Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (5 page)

One fight I especially remember was when I was in the fifth grade at good old P.S. 194. There was this other kid in my class who was kind of pushy and a show-off. He seemed to think he was better than all the rest of us, and he liked to boss other kids around. One day, he started smarting off at me until he really got on my nerves bad, and we ended up slugging it out in a vacant lot. I gave him a pretty good licking, and he didn’t act so high and mighty after that.

I enjoyed the bumps and bruises of competitive sports, too. I got a kick out of testing my strength and skill against other guys my age, maybe even older. I liked soccer and baseball just fine, but football was always my biggest favorite.

When I was about ten, I got invited to join a kid football team called the Dragons. After that, I played every season, either with the Dragons or another team called the Huskies, until the year before I joined the Marine Corps. They weren’t school teams, just groups of neighborhood guys who got together and challenged anybody we could find to play us. We had some fierce rivalries, and sometimes over a hundred people would come out to watch our games.

We didn’t have much in the way of equipment, just a few well-worn leather helmets and shoulder pads, but I truly believe the caliber of football we played was comparable to what small colleges played at the time. I played until I was twenty years old, and I figured anything was better than having to sit on the sidelines for part of a game. My goal was to play every down—the whole sixty minutes. I never hesitated to try to tackle a guy twice my size, and sometimes
I succeeded. I guess I was lucky I never got hurt. Banged up a little, but never really hurt.

At first, I switched positions quite a bit. Sometimes I played in the backfield, sometimes on the line, and always on both offense and defense. There was no such thing as two-platoon football in Gerritsen Beach.

Later on, I settled in at right end and played that same position for several years. By then, I was almost six feet tall, but I was still kind of skinny—only 155 pounds dripping wet. I got to where I liked defense best because I got a real kick out of rushing the quarterback. I’d just lower my head and run straight at him as hard as I could go. I usually didn’t get there, but sometimes I did, and it gave me a good feeling.

O
N SOME DAYS
in the hot part of the summer, I stayed on the beach from sunup till dark. Lots of the other kids did, too. The beach ran for a mile or more from north to south. It was a great place to swim, or dig for clams, or just lie in the sun. And sometimes we’d find really interesting stuff that drifted up on the shore. Even during the cooler part of the year, I spent lots of time fishing—not just for sport but to help put food on the family table—and I hardly ever came home without a pretty good catch.

In July and August, bluefish came into the bay by the thousands, and even at other times there were plenty of fish called flukes. They were flat like flounder, but some of them got huge—up to three feet long. When they got that big, we called them doormats. A whole family could eat off one of them for two or three days.

Much as I loved that beach on Jamaica Bay, I didn’t feel the same
about any of the beaches I landed on in the Pacific. On the contrary, I wanted to get the hell away from them as fast as I could.

I
WOULDN’T SAY I
was the “churchy” type as a kid, but I did go to church almost every Sunday. My mom had to work on Sundays if she wanted to keep her job, so she hardly ever got to go to mass herself. But she was a devout Irish Catholic mother who wouldn’t take excuses for my sister and me not going. She always made sure we had clean clothes to wear and a dime or two for the collection plate, and we knew better than to skip. If we did, Mom was bound to find out.

As somebody who maybe got into more than my share of scrapes, I got acquainted with the confessional booth at an early age. But the priest at Resurrection Catholic Church usually let me off fairly easy when it came to doing penance.

“Just do one ‘Our Father,’” he’d say, “and that should take care of it.”

That meant repeating the Lord’s Prayer all the way through one time. It was the lowest penance there was for committing a minor sin like punching some other guy on the football field.

That was something else I thought a lot about at Guadalcanal. I must’ve said the Lord’s Prayer a couple thousand times while I was there. I started that very first night.

W
HEN I WAS
about twelve years old, my father, Thomas McEnery, died of pneumonia. He was only thirty-four, but he’d led a hard life. A hard-drinking life, I’m sad to say. It was probably the booze as much as the pneumonia that killed him.

