That night in the Okinawa Hilton I dream of the Sergeant, the old man, and their hill. It is a shocking nightmare, the worst yet. I had expected irony, scorn, contempt, and sneers from him. Instead, he is almost catatonic. He doesn't even seem to see the old man. His face is emaciated, deathly white, smeared with blood, and pitted with tiny wounds, as though he had blundered into a bramble bush. His eyes are quite mad. He appears so defiled and so miserable that on awakening I instantly think of Dorian Gray. I have, I think, done this to myself. I have been betrayed, or been a betrayer, and this fragile youth is paying the price. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. And for this there can be no absolution.
But I cannot leave it at that. Despite my disillusionment with the Marine Corps, I cannot easily unlearn lessons taught then, and as the youngest DI on Parris Island can tell you, there is no such word as impossible in the Marine Corps. There must be more on this island than I have seen. And there is. Next morning I explore the lands beyond the neon and all it implies, and find that the island's surface tawdriness is no more characteristic of postwar Okinawa than Times Square is typical of Manhattan. Hill 53, for example, once an outer link in the coast-to-coast chain of the Machinato Line, is now shared by an amusement park and a botanical garden. The peak provides a superb view of modern Naha. Looking in that direction through field glasses, it is satisfying to see that the city's tidal flats, where we trapped a huge pocket of Nipponese after Sugar Loaf had been taken, have been filled in and are part of the downtown shopping center. The city's suburbs reflect quiet good taste: flat-topped stucco houses roofed with tiles and shielded for privacy by lush shrubs.
The pleasantest surprise is Shuri, the Machinato Line strong-point which was second only to Sugar Loaf in Ushijima's defenses. Japanese tourists seem to prefer visits to the Cave of the Virgins, or a descent of the 168 sandstone steps that lead to the Japanese commanders' last, underground command post on the island's southern tip, but to me Shuri is more attractive and far more significant. Commodore Matthew C. Perry first raised the American flag over Shuri Castle on May 26, 1853; the Fifth Marines did it again on May 29, 1945. Since 1950 the ruins of the castle's twelve-foot-thick walls — some of which have survived, curving upward with effortless grace — have enclosed the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa being the largest island in the Ryukyu Archipelago, and dotting the ridges flanking the university are modest, immaculate, middle-class homes. The castle-cum-university is on Akamaruso Dori, or Street, on the opposite side of which are swings, jungle gyms, and sandboxes. Under the shade of a tree in one corner stands an old Japanese tank, rusting in peace. None of the children in the little park pay any attention to it, and neither, after all I've seen, do I.
Before leaving the island I want to pay my respects to scenes once vivid to me. This seems a recipe for frustration, because most of them are gone. Green Beach Two, where my boondockers first touched Okinawan soil, is remarkable only for a silvery petroleum storage tank and two fuel pumps. My leaking cave near Machinato Field is gone; so is the field; only a renamed village, Makiminato, remains, and there is nothing familiar in it. The seawall on Oroku Peninsula and the tomb where I nearly died have completely vanished; a power station has replaced them. Motobu Peninsula, still clothed in its dense jungle, is the least-changed part of the island. The trouble here is not the absence of memorabilia. It is, once more, in my aging flesh. Precipices I once scaled effortlessly are grueling. Nevertheless I make it up the peninsula's peaks, Katsu and Yaetake. The pinnacles there provide first-rate views of the peninsula, and my presence on them attracts inquiring guards. I have been trespassing, once more, and I have been caught. But the guards are more curious than punitive, and presently I am talking to a voluble Japanese technician, Mr. Y. Fujumura. He explains that the peaks are used for Japanese and U.S. Signal Corps equipment which relays long-distance telephone calls, monitors radio traffic, and eavesdrops on phone conversations as far away as North Korea. He provides details. I understand none of them. We part, and on my way once more, checking my notes, I conclude that I have touched all bases on Okinawa.
I am wrong. I left the United States believing that a revisit to Sugar Loaf was out of the question because it had been bulldozed away for an officers' housing development. In La Jolla, General Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr., the retired Marine Corps commandant, said he had been in the neighborhood recently; he assured me that the hill just wasn't there any more. But I ask Jon Abel and Top Milton to join me in a visit to the development anyway. There we pass a teen center, turn from McKinley Street to Washington Street, and, as I give a shout, come to a complete stop.
There it is, a half-block ahead. I am looking at the whole of it for the first time. It is the hill in my dreams.
Sugar Loaf Hill.
