Battleground Pacific

by Sterling Mace

I did.

  Yet from the moment I jabbed the buttstock of my M-1 into the mud and used it to pull myself to my feet, everything went quickly—rapidly taking what was left of my light and turning it to deepest black. I became King Midas in reverse, where everything I touched turned to shit.

  Let’s go.

  Suddenly I see myself, running from afar, and before I know it, I’m in the center of a chewed-up area of the line. Dammit!

  Hurriedly, I dodge into a good-sized shell hole. It is still smoking, swirling and warm inside—the bowels of a newly turned grave.

  As far as I can tell, I am the only target out here—and that’s the last thing anybody wants to be. Okay, do somethin’! If my sense of direction is right, I’ll have to slog through this patch of trash to get back to where we started. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. That’s it.

  My sole companion is the rasp of my own breathing, serrated, too fast, as I tentatively peek out of the hole, trying to get my bearings. Nothing. No marines, only the dysentery-splotched earth and the incessant buzzing of hundreds of flies, clogging the ground, too engorged and gross to fly.

  There’s something dead out here.

  There is a stench that mingles with the odor of wet earth, and although it doesn’t smell natural, in reality it’s as natural as entropy, twofold. This place is a wreck of ruin. Despite the sounds of battle coming in shortwave, this plot of ground, with four shell holes in its belly, retains only the fading echoes of how loud it was earlier. It’s creepy when you’re separated from anything alive. A sole survivor.

  It doesn’t help that it begins to drizzle again, either.

  Move!

  A high-pitched—

  No!

  The high-pitched warble of an 8-inch Jap artillery round abruptly pierces my eardrums. I’m looking around frantically for the shell that’s bearing down right on top of me, feeling like it’s coming straight up my ass. Not metaphorically, but literally, right up my ass! I take another fast look toward the heavens, wanting to see the one that kills me, yet all I see is the falling rain. Down! Burying my face in the earth, I curl up, fetal positioned.

  It lands two feet to my left.

  Rung!

  I’ve got my head in a church bell, and somebody is banging the hell out of it.

  You hang on. You just try to hang on as the earth attempts to heave you out of her womb. I’ve got a screamer in my skull, and the lunatic is planning his escape.

  Rolling over, in the bottom of the hole, I exhale in one great puff, as if I’ve been gut-punched, almost expecting smoke to spew from my mouth. It’s over. I check my body for blood.

  Somehow, slowly, I manage to bring myself to the rim of the shell hole again, only to see three horizons vibrating before my eyes, until finally they settle down and meld into one straight line, the way edges are meant to behave.

  It was a goddamn dud.

  “It was a dud,” I whisper. Still, the dud struck too close, making the hair on my arms stand, electric. The scent of crisp ozone and the metallic tang of hot brass permeates the air. Oh, Jesus Christ in heaven. I shake my head to clear the heat from it.

  Bbbrrrrrrppppppp! A Nip machine gun touches off, somewhere to my right—too close—so I run and launch myself out of one hole, diving into the next.

  Every shell hole appears the same.

  I am only hazily aware that Bob Whitby is beside me now. If I say something to him, he might simply disappear. Yet just as I’m about to speak—

  Another 8-inch needle comes squealing in, a freight train, bearing down with its brakes locked, tight.

  This one takes forever to get us, so I quick-look at Bob. Yes, he knows. We have an instant to decide: Stay in the hole and bank on another dud, or make for the next hole and roll the dice. Decide.

  I move out, and maybe Whitby comes, too. At a trot, I crane my neck upward, attempting to work out where the shell will land.

  WHAM!

  We’re dead.

  Levy and I are on Pavuvu, our feet in the drainage gutter, snapping our fingers to Sinatra singing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” before we ship off to Peleliu.

  There’s the sensation of being lift—Gah!—

  Thrown—

  Suck in air, a wheezing sound … It’s all in water—every word, belching out sound-bubbles. Drowning. Suck in air—great gulps of …

  A skeleton at your shoulder. Icy fingers squeeze firmly around your neck. Leaving blue-black impressions there. A green smell. Nauseous.

  Not a dud.

  Can’t breathe—

  The sound of breaking glass …

  I want—

  Images of marines coming toward me flicker in and out. The bulb burns out.

