by Chris Lynch
He is nearly there and I am terrified for him. No one has peeked around either corner by the time he is within ten yards. He was game, sure, and excited when we went over the plan, with the drawing of the opening he had to make. There will be as many as ten Japanese in the box at any one time and with no action down there now we can’t even estimate from their gunfire. Once he hits the corner he is to whip himself halfway around the front of it and in the same motion hurl his specially constructed package of TNT, grenades, and assorted smaller goodies that are designed to go boom with just enough time to unwhip himself from that opening but not enough time to let anyone else out after him.
That is the plan, anyway.
But the plan is blown to smithereens when a Japanese lookout steps around the corner at the very moment Tails has crawled up to the ground right in front of him.
Tails freezes. The startled lookout fumbles with his gun.
And the crack of a single round from the Johnson semiautomatic shakes the jungle floor beneath us as the lookout’s head snaps back and he follows it, hurtling backward down the hill.
Tails has scrambled to his mark before the dead man has even stopped his downhill run. He slings his package into the box at feet level, then executes his own expert sideways barrel roll rightward and away from the scene so fast I think he may have some wheel in his bloodline somewhere.
Paww-waaw-waaw-waaaaaaw
The many different explosions go off in rapid succession, ending with a colossal bhoooooommm that blows a fat column of black smoke and fire and a geyser of human body parts including one head I can see so clearly that it spooks me into shouting as I look away from the clear, clear, clear toothy bloody grin he directs straight at me. When I turn back, the carnage and destruction is magnificent, but still comes off as the second most thrilling sight on this hill at this moment.
Tails’s grin is a whole different thing but just as evident as he appears, run-crawling back up with the aid of this awful jungle. He scales the hill like a spider monkey and reaches the road at a clip, ahead of us all.
“Maintain discipline, marines,” Havlicek tells us for the second time within ten minutes. “It’s still a long road back.”
He is as right as he always is. But it’s hard not to bounce a bit more with our steps, to grin back and forth with our fantastic demolition man over our fantastic execution. It doesn’t work so beautifully every day. Even when we are defeating the Japanese, pushing them back, getting jobs done, killing and not being killed, there are so many difficulties and setbacks and horrors, it can be easy to feel that winning doesn’t feel much like winning.
This feeling, here, is rare, and the rush of it is as tough to fight off as some of the most fanatical Japanese fighters.
But that’s what we have to do, because we are marines, professional fighting men, and discipline is the very minimum a squad leader can ask. There will be time to savor later, and we sure will.
The rain does its part to dampen spirits, and by the one-hour mark back along the main muck road we are very grim and serious fellows once more. My legs are getting heavy after all the marching and all the fluid I’m absorbing through the sores on my skin, the permanent underwater pollution of my desperate feet in these boots. I feel as if my burning skin should be causing steam to rise off my forehead when the raindrops pummel it. Then I remember: it rains hot water on Bougainville, the same temperature as me.
“Man down, to your right, Klecko,” Havlicek snaps, and we all turn.
It is a fresh-killed Japanese rifleman. We stop, in our two-by-two formation, as Klecko walks off the side of the road to look.
“Proceed with extreme caution,” the corporal says, and those are enough words to recall all the images we’ve been given of play-dead Japanese popping up and knifing a casual strolling American chump in the brain, by way of the soft tissue under the chin and the harder stuff at the roof of the mouth. Klecko stops abruptly five feet away from the rifleman, as if he heard my thought and froze. Turns out it’s the opposite, and high spirits have returned to get the better of him.
“This should be cautious enough, then,” he says, and lays into the body with a stream of automatic fire that would have killed this one and five more.
When Klecko turns and walks back our way, he is pleased and Corporal Havlicek is livid.
“You should have used —”
Bang-ping! Bang. B-b-b-b-bbang.
Snipers are on us, from well off the other side of the road.
“Down!” Havlicek barks, and everybody throws right down into the semisolid, putrid road. The two shooters are in trees one hundred yards straight ahead. I am again lying in complete muck as I take position, elbows down below the stuff, chin just dipping into it. I see both muzzle flashes as they continue to fire at us. The bang, the whistle, the plunk of one round hitting the muck a foot from my head is more stimulation than I need.
“Fire when you see your shots, men,” Havlicek says just before they both open up again with semiautomatics and multiple muzzle flashes. The air whistles and the muck goes plunk as the Expert and the Sharpshooter level their barrels, train their sights, and send round after round straight up to the targets and the corporal’s semiautomatic fills in any gaps and we fire and fire until we’ve emptied everything. We have to reload but we listen, listen for it, and there is nothing. Gorgeous nothing.
I do not take anything for granted and I don’t take my eyes off those two killer bird nests in the distance. I load another cartridge in my gun and prepare for what tricky whatevers may still be to come. While I am lowering myself once more into the disgusting substance that is now my life, a body falls one hundred feet, plummeting from the canopy to the floor and let’s hope to the hell below it.
We wait out the second one for twenty minutes before the corporal finally lets us get up.
Then three stand over one.