Jon and Top, almost as excited as I am, begin digging out old maps, which confirm me, but I don't need confirmation. Instinctively I look around for patterns of terrain, cover and concealment, fields of fire. To a stranger, noticing all the wrinkles and bumps pitting its slopes, Sugar Loaf would merely look like a height upon which something extraordinary happened long ago. That is the impression of housewives along the street when we ring their doorbells and ask them. They are wide-eyed when we tell them that they are absolutely right, that those lumps and ripples once were shell holes and foxholes. Now a mantle of thick greensward covers all. I remember Carl Sandburg: “I am the grass … let me work.”
Up I go — no gasping this time — and find two joined pieces of wood at the top, a surveyor's marker referring to a bench mark below. I take a deep breath, suddenly realizing that the last time I was here anyone standing where I now stand would have had a life expectancy of about seven seconds. Today the ascent of Sugar Loaf takes a few minutes. In 1945 it took ten days and cost 7,547 Marine casualties. Ignoring the surveyor's marker, I take my own bearings, from memory. Northeast: Shuri and its university. Southeast: Half Moon; officers' dwellings there, too. South-southwest: one leg of Horseshoe visible, and that barren. Southwest: Naha's Grand Castle Hotel, once a flat saucer of black ruins. And beneath my feet, where mud had been deeply veined with human blood, the healing mantle of turf. “I am the grass.” I the Lord am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer. “Let me work.” Sacred heart of the crucified Jesus, take away this murdering hate and give us thine own eternal love.
And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man's real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understand, at last, why I jumped hospital that Sunday thirty-five years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front and almost certain death.
It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die, is not a man at all. He is truly damned.
And as I stand on that crest I remember a passage from Scott Fitzgerald. World War I, he wrote, “was the last love battle”; men, he said, could never “do that again in this generation.” But Fitzgerald died just a year before Pearl Harbor. Had he lived, he would have seen his countrymen united in a greater love than he had ever known. Actually love was only part of it. Among other things, we had to be tough, too. To fight World War II you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s Depression by a struggle for survival — in 1940 two out of every five draftees had been rejected, most of them victims of malnutrition. And you had to know that your whole generation, unlike the Vietnam generation, was in this together, that no strings were being pulled for anybody; the four Roosevelt brothers were in uniform, and the sons of both Harry Hopkins, FDR's closest adviser, and Leverett Salton-stall, one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate,
served in the Marine Corps as enlisted men and were killed in action. But devotion overarched all this. It was a bond woven of many strands. You had to remember your father's stories about the Argonne, and saying your prayers, and Memorial Day, and Scouting, and what Barbara Frietchie said to Stonewall Jackson. And you had to have heard Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge and to have seen Gary Cooper as Sergeant York. And seen how your mother bought day-old bread and cut sheets lengthwise and resewed them to equalize wear while your father sold the family car, both forfeiting what would be considered essentials today so that you could enter college.
Sugar Loaf, then and now
You also needed nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous, in which nothing was insuperable, whose ingenuity could solve anything by inventing something. You felt sure that all lands, given our democracy and our know-how, could shine as radiantly as we did. Esteem was personal, too; you assumed that if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity, respected as well as adored by your children. Wickedness was attributed to flaws in individual characters, not to society's shortcomings. To accept unemployment compensation, had it existed, would have been considered humiliating. So would committing a senile aunt to a state mental hospital. Instead, she was kept in the back bedroom, still a member of the family.
Debt was ignoble. Courage was a virtue. Mothers were beloved, fathers obeyed. Marriage was a sacrament. Divorce was disgraceful. Pregnancy meant expulsion from school or dismissal from a job. The boys responsible for the crimes of impregnation had to marry the girls. Couples did not keep house before they were married and there could be no wedding until the girl's father had approved. You assumed that gentlemen always stood and removed their hats when a woman entered a room. The suggestion that some of them might resent being called “ladies” would have confounded you. You needed a precise relationship between the sexes, so that no one questioned the duty of boys to cross the seas and fight while girls wrote them cheerful letters from home, girls you knew were still pure because they had let you touch them here but not there, explaining that they were saving themselves for marriage. All these and “God Bless America” and Christmas or Hanukkah and the certitude that victory in the war would assure their continuance into perpetuity — all this led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell, and, if it came to that, justified your death to all who loved you as you had loved them.
The author in 1979
Later the rules would change. But we didn't know that then. We didn't know.
