Others were as good as there was and didn’t make it, like Lieutenant Benny Cole. The second time we were in New Zealand, he was my commanding officer. He was tall and lanky, about forty years old and an expert marksman. He represented the United States in the world shooting championships and fired at a thousand yards. Actually, he was not just an expert but a “distinguished marksman,” which meant you were the best the Corps had. He had been on a train in Nicaragua that was attacked by bandits, and he laid by a wheel, killed twenty or thirty of them and saved the train. He was not only the best Marine I ever knew, he was the best man. I named my boy after him.
The first thing he did was to announce we were out of shape from being aboard ship too long and take us on a “little hike” through the mountains. Carrying packs and full combat gear, we walked up hills, down hills and through those woods till we were ready to drop. He’d kid us about being younger than him and keep going. First thing, he assembled the men and told us what he expected. He said he would ask a lot but wouldn’t ask anything he wouldn’t do himself. He said if anybody didn’t like him as an officer or thought they could whip him, he’d go away from camp with them and fight it out.
“I want your full cooperation afterwards, or you can put in for a transfer and I’ll try to get it for you,” he said. “If you want to stay, it won’t be held against you.”
Not long afterward, a guy decided to try him. They went off the next morning before reveille. When they came back, the guy’s face looked like hamburger meat. He told us about it. “He laughed and talked all the time. I never could even lay a hand on him for those long arms. He’d knock me down and keep on laughing and talking.”
Lieutenant Cole had put in for the First Marine Raider Battalion and got his assignment while we were in New Zealand. He was on one of those islands when a Japanese machine gun nest riddled him. They said his men shot the Japs to pieces and cried like little boys. I cried, too, when I heard about it. I meant to go see his wife when I got to California—she lived in Los Angeles—but never did.
We had some things to get used to with New Zealand girls. The first one I went with turned around at the door and said, “Ta, ta, see you in a fortnight!”
I didn’t have any idea what she meant. An old boy named Dykes and I met a couple of them, I introduced us, and they started giggling. We felt kind of insulted until we found out they call a latrine a dike. I still don’t think Dykes liked it much. Some black soldiers were there, and they would tell those girls they were night fighters. Most New Zealanders had never seen a Negro before, and the girls went out with them. Some of the guys got agitated, but I have never had any hostility toward black people and figured it was none of my concern.
We spent nearly as much time aboard ship as anywhere else. There was nothing to do except play cards or talk. The swabbies took care of the ship. We had fresh water for drinking but had to take our showers in salt water. Everyone called me “Tex.” We were supposed to work on our weapons and keep them spic and span, but it took discipline to make yourself unless an invasion was coming up. It was real hard for me because I was issued a Reising Gun, a forty-five-caliber fully automatic weapon made by the Daisy Air Rifle Co. Its parts were stamped instead of milled, and it had a tendency to jam that was aggravating to say the least. I made a leather strap and fixed it to the slide so I could clear it without stopping to look. The main thing I hated was that it wouldn’t shoot straight. It put out a lot of slugs, but I had grown up shooting a single-shot twenty-two and was used to hitting what I aimed at. Because I hated it so much, I let it go without cleaning for weeks, and that ocean air fouled it up in a hurry. I looked down the barrel and saw it was all rusted up, so one night I carried it up on deck in my long coat and dropped it off the stern. I lied and told them it was lost. They issued me an M-1. I could have been court-martialed for throwing that weapon away, but I couldn’t carry it into combat because I didn’t have any confidence in it.
Some of us kept halfway in shape by boxing a little bit. The best boxer on my ship was LeMoine Barque, a Golden Gloves light heavyweight champion from Oklahoma. He weighed a hundred and ninety or ninety-five pounds and was about six feet tall. LeMoine and I were fairly good friends, and I sparred with him now and then. He said I had a good punch, but of course I never really teed off on him. He didn’t have many matches because he was a professional boxer and too advanced. He murdered everybody he did fight. He could knock your head off with either hand, and he could keep you from hitting him at all if he wanted to.
I was a private first class. There was a first sergeant I didn’t like, and he didn’t like me. It was one of those things where two men hate each other at first sight. The non-coms made the matches every week. This sergeant came through one Friday with his clipboard with the matches on it and kept mine for last. He smiled and said, “Byrd, you fight Barque.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Yeah, let’s find out how tough you are.”
“I’m not supposed to be able to stay with him.” I started getting mad. “But I will fight you.”
“No, you’ll fight Barque tomorrow or you’ll go on report. You signed up to fight. You fight who we say.”
When he left, I went to the lieutenant and told him it was ridiculous to have me fighting LeMoine Barque. Then I told him I challenged the sergeant to fight me.
“Did you challenge him in front of the men?” the lieutenant said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, go on and fight Barque, but don’t bear down on him. He probably won’t hurt you too bad. He knows you’re no match. Fight him, and Sergeant Alexander will be in the ring with you next week.”
Barque told me to put on a good show, and neither one of us would go for the kill. He said, “Tex, there ain’t no point in us trying to hurt each other. Let’s make it kind of an exhibition match.”
