I was so happy to have his letter that I ran a front-page story under the headline MARE OF THE MARINES ENTERS PACIFIC CAMPAIGN, even though there was nothing specific I could tell about his activities.
Ernie Pyle himself, I learned from his column, had entered the Pacific campaign. The war in Europe was almost over, and they didn’t need Ernie Over There as much as they needed him Way Out There in the Pacific. In my reply to Mare, enclosing the latest issue of the Star, I told him to keep his eye out for Ernie, and if he saw him to be sure and tell him he was from Stay More, Arkansas, which Ernie would of course mention in his column, and then we could all feel famous for just a little bit. I also told Mare about my broken arm, but pointed out that in general the Axis were conquering the Allies, thanks especially to Willard, and we even anticipated that the Allies might soon surrender. I told Mare how Willard had got a mule for the Dingletoons, but that nobody knew that he was the one who’d done it. “Gypsy named the mule Old Jarhead,” I wrote. I didn’t tell Mare that Willard was nuts about Gypsy.
When Doc Swain finally removed the cast from my arm, I wrote Mare and told him all about it.
I don’t know if Mare ever caught a glimpse of Ernie Pyle. The ship Ernie was on, the U.S.S. Cabot, was also the base for Captain John Henry “Hank” Ingledew of Stay More, who was in charge of all radio operations for the Pacific Fleet (even though back home in Stay More we still hadn’t seen our first radio). Hank Ingledew, the lucky dog, shook hands with Ernie Pyle, but as far as I know Ernie didn’t put his name and hometown into any of his columns.
If Ernie had met Mare, what would he have written about what happened to him? Of course, to tell Mare’s story, Ernie would have had to know Mare as well as I did. So what if Ernie and I had collaborated on Mare’s story? We would have needed a little help from you.
Chapter seven
When pudgy, freckled Gerald “Mare” Coe first caught sight of what was left of the village of Motoyama, it seemed to him that he might be foreglimpsing what his hometown of Stay More, Arkansas, could become if people didn’t take care of it and kept leaving it, and nature herself stripped it of its trees and grasses. It was an awful sight. He knew that this fighting had harmed it beyond repair. Before all the women and children had been evacuated back to the mainland, Motoyama had been a little town with a dusty main street like Stay More’s, a general store, a school, a geisha house, a beer hall, and about fifty of the flimsy, single-story houses, a foot off the ground, that the Japanese typically built. The people had mined the sulfur that gave the island its name, Sulfur Island, Iwo Jima, but they had also grown a lot of sugar cane and milled it into sugar, which was what people in Stay More still did. Now the village was reduced to rubble, denuded of even the coarse grasses and gnarled bushes and trees that had struggled for existence, and pocked with the pillboxes and foxholes from which a steady barrage of machine gun and rifle fire, artillery and grenades, filled the air with blasts and hisses and pops and sizzles and screams. There were even cockroaches all over the place, waiting to inherit what was left of the place after all the shelling and killing. These weren’t the same kind of cockroach that Stay More had, but cockroaches all the same.
To the best of his knowledge, Mare Coe had never killed anyone before, except of course in play. In the assault on Mount Suribachi, several days earlier, he had actually fired his rifle in the direction of an enemy soldier, and the man had fallen, hit not by Mare’s bullet but by several bullets from Mare’s comrades. Mare wouldn’t have pulled the trigger in the first place had not a friend yelled into his ear, “My damn gun’s jammed! You get the Nip!” But Mare, an expert marksman, had carefully aimed to miss.
In the early years of the war, before he was drafted, back home in Stay More, playing war games with his triplet brothers, Earl and Burl, he found himself delegated to be leader of the “Japs.” It was all in fun and play, and the “Allies” were always victorious in their games, except their baseball games, where Mare, pitching for the “Axis,” was unbeatable, almost as compensation for suffering defeat on the “battlefield” and ignominy as a despised Jap.