My last war dream came to me in Hong Kong's Ambassador Hotel, in a room overlooking the intersection of Nathan and Middle streets. The dream began in a red blur, like a film completely out of focus, so much so that I didn't have the faintest idea of what I would see. Clarity came slowly. First: broad daylight, for the first time in these dreams. Second: the hill. No mystery about that now; it was Sugar Loaf down to the last dimple. The old man appeared on the right and began his weary ascent. But there was no figure rising on the left to greet him, though he didn't know that until, breathing heavily, he reached the summit and peered down the reverse slope. He saw nothing, heard nothing. There was nothing to see or hear. He waited, shifting slightly this way and that with the passive patience of the middle-aged. A cloud passed overhead, darkening the hill. Then the old man grasped what had happened. Embers would never again glow in the ashes of his memory. His Sergeant would never come again. He turned away, blinded by tears.
Author's Note
THIS BOOK IS LARGELY A MARINE'S MEMOIR, NOT A BALANCED HIStory of the war with Japan. Those who want versions of air and naval engagements during the conflict must look elsewhere; descriptions of Douglas MacArthur's campaigns, for example, may be found in American Caesar, my biography of the general.
That is the first breath. The second, which must quickly follow, is that my reminiscences are not chronological. Any attempt to impose structure upon the chaos of personal history, with the intent of attracting and holding the reader, necessarily involves some distortion. It may be as great as a Mercator projection's — for instance, Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, a riveting account of a disaster which struck when the writer was five years old — or as slight as H. L. Mencken's genial caveat that his autobiography was “yarning” and “not always photographically precise,” that “there are no doubt some stretchers in this book,” though “mainly it is fact.”
So here too. After thirty-five years, any man who suffered a head wound (my medical discharge papers note that, among other things, I had sustained “traumatic lesions of the brain”) can never be absolutely sure of his memory. But everything I have set down happened, and to the best of my recollection it happened just this way, except that I have changed names to respect the privacy of other men and their families. But I have resorted to some legerdemain in the interests of re-creating, and clarifying the spirit of, the historical past. Here and there I use the pronoun “we” in its all-inclusive sense, as in “We won the war.” More specifically, although I enlisted in the Marine Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor, I was ordered back to college until called up. Thus, although I spent seven months on Guadalcanal, I arrived after the Japanese hegira and saw no fighting there. No infantryman fought on all, or even many, of the Pacific islands. Deployment of troops, casualty figures, and tropical diseases laid down impossible odds against that. My own combat experience occurred on Okinawa, where I fought for over two months, during which I was wounded twice, was ordered off the line once, and was ultimately carried off the island and evacuated to Saipan. I have drawn from that bank of experience for flash-forwards in earlier chapters, introducing each episode at a point where it seems fitting. Writing them was extremely difficult. My feelings about the Marine Corps are still highly ambivalent, tinged with sadness and bitterness, yet with the first enchantment lingering. But by mining that tough old ore, and altering the order of those personal events, I have, I believe, been able to present a sequential account of a war which still confuses most Americans.
This, then, was the life I knew, where death sought me, during which I was transformed from a cheeky youth to a troubled man who, for over thirty years, repressed what he could not bear to remember.
Expressing gratitude to those who helped me along the way during this long journey into the past is an occasion for both pleasure and frustration — pleasure, because my memories of their kindnesses are still warm, and frustration, because my appreciation can never be adequate. I hope I have omitted no one. It is possible. Jungles are poor places to keep files. If I thus err in omission, I trust I shall be forgiven. Forgiveness is also asked for my failure to identify individuals by their military, diplomatic, civilian, tribal, and ecclesiastical titles. Generals are here, and monsignors, and ambassadors — all in different hierarchies, so varied and often so defiant of classification that I have resorted to that weak crutch, the alphabet. I honor each source; I thank each; I am deeply indebted to all; and I believe that they will share my doubt that rank will count for much when we cross that dark river to the far shore where all voyages end and all paths meet.
