished I only had a job unloading box cars waiting for me and football practice in the fall.

  We shipped out from San Diego in September on a troop ship called the President Monroe with as many Marines and Army boys as they could get on it. It was hot and crowded. If you had a place to sit, you didn’t get up and leave unless you wanted to give it up. And you didn’t say anything to anybody unless you wanted to fight because you just had to say the word. All we had to eat a lot of the time was powdered eggs, mutton stew and canned rations. I got so sick of powdered eggs that I could barely choke them down.

  We anchored at Pago Pago, American Samoa, and from there went to Noumea, New Caledonia. They let us go ashore, and me and a guy named Garfield had a dollar and forty cents between us. We went in a bar and stayed till it closed and they made us leave. They spoke French. We ran across some Army boys who got us to buy whiskey for them because they weren’t allowed to buy any. They bought us a bottle for the one we bought them. There were Moroccans and English along with Americans. They wouldn’t let us in one bar, so we went around to the side where they had a high rock wall two feet wide with broken glass on top. Garfield boosted me up, and I broke the glass and helped him up, and we jumped down and went in. They ran us out anyway. We got the sack of whiskey we had left by the wall and spent the rest of the night walking around. It was almost morning when we got back to the ship, but the captain turned his head and let us come aboard. We unloaded most of the troops and equipment at Noumea and shipped out for New Zealand with sixty-seven officers and men.

  The ship was riding high in the water, and we had a bad storm at sea. I tied myself in the bunk with my belt. That night, we finally got some decent food. They gave us fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy and biscuits. Garfield got sick during the storm and lost it, and I had a good time teasing him. We pulled into Waitemata Harbor in New Zealand and saw they had big coastal guns and many aircrafts. They looked well-fortified, but we got ashore and saw the guns were made out of wood and the airplanes were cardboard. We were at Mechanics Bay for thirty days in the barracks at Domain Park. The Third Marines were pulling out, and a guy named Kirkham and I noticed their beer dump. We borrowed a truck, and I got a Tommy gun and posed as a guard. Kirkham was the driver. We went up there and stole a whole truckload of beer. You should have seen the guys when we got back. Our whole outfit had a beer bust.

  We left New Zealand for New Caledonia again after several months and stayed there about a month in tents with dirt floors. New Caledonia is right on the Equator, and if you think it gets hot in Texas, you should try living there in a tent with it raining all the time. We had one change of clothes, and it was so humid and rained so much that we’d wash our clothes, hang them up outside and put them on wet the next day. That was our first real taste of life in a tropical paradise.

  When we made an invasion, I thought I was lucky if I went in on the first wave. The Japanese would wait for the third or fourth wave to open up so the battleships wouldn’t spot their artillery positions. They were masters of camouflage, and you usually couldn’t find them until they started firing. No matter how long the ships laid off shore and pounded those islands and sent planes over to bomb and strafe, they still had artillery and machine guns when we came in. The water along the shoreline was always red. Once we fought our way off the beach, we went over the island step by step and mopped up, which is what we called it. I was on some islands where those big guns had sheared off every last palm tree shoulder-high. The Japs were always hell to root out. They were good soldiers.

  I don’t really think of my time in the Pacific by islands. It seems like one overall thing. I was in on Bougainville, but Guam was the worst because we were there the longest. The Third Marines were there with the Army’s Seventy-seventh “Statue of Liberty” Division from New York. I was in the First Marine Brigade, which comprised the Fourth and Twenty-second Marine regiments, and we fought twenty-five thousand Japanese in the summer and fall of 1944. I had times on Guam when I would have given a hundred dollars for a cot to lie down. Each man carried a rifle and a full pack. The packs weighed fifty or sixty pounds. They held a couple of bandoliers of ammunition, a canteen, a gas mask, hand grenades, “K” and “C” rations, a bed roll, a change of dungarees and socks, a mess kit and toothbrush, shaving gear, a first aid kit, a bayonet, a knife, a trenching tool and half a pup tent. My big obsession was ammunition. I did everything I could to keep plenty so I never had to go hand-to-hand. Once you get command of the field of fire, don’t back down. Stay up and hold it. That was kind of hard to learn.