Tails has his face deep in the thick of the muck. The depth of him, the way so little is visible of his back and shoulders and helmet means he’s been sinking into it for some time. Since we all hit the deck at the first shots.
Nobody is going to say it right now, but this, this is why you bayonet a body rather than shooting it. Don’t attract any more attention than you’re already going to draw. Even snipers get caught napping sometimes, but not if you set the alarm for them.
It is now a V patrol formation, with Corporal Havlicek at the point and his two gunners behind on each flank. We maintain a brisker pace than at any other time today. And a silence deeper and darker than all the Pacific nights so far combined.
The two buddies remain strong and together, now in lockstep toward our camp. Zachary Klecko has got a champion demolition man known as Tails strapped over his shoulder in an unbreakable fireman’s carry. Because we are American marines and these are our guns and this is our duty, we look straight ahead and press on ahead in the way proud soldiers press on always. It is raining. A rain that would by now have defeated Noah is washing over us. I will not look but I can smell clearly through everything and I smell the tears washing down my old friend’s face as heavily as this or any rain.
I’m pretty sure you killed him,” I say to Klecko.
“Do you think so?”
“I do,” I say, leaning in as if for a close inspection. “Yeah, I really do.”
What I am not really inspecting is the very unfortunate and very dead man at the sharp end of my buddy’s bayonet. Klecko is leaning into him with all his weight like Death’s own farmer trying to turn over a stubborn chunk of turf.
It is also third-time unlucky for the guy, since various patrols have taken us past this same spot three times, and Zack thought he had a sneaky, suspicious look on his face each time.
I straighten up, concluding the inspection. He follows by slowly drawing the blade up and out of the corpse.
“You can’t be too careful,” he says, meaning it.
“No, you can’t,” I say. Because, you know, you really can’t.
We kn
ew that from the start, of course. But with every fresh start, new start, restart, stop-start, and jump start we know it a whole lot more.
We’re on the island of Saipan, I think. They’re all starting to blur — to bleed together, would be the most accurate way to put it. After Bougainville, everything accelerated, and new starts were indeed the order of the day, seemingly every day.
I suppose you’d say the biggest change was to our battalion, the Second Marine Parachute Battalion. That was changed a lot, because it was deactivated right out of business along with the rest of the Marine Parachute Regiment and all of the Marine Raiders. There now were no more “elite” specialist Marine operations teams because — as a lot of people believed from the beginning — all Marine divisions are elite.
So, the personnel all got assigned elsewhere, and a small number of companies, including the remains of our Company F from Bougainville, got shifted over to the Second Division. Different outfit, different job, different weapon, and, naturally, different island. There is no shortage of those from what I can tell.
And every one is the worst. Followed by the worst.
When we resume walking, once Klecko’s guy is a certified kill for the third time, we walk through this cabbage patch of Japanese dead in search of one that needs to join them. It won’t be far off, that much we know.
He’s been different since Tails got killed, but I’m the only one who really knows. To the outside view and the guys working closely with him, if they see anything at all changed since then it’s that he has become more serious, more focused, and more efficient. He does not make a wrong move or a decision that leaves anybody on our side at risk if he can eliminate that risk. These would be considered good changes, and they are, in military terms.
But I can see more. Any change from the Zachary Klecko that was already there would be unnecessary and not really welcome. We don’t talk about it directly, but it is his turn to lean on me and I am there at every moment to make sure that he can.
“Don’t you miss being a paramarine?” I ask him, just shooting the breeze, because it is a rare chance we have to shoot something so light and imaginary that even we can’t shoot it to death. We are almost in a relaxed position, despite the fighting on Saipan being the highest pigpile of corpses of anything we have seen so far.
“Are you joking?” he says. “No. First, I love my gun now. The Browning Automatic Rifle wipes the floor with that stupid Reising that came out of a box of Cracker Jacks. And second, we never jumped, Nick.”
“Yeah. The BAR is way better, fine. But I liked the idea, the identity, that came with being a para. I guess it’s like how I feel when I get to tell people I play pro ball in the Red Sox organization. Even if it’s only D-level so far, I got pride over that, same way. And, I would have liked to jump into combat at least once before they disbanded us.”
“Yeah, uh-huh. Like all those Germans they dropped down on Crete. They got to jump once. Why not ask them how that was? Oh, that’s right, we can’t.”
Troops on the ground in Crete were ready and waiting and shot those helpless paratroopers out of the sky while they floated to the ground. Like a murderous carnival game. I get an all-over shudder whenever it gets mentioned.
“Okay,” I say. “I suppose that might have been a more horrible way to end the regiment than this was. But I’m never gonna dream about amphibious assaults the way I did about airborne drops behind enemy lines.”
“Understood,” he says, and resumes the meticulous care and cleaning and oiling of his beloved BAR.
Saipan’s got a mountain range running steeply down the middle like a spine, and has surely and understandably had its back up the whole time we’ve been here. We’re fighting north along the western slope of that spine toward the final objective, the airfield at Marpi Point on the very northern tip. We are nearly there, and have settled with most of our battalion into a shallow depression that’s like an ice cream scoop out of the top of a hillock. It is our own islet of peaceful seclusion as night falls over an island that’s still exploding and screaming everywhere else.
