The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (17 page)

“Gentlemen, it’s good news indeed,” Admiral Crews continued.
“I’m here to describe the manner in which naval forces will support you in your operation against the Japanese homeland. Let me say that our support cannot, of course, supplant in any way the marines’ incomparable mastery of amphibious warfare, yet we are prepared to make your task easier.” He spoke for nearly an hour. He said that while the present war had seen invasions that were complex and audacious enterprises—North Africa, Normandy, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—they would be dwarfed by the magnitude of the coming event, doubtless the mightiest naval offensive in history. He told of the armada of vessels that would be involved—the battleships, the cruisers, the destroyers, the submarines—and the titanic fleet of aircraft carriers with their hundreds of planes, altogether the largest assembly of ships ever set afloat on any ocean. He dwelt on the thousands of tons of supplies the cargo ships would deliver, transported to the Japanese shores from depots across the breadth of the Pacific, from California to Hawaii, the Philippines, Espíritu Santo, and the Solomons. But chiefly the admiral extolled the might of naval gunfire, whose concentration on the landing area, he said, gesturing heavenward with his meerschaum, would be the heaviest ever to support American troops. Together with precision attacks from carrier-based planes, the pre-invasion bombardment would pour fire day after day onto the beaches with such intensity—he paused, weighing the phrase, then said, “with such
stupendous
intensity”—that the very ground upon which the Japanese defenses stood would be entirely obliterated. Furthermore, he added, should the marines be properly apprehensive about underwater obstacles, these would be effectively eliminated well before D-day by teams of naval frogmen who would clear the beaches …

“I cannot believe this dingbat!” I heard Happy Halloran burst out, a little too loud, just before the admiral wound down his spiel in a monotonous statistical stutter of tonnages, man-hours, payloads, cubic yards. I could sense a tropical downpour in the offing. Greenish lightning flashed across the ocean darkness, and there was a distant grumble of thunder. Halloran had risen from his bench and was clowning around in the shadows, mimicking the admiral’s pipe gestures and delighting the younger officers who, like me, were as much in awe of his maverick brashness, his contempt for the brainless minutiae and hollow trumpery of military life, as they were of his ability to command for himself—when needed—absolute respect. Few senior officers had the capacity to give their troops a big laugh, and the single feature that made tolerable my vision of D-day, if there was such a feature, was having Happy Halloran lead me into the jaws of death.

Now I saw that, having come to the period of questions and answers, the admiral—who appeared slightly deaf—had cupped a hand around one ear and was attempting to answer a question from Halloran; it was a query delivered across the arena in a voice deliberately pitched a little too low for the admiral to hear. Beneath his huge handlebar the colonel’s teeth flashed a malevolent grin. The excremental trope was, I thought, stunning: “Are you aware, sir, that you are full of
ostrich shit?”

It was wonderfully deft in its controlled daring: a lieutenant colonel baiting a rear admiral in public was a scary tightrope act even in a community as notably hostile to navy brass as the marines. The impertinence was astounding, courting severe punishment. But somehow Happy Halloran pulled it off; a ripple of laughter rolled through the crowd of
officers, then became a sustained roar as the admiral persisted with the puzzled “What did he say? What did he say?” and the wind squall out of the ocean blew stronger, scattering papers and maps and adding its own sudden savage bluster to the general din.

Shortly after this, when the assembly broke up, we found ourselves running. We were running like hell; that is, the battalion officers—eighteen or twenty of us platoon leaders and company commanders and a major named Williams, the battalion exec—were trailing Happy Halloran at full speed down the hard sands of Rat Beach through a rainstorm so dense that the water filled our mouths as we ran and half-blinded our sight. Lightning bolts struck the ocean and the bordering jungle, and we hollered with alarm. We ran like maniacs. We were alone in this weird spree; only our colonel in his dotty genius would have had the gall to lead his officers on such a gallop after a mind-deadening lecture and a sixteen-hour day that had already left us aching with fatigue. But though we were in misery over what was happening, there was not one of us, gasping for breath and choking on rain, who wasn’t somehow secretly proud that the colonel’s inspired whim was testing our endurance to the breaking point. To patiently absorb this extra shred of suffering was one reason we’d joined the marines. And so, glad masochists all, we fled down the sand in the darkness, following our dungaree-clad leader with his Jerry Colonna mustache and his comically off-pitch baritone that suddenly burst forth with “The Marines’ Hymn,” which we all joined in singing, or tried to in the heavy pain of our breathing. I recall thinking what a blessed release this was, what a deliverance from the demons of my fear. If I could be caught up in
pure motion like this, or if, as sometimes happened to me in the jungle, I could stay focused on some knotty weapons problems or question of tactics, I’d manage to keep the terror perpetually at bay. Action freed me. It was only in the quiet hours that I felt the lethal dread.

