When the boat reached shore, the front ramp was dropped down and we were ordered to storm the beach. Splashing through the surf, surrounded by a hail of machine gun fire, we ran for our lives. I can hardly remember the details of what happened. It is all a haze now. But somehow or another most of us made it, scampering into the foliage and digging ourselves in. How we survived I still don’t know. There were many brutal close encounters with the Japanese all over the island during the weeks that followed. After some gruesome fighting the First Marine Division was withdrawn from Guadalcanal in December 1942. By then, the island was firmly held by units of the U.S. Army. As we shipped out we tallied our casualties. In our division 650 had been killed, 1,278 wounded, 31 were missing in action, and over 8,000 were suffering from malaria. We Marines shared a camaraderie that is unique in America’s fighting forces. We went through so much together that watertight bonds were formed. We thought of each other as brothers, and those deaths affected us all on a very personal level. On December 18, I leaned over the railings of our naval transport ship watching the island slip beneath the horizon as we made our way toward Australia. I was fortunate to still be alive and unhurt. I was one of the lucky ones.
AFTER BEING BRIEFLY STATIONED in New Caledonia I joined the Third Division and, for whatever reason, we spent a month back on Guadalcanal where all hostilities had now ceased. We didn’t mind the interlude but I still have no idea why we spent so much time there. Surprisingly, the forest and undergrowth had already covered most of the signs that a fierce battle had been fought there. In March 1943 we sailed for the island of Vella Lavella in the Solomon Islands group. By now I had received the exciting news from home that my brother Donald had also joined the Marines. I was really pleased to hear this and hoped that we would not only meet up again soon but see some combat action together. In that same letter I also learned that Momma and Phyllis were both doing well. They had given up the apartment in Chicago and moved back to Ottawa with my stepdad. It made better economic sense for them to be in a small town rather than in the big city. They were renting a small house, not too far from where Grandma Boltman lived. I don’t know whether Momma ever saw her anymore now that she and Dad were divorced, and I never ventured to ask. I missed Momma so much, but I knew that she would remain comfortable on the money that was coming in from my Marines pay, augmented by whatever my stepdad was earning
On Vella Lavella we trained on PT boats for three weeks. Intelligence reports revealed that there was a small noncombatant Japanese presence on the island of Choiseul, about fifty miles away, so one night a group of 125 of us were ordered to carry out a raiding party to neutralize them. We set out just after sunset on six PT boats.
By early dawn we reached Choiseul and made contact with an Australian missionary who was stationed on the island. We rendezvoused at an agreed point and he led us to a steep cliff where the locals had secretly knotted together a series of throw-down ladders made from tropical vines. We used these to clamber up the cliffside, reaching the summit before the sun was too high in the sky. The locals were very helpful and led us to a spot where we could observe the Japanese, way on the other side of a thickly forested valley, through our binoculars. It took all day to crawl through that dense and miserable abyss, fighting heat, sweat, mosquitoes, and thirst all the way. Just before we reached the Japanese outpost three of our guys were captured by what must have been a Japanese reconnaissance party. One minute our men were there, and the next minute they were gone.
We were petrified. We didn’t know how many more Japanese were around. I could literally hear my heart pounding in my chest. But we pressed on. We approached the Japanese settlement, encircling it as quietly as we could. From thick cover on the perimeter of the clearing we observed a bunch of them sitting at makeshift tables outside a little building made of bamboo. They were laughing and chatting as they ate a meal from little bowls. They were so preoccupied with their food and their conversation that they didn’t detect us. We hit them hard with our Thompson submachine guns, Browning automatic rifles, and .45 caliber sidearms. A fierce firefight ensued and then the enemy raiding party that had captured our three buddies appeared out of nowhere and joined in the battle. We fought hard. After a couple of hours not a single Jap remained alive. Six of our own men lay dead. We searched everywhere for the three men who had been captured earlier but they were never found.
