Coming back, I noticed a knot of marines, many from G Company, gathered in excitement on the riverbank. Runner rushed up to them with my new field glasses.
He had them to his eyes, as I came up. I thought he was squinting overhard, then I saw that he was actually grimacing. I took the glasses from him and focused on the opposite shore, where I saw a crocodile eating the fat “chow-hound” Japanese. I watched in debased fascination, but when the crocodile began to tug at the intestines, I recalled my own presence in that very river hardly an hour ago, and my knees went weak and I relinquished the glasses.
That night the V reappeared in the river. Everyone whooped and hollered. No one fired. We knew what it was. It was the crocodile.
Three smaller V’s trailed afterward.
They kept us awake, crunching. The smell kept us awake. Even though we lay with our heads swathed in a blanket—which was how we kept off the mosquitoes—the smell overpowered us. Smell, the sense which somehow seems a joke, is the one most susceptible to outrage. It will give you no rest. One can close one’s eyes to ugliness or shield the ears from sound; but from a powerful smell there is no recourse but flight. And since we could not flee, we could not escape this smell; and we could not sleep.
We never fired at the crocodiles, though they returned to their repast day after day until the remains were removed to the mass burning and burial which served as funeral pyre for the enemy we had annihilated.
We never shot at the crocs because we considered them a sort of “river patrol.” Their appetite for flesh aroused, they seemed to promenade the Tenaru daily. No enemy, we thought, would dare to swim the river with them in it; nor would he succeed if he dared. We relied upon our imperfect knowledge of the habits of the crocodiles (“If they chase you, run zigzag: they can’t change direction.”) and a thick network of barbed wire to forestall their tearing us to pieces. Sometimes on black nights, in a spasm of fear, it might be imagined that the big croc was after us, like the crocodile with the clock inside of him who pursues Captain Hook in Peter Pan.
So the crocodiles became our darlings, we never molested them. Nor did any of us ever swim the Tenaru again.
3
Our victory in the fight which we called “The Battle of Hell’s Point” was not so great as we had imagined it to be. It was to be but one of many fights for Guadalcanal, and, in the end, not the foremost of them. But being the first in our experience, we took it for total triumph; like those who take the present for the best of all worlds, having no reference to the past nor regard for the future.
From the high plateau of triumph we were about to descend to the depths of trial and tedium. The Japanese attack was to be redoubled and prolonged and varied. It would come from the sky, the sea and the land. In between every trial there would stretch out the tedium that sucks a man dry, drawing off the juice from body and soul as a native removes the contents of a stick of sugar cane, leaving it spent, cracked, good for nothing but the flames.
And there is terror, coming from the interaction of trial and tedium: the first, shaking a man as the wind in the treetops; the second, eroding him as the flood at the roots. Each fresh trial leaves a man more shaken than the last, and each period of tedium—with its time for speculative dread—leaves his foundations worn lower, his roots less firm for the next trial. Sometimes there is a final shattering: a man crouching in a pit beneath the bombardment of a battleship might put a pistol to his head and deliver himself. Sometimes it is partial; another man might break at the sound of a diving enemy plane and scream and shudder and wring his hands—and rise to run. This is the terror I mean; this is the terror that strangles reason with the clawing hands of panic. I saw it twice, I felt it pluck at me twice. But it was rare. It claimed few victims.
Courage was a commonplace.
It formed a club or corporation, much as do those other common things upon which men, for diverse reasons, place so great a value; like money, like charity. For it is the common on which the exclusive rests. Our muddy machine gun pits were transformed into Courage Clubs when bombs fell or Japanese warships pounded us from the sea. There was protocol to be observed, too, and it was natural that the poor fellow who might break into momentary terror should cause pained silences and embarrassed coughs. Everyone looked the other way, like millionaires confronted by the horrifying sight of a club member borrowing five dollars from the waiter.
But there was a bit more charity in our clubs, I think. We were not quite so puffed up that we could not recognize the ugly thing on our friend’s face as the elder brother of the thing fluttering within our own innards. You today, me tomorrow.
A month had passed, and it seemed to us the falling bombs were as numerous as the flies around us. Three times a day and every Sunday morning (the Jap fixity of idea, nourished on the great success of Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor) the coconut grove was sibilant with the whispering of the bombs. It sounded like the confession of a giant.
At night Washing Machine Charlie picked up the slack. Washing Machine Charlie—so named for the sound of his motors—was the nocturnal marauder who prowled our skies. There may have been more than one Charlie—that is, more than one Nipponese pilot making the midnight run over our positions—but there was never more than one plane at a time overhead at night. That was all that was needed for such badgering work.
Like the dog whose bark is worse than his bite, the throb of Charlie’s motors was more fearsome than the thump of his bombs. Once the bombs were dropped, we would be relieved, knowing he would be off and away. But the drone of Charlie’s circling progress kept everyone awake and uneasy for so long as Charlie cared—or dared. Dawn meant departure for Charlie, for then our planes could rise to chastise him, and he would become visible to our anti-aircraft batteries.
Charlie did not kill many people, but, like Macbeth, he murdered sleep.
