Gone to Soldiers (67 page)

For what felt like hours they circled in dim choppy water. There was a wave ahead of them. They were the second wave, if they ever got going. The Japs were shelling heavily, so another round of bombardment and another run of the dive bombers off the carriers sent shock waves through the air.

In the dim light, they stared at the long low shore. A long pier and a shorter one stuck out. Coconut palms bent in the blast from the bombs. Most of them had already been broken. Murray could not see one intact building. It looked as if the Navy had done its job. As the amphtracs finally started in, however, it became clear plenty of Japs were still dug in, somewhere below that bomb- and shell-pocked surface.

The first trouble was that the tide was supposed to be high, but it wasn't. They couldn't float over the coral reef that stuck up like fangs. The amphtracs crept through the water and then crawled over the reefs, awkwardly lumbering under the increasing but still spotty fire from shore. Whatever the Navy had hit, there were intact emplacements gunning for them. As time passed, as the cumbersome amphtracs dawdled along awkwardly, the Japanese fire grew fierce, concentrated, accurate. Shells were landing in the water around them, close enough to soak them, close enough so that the lieutenant took a piece of coral in his cheek that bled like a gusher. With the shells bracketing them, they all figured the Japs could improve their aim and get the next one on them. In the little boat, the smell of shit was strong. Scared shitless was no empty phrase in battle. His stomach burned as if he had drunk acid. Why couldn't the damned amphtrac move faster?

This was his first landing under fire. He wished they were back in the pack that would come later in the boats, once they'd cleared the way. He figured being in the second wave, they'd get it bad.

A couple of destroyers were laying down a smoke screen but it was blowing away and smoke from shelling hung in the air instead. The lagoon was choppy, eighty-eights landing all around them. About half a mile out, the shore artillery opened up, and as they came farther in, they came under the machine guns. As they came closer yet, the amphtracs waddling like ducks in slow motion over the sharp angles and abrupt drops of the reef, everything began to hit around them including mortars. Ahead of them the first wave of amphtracs was going aground. Behind them came another wave. He couldn't make out anything in the smoke, the water exploding, coral hunks flying, and he wasn't about to stick his head up to see anyhow, but the shells rattled his bones.

The man between him and Jack had his head blown half off. He lay between them with his blood soaking into their boondockers, while someone wedged in just behind in the twenty-man boat was screaming in pain or terror, who could tell in the deafening noise and the smoke haze and the pounding of the guns? They were soaked from the seawater and soaked with blood too. The driver had been killed and his replacement was wounded.

As their amphtrac finally grounded, they were ordered out and went into the crotch-deep water. They headed for the pier that stuck out from the beach on coconut legs, not much shelter but all that he could see as he dove for it. Someone landed right behind him: Jack. They huddled, stealing glances toward shore, but the Japs were well protected. Now that they had landed, what in hell were they supposed to do? Harvey was clinging to the next post with Rinso, a corporal. The water all around them was riffled with the crisscross of machine-gun bullets.

Amphtracs were blowing up or grinding to a disabled halt on the reefs or in the shallows. Each wave was getting more concentrated fire. As he lay beside Jack in the slender protection of the coconut column, they saw that the marines in the Higgins boats were really catching it. The boats struck bottom on the coral, wedged there vulnerable to fire. The men had to clamber out, eight hundred yards from the beach in water up to their chins and go wading without cover into the increasing fire. Men kept dropping. As each boat wedged or foundered, men jumped out and were shot.

Maybe he was lucky to have been in the early wave, where at least they had been brought in most of the way to shore. If anything, the Japanese fire was hotter now. The air zinged with metal. Some boats landing out there on the reef were being wiped out to a man, whole boatloads killed within minutes. He wondered why they didn't all sit down, start weeping and refuse to move. He saw his bed in his mother's house vividly, the dark blue blanket, the bird's-eye maple headboard. He wanted to crawl into that bed, right now.

