The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (16 page)

The fucking snails were always getting squashed beneath our field boots, making a tiny mess that reminded me of the fragility of my own corporeal being. It didn’t take long for the instruments of modern warfare to turn a human body into such a repulsive emulsion. Would I be reduced to an escargot’s viscous glob? Or did one escape, almost literally, by the skin of one’s teeth? One of the riflemen in my platoon, a big muscular farm boy from South Dakota, had seen, strewn on the Tarawa beachhead, a string of guts twelve feet long belonging to the marine who, only seconds before the mortar blast, had been his best buddy. Nearly all the combat vets had endured such grisly traumas. Here during last year’s landing on Saipan my new platoon sergeant, a onetime trapeze artist from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had survived (with only a cut lip and a lingering deafness) the explosion from a Jap knee mortar shell that vaporized the other two occupants of his foxhole. Would I avoid the worst like these guys or would I, when I finally stumbled ashore on the Japanese mainland, be immolated in one foul form or another, consumed by fire or rent apart by steel or crushed like a snail?

Gazing across the water at the distant outline of the
Missouri
, I recalled that stifling tent. Such thoughts had been torment. As I lay on my cot,
The Pocket Book of Verse
would slip from my hand and fear—vile, cold fear—would begin to steal through my flesh like some puzzling sickness. I actually felt my extremities grow numb, as if the blood had drained from my toes and fingers, and the sensation caused me both alarm and shame. Did my tentmates, Stiles and Veneris, the
two platoon leaders whose cots lay so closely jammed next to mine, feel the same terror? Did their bowels loosen like mine at the mere thought of the coming invasion? I knew they were scared. We joked, God how we joked—we joked all the time about our future trial—but this was a form of wisecracking, smart-ass bravado, cheap banter. I could never know the depths of their fear. It was a region I dared not explore. In our smothering proximity we shared everything else—snores and farts and bad breath and odorous feet. Even the clumsy stealth of jerking off was a matter for shared joking—the unsuppressed moan, the vibrating sheet glimpsed in the dawn light.
Beatin’ your meat again, Veneris!
But somehow I knew we could never share real fear. Was theirs as nearly unbearable as mine, this dread that wrapped me in a blanket woven of many clammy hands? Or was their mastery over their fear simple bravery in itself—something I could never possess?

Often I thought it was creepy to feel this fear in such a seductive place. Saipan was really a bowl of tropical Jell-O. Even in the muggy rainy season there were glowing days that made me mourn the recent fate of this lush Technicolor landscape, shattered by gunfire and trampled by so many boots and fires and tank treads. Most of the islands that marines had fought over and secured had been jungle horrors infested by disease and rot or were sun-scorched coral outcroppings worthless as real estate and in strategic terms scarcely worth being conquered, much less being the cause of the thousands of American lives destroyed in their capture. But Saipan was actually—I couldn’t resist the word—lovable, or would be under peacetime conditions, with a jungle of hibiscus and flame trees and bougainvillea exuding
an urgent exotic odor that was dispersed on balmy breezes and conjured up visions (whenever I allowed myself to think the war might ever end) of Pan American Clippers bearing their cargoes of hot honeymooners panting to get laid or otherwise to disport themselves in swank palm-thatched huts on the very beach of our company bivouac. Jesus, I thought, they’d probably even be getting sex that was air-conditioned. As I lay in the tent on some mornings, just at dawn, inhaling the flowered air was like the sweetest aphrodisiac and I’d get tremendously stirred up with lewd fantasies that for a single moment, arresting me in rapture, would wipe out my fear. It was the merest instant but it helped. Only a self-induced sexual climax had the capacity to obliterate the future, and the unspeakable dread of it dwelling in my heart.

As July wore on, the daily procession of ambulances dwindled down to one or two every few hours, then ceased altogether—a sign that the Okinawa battle was now history. But an ambulance was not the only
memento mori
, and there were other auguries capable of scaring us shitless. The word came down through dispatches on the Armed Forces Radio, and spread rapidly as scuttlebutt all through the encampment, that on the Japanese mainland the civilian population had gone berserk; they were arming themselves to the teeth—old men, women, and hysterical kids. The Jap defeat on Okinawa, far from crushing the national spirit, had aroused the citizens to a new resolve, and they’d be waiting for us with every primitive weapon they could lay their hands on. On a bright morning after hearing this freakish news I had one of those strangling nightmares from which one awakes with heartbeat amok. The dream had a jerky
clarity, like a newsreel clip. In some Osaka suburb I was leading my platoon through clouds of smoke as we roamed about in house-to-house fighting. All of a sudden there rushed at me a murderous little woman in a kimono and with one of those ivory doodads in her hair; screaming banzais and on the point of harpooning me with a bamboo stick, squarely through the gut, she instantly metamorphosed into a nattering wee manicurist busily attending to my nails.