Our bout was eight rounds. He never tried to knock me out, and he had shots at some good licks that he passed up or aimed high on. I body punched him when we got close and popped him hard, which I knew he wouldn’t mind because he had a midriff like a metal plate. I hit him high on the head a few times. He busted my mouth a little and blacked my right eye with jabs but never went for heart punches or big knockout licks to the jaw. He could have knocked me out. No man stands up to seven or eight consecutive licks to the jaw and temple from a real hard puncher. We waltzed around and belted each other pretty good every now and then till the fight was over. I think he was even letting me hit him to make me look good. He was a bigger man than he had to be, and I doubt if anybody knew but us.
There is an art to boxing on a ship. The difference between that and fighting on dry land is that the ship rolls. I was accustomed to it, but the sergeant was not. It was just like the lieutenant said. The sergeant hadn’t said anything to me all week, so I assumed he had been ordered to fight me. Man, was I looking forward to it, and sure enough, he was in that ring the next Saturday. He knew he didn’t have a chance, but I doubt if he expected what he got. He was a little shorter than me and some heavier, maybe thirty-five years old. We fought the first round. He was only trying to get through it without looking too bad. In the second round, he came at me when the ship rolled to my side. I pushed him off as the ship rolled as far as it was going to and barely started back. He stopped in the middle of the ring and made the mistake of trying to come back as I stepped in with the roll of the ship, taking a quicker step than I had used yet to move in range and catching him flush on the chin. He went down like a pole-axed bull. I broke his jaw in about three places and knocked down the middle two knuckles on my right hand. I had every bad detail there was after that, but I had the satisfaction of seeing him eat soup through a straw for six weeks.
There are a hundred different levels of boxing skill. Get one step too high and you may get killed. Barque was the best fighter I ever knew personally. He turned professional after the war, though, they brought him along too fast, and he died in the ring. I suppose he could have had a weak blood ves
sel in his head or something, but I suspect it was a case of getting that one step too high. You could take a big old boy strong as a bull, looking like he could fight a bear with a short stick, and a pro boxer or even one just pretty good within twenty pounds of his weight would beat him unmercifully. He would be helpless.
A Marine feels helpless at times. There was a time I got beriberi and lost forty pounds. You also feel that way sometimes when you get up in the morning. Your legs feel weak, your eyes hurt or your arms feel soft. You have to fight that feeling. Although I wasn’t saying it to myself anymore, I think my old habit of telling myself I was a freight train helped me be bullheaded enough to survive. What it came down to was that I wasn’t going to let some Jap kill me if I could help it, and I wasn’t going to kill myself by goofing off or letting down in combat. Maybe I got the luck I needed because I didn’t need much.
I didn’t go to be a hero and wasn’t. Hero means “dead man”,” you know. What I did was go on living so I could come home. There have been times through the years when I thought I would’ve been better off to go out like Lieutenant Benny Cole. That can be more attractive than you think. The satisfaction I get from it now is having had a time when I willed myself to come through something bad, worse than you can imagine, and made it.
After two and a half years, I finally got sent home. I was stationed in Corpus Christi, Texas, for a while and then in Oceanside, California. They were getting ready to send me and a bunch of others back when we dropped the A-bomb on Japan and ended the war. It was terrible to kill civilians, but there is no telling how many Americans would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. It would have been just as bad, I think, as what we did with the A-bomb. I also doubt if I would have come back a second time.
My nerves were nearly shot, but the time we spent on Guam after we secured it helped. One of the natives was a middle-aged man by the name of Jimmy Teroz. All he wanted was a pair of shoes and a safety razor, and for those he brought me fresh eggs, which I hadn’t had since I left the States, and treated me like an island king. Jimmy told me his dad was killed by the Japanese. Jimmy and some other Guamanians hid out and killed Japs with machetes. They called guards away from camp and popped up and hit them. He told me they sometimes lined up heads at the camp perimeters so the other Japanese would see them the next morning. The Guamanians looked on us as saviors because they never would have gotten rid of the Imperial Army by themselves. When I was leaving, Jimmy ran up on the dock with tears in his eyes and hugged me. When we were in New Zealand, a Maori ran up and kissed me, and I knocked him down because I didn’t understand that was just their way of doing things.
When I came back, they put me in the Shore Patrol. They must have thought I’d be good because of my size and because I had made a good showing in the islands. It took less than a week to decide I wanted out. It’s one thing to whip a man in a fight. But beating a man who can’t defend himself because he fought you earlier or putting your knee in his back and pulling his arms up till they pop out of the sockets is not my style. I went to the commanding officer and told him I didn’t sign up to whip other Marines.