The shallows were a red clay color from blood. Things hit him in the water, nudging like fish, and he shoved them away furiously, a bled white ragged arm, a lower leg, a haunch. Right off the end of the pier an amphtrac went up in flames, probably hit in the fuel tank, and the men leaped into the sea with their clothes and hair burning. The hideous smell of roasting flesh and charred hair blew over him and Jack. The lieutenant and Sergeant Miller were yelling at them to start advancing.

“Come on,” Sergeant Miller yelled. “No use standing here and getting shot. Let's get ashore.” About a third of their men were down already. Harvey and Rinso were still huddled nearby, but another man who had taken shelter with them had been picked off. A shell would finish them all. Murray looked at Jack. Jack, whose face was still streaked with blood from the dying man in the amphtrac, shrugged at him. They flung themselves forward at the next column of coconut.

They had been supposed to be landed on the beach itself. They had been supposed to be landed at high tide, when the boats could pass over the coral easily. There had been supposed to be air bombardment from the Army. There had been supposed to be such heavy big gun pounding that scarcely a Jap was left alive. Instead here they were landing wave after wave of marines to be cut down in water too deep to run through, too shallow for the boats to cross the reefs. It was a stupid fucking massacre and he was going to die right where he was. Except he might as well die drying off on the beach as wading in the bloody water.

He was right behind the lieutenant when the looey got it in the chest and went down. The sun stood overhead like a crab on fire before they made it to the damned beach. It was hot. Oh, they'd been right about one thing: there was no jungle here. There wasn't anything except a rain of metal death. No jungle, no swamp, no trees, no houses, no hills, nothing except flat death coming at him from everyplace. Not a scrap of shade or shelter except for a four-foot seawall where sixty other terrified marines lay and where Murray hurled himself to join them, Jack right at his side. Murray turned back shouting to Harvey who waved back and ran toward them. Murray was still facing Harvey when the shell hit. He saw Harvey come apart like a busted bag of groceries. He stared. Then he turned to the wall. His bowels gave way but there was nothing left in him.

They were passing around what water they had. It tasted like paint. Some of the men were puking it back up, but he managed to keep it down. His mouth felt blistered with thirst. Something had cut his elbow. It hurt now, the wound inflamed by salt water. At first some guys always told you to wash out minor wounds with salt water, it would cleanse them, but after you'd been out here awhile, you knew better. A wound washed in seawater would get infected. The water was a soup of microorganisms, all of which seemed to like living in the blood. A coral cut could be particularly nasty, because coral could just take up residence in you.

For a moment he grinned, lying there against a four-foot wall pinned down by fire with the bodies of the dead washing up like a bad fish kill in a river. He was doomed. They were low on ammunition already. The Japs were dug into concealed and buried emplacements and pillboxes. His group had little water, and he was lying there worrying about would his elbow get infected. He'd be luckier than Harvey if he left an elbow to be sent home in a body bag. It was just another grand fuck-up that some bunch of generals and admirals had thought up in a haze of ego stoking. When he looked out to sea, he tried to avoid the smashed carcass that was Harvey. The lieutenant bobbed facedown in the choppy water, his body gradually working its way to shore. Sergeant Miller lay groaning on the beach. Two men tried to pull him to the wall. Both fell dead across him.

The amphtracs that hadn't been hit on the way in were taking back wounded and returning for another trip. By early afternoon, there wasn't one left. They had all been wrecked. The tide was falling even farther now, ten hours after it had been supposed to come in. It had never really risen and now it was going out. The fourth wave had never landed. Nobody new was arriving. Murray whispered to Jack, “Looks like they're calling it off. Are they going to dump us here?”

“They dumped us here already. Shit, I suppose they're waiting for dark. Or would that be too smart? Do you suppose that was high tide? If it was, we're fucking screwed, because they'll never get the heavy stuff in.”

There was no way they could take those gun emplacements and dug-in pillboxes with rifles and a few grenades. It was a raw bad joke. They huddled there, the three men left from the twenty who had embarked in the amphtrac, Rinso who was a regular marine, Jack and Murray. The officers were dead. Sergeant Reardon had been taken back wounded and Sergeant Miller lay on the beach with his belly open.

