But men don’t fight for the flag. It’s too remote; they need something closer. Leathernecks have it. As in the French Foreign Legion motto, Legio Patria Nostra, their legion is their country. The Army has its own ways of instilling pride. Marines, however, are something apart. It is arguable that they are because they merely think they are. The effect is the same: an élite phalanx of assault troops who can be counted upon to make the most impossible assignment possible, and who ask only that the survivors be permitted to gloat. Gentlemen may deplore the exalting of such values in a nation at peace, but until peace is forever the country needs men who will fight for gewgaws and bellhop blue, and who do not ask what price glory. Ladies may protest that in violent death there can be no glory. Maybe not. But in the Marine Corps there is such a word.
The Man Who Couldn’t Speak Japanese
In the spring of 1944 the United States Marine Corps formed its last rifle regiment of World War II, the 29th Marines, in New River, North Carolina. The first of its three battalions was already overseas, having been built around ex-Raiders and parachutists who had fought on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan. Great pains were being taken to make the other two battalions worthy of them. The troops assembling in New River were picked men. Officers and key noncoms had already been tested in battles against the enemy, and though few riflemen in the line companies had been under fire, they tended to be hulking, deep-voiced mesomorphs whose records suggested that they would perform well when they, too, hit the beach. There was, however, one small band of exceptions. These were the nineteen enlisted men comprising the intelligence section of the 29th’s second battalion. All nineteen were Officer Candidate washouts. I, also a washout, led them. My rank was Corporal, acting Platoon Sergeant—Acting John.
We were, every one of us, military misfits, college students who in a fever of patriotism had rushed to the Marine Corps’ Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia, and had subsequently been rejected because, for various reasons, we did not conform with the established concept of how officers should look, speak, and act. Chet Przystawski of Colgate, for example, had a build like Charles Atlas but a voice like Lily Pons; when he yelled a command, the effect was that of an eerie shriek. Ace Livick of the University of Virginia had no sense of direction; at Quantico he had flunked map reading. Jerry Collins, a Yale man, was painfully shy. Stan Zoglin, a Cantab, had poor posture. Mack Yates of Ole Miss wore spectacles. Tom Jasper of Brown and I had been insubordinate. I had refused to clean a rifle on the ground that it was already clean, and I suffered the added stigma of being scrawny. I’ve forgotten the order Jasper disobeyed, though I knew that he too had another count against him: he admired the Japanese enormously.
Sy Ivice of Chicago christened us “the Raggedy-Ass Marines.” That was about the size of it. Love had died between us and the Marine Corps. The rest of the battalion amiably addressed us as “Mac”—all enlisted marines were “Mac” to their officers and to one another—but there was a widespread awareness that we were unsuitably bookish, slack on the drill field, and generally beneath the fastidious stateside standards established in the Corps’ 169-year history. If there had been such a thing as a Military Quotient, the spit-and-polish equivalent of an Intelligence Quotient, our M.Q. would have been pegged at about seventy-eight. It is fair to add that this rating would have been confined to our parade-ground performance. We were regarded as good combat prospects. All of us, I believe, had qualified on the Parris Island, South Carolina, rifle range as sharpshooters or expert riflemen. It was believed (and, as it proved, rightly so) that we would be useful in battle. Our problem, or rather the problem of our leaders, was that we lacked what the British army calls Quetta manners. We weren’t properly starched and blancoed, weren’t martially prepossessing—weren’t, in a word, good for the 29th’s image.
We were rarely given liberty, because our company commander was ashamed to let civilians see us wearing the Corps uniform. Shirttails out, buttons missing, fore-and-aft (overseas) caps down around our ears—these were signs that we had lost our drill-field ardor in OCS and were playing our roles of incorrigible eccentrics to the hilt. We looked like caricatures from cartoons in The Leatherneck, the Marine Corps equivalent of Yank, and the only reason our betters allowed us to stay together, setting a bad example for one another and damaging battalion élan, was a provision in the official Table of Organization for an intelligence section and our qualifications for membership in it. Between Quantico and assignment to the 29th we had all attended something called intelligence school. Theoretically we were experts in identifying enemy units by searching Jap corpses, recognizing the silhouettes of Zero fighters, reconnoitering behind the lines, etc. It was all rather vague. If we proved useless in these tasks, our commanders knew that we could always be used for odd jobs.