My Samaritans, then, were: Jonathan F. Abel, Aguedo F. Agbayani, Consul Alberto, C. W. Allison, Norman Anderson, John A. Baker, Itaaka Bamiatoa, Kabataan Barangay, Carmelo Barbero, Susan Bardelosa, Ieuan Batten, Bill Bennett, Homer Bigart, Al Bonney, Baltazar Jerome Bordallo, Madeleine M. Bordallo, Ricardo J. Bordallo, Robert L. Bowen, Edward R. Brady, Margaret A. Brewer, Paul H. Brown, Stanley Brown, Robert Byck, George Cakobau, Oscar Calvo, Carlos S. Camacho, Anthony Charlwood, Donald Chung, Martin Clemens, Andrew W. Coffey, Jeremiah Collins, John P. Condon, Paul Cox, Elfriede Craddock, Jerry Crad-dock, R. Don Crider, Horace Dawson, Beth Day, Judy Day, John deYoung, Rodolfo L. Diaz, Mack R. Douglas, R. E. Duca, Rodolfo Dula, Jim Earl, Florence Fenton, Y. Fujumura, Robert B. Fowler, Jay Gildner, John R. Griffith, Samuel B. Griffith II, John Guise, James Gunther, Robert Debs Heinl, Jr
., Ernest S. Hildebrand, Jr., Frank W. Ingraham, Osi Ivaroa, Sy Ivice, Emilie Johnson, Robert Jordan, Timothy Joyner, Bruce Kirkwood, Jackson Koria, Isirfli Korovula, Joiji Kotobalavu, Maura Leavy, Har-land Lee, Theodore Lidz, Chester A. Lipa, Arthur C. Livick, Jr., Ichiro Loitang, Haldon Ray Loomis, Fijito Oshikawa, Howard Mabie, P. D. MacDonald, Luis G. Magbanua, Pio Manoa, P. F. Manueli, Ferdinand Marcos, Imelda Romualdez Marcos, Ann Marshall, Tim Mauldin, Alan Meissner, Mike Mennard, Ross Milloy, Robert Milne, Arnold Milton, Yoshida Mitsui, Ben Moide, George E. Murphy, Satendra Nandan, Beretitaro Neeti, Dave Ngirmidol, Praxiteles C. Nicholson, Homer Noble, Myron Nordquist, Russell E. Olson, Jeremiah J. O'Neil, Noah Onglunge, Hera Owen, Robert Owen, Ted Oxburrow, Katsy Parsons, Lester E. Penney, Harry W. Peterson, Jr., Raymond Pillai, Eugene Ramsey, Asasela Ravuvu, John E. Reece, Garth Rees, Thomas Remengesaw, Carlos Romulo, Tessie Romulo, Pedro C. Sanchez, Frank Santo, Frans Schutzman, Tom Scott, Charles S. Shapiro, Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr., George Silk, Harry Simes, E. H. Simmons, Gus Smales, Kalista Smau, Hinao Soalablai, Kerrie Somosi, Robert Somosi, Laura M. Souder, Patrick Spread, Taute Takanoi, Jay Taylor, John Terrance, Ian Thompson, Joe Tooker, Jean Trumbull, Robert Trumbull, Fred Turner, Richard Underwood, Mae Verave, Mariano C. Kersosa, Jacob Vouza, Mike Ward, R. J. Wenzei, Roger L. Williams, William Wilson, Adrian P. Winkel, Anne Wray, and Stanton F. Zoglin.
Although this tale is personal, certain books were useful in the telling of it and are recommended to those interested in reading more about the battlefields it cites. These are Rust in Peace, by Bruce Adams (Sydney, 1975); The Pacific: Then and Now, by Bruce Bahrenburg (New York, 1971); A Complete History of Guam, by Paul Carano and Pedro C. Sanchez (Rutland, Vermont, 1964); History of the Sixth Marine Division, by Bevan Cass (Washington, 1948); The Battle for Guadalcanal, a superb account of that struggle, by Samuel B. Griffith II (Philadelphia, 1963); History of the Second World War, by B. H. Lidell Hart (New York, 1971); Soldiers of the Sea, a history of the Marine Corps, by Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. (Annapolis, 1962); The Long and the Short and the Tall, by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (New York, 1946); The Old Breed, a history of the First Marine Division in World War II, by George McMillan (Washington, 1949); The Fatal Impact, by Alan Moorehead (Middlesex, England, 1966); History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, volumes III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, XIII, XIV, by Samuel Eliot Morison (Boston, 1948, 1949, 1949, 1949, 1951, 1953, 1959, 1960); Untangled New Guinea Pidgin, by Wesley Sadler (Madang, Papua New Guinea, 1973); Tin Roofs and Palm Trees, by Robert Trumbull (Seattle, 1977); The Pacific Way, edited by Sione Tupouniua, et al. (Suva, Fiji, 1975); Tarawa, by Robert Sherrod (New York, 1944); World War II: Island Fighting, by Rafael Steinberg and the Editors of Time-Life Books (Alexandria, Virginia, 1978); and World War II: The Rising Sun, by Arthur Zich and the Editors of Time-Life Books (Alexandria, Virginia, 1977).
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