Battle Field Angels (17 page)

Military medical personnel were armed with a valuable new weapon. Joe Marquez and other corpsmen and medics on the front line were issued pairs of small tins filled with the plasma powder and distilled water for reconstituting it. But plasma had limitations: it couldn’t fully replace all the components of blood a man lost when seriously wounded.

Long before the sun rose at Peleliu on D-Day, September 15, 1944, reveille sounded on the pitching transports. Marquez gathered his gear and balanced it on his back for the climb down the cargo net into a Higgins boat. He had two large medical kits, one attached to each hip. He carried a .45 pistol and two clips of ammo along with a backpack and trenching shovel. As the temperature soared past ninety degrees within two hours of sunrise, the boat’s exhaust seemed to settle inside the boat. A thickening blue haze made men woozy as they waited for word to head for shore.

As soon as his amtrac touched sand on the southwestern end of Peleliu, someone yelled “Everybody out!” Marquez rolled out to help another corpsman unload a box of plasma. Within seconds, a mortar shell detonated only yards away. Knocked off balance with a foot injury, Marquez heard “Corpsman!” over the noise of constant explosions. Head down, he limped toward an injured Marine lying on the sand bleeding from the ears, nose, and mouth. Marquez’s first casualty neared death, and he didn’t know what to do.

“There’s nothing you can do for him,” said a veteran corpsman who had come up behind Marquez. “Move on!”
⁴⁷
Marquez returned to his unit without looking back at his first patient. He never saw him again.

As Marquez helped establish a battalion aid station, the Japanese pounded the beach with well-hidden artillery. Again, Marquez heard a weak call, “Corpsman!” He ran to a Marine who had lost his right arm and left leg to a mortar shell. Blood drained from his body.

“Don’t do any more for him,” the battalion doctor told Marquez. “Just ease his pain.” Marquez gave him morphine, hoping it would numb both stumps. In a thick Southern drawl, the Marine asked Marquez to dig a photo out of his wallet and show it to him. Two minutes later, he died, looking at the photo of the infant son he never held in his arms.

A cascade of enemy fire greeted the landing force as it came ashore. One Marine stopped to stare at a buddy whose stomach had been blown away. Only a sliver of skin on either side connected the torso with the man’s hips. Not far away, a Marine hunkered behind a jeep, trying to smoke a cigarette even though his upper lip had been torn from his face. Nearby, another jeep disappeared in an explosion. A Marine wounded in the blast watched a corpsman stagger toward him, missing an arm that had been blown away. The corpsman apologized to the Marine, saying he didn’t think he could help him. The corpsman then collapsed dead on the sand, as one artillery explosion blurred into the next.

Based on what they had learned from defending islands against earlier American invasions, the Japanese had designed deadly crossfire alleys and pinpoint artillery barrages. The eleven thousand Japanese on Peleliu, under the command of Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, also had adopted a new defensive tactic called
fukakku
. Instead of attacking and fighting to the death at water’s edge, Colonel Nakagawa had deployed his troops on the beach’s flanks in honeycombed caves and behind natural defenses. The days of wasted defensive Japanese banzai charges had passed. Meanwhile, the Americans had stuck with the same tactic of nearly identical beach assaults that relied on massive pre-invasion bombardment, which usually proved ineffective.

By the end of D-Day, the assault had bogged down. Marines hunkered down for the night, speculating on a Japanese counterattack under the cover of darkness. They stuck their Ka-bar knives into the sand within arm’s length, just in case. Veterans from previous campaigns told first-timers not to take their boots off. If the enemy attacked, no one wanted to fight on ground coral in socks.

The next morning, as Marquez gathered his gear at the battalion command post for the hike inland to the front line, a Japanese machine gunner opened fire. Bullets fractured the air as Marines fell on the coral gravel.

“Corpsman!”

“Corpsman!”

“Goddamn it, CORPSMAN!!”

Marquez scrambled to his knees, ready to sprint out to a fallen Marine.

“Don’t go,” said Bob Lovell, Marquez’s tentmate on Pavuvu. “You’re with battalion aid. Let the company corpsman handle it.”