One evening startling news circulated: all the officers in the division were being ordered to assemble immediately in the huge amphitheater at the far end of the beach. Such a muster of officers had never happened before. Almost at once the rumor flew about that we were gathering to learn about the invasion, though precisely what no one could even guess. Just after chow in the mess tent, at around six o’clock, I walked with Stiles and Veneris down a path through a scrubby pandanus-pine grove bordering the lagoon beach and onto the beach itself, a stretch of clean powdery sand cleared of the landing rubble and set apart for swimming. I’d been there many times and so was familiar with the droll monstrosity on the giant poster an engineer outfit had stuck up on a stanchion—a creation executed by some marine who had been a cartoonist in civilian life. It was a bespectacled squinty-eyed Jap soldier portrayed as a dementedly grinning rat.
KNOW YOUR ENEMY
was the legend beneath the profoundly repulsive effigy complete with shitty-looking cap, buck teeth, whiskers, pink watery eyes, a coiling pink tail, and—drawn with such subtlety that one didn’t immediately notice it—an elongated pink cock gripped in a hairy paw. It was this last detail, usually eliciting a slow double take, that got at everyone’s funny bone, especially the old-timers who’d
been through the meat grinders on Guadalcanal and Tarawa and here on Saipan and whose hatred for the Japs was like an ongoing lust. Aided by the Marine Corps habit of uglifying, whenever possible, the names of natural splendors it encroached upon, the poster had caused this portion of the shoreline to be called Rat Beach, and as we trudged along its edge, mostly silent, I think all of us felt the same desperate unease, aware that in the amphitheater we were doubtless being prepared to receive momentous tidings.

Finally Stiles spoke up. “Jesus, I hope this is it. We wait around any longer we’ll go nuts.”

Veneris put in: “Maybe they’re going to give us a landing date. I hope the fuck it’s soon.”

I said not a word as all hope withered inside me.
Oh Jesus
, I thought,
I hope the fuck it’s never.
I couldn’t even work up a falsely brave remark, and I felt twisted with envy at their breezy offhandedness. That wasn’t all that I envied about Stiles and Veneris, both of them blandly efficient athletic mesomorphs who could do with maddening grace what I could do only with dogged effort: strip down a weapon, set up a mortar emplacement, follow a compass heading on a night march, quickly find fields of fire for a machine gun, carry out a snappy rifle inspection, even keep their dungarees looking crisp and clean. I wasn’t a bad platoon leader; in fact, I was pretty good. I was certainly not a fuckup—I was too desperate to avoid failure and disgrace for that—but in facing certain petty military challenges, duck soup for most lieutenants, I often barely squeaked by. I was happy to be just average. I was happy too that I got along so well with these guys. I’d been boringly and single-mindedly an aesthete in college, a devotee of quality lit and chamber
music, with tendencies that might have been known as “neurasthenic.” My tentmates had each been standout jocks and were also gorgeous—the blond Stiles on a champion swimming team at Yale; the Greek Veneris, with skin like dark enamel, an all–Big Ten tackle at Ohio State. Such looks and pedigrees gave them a big leg up with the kids in their platoons, while I, skinny and knobby-kneed, almost dared not let my troops see me reading anything so sissified as
The Pocket Book of Verse.

The amphitheater, a natural coral bowl surrounded by palm trees, was already partly filled with the hundreds of officers and warrant officers of every rank in our division. This vast space served the needs of the army and navy personnel on the island as well as the marines. The week before, Bob Hope had entertained all the troops from the stage, and the week before that we’d sat through an evening of Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, featuring among other warblers Ish Kabibble and Wee Bonnie Baker, whose infantile voice in a song called “Oh Johnny!” had been one of many dim-witted numbers that had held me captive during my pubescence. If two hours of Kay Kyser had been an ordeal, the same could not be said for Bob Hope; he’d been extravagantly, bigheartedly funny and had brought along a troupe of showgirls, gorgeous long-legged creatures in feathers and G-strings who displayed a stupefying amount of bare flesh as they wiggled their butts down upon the screaming mob. It was another surreal dimension added to this ghoulish Pacific war: the bimbos debarking from gargantuan transport planes, flashing their teeth and gyrating their groins, then becoming almost instantly airborne again, leaving behind thousands of doomed devils with aching gonads. As Stiles observed, the Jap army had at least one thing: they
supplied their troops with girls you could actually stick something into.