But Mare (who got his nickname from his aspiration to become “mayor” of his little town) had a thick hide, and the same altruism or goodwill or whatever fellow feeling that made him the first member of the rival gangs of “Allies” and “Axis” to become political rather than simply militaristic also made him somewhat sympathetic with the people whose representative he had been appointed and whose leader, Tojo, he had been impersonating. The kids of Stay More, like all Americans, despised the Japs, even more than the Nazis, because at least some Stay More families might have had remote Germanic ancestry or in any case they spoke a language that had largely derived from Anglo-Saxon, whereas the Japs were yellow-skinned, slant-eyed, smelly, and the most vicious bloodthirsty soldiers in the history of warfare, and what they uttered bore no resemblance on earth to anything that anybody could understand.
“Atama ga okashii!” exclaimed Hisao Fujida from his bunker as he watched Mare Coe rise up from his sniper’s crouch and begin to walk erect and casually into the village of Motoyama, or what little was left of it. What Hisao said may be translated as the equivalent of Mare’s having said “His head is plumb peculiar,” or “That feller has shore got nobody home upstairs.” Hisao added, not without admiration, “Ban-yu!” which means foolhardiness. Mare’s act was not bravery or recklessness but sheer brazen determination, although Hisao on reflection had a suspicion of the unthinkable goodwill that could have lain behind it.
Mare took off his helmet, all that preserved his consciousness from the hail of bullets and shrapnel that zipped and zinged all around him, and he began gently to sweep the path with his helmet as if trying to drive a herd of cows. So many of the watchful enemy were astounded by his behavior that they repeated Hisao’s exclamation of “Ban-yu!” and the machine gunner exclaimed “Yu-ki!,” or bravery, and took his finger off the trigger and one by one the others too ceased firing, so that enough of the raucous din had died down that they could hear him.
“Saw bossy,” Mare was saying, with the same mild and gentle ease with which he walked. His audience discussed among themselves the possible meaning of his words. In Japanese, “saw—” is a common prefatory or introductory expression, like our “Well—” as in “Well, how about that?,” or indicative of upbeat determination, as in “Well, let’s get going!” But “bossy”? Some of them thought he might have said “boshi” which just means hat. But “Well, hat?” No, it was more likely he’d said “basshi” which means youngest child. Was he therefore being insulting? Taunting them as babies? “Well, kiddo”? They looked at each other and repeated his expression among themselves, as they repeated Hisao’s ban-yu or the machine gunner’s yu-ki. But, one and all, they stopped firing.
Mare wondered if any of these hidden soldiers were actually natives of this town of Motoyama. Were they defending their own village, as he had defended the village of Stay More against the attacks of the “Allies” in their war games? There was scarcely anything here worth defending, but for that matter there hadn’t been much left of Stay More to defend.
Just because he had been required to take the part of the enemy in those war games, to become a Jap in play-like, did not mean that Mare Coe was still taking sides with the enemy. He was not lacking in patriotism. It had been he who, after the successful assault on Mount Suribachi and the raising of the first small flag, had gone back down the mountain to the beachhead and boarded a landing ship and saluted an ensign, and had said, “Sir, lookee up yonder,” and had called his attention to the small Stars and Stripes atop the mountain. Mare had been out of breath from running, and the ensign had had difficulty understanding him when he requested, “D’ye reckon ye mought have a bigger flaig than that’un hereabouts, that ye could lend us the borry of?” After Mare had repeated himself and had attempted a paraphrase, the ensign had understood. “Must be pretty rough up there,” the ensign had observed, and Mare had said “Yessir, it shore
is, but we didn’t have a awful lot of trouble a-taking the mounting.” The ensign had fetched a folded large flag, which, by appropriate coincidence, had come originally from the salvage depot at Pearl Harbor. Where the first flag was a mere four feet by two feet, this new one was eight by four. Mare had thanked the ensign profusely for it, then had taken off at a dead run, back up the mountain. When he had reached the summit, he had had just enough breath left to lurch forward and place the folded flag into the hands of another marine, who attached it to a makeshift flagpole and, with the help of five other fellows, had begun to struggle to shove the staff of the flagpole into the rubble. Mare had wanted desperately to help them raise Old Glory, but he had been so tuckered out from his errand that he could only sit panting on the ground while the other six marines raised the flag as a photographer took their picture. By all rights, Pfc. Gerald Coe ought to have been in that picture. If he had, his image would eventually exist in a gigantic bronze sculpture in Washington and lesser replicas at Quantico Marine Base and elsewhere. As it was, there would be only a small bronze plaque in Mare’s memory on the wall of a hallway of the high school at Jasper, Newton County, Arkansas.