Fortunately, we humans have incredibly effective natural defense mechanisms that we aren’t even aware of until they are needed. I managed to distance myself enough from all the horrors and suffering and carnage by valuing life and living more than anything else. The device that I used to keep that safety net in place was to believe that I would survive anything and have enough left within me when I got out of that lousy war to enjoy life to the maximum. What I missed most during the war was a nice glass of ice-cold milk and what we Marines called “flat peter,” which was nothing more than military slang for pussy. I knew that as long as my penis was intact and my balls in place I was still capable of enjoying the years that I was convinced still lay ahead of me. And I would certainly need that conviction, especially as the war continued. Because the worst was yet to come.
IN 1944 WE RETURNED to the States on the transport ship USS President Hayes for a thirty-day furlough. Camp Pendleton, just outside Oceanside on the Southern California coast, had recently become operational and was to be our new base. My pay had dropped by $50 a month because in March 1944 Congress had decided to disband the Marine Paratroopers. On account of the way the war in the Pacific was going, the military brass had decided that dropping Paratroopers on the Burma Road was no longer necessary, and my pay envelope reflected that decision. Nevertheless, my brother Donald was now also in the Corps, so between us we could still ensure that Momma and Phyllis were getting enough financial assistance.
I hadn’t seen Momma for more than two years, so I took a train out to Chicago and then a bus to Ottawa. It was strange being back in Illinois, especially in midwinter. I had become used to the tropics and very tolerant of the sunshine, intense heat, and humidity. Yet here I was trudging through a couple of feet of snow again, just as I had done for years as a kid. But I was now almost twenty-one years old, and I felt so much older, so much more worldly and mature. War and travel do that to you. You grow up quickly.
I was delighted to see that Phyllis had turned into a lovely nineteen-year-old woman. Suitors weren’t in abundance, as most young men who might have wooed her were in the service. For the three or four days that I spent at home my favorite meals and pies were served and I spent a lot of time relating war stories around the kitchen table. But a furlough was a furlough, and a guy of my age wanted to spend as much time as possible doing other things, like screwing his brains out. Which I certainly did. I took a bus into Chicago, looked up old friends, and made a lot of new ones. I had a great time, more than making up for sexual abstinence in the military. I partied hard and barely got any sleep. Sometimes I needed an ice pack to soothe my overworked dick in the morning. But, alas, nothing that good lasts forever. Before I knew it I was on board a train bound for California.
By the time I returned to Camp Pendleton the Marine Corps had been considerably expanded, so I became a member of the twenty-eighth Marines of the new Fifth Division. My brother Donald had finished boot camp and was also stationed at Camp Pendleton. He and I were now part of the same outfit and we managed to spend a lot of time together catching up. It was great fun having him around and it wasn’t until then that I realized how much I had missed him. Don had recently married, having met a woman named Bonnie Feller in San Francisco, where he had been working in a shipyard. They were madly in love and I was truly pleased for him. He never played the field like I did. He was a loyal, devoted, one-woman man.
In late 1944 my shore leave ended and we shipped out to Hawaii for more practice landings on the beaches, mainly intended as training for new guys like Don. But it was time well spent for all of us because from Hawaii we sailed for a desti
nation that we were all beginning to hear about, Iwo Jima. When we left for that tiny Japanese stronghold situated only a thousand miles away from the Land of the Rising Sun itself we had no idea what we were in for.
My good buddy Bill Nall, who had signed up for the Marines on the same day that I did and who was with me throughout the war, was one of the first to be killed. We were in the thick of a bitter battle, attempting to storm a Japanese machine-gun position when I heard the news. I was devastated. I just fell onto my haunches and wept, with bullets whizzing all around me. Little did I know that a day later I was to receive even worse news.