By the time Dad died, my mom had left him because of his heavy drinking. It was during Prohibition, but he never had a problem keeping himself supplied with alcohol. He made his own whiskey in a still in the back room of our house. He was a mechanic by trade, and he made fairly good money when he was sober enough to work, but that was less and less often as time went by.

My mom was commuting up to an hour and a half a day by bus and train to a job as a clerk in a candy store at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. But the paychecks she brought home weren’t nearly enough to cover the bills. Before she left Dad, we were forced to move several times because we couldn’t pay the rent. We lived on Knapp Street for a while, then on Gerritsen Avenue. Honest to God, I lost count of the places we lived before Mom finally took my sister and me and moved in with her parents.

By that time, we were so broke we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. I had really mixed-up feelings about Dad when we moved off and left him. I was mad at him for being such a drunk and making life so hard for Mom, but I worried about him, too. Of course, there was nothing I could do to help him. By then, nobody could help him.

A little over a year after Dad died, I graduated from the eighth grade at P.S. 194. By then, times were about as bad as they could get. It was the spring of 1932—rock bottom of the Depression—and the only thing that kept us afloat was Mom’s piddling little salary and my grandparents’ generosity.

Instead of going on to a regular high school, I decided to enroll in a trade school that promised the students good-paying jobs in the aviation industry after graduation. I stuck it out there for six terms, picking up a few dollars here and there at little part-time jobs like
delivering messages for Western Union in what spare time I had. But I still lacked two terms to graduate when we couldn’t come up with the rest of the tuition money. Then I had to drop out and look for a full-time job.

By this time, my mother had gotten married again to a Polish guy named Peter Paul Muroski, who lived just a few blocks away, and we’d moved in with him. Mom was a fine woman, but she sure didn’t have much luck when it came to picking a husband. My step-father was an even worse drunk than Dad had been—and a mean one at that. Dad was never abusive. He’d just pass out peacefully after he got a snootful, whereas Peter would get really ugly.

But Peter did have a nice little son named Peter Jr. Bad as his father acted, I always loved the kid. I called my brother “Junior” and tried to treat him the way a brother should. If he’d been my full brother, I couldn’t have loved him more.

Dad was the kind of guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but Peter Sr. could lose his temper over anything. On Tuesday nights after he got his weekly paycheck, he’d mix up some kind of drink with alcohol he bought from under the counter at a drugstore. Within an hour, he’d be skunk-drunk, and he’d think up some reason to get mad at Mom. He’d start threatening to knock her around, and more than once he actually did.

One evening when I was fifteen, I came home from trade school to find Peter chasing Mom through the house and threatening to kill her. He sounded like he really meant it, and it scared the hell out of me. My sister was jumping around in the background and screaming bloody murder, and Peter Jr. was hiding someplace.

As I ran through the kitchen after Peter Sr. and Mom, I threw
down a cup of milk I was carrying and grabbed up the first thing I could get my hands on to conk him with. It was an electric coffeepot made out of crockery that Mom had gotten with some coupons she’d saved up, and it must’ve weighed three or four pounds.

“You leave my mom alone,” I yelled at Peter, “or I’ll bust you with this thing!”

“Like hell you will, you little shit,” he said and started toward me.

I swung the coffeepot and smacked him pretty good with it. I wasn’t sure exactly where I hit him, but I knew I hit him hard.

He let out a groan and fell on the floor with blood spurting all over the place. I couldn’t believe how fast the blood ran down his neck and onto his shirt, and I was afraid for a second that I’d cut his jugular vein.

Oh my God!
I thought.
Maybe I’ve killed the son of a bitch, and they’ll send me to the electric chair!

Then I heard Peter cussing and saw him trying to get up, so I knew he wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t in real great shape, either, and the next thing I thought about was trying to get an ambulance.

We couldn’t afford a telephone, and the nearest one was two blocks down the street at a neighbor’s house. By the time I ran all the way there as hard as I could go and called for an ambulance, I was shaking all over. When the ambulance showed up a few minutes later, a cop was following along behind it. I shook even worse when my mother told the cop what happened.