“I can’t,” Marquez told Lovell. “I just can’t do that. I have a job to do.”
⁴⁸

Marquez skittered out to the wounded man under friendly covering fire and helped him back to the battalion aid station. Adrenaline, horror, and gore blurred his world just before he threw up. It would be the only time nausea overcame the corpsman. Meanwhile, his patient was transported out to a fully equipped hospital ship offshore.

As the battle on Peleliu stretched into weeks, Marquez’s hands and face blackened with oil, grease, and an oily mosquito repellent called “skat.” His uniform had paled from the coral dust that covered every fiber that hadn’t frayed from crawling on his elbows and knees toward the wounded.

Coral made life miserable for Marquez and his fellow troops. A soldier couldn’t dig a hole in rock-hard coral to do his business. Marines gagged at the smell of human excrement. When hunkered down in a foxhole for the night, a soldier was forced to use an empty can, which he simply threw over the side. Burying his waste wasn’t worth getting shot.

The stench of death was everywhere. In sweltering humidity, a body bloated and putrefied within hours. As American and Japanese fatalities reached into the thousands, burial became impossible. Grotesque bodies slowly cooked on the coral sand, the smell grabbing at the back of a man’s throat.

Blowflies, shiny green creatures, feasted on rotting food, human excrement, and corpses. They grew so bloated they couldn’t fly. Marquez and others shook their food to rid it of the flies, taking care that they didn’t fall into the drinking water that had been brought in five-gallon cans on a two-wheel trailer. Rust turned the lukewarm water brown.

By early October, enemy resistance remained only in the Umurbrogol Range of coral ridges, a tiny area that measured about four hundred yards wide and nine hundred yards long. The Umurbrogols caught the Marines by surprise. Somehow intelligence officers had concluded that Peleliu was flat. But the Japanese had blasted a honeycomb of connected caves inside sharp ridges that forced naked assaults by handsful of Marines on one cave at a time. Nicknamed the “Pocket,” the area controlled by the Japanese was riddled with steep coral ridges. American attack aircraft taking off from Peleliu’s airfield didn’t have time to retract landing gear before they were over their Umurbrogol bombing targets.

On October 13, Marquez checked his gear carefully before he headed up into the Umurbrogols. He joined a battered unit of thirty men trudging up the coral spine to an elevated covering position, as other units directly assaulted nearby caves. Just before dusk, Marquez encountered a unit that had suffered so many casualties that a first class private had taken charge. Marquez’s unit stopped on a barren ridge for the night. In a space a little larger than an average living room, the Marines bedded down, as a handful of sentries stood watch. The coral was so hard that it took hours to chip out a small depression for a man’s hips so he could lie on the ground more comfortably.

It must have taken the Japanese infiltrator hours to shimmy up the coral ridge before he got within range of Marquez’s exhausted unit. At 0300 hours, he lobbed a grenade into the group of men. It bounced and rolled to a stop on the coral. The dud failed to explode. Panicked, the infiltrator pulled another from his belt, armed it, and threw again. A blinding explosion knocked Marquez on his side and yanked his leg upward. Coughing in the dust, trying to regain his bearings, Marquez thought back to the Marine he had seen on the first day, the soldier missing a leg and an arm. At that instant, the corpsman didn’t know if he remained whole. He had neither the time nor the inclination to look.

“I’m hit! I’m hit!” a Marine yelled next to him. Marquez rolled over to him, his bloodied leg useless.

“I’m hit, too,” he whispered as he clamped a gritty hand over the young Marine’s mouth. “Now calm down. I’ll take care of you, but you gotta calm down.”
⁴⁹
A howling soldier became a target for the enemy at night. Silence gave the Americans a chance at surviving the attack.

Other men moaned in the darkness. The grenade had landed in their midst, spraying flying shrapnel and spinning chunks of razor-edged coral in every direction. Marquez couldn’t worry about how many Japanese might be within grenade-lobbing range. As he settled the first Marine, Marquez crawled across the coral to another wounded man. It was Ken Bluett, another corpsman. Shrapnel had shredded the side of his chest. Bluett needed plasma.

