Islands of the Damned

by R. V. Burgin

  Everyone scrambled for cover. A shell crashed into the scrub just ahead of us.

  I shouted, “Secure the mortars!” and took off toward the tanks, dodging from tree to tree and waving my arms. “Knock it off! Knock it off! You’re gonna kill the whole damn bunch!”

  Somehow over the racket I caught someone’s attention and the firing died away.

  In all the panic and confusion after the Seventh Marines had started firing at us, I did something that I’m not particularly proud of. Or I came very close to doing it.

  One particular lieutenant had been making our lives miserable ever since we were on New Britain. Not that he was strict—he was worse. He was two-faced. He’d lie and cover up. He’d order us to do something, then when someone higher up came down on him, he’d come down on us for doing what he’d told us to do in the first place. When he was needed, he could never be found. He had a way of disappearing when things got nasty. I’d already had one set-to with him that morning over a mortar emplacement.

  When the Seventh Marines opened fire, I saw him do something no Marine should ever do: He turned and flat out ran. That yellow son of a bitch, I thought, running like that. I brought my M1 rifle up and got him in my sights. My finger was on the trigger. He vanished behind a log.

  That yellow bastard, I thought. But I didn’t shoot. Am I proud? Not particularly. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t shoot him. It’s a good thing I didn’t.

  * * *

  It got dark pretty quickly. We still had no idea where I Company or L Company were situated, nor where we were supposed to be. Back at our battalion command post, behind the front lines, nobody knew where any of us were.

  Sometime after the tank battle, a Jap mortar round had landed squarely on the post, spraying our commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Austin Shofner, with shrapnel and taking off the head of his communications officer, Captain R. F. Kehoe, Jr.

  Shofner’s wounds were serious enough to force his evacuation to a hospital ship. In the confusion word spread that he had been killed. He was almost a legend to us. He had been fighting on Corregidor when they surrendered to the Japs. They took him prisoner and he survived the Bataan Death March. After almost a year in a prison camp he organized a successful escape party and came back to the Marines to fight again.

  Now, at the end of the first day of the invasion, Third Battalion’s commanding officer lay wounded and out of commission. Our executive officer and communications officer were both dead. There was no longer any effective command. And we were scattered along a thin line through scrub jungle, out of touch with everyone else and surrounded by the enemy.

  Our canteens were almost empty. We’d used up most of our ammunition. It was impossible to dig shelters, so we piled up rocks and logs and set up a perimeter defense. Machine guns rattled in the darkness and we fired off a few mortar rounds, more to make us feel good than to make the Japs feel bad.

  From time to time a Navy destroyer lying offshore would fire a star shell. It would burst over our heads and come floating down on its parachute, shedding a yellowish glow over everything.

  But it cast no light for us. Our luck had run out.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Marine’s Story

  They talk about the Greatest Generation. I’ve always thought the greatest generation that ever lived were my parents.

  My dad, Joseph Harmon Burgin, was about six feet two. My mother, Beulah May Perry Burgin, was about five feet two. He could hold his arm straight out and she could walk under it and never touch it. I guess I took after my dad, but not quite as tall. I was only six one.

  I was born in 1922, the third of seven children. I had two older sisters, three younger brothers and one younger sister.

  My father had three younger brothers: George Burgin was the second child, and the twins, Remus and Romus. That’s where I got my name, that and a four-year-old kid in our neighborhood named Valton Woods. Mother had never heard the name Valton, but she liked it. So, Romus Valton Burgin. There’s not that many of us out there, I’ll tell you.

  All of us Burgin boys were in the military. Edgar and Bobby, my two youngest brothers, served in the Korean War. My other brother, Joseph Delton Burgin—we called him J.D.—was killed by artillery in Alsace-Lorraine on February 17, 1945. He had just got there.

  I chose the Marines under circumstances I’ll tell you about later.

  In 1955 my mother and dad’s farmhouse burned down, and all of our records, all my war souvenirs and everything else went with it. Nothing saved except a cedar chest and maybe a bed or two.

  The farm was about eight miles from Jewett, Texas, which is seven miles southwest of Buffalo, almost halfway between Dallas and Houston. We were about three miles off Highway 79, running from Bryan to Palestine. My dad owned sixty acres, and then he had what we called “free range.” I don’t know who owned it. Most of it was timber-land where we’d turn the cows out in the wintertime. In the summer and spring we’d keep them penned up in our pasture.

  For the first six years, I went to a two-room schoolhouse, Friendship School. So did my two older sisters and one younger brother. When I finished the sixth grade in 1935, they consolidated the schools. After that we rode the bus into Jewett.

  We had horses and mules, cultivators, middlebuster turning plows, planters. But no tractor. My father raised corn, cotton, sugarcane, and sorghum and we made sorghum syrup and ribbon cane syrup. But the cotton was his money crop. That was about the only money crop. I picked cotton from the time I was about three or four years old. My parents would give us a little sack, and we’d go along the rows and pick cotton. The one thing my mother and dad never did, they never did hold us out of school to help on the farm. But we would come in from school and change clothes and hit the field until dark. We helped Saturdays, Sundays and whenever we needed to get something done.