  Voices come in tinny, at first—the first recorded human voices—scratchy in character, a dull needle, skipping on a warped groove. The thing is, they claim you never hear the one that kills you, and I never heard the explosion—only a rapid-fire cluster of sensations that don’t peel off as a score of corpse fingers pull me deeper into the sod. There are only the voices, wafting in clearer, unraveling, decoding, beneath a steady flatline. My mouth is filled with— Bong, bong, bing, bong! The bells of St. Mary’s keep clanging through my bullet-headed skull. Bong. Bong. Bong. As a distant clock— Tick, tick, tick, tick, clatch! The pendulum stops swinging in midmotion. There’s only the slightest impression that there are other marines helping me up now. Hell, I don’t even know if Whitby was really there. No matter. Whatever happened to me, the world has gone cuckoo.

  If I say anything to the other marines lending a hand, it’s “Hey, I’m okay, alright? Just get your paws off me!”

  It stayed loony, too, all the way through my ragged walk back to our lines—which were only about twenty-five yards away the whole time.

  When I was among the boys again, I threw my helmet down and sat on it, watching my hands go from a steady shake to no motion at all. I must’ve been okay. Except this damn ringing in my ears!

  “My God, Mace.” Eubanks’s face appeared much too close to mine for comfort as he leaned in. “We thought you guys were killed, for sure.” What I really heard from Eubanks was “Erus rof, dellik rerw syug uoy thguoht ew, ym dog ecam.” Why the fuck is it always Eubanks at the scene of the crime? My head really started to pound, so I closed my eyes, blocking out the whirring voice, only to see the image of the rough hole in the mud, only ten feet away from Bob and me, when the shell exploded, flinging us around, nothing but paper sacks in the breeze. I guess Whitby was with me after all.

  When I opened my eyes again, Eubanks was lighting a cigarette for me. He put it between my lips. It was then that I realized I didn’t even know his first name. The name his mother gave to him. He had always been just Eubanks to me—the young yokel with the BAR. Too bad that was the last time I ever saw him.

  It was the last time I remember seeing a lot of the marines in K/3/5.

  The rain begins to fall harder as I slowly make my way to a foxhole that looks like mine, although in a quagmire like this, it’s hard to tell one sludgy hole in the slop from the other. Climbing under the poncho, I find it occupied by some new kid—and I mean really a kid, named Piazza, or something like that. I would be surprised if he’s barely seventeen. It is so sad. It’s sad because now they take these baby-faces—genuine Marines, mind you—who just grew their first pubic hair; and they don’t know enough to stay alive in the best of times, let alone times like these, when the sky is falling and there isn’t a damned thing you can do but stay and be crushed by it.

  Piazza has other ideas, however. You have to hand it to him, he’s a resilient kid. The rain thrums down on the poncho, loud, annoying; it might as well have been a hailstorm above the near-darkened underside of the poncho—yet this baby-face is trying to convince me otherwise. I don’t want to hear this shit. Not right here. Not right now.

  “Ya know,” he says, “this rain, it reminds me of … gee, I was back home, sittin’ with my girl in the car, listenin’ to the rain fall on the convertible top. Just … ya kno
w, holding her and thinkin’, like?”

  He pauses. My head feels like I have a crane in there, pulling up my brain from the base of my spine.

  “Yeah,” he resumes. “I told ya about my girl, Claire, right?”

  I don’t even know you, dumb ass.

  I can tell that he’s talking through a smile, “She’s … she’s amazing is what she is. Gonna get married after the war, don’t ya know.”

  Yeah, sure, pal. What are they gonna do, stand your corpse up in a tux and wheel ya down the aisle? Fat chance.

  The rain falls heavier, threatening to cave the poncho in. I don’t care. It drowns out the kid’s voice; it turns down the squeal in my ears. I believe I hear the roar of the crowd, even shivering as I am beneath the poncho, as if I have a case of malaria. Anyway, that’s merely a product of my wild Queens imagination. Just ask Larry Mahan.

  Despite it all, I manage to drift off to sleep, seeing Larry and Billy Leyden as clearly as …

  … well, as clearly as a dream:

  On Pavuvu—before Peleliu … before any of it—Billy Leyden and I were sitting around, and we spied Larry heading in our direction, walking at a good clip.

  “Oh, brother,” I said to Leyden. “Wonder what Larry’s got on his mind?”