For his pains, Mare got to keep the first flag, the smaller one, and he now intended to plant that flag in the village of Motoyama, just as the boys had done in the game of Capture the Flag back home in Stay More. He did not see any Jap flags flying in the village, but if he found one, he would capture it.
Hisao Fujida began to laugh. It was the only sound except for the far-distant gunfire elsewhere on the island, as faint as a Ford way off up on the Butterchurn Holler road a-backfiring in the summer night. All of the enemy entrenched in Motoyama town had stopped firing. Like Hisao, like Mare himself, they had a touch of combat fatigue and needed a moment’s rest. They watched with amusement and interest as the pudgy, freckled American, perhaps possessed not so much with ban-yu nor yu-ki but with the atama ga okashii, dementia, put down his carbine and took from his backpack a folded red-white-and-blue flag, and began to look around for a pole of some kind to attach it to. All the trees and branches and shrubs had been reduced to splinters and flinders. Mare’s best hope was a length of the drainpipe that all the houses had had to catch the precious rainwater, which was the only source of fresh water. But all of these appeared to be gone.
Hisao Fujida’s superior, Lieutenant Toshinosuke Kaido, did not see any humor in the situation, and was seething over the implied insult in “Saw bossy.” He was tempted to shoot the American himself with his Nambu automatic, but the American had put down his carbine and was thus unarmed, and a gentleman does not shoot an unarmed man. So Lieutenant Kaido took his ceremonial sword, inherited from a samurai ancestor, and approached the American, ready to decapitate him. Hisao Fujida winced, and grieved.
Mare saw the Japanese lieutenant coming and said in his mild fashion, “You’uns had all best jist pack up and git on out. I aim to raise our flag over what’s left of this here town.” But as the lieutenant raised the sword overhead with both hands, Mare had the sense to back away from him. Backing, he tripped and fell into a shell crater.
Back behind the lines, where ninety other marines of Alpha Company, the Second Battalion, Twenty-eighth Regiment, Fifth Division, were watching with even less amusement than Lieutenant Kaido possessed, and where Mare’s platoon sergeant was cursing Mare’s sister and mother and all his ancestors because Mare had not waited for the “Move out!” command and was thus insubordinate, a sharpshooter stood up and fired at Lieutenant Kaido just at the moment that the latter raised his sword over Mare Coe’s head. The lieutenant fell, whereupon the air everywhere once again was filled with pows and pams and booms and bings and chattering pops. Mare did not dare lift his head above the rim of the shell crater and attempt to retrieve his carbine. He could only lie there, realizing that he might have lost the chance to raise Old Glory in Motoyama town. “Who’d want the place anyhow?” he said to himself, as if in consolation. In fact, the entire Twenty-eighth Regiment desperately wanted it, and had been trying all day to take it.
Pinned down, Mare could only lie there and reflect upon the town that he had wanted to be mayor of, and, while he was at it, allow his thoughts to drift to the girl he’d left behind, a lovely thing he’d met not too long before he had shipped out. Her name was Gypsy, appropriate for a girl whose family was always nomadic and had not been in Stay More very long. At fourteen, she was the oldest daughter in a large family of hardscrabble squatters who lived up in Butterchurn Holler. Mare had never had a girlfriend before, and it was almost by accident that he met her one night on the banks of the creek, and a passion hit them both, not because he was soon leaving to join the service but because of the chemistry of some old country superstition that made a pretty young vagabond girl fall in love with a pudgy, homely, awkward but infinitely kind young man. It must have been one of the quickest consummations of a courtship anybody had ever heard, seen, or dreamt.
Not long afterward, at Camp Pendleton where he trained for the marines, in his barracks the other guys talked about girls as if screwing and humping and balling and banging and plowing was the wickedest, nastiest, meanest, dirtiest thing a fellow could do, but that old time on that old sandbar with old Gypsy had been the nicest old thing that Mare could ever have imagined, the loveliest thing in all God’s thoughtful creation of this world. Even now, when the grenade came rolling alongside him, he was able to give himself over almost entirely to the memory of its beauty.