A night I clearly remember was spent beside a building at the docks in San Francisco. An Army boy from Clovis, N.M., that I had known in high school, Felton Gifford, saw me and a couple of friends of mine at a bar and called my name. I didn’t recognize him for a minute because he had been a prisoner of war of the Germans. He was thin and looked ten years older than he was. We got some bottles and started walking around town and ended up by the water, which I couldn’t get away from, evidently. We sat down in an alley. It was summertime, warm and a little foggy. We stayed there all night. It was one of the few times in my life that I talked until everything had been said in the right way and at the right times. We talked and drank and were perfectly at ease when the sun came up. Mainly, we exchanged stories about what the Japanese and Germans did to their prisoners. Gifford only had three or four fingers because the Germans hung him up by them on wires one at a time on each hand till they pulled off. I told him about the Japanese filling men up with water hoses and having their biggest, fattest man take a flying jump on the prisoner’s belly. They said water came out of every hole in his body. I wouldn’t know how to analyze it, but it was peaceful to sit there and go over those and other things about the war.
I got home to Victory on furlough in January 1945. Papa let me use the car this time. I was up to two hundred-twenty pounds and pretty hard, but my family treated me like they always had. They were glad to see me. Did you ever go back to the place where you used to live and realize it was a lot different than you thought? Victory was smaller. After everything I had seen, it was even strange. Like the First Baptist Church being fairly small when I remembered it as big. And not being real far, less than a mile, from the house to the school when I remembered it as a long way. The people weren’t much older, but it was like I had been away a long time.
Old Coach Rudd was in the Army and gone. I went to school and saw some of my teachers. The school seemed little, too. I could have had a date with one of my old girlfriends or somebody that night, but I got a bottle instead and went riding around in Terkel, which is a bigger town seven miles from Victory, and through the country. I could have taken my twenty-two and killed some rabbits but didn’t feel like shooting. I got drunk and ended up back in town at the football field. I walked around for a while and finally sat down against a goal post. Then I got a surprise. I knew I wasn’t hearing it on the field. I was hearing it in my head, that high, clear voice, “Marine, you die!” I wasn’t shook up. I thought maybe he was telling me I still had to eventually despite his attempts to make it happen sooner. All it really meant was I remembered things. I sat under the crossbar with my little buddy in my head or under the stands or somewhere until we were both drunk and didn’t want to fight anymore. I laid over on the grass in my dress blues and went to sleep. Fortunately, the next day was a Saturday. School was out. Nobody saw me, I don’t think so. I told Papa I had sat up all night talking to friends.
I had wanted to get home on furlough for years, and then I counted the days till I had to report in Corpus Christi. I couldn’t stand to sit there in that one little place. I suppose I couldn’t be still if I wasn’t surrounded by water. The only thing I enjoyed on furlough was working some with Papa. He wanted me to work more, but I said I was tired and only went with him three or four times in a month. He had aged some but was still big and strong. His bald spot on the back of his head was a little bigger, and he had more gray in his hair and deeper wrinkles. He still didn’t like me to hum when I cranked the bellows on the forge.
I saw Noona and Rayno, who had tried to enlist in the Army but failed his physical because of his train wreck. They had two boys and a girl, Herbert, Joe Don and Raynona. Their last name was Farquhar. Johnette had married a fellow named Farrell Fraley and was living with him and their two kids, a boy named Rusty and a girl named Rina, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hilbert and Gilbert—I don’t know why Gilbert never came first—were still in the Navy together on a cruiser and had been home on furlough every year. I wrote them that if I had been smart I would have been a swabbie instead of a Marine. They weren’t bad guys. When I was on Guadalcanal, I caught a ride fifteen miles to Tulagi one day and saw them.
I went to Lodge Pole to see Annabelle. Did you ever talk to somebody at their grave when you were by yourself? I think it must be fairly common because it seemed natural when I would go see Annabelle. Not that I thought she could hear me. I told her I made it back just like I said.
“I might be better off in the ground,” I said, “but I figured I’d get there pretty soon anyway without letting anybody get me.”
I didn’t get anything from her side, of course. I sat there while it got dark and listened as the wind died down and let me hear the birds and things. I sat for a long time and laid down with my hands behind my head on the grass beside the grave before driving through Lodge Pole toward home.
Me and a ta
ll girl from Central Texas, Adrianne Dawson, met in Corpus Christi, where I cut quite a figure in my flat-brimmed campaign hat and on my motorcycle as a messenger. Adrianne had worked in Canada and knew all about the Marine Corps because she was secretary to the Naval base commander. We started seeing each other every day. When I was assigned to Camp Pendleton at Oceanside, I got her to come to California with me. We married in December 1945. I walked through a rainstorm to get the ring, and a justice of the peace married us in his living room.
I was working as a blacksmith again. They had me doing heavy metal work and other things in the Camp Pendleton shop. I was up for discharge in December, and they tried their damnedest to get me to re-enlist. When I wouldn’t, they held me for an extra month on the grounds that I was indispensable. They had always told us we were expendable, but they changed tunes when it came time to get out. I raised Cain and was finally discharged in January. I’m proud of my military service, and it was a privilege to know men like LeMoine Barque and Lieutenant Benny Cole. But I can’t say I liked the Marine Corps because all they taught us was to hate and kill.
The Byrds of Victory Page 3