  You could always count on Mahan to be up to something.

  “Dunno.” Bill shielded his eyes from the sun. “Maybe Larry’s wonderin’ the same thing, huh?”

  “Ha! Yeah.”

  Larry arrived and just stood there, his hands on hips, waiting for one of us to ask him what’s wrong. Okay, I’ll bite.

  “Say, what’s eating you, Mahan?”

  “Goddammit!” he said. “My tent’s too crowded!”

  “So?” I replied, thinking to myself that every marine has roughly the same number of tentmates on this island. In fact, nothing has changed since boot camp. We’re in the military, for chrissakes.

  “So?” Larry gaped at me as if I’d lost my mind. “So? How’s a fella supposed to beat off with all these guys hangin’ around all the time?”

  Before I could laugh, Leyden nudged me in the ribs. Bill looked up at Larry, stone-faced. “Well, that’s easy, Larry. Listen, what ya do is … ya get in your rack and then pull the covers up over ya, see? Then when things start shakin’, and if anyone asks what you’re doin’, you just tell ’em you got malaria fever. Works every time, I tell ya. Might even get you off of work parties.”

  “Hey, ya know, that’s not a bad idea.” Mahan appeared satisfied.

  “Either that,” I said, “or you can climb up one of those coconut trees. But if ya fall out?” I whistle through my teeth. “Ya might end up breakin’ somethin’ you’re thinkin’ about usin’ later.”

  When we saw Larry again he was back to his usual self. “It worked! It worked!” he shouted with glee.

  Of course, it was only a dream of that day on Pavuvu, though. The next morning Okinawa looked exactly the same as I left it. Not that I expected anything different, but still, Okinawa made the distant memory of Pavuvu seem like … Sumiko Yamaguchi … as sweet and quiet as a field of daffodils.

  Shaking my head clear of the morning rust, I rubbed my fingers through my hair.

  Just the touch of my fingers against my scalp sent a fresh wave of delirium across my vision.

  Christ, something’s really gotta be wrong with me.

  “Say, pal—how’s it goin’?”

  Sitting at the rim of my foxhole, I look up and there stands Billy Leyden, covered in his poncho. Or, rather, what used to be Billy Leyden. Billy looks like he’s been on a ten-year bender. His eyes are two pissholes in the snow.

  “Oh, don’t ask,” I say, rolling my eyes toward the kid, Piazza, at the bottom of the foxhole, who is mercifully too occupied with stuffing his mouth to be much of a bother.

  Bill stifles a snigger, squats down, and begins fishing for his cigarettes.

  Cocking my thumb toward Piazza, I say, “This is what I’ve got over here, a fucking kid like this. Ain’t that somethin’?”

  “Shit, Sterl, you’re startin’ to sound like goddamn McEnery, for chrissakes!”

  I laugh and make note of that. “Nah, you know me. It’s just that they’re startin’ to roll these guys out on an assembly line, a parade of—”

  Suddenly I remember that Billy was one of those marines. They pulled him fresh out of the ass of boot camp and shat him out all over Pavuvu and Peleliu. Only Bill, unlike Piazza, had the tendency to be a little morose over things.

  After being wounded on Ngesebus, and greeting the other survivors on Pavuvu, Billy told me that he and George McNevin had listened to the wire every day to see who was killed on Peleliu—listening for my name, hoping I would make it out alright. He already knew about Levy, and that really hurt.

  Yet coming over to Okinawa, aboard the USS McCracken, Billy came up with a different spin on things. One that was difficult for me to abide by.

  Billy and I are standing on the deck of the ship, smoking, looking out over the ocean and watching the whitecaps break and eventually vanish back into the deep blue. Periodically, small silver fish leap out of the water in schools, glittering pretty in the sunshine. Marine life in abundance.

  Bill flicks his ashes over the railing, “Hey, Sterl, there’s somethin’ I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, well … ya know, I’ve been thinkin’. ’Bout this whole invasion, right? And with what happened to me on Peleliu and all … if somethin’ were to happen to me—”

  “Hey, wait. What are ya sayin’, Bill?” Automatically the tips of my ears grow hot.

  “Well, just that if I get kill—”

  “Nah, Bill, screw that! I don’t wanna hear any crap like that, okay? Guys start talking shit like that and the next thing ya know, they get themselves killed. That’s the way it works. So just quit flappin’ your gums, alright? You’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.”

  So far so good. At least for some of us.

  I glance down at the kid, Piazza, and his very presence on this island means that he replaced somebody else; one of the old K/3/5 veterans, perhaps, who got killed or shipped home—or both. Maybe he replaced one of the marines who still lay out there, in no-man’s-land, half decomposed, melting back into the mud from which he came. The stretcher bearers can’t retrieve their bodies, or they, too, will get swept by machine-gun fire. So the whole place reeks of green meat: Nips, marines, GIs, adding a new fleshy tone to the rancid earth.

  “Yeah.” Billy grimaces. “This artillery bullshit is the worst. Can’t move forward, can’t move back. I don’t even know how we made it this far.”

  I glance over my shoulder, and in the distance is a pile of rocks they tell us is called the Castle. Shuri Castle.

  “Sure,” I say. “You guys in the First really took your lumps on that first day, huh?”

  Billy nods in affirmation. “I heard you had some trouble of your own. Yesterday, in fact. You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah … I’m okay, just can’t get this goddamn ringin’ out of my head, that’s all.”

  “Alright, well, let me get the hell outta here.” As Billy starts to get up, I grab the end of his poncho, signaling him to stay. “Wait, Bill.”

  On second thought, maybe Bill doesn’t look as bad as I originally thought. Perhaps what I saw was merely my own reflection, mirrored off the surface of Billy’s eyes.

  “Junior?” I ask. “Ya know, Freddy Hudson? Whatever happened to Junior Hudson?”

  Bill looks away, his lips pursed, thin as a razor slice. “Ah shit, Mace.” I begin nodding that I understand—that Bill doesn’t have to finish. I already know.

  Billy brings his eyes around to meet mine again. “He got all blown up, Sterl. Same as Aubrey Rogers. He just … Nothing left of him. I’m glad you didn’t have to see it, pal.”

  “Sure, Bill. Thanks.” I release his poncho. I don’t want to say it, but I have to say it—“So long, Bill.”

  “Yeah, I’ll
be seein’ ya.” Billy simply gets up and walks away.

  Only I never saw Billy Leyden again, during the war. Bill got his second Purple Heart on Okinawa and was evacuated a few days later.

  So it happened that Junior Hudson ended up exactly like Mahan and Levy after all. It was just that I didn’t imagine it that way—though I should have foreseen it. It’s a sorry life when it feels better to imagine the worst. Yet it’s a real sonuvabitch when you can’t bring yourself to do it.

  That’s where the story ends.

  Almost.

  Two other things happened right after my visit with Leyden. Both of them—despite my inner protests, despite the fact that I wanted to get the hell off of that island—finally forced me to pay a visit to Doc Chulis, and Chulis sent me home. You see, I never quit on anything in my life. I wanted to—many times; however, a person simply can’t be what it’s not in him to be. Nevertheless, although I didn’t know it then, the artillery round that almost killed me gave me a blistering concussion and two busted eardrums, pierced all the way through. I just hadn’t been diagnosed yet. Then after what later happened with Bob Whitby? I suppose you could say that I performed my duty as a rifleman in K/3/5—and I had no regrets, no desire to say otherwise. I finished the war, and the war was finished with me.

  In the end, I’d like to think that I saved more lives than I took—but when it comes to taking or saving, a far greater hand than mine holds the scales of balance, while my hand merely controlled the weight on the trigger.

  Anyway, I killed.

  Have mercy on their souls. Not mine.

  We are getting ready to make another attack. Marines strain to push trucks from the sucking mud, putting chains on the tires and flailing around in the sludge. Fieldpieces are pulled on the backs and shoulders of dromedary marines. Draw ammo, carry crates, clean weapons, fight the flies, smoke cigarettes, try to smile, dig foxholes, bail out water, fill canteens, pick at scabs, read some letters, examine your hands—there are myriad things a rifleman does before an attack.

  Oh, yeah, and one more thing … send Whitby home.

  Whitby sat at the edge of our foxhole holding a crumpled letter in a trembling hand, his chin on his chest, his chest hitching spasmodically—raw anguish etched on a fatherly face that never did look right under a camo-covered steel helmet. It never rained so much on Okinawa as it did from Whitby’s eyes.