But he had the presence of mind, even while re-creating the vision and sensation of his first and only experience of a woman, to reach for the grenade and to give it a fling that sent it back whence it had come. His thoughts still lost to Gypsy, he did not have time to decide consciously just where to throw the grenade. Almost by accident, even though he had an accurate arm that could pitch a mean fast ball or a wicked curve ball, the grenade lobbed into a foxhole and destroyed its inhabitant. It was the first person Mare had ever killed. He had no time to reflect upon having killed a Jap before another grenade fell into his lap. By now he could no longer think about Gypsy. Having killed one man, he might as well kill another. He wound up and pitched the grenade into the vent of a bunker and annihilated its five occupants. Gypsy evaporated like dew on the sunstruck grass; had he actually told her that he would never kill the enemy? He began to give his full attention to the job before him. The third grenade exploded halfway back to its sender without hurting anybody. Then the enemy craftily delivered the fourth and fifth grenades simultaneously, one to his left, the other to his right. But he had two hands, didn’t he? And while the fourth grenade also detonated before completing its return journey to the enemy, the fifth, thrown with his good left arm, his pitching arm, landed in a machine gun nest and obliterated three of the enemy as well as their machine. The sixth grenade he actually leapt up and caught in the air, like a fly ball, and was thus able to aim, like a pitcher trying to throw a man out at third, and to impart such an unerring focus to its trajectory that it went through the gunport of the largest of the pillboxes, wreaking considerable loss of life and property therein.
One wonders why the Japanese were wasting so many grenades trying to kill an unarmed Ozark hillbilly whose only talent, apart from helping his father blacksmith while daydreaming of becoming the mayor of a town in its terminal demise, was pitching a pretty fair game of baseball, seldom losing. Hisao Fujida asked himself that question, or, rather, since he knew nothing of Mare Coe’s background, he wondered why his comrades were not saving their grenades for the imminent onslaught of the ninety other members of the Twenty-eighth Regiment, who were even now setting up mortars, bazookas and a 37 mm cannon in order to shell the daylights out of any Japanese who escaped the grenades returned from Mare Coe, a soldier possessed of ban-yu, yu-ki, and quite possibly atama ga okashii, but perhaps crafty enough to feign his eccentric behavior in order to lull the Japanese into a momentary but dangerous dropping of their tight security. In other words, this weird American had quite poss
ibly been part of a clever scheme, a decoy, if you will, to trick and thus disarm the defenders of Motoyama. Back home in his own village in Shikoku, playing war games as a boy, Hisao had been similarly tricked. This thought somewhat disturbed Hisao, and whatever benevolence he had felt for the American vanished. His wits returned to him, and he used them.
Hisao Fujida calculated the amount of time it took the American to receive and return a grenade, and Hisao deliberately, after pulling the pin on a grenade, allowed three seconds to elapse before throwing it, counting aloud to himself, Fujibachi One, Fujibachi Two, Fujibachi Three.
When Mare Coe caught Hisao’s grenade, and started to throw it back, it exploded in his hand, taking off his arm, most of his face, and all of his life.
Chapter eight
When Miss Jerram saw Doc Swain’s old car pulling into the schoolyard that March morning, she wondered if one of us had took down sick that she didn’t know about. She looked around the room at all of us, but we all looked reasonably healthy. Maybe Doc Swain was coming to vaccinate everybody, she decided, but wondered why he couldn’t just do it at his office. Quickly she grabbed her purse and got out her compact and snapped it open and took a close look at her face. She already had on enough powder and rouge and lipstick and all to disguise her identity from anybody except her dog. She put some powder on her nose and had time to re-edge her mouth with the lipstick before Doc came into the schoolhouse. We all turned to look at him, a man in his middle sixties, thirty or more years older than Estalee Jerram, as if she cared—he was a man, wasn’t he? and there weren’t many of those left in Stay More. He gave us a forced smile, as if he had nothing to smile about. Then he crooked his finger at Miss Jerram, motioning her to come outside the schoolhouse so’s he could talk to her in private.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 83