To these trials was added the worst ordeal: shelling from the sea.
Enemy warships—usually cruisers, sometimes battleships—stand off your coast. It is night and you cannot see them, nor could you if it were day, for they are miles and miles away. Our airplanes cannot rise at night to meet them. Our seventy-five-millimeter pack howitzers are as effectual as popguns opposing rifles. The enemy has everything his way.
We could see the flashes of the guns far out to sea. We heard the soft pah-boom, pah-boom of the salvos. Then rushing through the night, straining like an airy boxcar, came the huge projectiles. The earth rocks and shakes upon the terrifying crash of the detonation, though it be hundreds of yards away. Your stomach is squeezed, as though a monster hand were kneading it into dough; you gasp for breath like the football player who falls heavily and has the wind knocked out of him.
Flash. Pah-boom. Hwoo, hwoo-hwoee.
They’re lowering their sights … it’s coming closer … oh, that one was close … the sandbags are falling … I can’t hear it. I can’t hear the shell … it’s the one you don’t hear, they say, the one you don’t hear … where is it? … where is it?
Flash! … Pah-boom! … Thank God … it’s lifted … it’s going the other way.
Dawn blinks across the river. They go. The planes on the airstrip behind us rise in pursuit. We emerge from the pits. Someone says he is thankful the bombardment continued all night, for if it had ceased, an attack by land might have followed. Someone else calls him a fool. They argue. But nobody cares. It is daylight now and there are only the bombings to worry about—and the heat, and the mosquitoes, and the rice lying in the belly like stones.
The eyes are rounder. The tendency to stare is more pronounced.
We hated working parties. We were weak with hunger. We manned the lines at night. By day, they formed us into working parties and took us to the airfield. We buried boxes of ammunition there. Digging deep holes, lugging the hundred-pound crates, we only got weaker.
Once, returning from a working party, the bombers swept suddenly overhead. I fled before the crashing approach of the bombs they scattered throughout our
grove. I leapt into a freshly dug slit trench with three others. I crouched there while roaring air squeezed my stomach. Behind me crouched another man, his face against my bare back. I felt his lips moving in prayer over my skin, the quivering kiss of fear and faith.
When I returned to the pits, they told me that the other working party, the one that I had missed, had been obliterated by the bombs. That was when Manners died, and the gay Texan.
Chuckler made corporal. He made it in a battlefield promotion. Lieutenant Ivy-League had recommended him for a Silver Star for our work on the riverbank in the Hell’s Point fight, specifying that our action in moving the gun from place to place may have discouraged an enemy flanking attack. The regimental commander reduced the citation to a promotion of one grade. Ivy-League had not mentioned me in his recommendation. I have no idea why not. Though it was Chuckler who had first grabbed our gun, it was I who had proposed the moves—and Ivy-League knew it. I resented being ignored, although I tried to conceal it, and Chuckler, embarrassed, did his best to pass over it, trying to make a joke of it. But he deserved both promotion and citation, for he was a born leader. I never forgave Ivy-League, and I think this marked the beginning of my dislike for him.
They brought us mosquito nets. We still slept on the ground—a poncho under us if it was dry, over us if it was raining. But the mosquito nets were a boon. Now we could use our blankets to sleep on, rather than to guard our head against mosquitoes. The poncho could be rolled up for a pillow; if it rained, it went over us. But the nets really came too late. We were full of malaria.
They brought in supplies. Each squad got a toothbrush, a package of razor blades and a bar of candy. We raffled them off. The Runner won the candy bar. Despairing of dividing it among ten men, he fell into a torment of indecision, until everyone assured him he should eat it himself. He slunk off to the underbrush to do so.
Oakstump continued to reinforce his private fort. Every time I saw him it seemed he had an ax in his hand or a coconut log on his shoulder. Once he carried a log so huge that it gouged a hole in his shoulder; a wound which, in civilization, would have required stitching.
Everyone kept saying hopefully that the army was coming in next week to relieve us.
Everyone was in despair. We heard that the army relief force had been destroyed at sea.
Chuckler and I visited the cemetery. It lay to the south off the coastal road that ran from east to west through the coconuts. We knelt to pray before the graves of the men we had known. Only palm fronds marked the place where they were buried, although here and there were rude crosses, on which were nailed the men’s identification tags. Some of the crosses bore mess gear tins, affixed to the wood like rude medallions, and on those the marines had lovingly carved their epitaphs.
“He died fighting.”
“A real marine.”
“A big guy with a bigger heart.”
“Our Buddy.”
“The harder the going, the more cheerful he was.”
There was this verse, which I have seen countless times, before and since, the direct and unpolished cry of a marine’s sardonic heart:
And when he gets to Heaven
To St. Peter he will tell:
One more Marine reporting, sir—
I’ve served my time in Hell.
Other inscriptions, and most often the dead man’s name, were made by pressing bullets into the ground, so that the round brass end of the cartridges gleamed above the earth. Chuckler and I lifted our gaze from the cemetery to encompass the entire level plain sweeping back to the hills. Chuckler raised his eyebrows sardonically.