  When we “lay by,” as my dad called it—plowed for the last time, everything kind of waiting on the harvest—then he would take us down to Birch Creek and we’d fish. There wasn’t anything in there but just little perch and little catfish. That was all it was. But it was a good outing.

  My mother cooked three meals a day for nine people, and she worked in the field. The boys in the family, we did the housework just the same as the girls. My mother felt that if the girls can work in the fields, then the boys can do housework. So we all washed dishes, ironed, helped do washing—the whole nine yards.

  She was a chef. She could make pies, cakes, soups. My wife, Florence, learned to make her soup with vegetables straight out of the garden. We still call it the Burgin Soup. Mother baked bread and made corn bread and biscuits. And we had milk cows, so we had milk to drink, and fresh butter.

  She cooked everything on a woodstove. She washed in an old iron wash pot with a scrub board. She made most of our clothes. And she made her own soap, you know, make a pot of lye soap. She’d put up pickles and tomatoes in quart jars. She had a canner with a crank. You’d put a can in and fill it, and the canner would seal that rascal right up. We’d butcher a cow or a hog and she would can the meat.

  We didn’t have an icebox. We had a food cabinet with screen wires on the front and back so the air could circulate. We had a smokehouse built of logs with wooden shingles. My dad would go down on a little branch and find a tree that was pretty straight with no knots in it. He’d cut that down with an ax and crosscut saw, and saw it up in the lengths that he wanted for shingles. He had another tool with a big handle and a kind of ax-type blade on it, real sharp. He’d split the shingles to the thickness that he wanted. Then he would shingle that smokehouse that he had built out of logs.

  Whenever we butchered one of the hogs and hung the hams and shoulders and the side that you make bacon out of in the smokehouse, it was my job before I started school to keep that fire burning. But not blazing, just let the smoke out of the hickory wood. I did that practically all day long. Dad would sugar-cure the meat, and it was absolutely delicious. No doubt about it.

  We didn�
��t have electricity and we didn’t have indoor plumbing. When I was thirteen or fourteen we dug a well in our yard. I did most of the digging. My dad would pull the dirt up with a rope and a pulley in a deal that had a steel rim about two inches wide, about twelve to fourteen inches in diameter. A gunnysack made the bucket part. That way if it broke it wouldn’t drop a metal bucket on me. At the end of the day he’d pull me out with the pulley.

  We went down about thirty-two feet, and it was great water. The only trouble, if we had a drought it went dry. So we would have to haul the water from one of the branches and my mother would have to go down to the branch to wash her clothes. I would imagine it was pretty close to three-quarters of a mile.

  We still didn’t have electricity when I joined the Marine Corps in 1942. Rural Electrification finally came in sometime between 1942 and when I got home from the Marines in 1945.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to miss a day of school. It wasn’t because I wanted to learn. I just barely passed, I made Cs. But I liked being around other folks and playing whatever they were playing at the time. I didn’t want to miss anything. I tell everybody that during my high school days I majored in PE and athletics. That’s almost true. It didn’t make any difference whether it was basketball, football, volleyball, track, or field. I was into it. I ran the low hurdles, high hurdles, pole vault, 440s. I was never a distance runner. I never ran a mile at one time in my whole life, even when I was in the Marines. But I was pretty speedy. I could run a fifty or a hundred in real good time.

  I guess I liked football best. When I was a senior the team voted me captain. I still have the jacket with the star on it. I was always proud of that because the men voted me and not the coach. We weren’t a .500 team, I’ll tell you that. We won a few games, but not that many. But I enjoyed it. I would play basketball at night, but the bus wouldn’t stay for the basketball players. After the ball game was over I’d walk eight miles home.

  During Depression days there wasn’t any money. There was a Works Progress Administration program in the schools, and they gave me the job of cleaning the gym. It paid three dollars a month. In the Depression a silver dollar—and silver dollars were plentiful in those days—looked as big as a wagon wheel. It was really something to get a silver dollar. Several dollars, man, that was something. That would carry me for a long time.

  In the spring I picked berries and took them to town to sell for a dime a pail. Wild blackberries and dewberries. If we needed notebook paper or school supplies, mother would give me one or two dozen eggs and I’d take them in and sell them to merchants for a dime a dozen. You could take a dime and buy pretty much what you needed.

  When I was about sixteen, Ed Hull, a neighbor, hired me for a couple or three days in the spring to chop cotton. There’s a lot of grass and weeds that the plow won’t get, and so you come in and chop cotton, that’s what they call it. Thin down the stalks, cut the weeds out of it. I would be out there at the break of day and stay until it was dark. He fed me lunch and paid me seventy-five cents for the day. The next year he raised me to a dollar a day.

  But farming wasn’t one of my things. I’d seen my dad work hard only to see the crop fail. I thought, There’s a better way to make a living than on the farm. I graduated from high school in May 1941, and as quick as I graduated I went to Dallas. My sister Ila was there and I lived with her until I found a place of my own.