Meanwhile we carried out exhausting exercises in the Carolina boondocks, inflating rubber boats, getting snarled in bales of communications wire, carrying out simulated patrol missions at night. Whenever it was Livick’s turn to keep the map, we would vanish into the piney woods, subsisting on K and D rations for hours until we were found thrashing around in the bush and led back by a rescue party from the battalion’s 81-millimeter platoon, our long-suffering neighbors in New River’s Tent City. For the most part it was an uneventful time, however. Nothing interesting seemed likely to happen before we were shipped overseas.
Then one morning the battalion adjutant summoned me.
“Mac.”
“Sir.”
“You will square away to snap in a new man.”
Marine Corps orders were always given this way: “You will scrub bulkheads,” “You will police this area,” “You will hold a field day.” There was only one permissible response.
“Aye, aye, sir,” I said.
“A Japanese-language interpreter,” he said.
“A what?”
In 1944 no one in the Marine Corps spoke Japanese. Unlike the ETO, where plenty of GI’s were bilingual, Americans were at a severe linguistic disadvantage in the Pacific. It was worsened by the fact that many Japs spoke English; they could eavesdrop on our combat field telephones. As a result by the third year of the war the headquarters company of each marine battalion carried on its roster a full-blooded Navaho who could communicate over radiophones in his own tongue with the Navahos in other battalions. After the outbreak of the war Washington had set up several crash courses to teach Japanese to bright young Americans, but the first graduates wouldn’t emerge until the spring of 1945.
“We’ll be the only outfit with its own translator,” he said. “Sir.”
“Private Harold Dumas will be coming down from post headquarters at fourteen hundred.”
That was too much. “He’s only a private?”
“Knock it off!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
A noncom wasn’t supposed to question higher wisdom, but clearly there was something odd here. Back in our pyramidal tent I passed the word among my people, whose astonishment matched mine. Their first reaction was that I was snowing them, but within an hour the dope was confirmed by the sergeant major, a bright little sparrow of a man named John Guard. Guard had some intriguing details, including an explanation for the translator’s low rank. Until very recently—two days ago, in fact—Harold Dumas had been locked up in Portsmouth naval prison. The nature of his offense was unknown to Guard, but the sergeant major knew where Dumas was believed to have learned Japanese. He was a native of California; his neighbors had been Issei (first-generation Japanese-Americans) and Nisei (children of Issei).
The fact that the newcomer was a Californian is important to an understanding of what happened later. The Marine Corps maintained a rigid geographical segregation. Every man enlisting east of the Mississippi was sent to boot camp at Parris Island and shipped to New River after his recruit training. West of the Mississippi, boots went to the San Diego base and, once they had qualified, to nearby Camp Pendleton. Virtually none of us in Tent City knew anything about life
on the West Coast. We had never seen a giant redwood, or the Grand Canyon, or Hollywood. We had never even met anyone from California until Harold Dumas arrived that afternoon at two o’clock.
He made a great entrance. He was wearing a salty barracks (visored) cap, a field scarf (necktie) so bleached that it was almost white, heavily starched khakis, and high-top dress shoes. The shoes were especially impressive. The Marine Corps had stopped issuing high-tops after Pearl Harbor, and they were therefore a great status symbol, signifying membership in the élite prewar Old Corps. Dumas was the only post-Pearl marine I ever knew who had them, but then, he was unusual in lots of ways.