“Is he gonna die?” I asked the cop.

“Nah, he’ll be okay,” the cop said. “He’s bound to have one helluva headache, though. You sure put a dent in his hard head.”

“Are you gonna take me to jail?” I asked.

The cop laughed and shook his head. “No, son. All you were doing was trying to protect your mother. From what she tells me, it was self-defense all the way.”

Peter ended up with a J-shaped scar right in the middle of his forehead. From then on, he stayed out of my way, and I stayed out of his. And as far as I know, he never threatened Mom or chased her through the house again.

I thought a lot about that stuff with Mom and Peter and Dad and Peter Jr. on that first night at Guadalcanal. I knew I still had some anger toward my dad bottled up inside me for all the misery he caused Mom, but I felt sad about what happened to him, too.

I made a pledge to myself that, if I ever had a wife, I’d never treat her the way Mom was treated, and I believe I’ve kept that pledge. If any good came out of me busting Peter with that coffeepot, I guess that was it. Plus it taught me later on to keep strict limits on my own drinking. A beer or two was okay, but I always seemed to have a sixth sense that warned me when to stop.

The way I figured it, having two drunks in the family was more than enough.

A
FTER I DROPPED OUT
of trade school, I wanted to join the Navy. But I was still a few months shy of my seventeenth birthday, and Mom refused to sign for me. I fussed and pleaded, but she wouldn’t change her mind.

Maybe she really thought I was too young, or maybe she just wanted to keep me around for a while longer to keep Peter in line. Whichever it was, Mom’s refusal turned out to be a lucky break for our whole family. After many months of searching for work, I finally
landed a great job as a shipping clerk for a company that manufactured ink pens.

I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming when they told me the salary was fifteen dollars a week. It was like a miracle. There were plenty of guys twice my age who weren’t making that much, and it was a godsend for me and Mom and my sister. I was so happy about the job that I almost quit thinking about joining the service for a while. But after the fall of 1939, when the war started in Europe, my friend Charlie Smith and I started talking about enlisting again, this time in the Army.

A private’s pay in the Army was only twenty-one dollars a month, which was just about a third of what I was making at the pen company. But all my food, clothes, and housing would be paid, and I could send part of my paycheck home to Mom every month. Every time I saw Charlie, he brought it up, and the more we talked, the more I wanted to do it.

Finally, we did.

L
IKE I SAID,
I think it was sheer fate that the Army recruiting office was closed the day we went to enlist. I never could figure out why it was closed; it just was. It wasn’t a holiday of any kind, and there was a steady stream of guys trying to join up. I think it happened because I was meant to be a Marine—even if I did have some second thoughts about it later.

The Marines didn’t give me and Charlie much time to wind up our affairs as civilians before they shipped us off to boot camp. In Europe, World War II had been going on for over a year. Hitler’s troops had marched into Paris and taken over France. Now they
were bombing the hell out of London. Everybody in New York was talking about it and wondering when the Nazis were going to invade England. From the way they talked, it could happen any day.

“You think they’ll send us over to fight with the Limeys?” I asked Charlie.

He shook his head. “I think we’ll end up in the Pacific,” he said.

That Charlie! He was some kind of prophet!

We enlisted on the Friday before the Labor Day weekend in 1940. They gave us the weekend and the holiday off, but they told us to be back Tuesday morning to be sworn in. Right after we took the oath, a sergeant took us to the nearest subway station and we rode over to the Hudson River, where a civilian passenger liner was docked, and we went aboard. As I remember, there were seventeen of us in the group, all from New York or northern New Jersey.

We were on the ship for three days, heading south in the Atlantic. The weather was perfect the whole time, and so was the way we were treated while we were aboard. Charlie and I had our own private stateroom, and the meals were great. We had the run of the ship just like the civilian passengers. We were allowed to dance and buy drinks and even play the slot machines in the casino. The problem was, none of us had any money.