  The Japanese were prone to act like they were surrendering and blow themselves up and Marines, too, with hand grenades. There was a time or two when one came out of a cave with a small machine gun strapped to his back and flopped down for one behind him to cut loose. So we let them come out if they wanted and killed them before they could pull anything. There were some dead ones in a tank we had knocked out on the beach, and my commanding officer told me and another guy to go down there and dispose of the bodies. We didn’t want to pull them out because they had been dead two or three days already, so we decided to cremate them instead of trying to bury them. Do you have any idea how hard it is to burn a human body or what that smells like? We went down there every day for a week and poured ten gallons of gasoline into the tank and set it afire.

  You do things that would be impossible in any other situation and then are unable to get them out of your mind when the war is over. On another occasion, we were sitting under a tree where a sniper had wired himself up. They’d wire themselves in the trees to draw your fire after they were dead and make you waste ammunition. This one had been up there a long time. We sat down to have some chow. Having rotted through the wires, he fell and splattered on the ground, and we went on eating like nothing happened.

  The Marine Corps is nowhere near as big as the Army or Navy, so everyone has to work together. You do what needs to be done, and one of my jobs was throwing hand grenades. I had a good throwing arm, and I went around in the middle of a bunch of guys with a box of grenades from one problem to the next, usually holes or caves. I didn’t try to hit the hole, just land in front and roll it in. My farthest throw was about eighty yards. The hard part was pulling the pins and counting down to three seconds so they couldn’t grab it and throw it out. We had grenades with fuses from three to ninety seconds, so there was a lot of suspense with pulling the pin and standing there holding the grenade that long. You needed a guy with a good watch to count it down.

  Did you ever hang around veterans at a VFW or an American Legion and notice how none of them ever killed anybody? My most unforgettable experience was on Guam, where we hemmed in several hundred Japs on an isthmus. We knew they’d be coming out, so we spent the whole night digging in with sandbags and bringing up automatic weapons, mortars and ammunition. We heard them getting drunk, praying and carrying on. Some committed suicide by jumping off the cliff. The next morning at daybreak, we were as ready for a small-scale ground attack as anybody ever was. One sang out, “Marine, you die!” We could hear him perfectly. That was the only thing in English that they all knew. We had heard it before when they were close to us at night, but that was the first time it ever soun
ded pitiful. And here they came. Some had rifles or swords, some only sticks. None got closer than fifty yards. It didn’t take long. None of them held back, and they were all dead in five or ten minutes. There was a wave of lead.

  One invasion was comical. It was on Banika in the Russell Islands. The Navy shelled it for two or three days and sent planes over to bomb. They couldn’t see any movement, but they figured the Japs never let you see them. We came in like Dick Tracy with both guns going, hit the beach, dug in and got the mortars to lobbing shells. The third and fourth waves hit, and there still wasn’t any return fire. We waited and waited and finally headed in. The only Jap we found was dead. We couldn’t tell what killed him. Probably a disease. The rest of them had moved on somewhere else. Intelligence was as bad on that one as it was on Tarawa, where the tide went out and the Marines were stranded on the beach. I was lucky there because I was in floating reserve and didn’t go in. There was a fellow with the same name as me, Bliss Arthur Byrd, and we got each other’s mail for a year or two. Then I was in a graveyard on Guam and came across his marker. That’ll make you feel peculiar.

  After Banika, we went in on Barata just off Bougainville. We returned to Banika and hit Treasury Island, where a guy on a bulldozer cleaned out a machine gun nest by shielding himself with the blade and going over it. We were sent to the Mariana Islands and held in reserve off Saipan and Tinian. We were aboard ship for sixty-seven or sixty-eight days with two meals a day. Everyone was hard to get along with. I had a fistfight with a friend of mine, a real fight, and we were back playing cards thirty minutes later.

  The night before an invasion, the chaplains came around and a lot of guys prayed. I never would. I figured if I didn’t pray ordinarily, it was no good then. I believe in God and Jesus in my own way. I’m not sure about heaven and hell or angels. The Bible says a man shall earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and preachers don’t. It’s not that I wasn’t scared. As a matter of fact, I usually couldn’t sleep the night before. It’s not much different, I don’t imagine, from the last night of a condemned man. You think about what people you know might be doing, how you could have done this or that differently. You think about how your arms and legs and head and heart could be blown to pieces before the clock goes around again. The main thing I thought about was living. I didn’t think about it so much as feel it. I felt myself being alive and was determined to make it. I told myself I was going home, and I wasn’t whistling in the dark. I had my mind made up that I would survive. That’s probably the reason why I did, that and some luck. A lot of guys got it because they were assing off. You wouldn’t think a man would fool around in a combat situation. A lot did, though, and got killed.