We waited and fidgeted, minding our behavior. Officers were supposed to exhibit decorum, so we spoke in low voices; when enlisted men had to wait for long they usually became a little raucous and horsed around, grab-assing—it was one of their privileges. I thought I’d managed to dominate my fear but I was wrong. The despondent mood I’d been trying to ward off all day overtook me while we waited, sitting on the hard benches. I was seized by a somber unfocused anxiety; I tried to make it disappear but there was no way I could beat back the waves of panic. I kept talking to myself, falling into a little monologue:
Just stay calm, relax, everything’s going to be all right.
Suddenly I saw our battalion commander, Colonel Timothy Halloran (“Happy” was his nickname), take a seat on a nearby bench, and the mere reality of his presence soothed me a bit, as so often happened when he hove into sight. We young officers were all nuts about Happy Halloran, who had a carefully cultivated, corny Irish brogue, a waxed handlebar mustache, a Navy Cross he’d won at the terrible shambles of Tarawa (where, badly wounded, he’d led an assault on a Jap pillbox, killing a slew of the enemy with their own machine gun), and, above all, an intuitive sense of leadership that allowed him to wield strict authority without losing the common touch. Unlike the other services, the Marine Corps has always harbored flamboyant characters and nonconformists, and Happy Halloran filled that bill; we loved him for his slightly wacky heterodoxy, always playfully challenging the System. I happened to glance at the colonel just as he happened to glance at me, and he gave me a wink; I felt a little better.

When at last, long after nightfall, the glittering bright
lights went up on the stage and the presentation commenced, and a parade of high-ranking Fleet Marine Force officers—big shots from Hawaii—made their speeches, we began slowly to realize a cold fact: they had nothing new to tell us. “Security” and “secrecy” were the watchwords. The assault date was set, announced one intelligence colonel, but for security reasons it could not be revealed. Another officer took the stage. The site of the invasion of Japan had been selected, he proclaimed, and the beaches had now been carefully evaluated for all pertinent factors bearing upon the successful amphibious landing, but secrecy prevented an announcement of their location. “Then why the fuck are we sitting here?” I heard Happy Halloran mutter. I could see the back of his neck redden; he was stewing. A couple of officers near him snickered. Drops of rain spattered our brows, the palm trees thrashed in the rising wind. Still another officer from Pearl Harbor, a brigadier general, spoke from the podium; his gravelly voice boomed over the loudspeakers: “Gentlemen, we are faced with a difficult paradox. It would be reassuring if, after the destruction wrought upon the Japanese army at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it could be reported that the morale of their troops had been shattered, and their resources undermined, making the coming invasion easier on us. But the plain truth is—and our intelligence reports are clear on this matter—the Jap forces are prepared more than ever before to die for the emperor, to fight to the last man …” He droned on. “More fucking blather,” I heard Colonel Halloran say. “Everybody knows the fucking Jap cocksuckers are a bunch of suicidal apes.”

Even the star of the evening, an admiral, had nothing new to say, or rather, what he did have to say was, we all
sensed, ripe hokum. He appeared under the brilliant klieg lights, the first admiral most of us junior officers had ever laid eyes on. His name was Crews. Dressed in khaki, silver stars glittering on his open collar, chewing on a meerschaum pipe, he ambled to the center of the stage with a sheaf of notes clutched in his hand. He was angular and professorial-looking, and he peered at us owlishly through steel-rimmed glasses with lenses that grotesquely magnified his eyes. Plainly he was a desk admiral whose seagoing days were far in the past, and plainly, too, his propaganda mission was to bring us tidings of hope and cheer. Happy Halloran gave a jolly cackle and pounded his fist in his hand as he identified the lecturer, whom he’d encountered before. “I’ll be a son-ofabitch if it isn’t Good News Crews,” he said to those nearby. “The fucking windbag, he’s going to feed us the same load of garbage!” And when the admiral began to speak—“Good news, gentlemen!” was his salutation—Halloran muttered hoarsely: “We had this guy just before Tarawa. He told us he had good news. He said after the navy shelled the island it would be a piece of cake. And look what happened!” Halloran needed to say no more. The Tarawa calamity was already a Pacific legend: how naval intelligence, relying on obsolete charts, had miscalculated the tides so flagrantly that the marine troops in their landing vessels were forced to disembark on coral reefs and then wade ashore for hundreds of yards through seas, exposed to killing fire from Japanese machine guns. In the history of warfare no amphibious assault had witnessed such bloodletting. Scores of slaughtered men caused the white-capped waves to turn incarnadine. Small wonder that Happy Halloran detested the navy and its spokesmen. “Listen to this creep!” he said.