We are setting up to camp here for what should be the most normal and sane sleeping station of the whole campaign.
Then the peace is slaughtered as all at once there is a screaming, crazed, charging wild horde of Japanese soldiers coming up over the highest side of our comfortable bowl. That slope is the steepest, most heavily wooded, so our lookouts were few and probably inattentive and definitely dead.
All of our men rush into an old-style battle line and we open up an all-out barrage straight into the fearlessly crazy onslaught of the banzai charge.
Shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder we stand and fire, and the killing is an unbelievable spectacle. Japanese fighters are dying, falling so fast in such great numbers that the ones behind are tripping over the ones hitting the ground in front of them. Then we kill them while they try to get up, while they keep on screaming until we shut them up with bullets. They try and shoot while they run but it is almost as if that isn’t even the point, because their passion for running straight at us and our guns and death is the point of it all. And the screaming. The screaming, from fury, from agony, from hate, it is all in there and it looks like it could be an actual nightmare, an endless tidal wave of all the people we have killed along the way to this point coming back not to defeat us but to remind us.
On that score, if no other, they are successful. I am reminded, and sickened, and no matter how decisively we are winning this, I am absolutely terrified out of my wits.
When it is over I am numb, standing at my post with my furiously hot rifle smoking in my hands, observing a fresh harvest of mutilation covering our peaceful hilltop hideaway.
“Couldn’t do that from a parachute, buddy,” my buddy says.
Marpi Point is a perverse reverse of all that.
“No!” Klecko screams. “No, no, no, no, no!”
I am running along just behind him, toward the cliff edge high above the sea at Marpi. The battle for Saipan and its important airfields is won, and the Japanese feelings about no-surrender are now clearer than they have ever been. The commander, General Saito, and all his aides committed suicide three days ago. The mop-up of this island has been more literally exactly that than it was elsewhere, as we came to find more and more companies of dead soldiers who’d killed themselves rather than surrendering.
The Japanese garrison here had made use of thousands of native civilians on this island, and we saw too late the evidence of whole towns that had been wiped out by our artillery. When it was all coming apart toward the end, they started using the civilians for protection as we shot into cave after cave only to find that we had killed whole families to get to two noble soldiers cowering behind them.
How do we ever begin to make up for what is happening?
“No!” I echo my buddy as we make our final late lunge — and the whole crowd makes theirs.
The civilians who did not want to kill themselves are forced.
The dozen soldiers in uniform along the line yell some long, passionate slogan in Japanese, and then they jump. The fifty or more women, children, and old folks all attached to the rope together jerk and buck as they are pulled, like the links of a bicycle chain, over the side.
“No, no, no, no” is all we can manage to scream. But I think we speak for everyone, everywhere, ever.
There’s a magazine being circulated, and by the time I get my hands on it, it’s softened and wrinkled as worn-out canvas, but the print is as clear as can be.
Brute Krulak is back in the States and he’s becoming some kind of star representing the Marines in this war. One quote stands out, and as we try to relax as much as possible in the belly of our taxi, the latest amphibious landing craft to take us to the latest assault on the latest crucial island, I read it out loud to Klecko.
“ ‘Japanese are really very easy to kill, because of the banzai charges. A man who goes directly into machine-gun fire generally loses his social security.’ �
�
“Ha,” Klecko says.
“Can you believe he’s saying stuff like that to a big magazine?”
“Well, Nick, technically he’s not wrong, is he?”
I feel myself getting a little flushed. “Well, Zack, I suppose technically he’s not,” I say in less than my friendliest tone. I’m not even certain who I’m angry at.
“Are you all right?” he says, with a sudden sharp look of concern on his face.
“What? Why?”
“I think Nicky look sicky, that’s why.”
“Oh,” I say, and now even that’s making me angry. I stand up and head for the top deck to breathe and be by myself. “Choppy waters, is all. Getting a little seasick. Air. I need air, then I’ll be right as rain.”
How does anybody know whether he has a fever or not in these islands? Who can tell? This whole situation is a fever, is the truth of the matter. There are only two possibilities: you’re either overheated, or you’re dead.
“How are you holding up?” Corporal Havlicek asks as he reaches down and gives me a hand up out of my foxhole. The remains of our squad stayed together after we were shipped from one division to another. Four riflemen are also with us but I don’t know them and have no intention of getting to know them. Or anybody else new, for that matter. Not before this thing is over. Un-knowing people is something I can live without now.
“I’m good, corporal, thanks. Sleeping better, for one.”
In what has become the routine, I turn and give my partner a helping hand up from the hole. He gets halfway up before I lose my grip and he slides back down. I reach again and with some effort I get it right this time.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I say to Klecko. “It’s not like you’re a flyweight or nothing. Pulling the load of you up ain’t easy.”
He runs his hands up and down his sides, feeling his ribs. “It’s forty pounds easier than it was two months ago,” he says.