We halted at last and the weather cleared suddenly and beautifully, revealing a blazing full moon. It was like coming forth from a stifling tunnel. The colonel would have run us on and on into the night, I thought, had it not been for a stone cliff jutting out into the sea; here we came up short and ceased our sprint, utterly pooped. Happy Halloran shouted “Fall out!” and we let ourselves sprawl on the sand, all of us silent for long minutes in the moonlight. None of us had canteens, and our thirst was fierce. Despite the rain we were sweating. The colonel was as bushed as the rest of us. I saw him squatting at the water’s edge wheezing hard, cooling his face with handfuls of the surf. After a while he stood up, and when we too began to rise to our feet he bade us stay where we were. He said, “Smoking lamp’s lit,” and most of us groped for cigarette packs as we tried to find dry matches amid the recesses of our sodden dungarees. Zippo lighters flared in the dark. For minutes no one spoke while we sat there amid the lavender fumes, awaiting what we all sensed had to be a declaration. And as we gazed up at Happy Halloran we saw that the comedian’s face had been transformed; he looked back at us with rage and sadness. His lips parted to say something but then, before he could speak, we heard a rumble of engines ascending in the air out of the south. It was a squadron of army air force bombers from the airfield on Tinian Island, across the channel, and they cast down upon us their furious vibrations as they gained altitude and
made a slow banking turn in their flight toward Japan. It was known as the nightly milk run. We looked up at their undersides as they climbed over the beach, glimpsed the swollen bellies pregnant with bombs that in some hour of the coming day would be unloosed upon Kobe or Yokohama or Tokyo; the noise was brutal but the planes rose with synchronous grace and when they flew past the moon, hugely silhouetted there, I was reminded of their witches’ errand and the awful multitude of deaths down in those paper-and-bamboo cities. It didn’t bother me too much since I had caught the contagion of Jap hatred and, anyway, now (as the planes vanished northward) I was ready to hang on to Happy Halloran’s every word.

“Never believe the fucking navy, lads,” the colonel said. “They will betray you over and over. Before Iwo, the admirals said that rock would be smashed to smithereens. They said those sixteen-inch guns would destroy every living thing on the island, even the rats and ants. But you know who died on D-day and afterward. You know how many thousands of brave marines were destroyed.” He began to stroll among us, tapping us gently on our shoulders and keeping up a murmurous flow of talk—talk tinged with a melancholy I’d never heard in him before, yet at the same time there was a note that was confident, reassuring. His presence struck some hopelessly romantic chord in me, and I couldn’t help but think of King Harry and those troubled yeoman soldiers in the aching dark before Agincourt. “I’ll be brief,” he said. “We’re all thirsty and tired and we need to go to sleep. But I’ve got to tell you something. You guys have helped make this battalion the best one in the division, probably in the whole Marine Corps. Your NCOs are magnificent. You have wonderful men under your command, and when this showdown
comes you’re going to get the kind of performance every battalion commander dreams about.” He paused for an instant, then continued: “But I don’t want to give you any shit like that admiral. I want to speak the real truth. What we’re facing is the toughest fight in the history of the marines and we right here tonight are going to be in the toughest part of the fight. I’m not telling you something new. Every one of you knows that because we were in floating reserve at Okinawa and only made that decoy landing, it puts us number one in line to be the spearhead division for Japan. Furthermore, lads, because this regiment, and especially this battalion, is such a fucking good one, I have almost no doubt that we will be the first to put foot on shore.”