As the following morning broke through a haze of acrid smoke and dust we were still desperately trying to capture that infernal machine-gun position. Dead and wounded Marines lay all around me. Bullets were zinging everywhere. A couple of our guys who had tried to storm the hideout with hand grenades had just been mown down by gunfire and were screaming in agony. Shells continued to burst. My eardrums hurt so much from the noise that it felt like my head was going to splinter into a thousand pieces. Then, through the cacophony of sounds I could hear my name being called. I looked behind me to see a fellow Marine hiding behind a rock, beckoning me to come over. I don’t know how or why I did it but I slithered over to him on my stomach and slumped against the rock, breathless and exhausted. He was also panting, his uniform so wet from sweat that it clung to him as though he had been in a rainstorm.
“Got bad news, Scotty,” he gasped.
I waited for it.
“It’s Don,” he said, his eyes glaring at me through the grime and dust that covered his face.
In fits and starts he told me that he had just seen my brother Don get killed no more than a thousand feet away from where I was. He said a shell had exploded near him and that a flying piece of shrapnel had torn right through him, literally cutting him in half at the stomach. Death was instantaneous. It’s hard to believe, but as this young guy crouched there spluttering these gory details to me an even more horrifying thing happened: a shell burst just overhead. It took me a few seconds to recover but as I came out of the shock I looked at the other guy and noticed that his eyes had widened to the size of saucers. And then, almost like a slow motion scene in a movie, he looked down at his waist. At the same moment, he dropped his rifle and, with both hands, grasped his stomach. It was too ghastly to be true, but the exact same thing that he had just been describing about my brother had happened to him!
He slowly keeled over, his eyes still wide, not a sound passing his lips. As his body slumped to the ground I could see that a piece of shrapnel had ripped right through his waist. His guts had spewed all over the black, muddy soil. I was so horrified that I couldn’t move. I knew his chances of survival were nil. Then he froze, looked at me, and gasped one more time. His eyes glazed, rolled backward in their sockets, and he was dead. I was too stunned to take this all in and simply crawled away, only to stop and retch violently. I will be forever indebted to that poor guy for finding me and for telling me about Don, and I will always mourn his fate. It is impossible for me to forget him. That incident was the single most harrowing thing I experienced during those gruesome years of fighting.
Don was twenty-three years old when he was killed. That kid who told me about his death and whose name I can no longer remember was a lot younger. Both bodies were eventually shipped back home to the States, but who can be certain they were really them? And what difference does it make? No one ever got to see the actual bodies. Momma attended Don’s funeral and was presented with a flag. Hopefully, she experienced some kind of closure that eased her grief. As for the other guy, I have no idea where he was buried.
IN APRIL 1945 we headed for home, sailing directly to the naval dockyard in Bremerton, near Seattle. During the entire voyage I could think of little else but the desire to play as hard as I could. Needless to say, that included getting as much sex as possible. I wanted to do anything and everything I could to put the horrors and miseries of battle behind me. Like just about every other soul on board that ship I needed to purge myself of all that had happened. Every single one of us was impatient to go ashore. Life took on a new dimension, becoming more precious than ever. The war had taught me an incalculably valuable lesson. After I had seen all those young guys stacked up dead or blown to pieces in that vicious conflict I realized that one of the most important things of all was to stay alive and to rejoice in the gift of every single day. When we finally docked at Bremerton in May 1945, I was transferred to Bainbridge Island Naval Radio Station to await the official end to hostilities.
Two months later, in June, armed with a weekend pass, I went across Puget Sound to Seattle one Saturday evening, ending up in the bar of the Olympic Hotel, which was a very fashionable place in the center of the city. I was sipping an orange juice when I spotted a very nice looking young lady sitting on the other side of the room. I eyed her for a while, until I was certain that she was alone, and then I went over and asked if I could join her. She agreed, albeit a little reluctantly at first, but as the evening wore on we got into some serious talking. Her name was Betty Keller and she told me that she had been married to a Navy officer who had been killed on the aircraft carrier Yorktown that had been sunk during the epic Battle of Midway in 1942. She went on to say that she was presently dating another naval officer. However, he had been called out to Bremerton to attend to some serious matter that morning. They originally had a date to meet at the hotel that evening and even though he wouldn’t be back until Monday morning she decided to come over to the Olympic anyway. By midnight we were exploring each other’s bodies in a big, comfortable bed in a room upstairs.