Plasma wasn’t the cure-all for shock that doctors had hoped it would be. In 1942, military doctors had been dismayed at how soldiers wounded in the North Africa invasion had died even after they had been given plasma. It didn’t always enable them to withstand anesthesia and surgery. Too many relapsed and died. Regardless, Army Surgeon General Norman Kirk believed whole blood in battle wasn’t necessary, that transporting it was impractical, and that plasma was what the wounded required most. But wounded American soldiers continued to die. By 1944, American military doctors concluded that plasma wasn’t enough to revive a badly injured soldier. Whole blood was critical to survival in battle. American doctors looked to their British colleagues who were using whole blood to treat shock and to promptly replace massive blood loss.

The Army had established an air transport program to deliver whole blood to the European theater. The Navy sought the same for the Far East, even though the war there was being fought more than seven thousand miles from home. On November 16, 1944, the first refrigerated shipment of one hundred sixty pints of perishable blood left San Francisco. Six days later when it arrived in Leyte—only three days before the end of Marquez’s four-month battle on Peleliu—there were no established medical blood teams to receive it. It sat on trucks in the tropical sun, uninsulated. Poor communication and coordination led to its spoilage.

Ultimately, the ability to collect, process, store, transport, and then utilize whole blood and plasma on the battlefield only minutes after being wounded saved thousands of soldiers, sailors, and Marines in World War II. It was one of the great military medical advancements in the war. Of nearly 600,000 Army soldiers wounded in battle, nearly 575,000 survived.

In four years, the American Red Cross collected 13 million units of blood and produced more than 10 million units of dried plasma. Marquez, like most corpsmen in battle, only had plasma at his disposal.

Marquez focused on getting Bluett the plasma he needed. It was so dark that Marquez botched the “stick” when he tried to get the reconstituted plasma into Bluett. His needle had missed Bluett’s vein. He crawled over to the company’s commanding officer, a man he knew only as “Meatball.”

“Sir, can we get a flare? I can’t see the men to treat them.”

“You’re in charge, doc,” said Meatball.
⁵⁰

Marquez radioed for a flare and under the greenish-white starburst he successfully inserted a needle into Bluett’s vein to get the plasma flowing. Ignoring the searing pain from his own damaged leg, Marquez pulled himself to another man, this one bleeding profusely. His hands sticky with the soldier’s blood, Marquez yanked a battle dressing package open.

“I’m a corpsman. Can I help you?” said a voice somewhere behind Marquez. Perhaps there was another unit in the area that had come up to provide support.

“Yeah. I’ve got a lot of wounded here. Go to it,” said Marquez, not bothering to turn away from his patient.
⁵¹
There were too many injured for niceties.

Marquez dragged himself from one wounded man to another for the next several hours, leaving a smeared bloody trail on the coral. He ignored his right foot, which was full of shrapnel and coral chunks. The quiet returned, broken only by the crunch of Marquez crawling from one casualty to the next.

As the sun rose to warm a cloudless sky, a string of Marines reached Marquez’s decimated unit high on the ridge. “You took care of all these men?” asked a corpsman who had arrived with the reinforcements.

“Not just me. Another corpsman showed up last night, and I put him to work,” Marquez replied.

“That’s impossible,” said the corpsman. “There are no other units in the area, no other corpsmen. I don’t know who you were talking to, but it wasn’t another corpsman.”
⁵²

Confusion spread across Marquez’s face. He clearly recalled hearing another corpsman offering help, but when he thought about it, he didn’t remember seeing the corpsman treating Marines later. Marquez turned to the unit’s lieutenant for orders on whom to evacuate off the ridge.

“You’re in charge, doc,” said Meatball.

“That’s all the stretchers we got,” said the corpsman, as twelve stretcher bearers gingerly snaked their way down the ridge with three injured men. Marquez had treated eight injured men through the night. His arm draped over a Marine’s shoulder for support and his lower leg wrapped in a bloodied bandage, Marquez walked off the ridge before collapsing at the battalion aid station. He never found the corpsman he thought had helped him through the predawn hours of hell.

Approximately 1,300 Marines died on Peleliu before it was finally secured after 73 days of fighting. More than 5,400 had been wounded. Their numbers paled against Japanese losses. An estimated 11,000 had been killed. Only 19 Japanese and 183 Korean laborers survived.

In 1945, Marquez was awarded the Navy Cross for his valor on Peleliu, but the Navy gave the corpsman little time to reflect on his award. He received orders to report aboard the USS
Mascoma
, a floating gas station that resupplied battle groups at sea.