I’d more or less been aware of this for weeks, or at least I’d suspected it gravely, like everyone else, but to hear the colonel verify the fact, in effect reading out our death warrant, sent my stomach churning in spasms; I saw some of the other lieutenants stir in the sand, as if his words had gripped them, too, with their desperate meaning. “Japan’s a big stinking fortress now,” he went on, “and you know from Okinawa what kind of fanatic fighting they’re going to put up to the very end. The miserable bastards are fighters whatever the fuck else they are—subhuman, I guess. I don’t know where they are but the landing beaches will be as impregnable as any such beaches can be made. They’ll have guns zeroed in to blow us apart. But we will have to go in and take that beachhead, even if it means that many of us won’t be coming back.” The moon cast Happy Halloran’s shadow over me, enveloping me in darkness as he drew near, and when I felt his fingertips lightly trace their way across my shoulder it was like a sudden benediction, calming—if only for an instant—my sick disquiet. “I don’t have much
else to say, lads, except that I think the world of you people.” After a pause he said again, “I really think the world of you. When the time comes I know you’ll do your best—and that’s the best the Marine Corps has to offer. Which is the best in the fucking universe. Now let’s saddle up and walk home.”

For a long time in the early hours of the morning I was unable to sleep. I lay on my cot staring up at the dark canopy of the tent, listening to the big spooky moths that every now and then bumped, with a flicker of soft wings, against the mosquito netting. Once in a while I’d hear another Superfortress rising in the distance from the airfield on Tinian, and far off down the coast there was the faint steady hammering of a pile driver where the Seabees were building a new pier.
Hang me! Hang me!
spoke the voice of the machine. Close by, a weird bird kept up a disturbance of flirtatious twitters in the jungle; closer still, beneath me, the snails on the plywood made their clumsy crackling. I focused on their sounds one by one, as if by distracting myself long enough I might avoid drifting down tributaries of thought into those swampy visions that would mire me in absolute despair. From their breathing I could tell that Stiles and Veneris were deep in slumber, and this caused me an even more hyped-up wakefulness;
shit
, how could they sleep, how could anyone sleep after the colonel’s evil prophecy?

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

Under my flashlight’s gleam I pored over the cluster of Housman poems in my
Pocket Book of Verse
, letting the sorrow and resignation take hold of my spirit; there was a note
both stoical and ill-omened in this pastoral requiem, and it mated perfectly with my enervation, my feeling of doomsday. I despised myself for being so spineless and disabled, so demoralized, but I could do nothing to avoid the mudslide slowly enveloping me. Finally I put the book aside and lay gazing upward into darkness. I couldn’t fight the fatigue any longer and drifted off into a shadowland where fantasy mingled with dream, and I was soon staring down an abomination: myself on D-day, coming undone. Now I saw myself as a figure in a newsreel, a running target. The beachhead was engulfed in flame. The ramps went down and I lurched forward onto the harsh ground, beckoning the platoon to follow me. I stumbled ashore through clouds of phosphorus and across an undulating terrain traversed by barriers of wire. A Jap machine gun, a Nambu, chattered from the flank and the air was thick with shrapnel, roiling, incandescent; the ground rocked with explosions. I turned to see my men hustling low as they scattered and deployed themselves at the edge of an embankment; some guys were falling now, still clutching their rifles at the instant of their collapse into the sand. I glimpsed white bones and blood, flowing like a sacrament. And just then, frozen with the sight of so much blood, I sank into paralysis. I could make no movement, nor speak a word; in the grip of an overpowering numbness I let my mind shut down. Nearby, one of my squad leaders questioned me with his eyes:
Lieutenant, what’ll we do?
Beyond power of thinking, I made no reply. Through billows of smoke I saw my tentmates; I could tell that Veneris on my right and Stiles on my left were advancing steadily with their men. Over the radio I heard my company commander’s frantic roar:
Get your troops moving!
But the command was without force, without meaning; it could have been shouted in
an unknown tongue. My immobility was complete, as if tendrils of myself had burrowed down and sought root in the soil of Japan, rendering me into brainless vegetation. Yet most intolerably—sickening and intolerable—was the look in the eyes of Stiles and Veneris, who, glancing back as they moved through the visible swarm of enemy bullets, turned upon me their measureless scorn and loathing …