“Plenty of room,” he said.
“That’s for sure,” I said.
We said a prayer before the grave of one of the dead from our own platoon.
“You know,” Chuckler said, rising, “he had two hundred bucks in his kick before Hell’s Point. He won it in a poker game.”
“Yeah?”
“When they went to bury him he didn’t have a dime.”
We plotted the death of a rat that had become attached to our machine gun pit. We swore we would kill it and have fresh meat. Its habit was to scurry across the gun embrasure, almost flitting, it moved so fast in the half light. It seemed the rat grew bolder as we grew weaker from hunger, until in our extremity it actually sauntered across the embrasure! We never caught it. If we had, I doubt that we would have eaten it.
One night we were shelled by cruisers. A projectile landed in the river mud not far from us; the pit shook like jelly. No one spoke, until No-Behind said hopefully, “Must be a dud.” I said, “Didn’t you ever hear of a delayed fuse?” and everybody giggled, except No-Behind, who drew his breath sobbingly. I had to slap him.
Another night—a very black night—we huddled in the pits while the sounds of battle came to us from the hills on our right. We were alerted for an attack. We sat wonderingly the whole night, all of it, until morning brought the news that the first half of the battle of Bloody Ridge had been fought. The Japs had been repulsed.
When night fell again, the battle was resumed. We sat again in the black pit, waiting. This time there was almost no crackling of small arms fire, only the thump and crash of artillery—our artillery, we hoped. We took turns peering from the pit for signs of the enemy on our front, or crawled out on the river bank for a better look. We could only hope the Raiders and Paramarines would hold, up there in that black-and-scarlet hell, where the issue had become so close that our own artillery was falling upon our own positions, abandoned by the defending marines and overrun by the attackers. It was a most unbelievable barrage our one-hundred-and-five-millimeters threw out. I was nowhere near either end of it, yet it made my teeth ache.
Morning was a blessing. It chased away fear of the Japanese breaking our line up in the hills, pouring through the gap, spilling into the groves behind us. We knew the Japs had been beaten. Strange, how the anxiety of that vigil could be almost as wearing as the actual fight.
The Hoosier said it next day.
We were gathered in the shade of the only tree on the river bank. Hoosier sat leaning against the trunk, whittling on a stick.
He kept on plying the stick with his knife, slicing off long curly slivers of white wood, seeming not to care whether or not anyone heeded his words.
“They’re gonna whittle us,” he said, shaping his sentences proportionate to the slivers. “They come in last night against the Raiders, same as they come in against us. Sure, we beat them. So’d the Raiders. But ever’ time we lose a few chips. Ever’ time we lose a couple hundred men. What do they care what they lose? Life is cheap with them. They got plenty more, anyway.” He waved the stick. “They got plenty of sticks, but we just got the one, we just got us. Fellow from the Fifth came by this morning and said the Japs was unloading two more troop transports down at Kokum. They keep on whittlin’ us. Ever’ day we lose ten, twenty fellows from the bombing. Ever’ night Washing Machine Charlie gets a couple. When they hit us with them battleships, I dunno how many we lose.
“But they got it all their own way,” he continued, grunting as the knife cut into a hard spot, “‘cause we ain’t got no ships and we ain’t got no airplanes ‘cept a coupla Grummans that cain’t get off the ground half the time because we ain’t got no gasoline. They got the ships and they got the airplanes and it looks like they got the time, too. So Ah’m telling you”—the knife cut through and the stick broke—“they’re gonna whittle us.”
The Chuckler sought to make a joke of it.
“What’s eating you? You never had it so good. Here’s a guy getting lamb’s tongue in his rice and he wants to get back to civilization and stand in them long lines for his war bonds. Whaddya want—egg in your beer?”
“Don’t be a damn fool, Chuckler. Ah’m not kidding. They’re gonna wear us down.”
“No egg in my beer,” said the Runner. “Just give it to me straight, just let me have mine in a nice tall glass like they have at the Staler. Carling’s. Carling’s B
lack Label.”
Hoosier arose and looked down at us with a glance of wearied exasperation. He strode away, and we sat there in silence. We felt like theology students whose instructor takes his leave after presenting the most compelling arguments against the existence of God. Our faith in victory had been unquestioning. Its opposite, defeat, had no currency among us. Victory was possible, that was all; it would be easy or difficult, quick or prolonged, but it would be victory. So here came the disturbing Hoosier, displaying the other side of the coin: showing us defeat.
It shook us, and it was from this moment that we dated the feeling of what is called expendability.
All armies have expendable items. That is, a part or unit, the destruction of which will not be fatal to the whole. In some ordeals, a man might consider his finger expendable, but not his hand; or, in extremity, his arm but not his heart. There are expendable items which may be lost or destroyed in the field, either in peace or in war, without their owner being required to replace them. A rifle is so expendable or a cartridge belt. So are men.
Men are the most expendable of all.
Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese, not one nor all of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability.
This was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice; that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being expended puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham. entirely without reproach; yet, for the same Master, he would have gone gladly to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifices of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim.
Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific Page 9