Rinso was the one to take command, being a corporal, but Murray was damned if he was going to stand up and charge. Onward the Light Brigade. They could stuff it. As the shadows lengthened, they had more water because several men died of their wounds. In a couple of places surviving officers led charges through or over the seawall and were cut down.

Suddenly Rinso grunted. “They got a tank there, trying to go through. Let's go, lads.” He rose. Jack and Murray looked at each other and slowly, slowly keeping low went after him. At some point an amphtrac had made a hole in the seawall and then been blown up on the far side, offering some shelter. A Sherman tank that had managed to get ashore was going into the breach with a sergeant whipping a motley group of marines on after the tank. It was dusk now. Murray stumbled and fell over a half buried leg. Jack grabbed at him suddenly and pulled him down flat. As he lay on his face, on the other side of the seawall the tank was struck dead-on by a shell. The men who could make it scrambled back, but they could hear the crew screaming inside the burning tank. Jack and Murray crawled back to the foxhole they had dug. Rinso didn't come back. When it began to be dark, they ate some of their rations.

“I'm not hungry,” Murray said, “but I got the great-grandfather headache of the world.”

“Eat anyhow,” Jack urged, chewing methodically, staring up at the red-streaked sky. “Sometimes that helps a headache. Who knows when we'll get to eat again?”

They curled up together in their little foxhole behind the wall and in all the chaos and noise, they slept. Lying against Jack, Murray called up his old bedroom at home, his bed, his blanket, his blue flowered curtains. Jack was there with him, in the safe room of his childhood, not even the real room in the house where his parents now lived. He and Jack were in his old room in the country, the turkeys gobbling in their run outside.

In the middle of the night, they woke to machine-gun fire from the sea, the sea, damn it, raking the beaches. Some of the Jap marines had swum out to the wreckage of a maru that lay in the lagoon and to the blasted amphtracs that littered the shallows. Still the attack Murray and Jack expected never came. The air remained heavy and hot, thick with fumes from burning fuel.

The next day was hotter. The fucking tide finally rose and boats hit the beach. Tanks landed, flamethrowers, heavier guns, reinforcements, ammunition, water, rations. Wounded were taken off. They formed up and began crawling inland.

He was past exhaustion into the nightmare state when everything felt at once raw, vivid and numb. Jack and he had come upon the remains of their platoon, the guys who had landed if that's what you'd call it in adjacent amphtracs, minus the guys in the squad whose amphtrac had blown up in the shallows. They were commanded by the one surviving and functional sergeant, Zeeland, a grizzled tubby man who always seemed to know what to do. They lay in the scrub beside an airstrip firing at enemy positions as a tank knocked off the pillboxes one at a time. The fighting was fierce and casualties were high, but they were no longer pinned down on the beach. At least what they did made more sense than simply to stand and die.

“Poor bastard,” Murray said suddenly, thinking of Harvey and not even realizing he had spoken.

Jack nodded, understanding at once. “At least he went like that. Miller was dying for two hours.”

So? Dead was dead. Dead was the majority and didn't matter. Living was what was temporary.

The Japs were really dug in, so it was a matter of blasting each emplacement, each dugout, each pillbox one at a time. If they couldn't blast them open, they'd try to seal them, get up on top, toss in some grenades or TNT or pour gasoline in the vents and set it off.

So it went. Hardly anything vertical stood and the stench of burning bodies hung in the air. Jack heard they had taken only seventeen prisoners and eighty Korean laborers. Marines vs. marines. The Japanese marines wore chrysanthemums on their helmets. He picked up one of their helmets but then he threw it away. Who cared? Jack nodded, saying, “Just one more piece of shit to haul around.”

By Tuesday afternoon Betio was taken and Tarawa was secured. For what? In five years, he thought, there'll be nothing here but rusting machines, a few bones and some unexploded shells. To have survived this place was something. He had never felt closer to anyone in his life than he felt to Jack. Harvey was gone, but the two of them were still together. He couldn't count the number of times they had saved each other in the last three days. They would get each other through. If I live to be a hundred, Murray thought, and grinned sourly because the odds were so slim, I'll never know anybody by blood or marriage, no mother, no son, not even Ruthie, the way I know this guy, my buddy I share my foxhole with.