Prepossessing is the word that best describes him, though it is really inadequate. The moment he strode into Tent City with his elbows swinging wide, every eye was on him. Six foot two, with a magnificent physique, he carried himself like Randolph Scott in To the Shores of Tripoli, the movie that had conned thousands of marines into joining up. His face was freckled, his eyes were sky-blue, his expression was wholly without guile; he was a man you trusted instinctively, whose every word you believed, for whose reputation you would fight, and whose friend you longed to be. When he removed the barracks cap, he was a towhead; and even before we had met—before that firm, manly handclasp that characterized all his greetings—he was known to us simply as “Whitey.”
“The name’s Dumas,” he said in a rich, manly baritone, looking straight at you with an expression that, in those days before Madison Avenue had corrupted the word, could only be called sincere. Sincerity emanated from him; so did an air of achievement. Whitey was in his mid-twenties, a few years older than the rest of us, and it developed that he had used his time well. No one could call him a braggart—he was in fact conspicuously modest—but over the next few weeks particulars about his background slipped out naturally in normal conversation. He had been a newspaperman and a professional boxer. The fact that he had made money in the ring had been his undoing, accounting for his imprisonment; he had slugged a bully in a San Francisco bar, and under California law, he explained, a blow by a professional fighter was regarded as assault with a deadly weapon. If it hadn’t been for his knowledge of Japanese, which he had disclosed to the authorities in Portsmouth, he would still be in the dreary exercise yard there.
“Isn’t it typical of the Marine Corps to keep him a private?” Yates said scornfully. “In the Army he’d be at least a major.”
The more we saw of Whitey, the more we admired him. He was everything we wanted to be. He even had a sexy wife, a Paramount starlet. After much coaxing he was persuaded to produce a picture of her, an eight-by-ten glossy print of a beaming blonde in a bathing suit; it was signed “With all my love—Laverne.” Even more impressive, Whitey, unlike most of us, was a combat veteran. He had been a machine gunner in the 1st Marines during the early days on Guadalcanal. This was a matter of special interest to Sy Ivice, who had landed on the ’Canal later with the 2d Marines. Sy wanted to reminisce about those days with Whitey, but Whitey politely declined. He had lost two of his best buddies in the fire fight along the Tenaru River, he told us, and he didn’t want to talk about it.
Whitey’s greatest achievement, of course, was his mastery of the enemy’s language, the attainment that had sprung him from Portsmouth, and it was far too valuable to be confined to my section. Shortly after we crossed the country by troop train and encamped at Linda Vista, north of San Diego, preparatory to boarding ship, our gifted ex-con attracted the attention of the 29th’s commanding officer, Colonel George F. Hastings. Hastings was the kind of colorful hard-charger the Marine Corps has always valued highly. Reportedly he was a native of an Arizona town named Buzzard’s Gulch. Myth had it that his middle initial stood for “Flytrap,” which was absurd, but it was quite true that between the wars he had designed the Corps’ standard M1A1 flytrap. Until the 29th was formed, this device had existed only on paper, but over one weekend in training he had ordered one built. It didn’t work. Not a single insect ventured into it. Nobody had the courage to tell the colonel, and on a Sunday of punishing heat the first sergeants had turned everybody out to catch flies by hand and put them in the trap so that Hastings wouldn’t feel crushed.
The colonel was a great, blond, buffalo of a man who always wore a bleached khaki fore-and-aft cap pushed to the back of his head. He was also the hoarsest and most redundant man I have ever known. His normal speaking voice can only be described as throaty, and he was forever saying things in it like “Here in Dixie we’re in the Deep South,” “Keep fit and healthy,” and “Eat lots of food and plenty of it.”
One sunlit morning—heavily handsome as only southern Californian weather can be—I was summoned by the sergeant major into the C.O.’s august presence. Hastings was standing beside a Lister bag in Officers’ Country, slaking his thirst.
“We’re going to sail aboard ship tomorrow,” he barked after draining a canteen cup.
“Sir.”
“The first day out I want Private Dumas to hold Japanese lessons. Just some fundamental key phrases. All officers and staff N.C.O’s will meet on the fantail in the stern. I’m requisitioning a blackboard from ship’s stores. Make sure Dumas is ready.”