  My first job was in a warehouse for thirty cents an hour. I’ll never forget that summer. We were unloading boxcars of candy bars. There were Snickers, Milky Ways, Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, all in eighty-pound boxes stacked chest high. The temperature was 110 to 115 a lot of days. The candy didn’t melt, but we melted. We’d pull those boxes out of there and put them on a two-wheeler and roll them out and stack them in the warehouse—eighty pounds of those rascals. They were heavy. But I was young and I had played football, so it didn’t bother me.

  December 7, 1941, was a Sunday. I was at home listening to the radio when the news came over that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor. I don’t think I really grasped the impact of what was happening. I knew a war had been brewing. Lots of folks had been gathering up iron and steel and selling it for about half a cent a pound. We knew where it was going—to Japan to make battleships. Even in high school we had joked about those guys shooting that steel back at us. But I didn’t realize how Pearl Harbor would change the world, or how long we would be in it. Or how long I would be in it.

  I went on working in the warehouse, but by February 1942 I was looking for another job. I read in the paper that a stationery company out of Columbus, Ohio, wanted a salesman to travel the country. I thought I’d go down and interview just to see what would happen. They hired me and put me on a sales crew.

  We were driving brand-new 1941 Studebakers. The company provided two of them. Claude Malone was driving one of them. He was from Tennessee and I was with his crew. Then Bill Duebner, the owner, and his wife and another crew.

  I loved it because I was getting an education that this old farm boy never knew. I had been to Houston and to San Antonio a few times and I’d been to Dallas half a dozen times. That was about as far off as I’d ever gone. I thought working for that stationery company was worth about two years of college, really, just being out in the world.

  We started up through Oklahoma, went through Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington State, Oregon, California. Then we came back through.

  One day in the spring of 1942 we had just left Jamestown, North Dakota, heading for Bismarck. We came to a roadside diner and decided to stop for dinner. We were in the back end of the place washing up when two guys came in with guns drawn, one of them the local sheriff. They were looking for “those four guys that was in the Studebaker out there.”

  Well, that was us. The sheriff, who had a gimpy leg, deputized somebody right there on the scene, and they drove us in two cars back to Jamestown. Then they locked us up for the night.

  I’d been in a jail. When I was in sixth grade, going to that two-room schoolhouse near Jewett, our teacher took a carload of us boys to visit the state penitentiary in Huntsville. I can still hear, walking those aisles with the cells on either side of you, those guys hollering at us, the guards clanging those big steel doors.

  On the way home, the teacher said to us, “Boys, you don’t ever want to be in there. You don’t ever want to go to jail.”

  And now here I was in jail. For what, I couldn’t even begin to imagine. We didn’t get anything to eat that night. The next morning they brought us cold oatmeal.

  We’d ask the jailer whenever he came by, “What’s going on? What’s happening here?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  About four o’clock that afternoon they came and let us out. The sheriff ’s wife had made fresh rolls for us, with butter.

  We sat there eating them, gratefully.

  “Well,” I finally said, “this is the first time I’ve been in jail. Just for the record, what the hell were we in for?”

  “First off,” the sheriff said, “you was driving a brand-new Studebaker. And we thought that might not be right. So we were checking for a stolen car.

  “And then we thought, that car is registered in Ohio, and you’re up here in North Dakota. So we thought you might be draft dodgers. So it just took time to get all the information that you was okay.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  I was twenty, not yet of draft age. But the war had already thrown its shadow across my path.

  * * *

  My story is the story of hundreds of thousands who fought for our country in World War II. In a way, there’s nothing special about it. In another way, everyone who fights for his or her country has a special story to tell.

  In 2004 and 2006 I was asked to present the Old Breed Award for distinguished service in the First Marine Division. At these gatherings there are always five or six World War II vets. The young guys, young Marine
s, always gather around to hear our stories.

  One of them, a mortarman, asked me, “They don’t shoot mortarmen, do they? I mean, you’re always behind the lines.”

  “Let me tell you something,” I said. “They don’t discriminate. They shoot anybody. I lost several men to rifle fire. A firefight is a firefight, whether it’s in the South Pacific or Korea or Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan.”

  But I understood what he meant.

  I have a photograph on my wall at home. There we all are, what’s left of K Company, on the beach at Peleliu. We’re waiting for the ship to take us somewhere, anywhere away from the battle. That young mortarman could be any one of us.

  I look at that picture today and I think, I don’t remember I was ever that young.

  CHAPTER 2

  Mortarman

  I’d made up my mind that when the draft caught up with me I was going into the Air Force or the Navy or the Marines. Anything but the Army.

  I was a year out of high school and the war was on. I’d been on the road with the crew, selling personalized engraved stationery from the company based in Columbus, Ohio. Everywhere we went I saw the Marine recruiting posters in front of post offices. They didn’t show them in their greens. They always had them in dress blues. I thought the Marines looked like a sharp outfit. Disciplined. Elite. I was from a farm. I was used to hard work and discipline. The Army seemed sloppy to me.

  Sometimes folks on the road would ask why I wasn’t in the service. The truth was, I wasn’t of draft age. But that was complicated to explain.

  So I told them, “I’m going to join the Marines next Friday.” It was always next Friday, no matter what day or week it was. And always the Marines.