I screwed around with a few other girls during the next few months but I really liked Betty. She was pretty, and there was something else about her that appealed to me. She had no airs. She was a very plain, ordinary, unspoiled sort of a woman. As for the sex, it was okay, but I knew there would never be any real fireworks with her. However, I felt that this was someone who could very well turn out to be a loyal, dependable, reliable, loving woman and someone I certainly wouldn’t mind having around and spending time with. We saw each other seven or eight times during the next six weeks.
In August of 1945 the Japanese unconditionally surrendered and the war was over. I was duly discharged from active service and received what they called my “mustering out” pay. This included funds to cover the cost of second-class rail travel back to Illinois. As far as the military was concerned, that’s where they were responsible for sending me because that’s where I originally enlisted. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go there. I was thinking more about California. Having spent so much time there in training and then at Camp Pendleton I felt a strong attachment to the place. Needless to say, memories of those crazy days hitting the high life of Hollywood were a draw, too. The military tried to persuade me to join the Marine Reserves, for which I was offered $20 a month, but I wasn’t interested. Fuck that, I thought. I’m outta here. And just as well I made that decision because nearly all of my buddies who did sign up for the Reserves were later killed or wounded in the Korean War.
I managed to get a message through to Momma in Ottawa that I might not be coming home. I told her that my prospects for a job were better in California than in the Midwest, even though I had nothing to back up that claim. In typical style she was understanding and empathetic and said that I should do whatever I thought was best. So I made a decision. I invited Betty Keller to come to California with me and I was overjoyed when she said yes. And so began another new chapter in my life.
WE SET UP HOME in a dilapidated little boarding house in Hollywood. And we were happy. I managed to pick up odd jobs here and there: tree trimming, cleaning stoves, driving a cab, and delivering furniture for a store diagonally across the street from a busy gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. The money I earned just about paid the rent and bought us groceries. What more did we need? Well, it turned out that I actually needed quite a bit more. Betty didn’t entirel
y fulfill my sexual needs so I still played around a lot. She either didn’t cotton on to that fact, or she simply didn’t mind. I’m not sure which. If I stayed out late at night she never once questioned it. That was the kind of woman she was. She just hung back and let me be. You don’t often find women like that, I can tell you, and because of it I cared deeply for her. She just wasn’t able to provide the sexual excitement and variety that I craved. What else can I say?
In February 1946 I was walking past the gas station near the furniture store where I worked in Hollywood and noticed a HELP WANTED sign outside. I don’t know why but I stopped, stared at the sign, and thought to myself, Why not? So I walked into the office behind the driveway where the pumps were located. The owner was a rather stout middle-aged man in his early fifties. He was seated at his desk and looked up as I entered, then sized me up and grinned. I told him I was there to talk about the job.
I liked him right away. His name was Bill Booth and he said he was looking for someone to take care of the station and pump gas from about five o’clock in the afternoon until around midnight. He had to head back home to San Pedro, somewhere down the coast in the Long Beach area, at five in order to get home for dinner with his family. Even in those days it took forever to get anywhere in L.A., especially because there weren’t any freeways yet. He said that because of the gas station’s proximity to downtown Hollywood and its buzzing nightlife—which encompassed theaters, clubs, restaurants, bars, and dance halls, plus all the thriving movie studios in the surrounding area—there was enough business to keep the station open until at least eleven at night, or later. He needed someone willing and reliable enough to take care of things at least until after the theaters and clubs closed. He told me that he had one other employee, a mechanic by the name of Wilbur McGee, who worked in the service and repair bay during the day. But it was the evening hours that worried him. He was losing business. Was I interested? Was I!
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