When I passed the word to Whitey, he gave me what we called a thousand-yard stare—a look of profound preoccupation. Then, while we were mounting the gangplank of the U.S.S. General C. G. Morton, lugging our seabags on our left shoulders and saluting the ship’s colors as we boarded her, word was passed of our voyage’s destination. We were headed for jungle maneuvers on Guadalcanal. “Oh, Christ, not that goddamned island,” Ivice groaned. As Acting John I had been the first to reach the deck, and I happened to be looking at Dumas when the news reached him. He gave me a two-thousand-yard stare.
The next morning all designated hands fell out aft, with notebooks and pencils in hand. First the colonel pointed out that the blackboard was there, with lots of chalk and plenty of it, and that we were about to get some dope that would improve our efficiency and competence. Then he introduced Dumas. It was, I later thought, one of Whitey’s finest hours. Arms akimbo, head high, with just the trace of a smile on that rugged face—the look of the learned teacher addressing eager neophytes—he proceeded with such assurance that one momentarily forgot he was outranked by everyone else there. Like English, he observed, Japanese was two languages, the written and the spoken. We would be chiefly concerned with the second, but it might be useful if we acquired some proficiency with the first. Turning to the blackboard he chalked with stenographic speed:
“That means ‘Put your hands up, Nip!’” he said easily. “The best phonetic rendition I can give you is ‘Zari sin toy fong!’”
We wrote it down.
The next phrase was:
“‘Booki fai kiz soy?’” said Whitey. “It means ‘Do you surrender?’”
Then:
“‘Mizi pik loi ooni rak tong zin?’ ‘Where are your comrades?’”
“Tong what?” rasped the colonel.
“Tong zin, sir,” our instructor replied, rolling chalk between his palms. He arched his eyebrows, as though inviting another question. There was one. The adjutant asked, “What’s that gizmo on the end?”
“It’s called a fy-thong,” Whitey said. “It looks like a quotation mark, or a German umlaut, but its function is very different. It makes the question imperative—almost a threat. In effect you’re saying, ‘Tell me where your comrades are or you’re a dead Nip.’”
“Right on target,” the colonel muttered, writing furiously.
Next Whitey scrawled:
“Means ‘I want some water,’” he explained. “You say it ‘Ruki gack keer pong tari loo-loo.’”
Then:
“‘Moodi fang baki kim tuki dim fai?’ That’s a question: ‘Where is your commander?’”
A company commander raised a hand. “Why no fy—fy…”
“Fy-thong,” Whitey prompted. He spread his hands. “I really can’t explain it, sir. The imperative just doesn’t exist
in certain conjugations. They call it a narrow inflection. It’s a weird language.” He grinned. “But then, they’re a peculiar people.”
“Murdering shitheads,” hoarsed the colonel, flexing his elbow and scribbling on.
The battalion operations officer—the BN-3—cleared his throat. He was a squat gargoyle of a man with a thick Brooklyn accent, the comic of Officers’ Country. He asked, “How do you say ‘I got to take a crap?’”
Into the laughter Whitey said earnestly, “That’s a good question, sir. The Japanese are very sensitive about bodily functions. You have to put it just right.”
He chalked:
He said: “‘Song foy suki-suki kai moy-ah.’”
The BN-3 shot back, “What about saying to a Nip girl ‘Voulezvous coucher avec moi?’”
Colonel Hastings thought that was hilarious, and once his guffaws had sanctioned the joke, everyone joined in lustily. Everyone, that is, except Whitey. Nursing his elbows and rocking back on his heels, he gave them a small, tight enlisted-man’s smile. Slowly it dawned on the rest of us that he had not understood the operations officer, that his foreign languages did not include French. There was much coughing and shuffling of feet; then the BN-3 said in the subdued voice of one whose joke had been unappreciated, “What I mean is—how do you tell a piece of gash that you want your ashes hauled?”
Now Whitey beamed. He turned to the blackboard and scrawled:
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 19
