Gone to Soldiers

by Marge Piercy

  On the ship, he and Jack had got tighter with Slo Mo Mazzini. He came from Akron, which struck Murray as kind of a little Detroit. Slo Mo was just as thoughtful as he had been, but he moved faster now.

  Murray’s nickname was King. The newer guys in the outfit couldn’t figure out why Murray was called King, because he wasn’t the biggest or the meanest or the bossiest, and everybody saw how much Sergeant Hickock hated his guts. Maybe somebody would explain he’d been called King David ever since he poked Sergeant Hickock in the chin, because he wouldn’t take no shit about the Jews. He was still the only Jew. Every time they got a fresh load of recruits he looked them over, hoping, but no luck. Jack was Frenchy, of course, just as Tiny was six feet four.

  The men on board sharpened their knives and bayonets, took apart their rifles and cleaned them, did their laundry in the sea, wrote letters, gossiped, slept, played cards, read comic books, killed time. They were taken out of the armada and sailed toward Saipan. Then they were transported right back to Okinawa, only the 8th Marines of all their division. Tough luck.

  Murray was standing by a bulkhead watching Hickock, himself in shadow and Hickock full in brief sunshine between the increasingly torrential rains. The sun fell on his close-cropped blond hair that looked white, his squared-off jaw and grey eyes squinted against the rare sun: tall, lean, careful of his appearance and affecting the swashbuckling Marine style, he looked like the minor lead in a Hollywood movie about the war. Why couldn’t Hickock simply take the plateful of goodies life had put in front of him and let him live in peace?

  Murray resented hating Hickock, like a parasite that hollowed him out from the inside. Life was hardly sweet, but it was his own, and he had not borne it through all these bloodbaths and stinking fetid jungles and jagged coral rocks pitted with fortified caves to spill it for one man’s idiot prejudice. