by Jim McEnery
“You’ll be sorr-eee!” they said. “You’ll be sorr-eee!”
I had plenty of reasons to remember that on my first night at Guadalcanal.
I didn’t have the foggiest idea what was going to happen next. None of us did. By this time tomorrow, we might all be dead. Or we might still be in this same exact spot, wishing for more water and ammo and something to eat.
All I knew for sure was that I was squatting in a foxhole listening to Bill Landrum snore. I’d never had enough money to buy myself a set of dress blues, and I doubted if I ever would. Unless they were bayonet-proof and bulletproof, they wouldn’t have done me much good where I was right now. I’d have traded them in a minute for some C rations and another unit of fire.
I squeezed my ’03 Springfield with both hands and went on staring into the darkness. And like a lot of other guys around me were probably doing at that exact moment, I kept hearing the same stupid question repeating itself in my head like a stuck record:
Okay, so how the hell DID I end up in this godforsaken place, anyway?
ALWAYS A MARINE AT HEART
I WAS BORN ON September 30, 1919, in a hospital at Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street in South Brooklyn, New York.
When I think back over all the years since then, I honestly believe I was always a Marine at heart. Even before I had any idea what a Marine really was—or ever even heard the word “Marine”—I think it was what I wanted to be. I just didn’t know what to call it back then.
I’m Irish to the core on both sides of my family. My Grandpa and Grandma McEnery were both born in Ireland, but by the time they got married in 1888, they’d crossed the Atlantic and settled in Brooklyn. Grandma McEnery died in childbirth before I was born, and I didn’t see Grandpa McEnery very often when I was a kid because he lived clear over on the other side of Brooklyn from me.
On the other hand, my grandparents on my mother’s side were always around. The first place I clearly remember as home was the neighborhood of Gerritsen Beach that began developing on the east side of Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay right after World War I. When I was real small, Mom’s parents, Grandpa and Grandma Daniels, lived just a few blocks away from us. But when I was about eleven, my mother and father separated, and she and my sister and I had to move in with Mom’s parents in a house at 109 Gain Court in Gerritsen Beach.
If I went back looking for it today, I’d probably have a hard time finding it, but it wouldn’t surprise me much if it’s still there. Most of the streets have the same names, and many of the old houses are still standing.
The neighborhood—I don’t think anybody calls it Gerritsen Beach anymore—was a remote place at that time. It wasn’t really like part of the city at all, and it was a long bus and train ride to the older, more established sections of Brooklyn. The neighborhood faced a beach along Jamaica Bay with a swamp on the east side that was eventually filled in by dredging silt from the bay. Then the swamp became a big park with baseball and football fields, playgrounds, and basketball courts.
I spent hundreds of hours playing in that park, and the name they gave it was kind of prophetic where I was concerned. They called it Marine Park.
There was a creek nearby where saltwater from the ocean mingled with freshwater before it emptied into the bay. In the winter, the freshwater would freeze into big chunks of ice that floated in the saltwater. At low tide, there’d be five or six rows of those big ice chunks left grounded at the mouth of the creek, each of them about a foot thick. Then, when the tide started to come back in, the neighborhood kids would make a game out of jumping from one chunk to another as they started to float out into the bay.
We’d walk down the rows of chunks that were on land, but as they started to float, you had to be careful. You had to be fast enough to jump from piece to piece as they moved out toward the main floe where the creek and the bay met. If you stayed on a piece of ice too long, it would sink underneath you. Then you’d find yourself dunked in the ice-cold water. We thought it was fun. We were a little crazy, I guess.
To give you an idea of how far off the beaten path the neighborhood was back in the 1920s, rumrunners would sometimes slip into the creek off Jamaica Bay at night to unload their illegal booze. They’d hire some of the guys from the neighborhood to help them put the stuff in hospital ambulances, which was how they delivered it to their customers’ warehouses. Those were Prohibition times, and rum-running was big business.
It was a violent business, too. One time when I was about eight or nine, the cops tried to intercept a boatload of bootleg hooch down at the creek, and a big gun battle broke out. I don’t know how many cops and rumrunners got shot, but I remember it scared the pants off one of my girl classmates and her family who lived close by. The girl’s mother made the kid lie down on the floor and put a mattress over her to protect her from stray bullets.
On the west side of Gerritsen Beach was a housing development that had been built in three sections. Gerritsen Avenue was the main street and the only way into the neighborhood by land. Knapp Street and Avenue U were other major streets that led down to the water.
In the early spring, all us boys would sneak down Knapp Street, climb over a fence, shed our clothes and hide them, and jump in the creek. We almost froze our butts off. All of us would turn blue from the cold, but we didn’t care as long as we could claim the honor of being the first ones to take a dip that year.
THE HOUSE WHERE I lived with my mother and father and sister before we moved in with my grandparents was a small, single-story frame with barely enough room for the four of us. We were poor as a bunch of church mice, as the saying goes, but Gerritsen Beach was far from being a wealthy neighborhood. Most of the people who lived there were first- or second-generation immigrants from Europe, and most of them were just as poor as we were.
It was what you’d call a blue-collar neighborhood. Most families struggled to make ends meet, even in the 1920s when times were pretty good. When the Depression set in, times got a whole lot harder.
ONE DAY WHEN I was about seven years old, I saw something that left a deep impression on me. It must’ve been Armistice Day of 1926. Everybody celebrated Armistice Day back then, much more than they do Veterans Day now. They wore poppies and held parades and sang songs like “Over There” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
There was a parade that day that ended with some kind of ceremony on the grounds of the Lutheran church in Gerritsen Beach. That was where I saw my first military uniform.
The man who was wearing it was really old, and somebody said he was a veteran of the Civil War. But he stood up straight and erect when he saluted the American flag, and I could tell he was proud of the uniform he wore. It was a lighter color than the dark blue uniforms most Union soldiers wore in the Civil War, and it had to be at least sixty years old, but it still looked good. I really admired that uniform, and I thought how great it would be to have one like it.
I never saw that old soldier again, but I thought about him a lot after that day, and I never forgot him. Seeing him in that uniform started me thinking about what it would be like to be a soldier.
I could picture myself marching in parades where crowds would be cheering and waving flags. I could see medals being pinned on me by some big-shot general, and I thought how much fun that would be. But the best part would be getting to wear a uniform like that old soldier’s every day.
I want a uniform just like that, I said to myself, and one of these days, I’m gonna get me one.
I guess maybe every boy feels that way at some point. The difference for me was I never got over it. As a seven-year-old kid, I didn’t stop to think that soldiering would be dangerous work, much less that you could get killed doing it. All I thought about was the glamour and excitement. I was what you’d call gung ho before that term was even invented.
And when I look back on that Armistice Day, I’m pretty sure that’s where it all started. I think I was destined to be in the military from the first minute I saw that old soldier u
ntil I actually joined the Marines thirteen years later.
FOR AS FAR back as I can remember, I was a scrappy kind of kid. I never went around looking for trouble, but I never dodged a challenge or ducked a fight, either.
One fight I especially remember was when I was in the fifth grade at good old P.S. 194. There was this other kid in my class who was kind of pushy and a show-off. He seemed to think he was better than all the rest of us, and he liked to boss other kids around. One day, he started smarting off at me until he really got on my nerves bad, and we ended up slugging it out in a vacant lot. I gave him a pretty good licking, and he didn’t act so high and mighty after that.
I enjoyed the bumps and bruises of competitive sports, too. I got a kick out of testing my strength and skill against other guys my age, maybe even older. I liked soccer and baseball just fine, but football was always my biggest favorite.
When I was about ten, I got invited to join a kid football team called the Dragons. After that, I played every season, either with the Dragons or another team called the Huskies, until the year before I joined the Marine Corps. They weren’t school teams, just groups of neighborhood guys who got together and challenged anybody we could find to play us. We had some fierce rivalries, and sometimes over a hundred people would come out to watch our games.
We didn’t have much in the way of equipment, just a few well-worn leather helmets and shoulder pads, but I truly believe the caliber of football we played was comparable to what small colleges played at the time. I played until I was twenty years old, and I figured anything was better than having to sit on the sidelines for part of a game. My goal was to play every down—the whole sixty minutes. I never hesitated to try to tackle a guy twice my size, and sometimes I succeeded. I guess I was lucky I never got hurt. Banged up a little, but never really hurt.
At first, I switched positions quite a bit. Sometimes I played in the backfield, sometimes on the line, and always on both offense and defense. There was no such thing as two-platoon football in Gerritsen Beach.
Later on, I settled in at right end and played that same position for several years. By then, I was almost six feet tall, but I was still kind of skinny—only 155 pounds dripping wet. I got to where I liked defense best because I got a real kick out of rushing the quarterback. I’d just lower my head and run straight at him as hard as I could go. I usually didn’t get there, but sometimes I did, and it gave me a good feeling.
ON SOME DAYS in the hot part of the summer, I stayed on the beach from sunup till dark. Lots of the other kids did, too. The beach ran for a mile or more from north to south. It was a great place to swim, or dig for clams, or just lie in the sun. And sometimes we’d find really interesting stuff that drifted up on the shore. Even during the cooler part of the year, I spent lots of time fishing—not just for sport but to help put food on the family table—and I hardly ever came home without a pretty good catch.
In July and August, bluefish came into the bay by the thousands, and even at other times there were plenty of fish called flukes. They were flat like flounder, but some of them got huge—up to three feet long. When they got that big, we called them doormats. A whole family could eat off one of them for two or three days.
Much as I loved that beach on Jamaica Bay, I didn’t feel the same about any of the beaches I landed on in the Pacific. On the contrary, I wanted to get the hell away from them as fast as I could.
I WOULDN’T SAY I was the “churchy” type as a kid, but I did go to church almost every Sunday. My mom had to work on Sundays if she wanted to keep her job, so she hardly ever got to go to mass herself. But she was a devout Irish Catholic mother who wouldn’t take excuses for my sister and me not going. She always made sure we had clean clothes to wear and a dime or two for the collection plate, and we knew better than to skip. If we did, Mom was bound to find out.
As somebody who maybe got into more than my share of scrapes, I got acquainted with the confessional booth at an early age. But the priest at Resurrection Catholic Church usually let me off fairly easy when it came to doing penance.
“Just do one ‘Our Father,’” he’d say, “and that should take care of it.”
That meant repeating the Lord’s Prayer all the way through one time. It was the lowest penance there was for committing a minor sin like punching some other guy on the football field.
That was something else I thought a lot about at Guadalcanal. I must’ve said the Lord’s Prayer a couple thousand times while I was there. I started that very first night.
WHEN I WAS about twelve years old, my father, Thomas McEnery, died of pneumonia. He was only thirty-four, but he’d led a hard life. A hard-drinking life, I’m sad to say. It was probably the booze as much as the pneumonia that killed him.
By the time Dad died, my mom had left him because of his heavy drinking. It was during Prohibition, but he never had a problem keeping himself supplied with alcohol. He made his own whiskey in a still in the back room of our house. He was a mechanic by trade, and he made fairly good money when he was sober enough to work, but that was less and less often as time went by.
My mom was commuting up to an hour and a half a day by bus and train to a job as a clerk in a candy store at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. But the paychecks she brought home weren’t nearly enough to cover the bills. Before she left Dad, we were forced to move several times because we couldn’t pay the rent. We lived on Knapp Street for a while, then on Gerritsen Avenue. Honest to God, I lost count of the places we lived before Mom finally took my sister and me and moved in with her parents.
By that time, we were so broke we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. I had really mixed-up feelings about Dad when we moved off and left him. I was mad at him for being such a drunk and making life so hard for Mom, but I worried about him, too. Of course, there was nothing I could do to help him. By then, nobody could help him.
A little over a year after Dad died, I graduated from the eighth grade at P.S. 194. By then, times were about as bad as they could get. It was the spring of 1932—rock bottom of the Depression—and the only thing that kept us afloat was Mom’s piddling little salary and my grandparents’ generosity.
Instead of going on to a regular high school, I decided to enroll in a trade school that promised the students good-paying jobs in the aviation industry after graduation. I stuck it out there for six terms, picking up a few dollars here and there at little part-time jobs like delivering messages for Western Union in what spare time I had. But I still lacked two terms to graduate when we couldn’t come up with the rest of the tuition money. Then I had to drop out and look for a full-time job.
By this time, my mother had gotten married again to a Polish guy named Peter Paul Muroski, who lived just a few blocks away, and we’d moved in with him. Mom was a fine woman, but she sure didn’t have much luck when it came to picking a husband. My step-father was an even worse drunk than Dad had been—and a mean one at that. Dad was never abusive. He’d just pass out peacefully after he got a snootful, whereas Peter would get really ugly.
But Peter did have a nice little son named Peter Jr. Bad as his father acted, I always loved the kid. I called my brother “Junior” and tried to treat him the way a brother should. If he’d been my full brother, I couldn’t have loved him more.
Dad was the kind of guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but Peter Sr. could lose his temper over anything. On Tuesday nights after he got his weekly paycheck, he’d mix up some kind of drink with alcohol he bought from under the counter at a drugstore. Within an hour, he’d be skunk-drunk, and he’d think up some reason to get mad at Mom. He’d start threatening to knock her around, and more than once he actually did.
One evening when I was fifteen, I came home from trade school to find Peter chasing Mom through the house and threatening to kill her. He sounded like he really meant it, and it scared the hell out of me. My sister was jumping around in the background and screaming bloody murder, and Peter Jr. was hiding someplace.
As I ran thr
ough the kitchen after Peter Sr. and Mom, I threw down a cup of milk I was carrying and grabbed up the first thing I could get my hands on to conk him with. It was an electric coffeepot made out of crockery that Mom had gotten with some coupons she’d saved up, and it must’ve weighed three or four pounds.
“You leave my mom alone,” I yelled at Peter, “or I’ll bust you with this thing!”
“Like hell you will, you little shit,” he said and started toward me.
I swung the coffeepot and smacked him pretty good with it. I wasn’t sure exactly where I hit him, but I knew I hit him hard.
He let out a groan and fell on the floor with blood spurting all over the place. I couldn’t believe how fast the blood ran down his neck and onto his shirt, and I was afraid for a second that I’d cut his jugular vein.
Oh my God! I thought. Maybe I’ve killed the son of a bitch, and they’ll send me to the electric chair!
Then I heard Peter cussing and saw him trying to get up, so I knew he wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t in real great shape, either, and the next thing I thought about was trying to get an ambulance.
We couldn’t afford a telephone, and the nearest one was two blocks down the street at a neighbor’s house. By the time I ran all the way there as hard as I could go and called for an ambulance, I was shaking all over. When the ambulance showed up a few minutes later, a cop was following along behind it. I shook even worse when my mother told the cop what happened.
“Is he gonna die?” I asked the cop.
“Nah, he’ll be okay,” the cop said. “He’s bound to have one helluva headache, though. You sure put a dent in his hard head.”
“Are you gonna take me to jail?” I asked.
The cop laughed and shook his head. “No, son. All you were doing was trying to protect your mother. From what she tells me, it was self-defense all the way.”
Peter ended up with a J-shaped scar right in the middle of his forehead. From then on, he stayed out of my way, and I stayed out of his. And as far as I know, he never threatened Mom or chased her through the house again.
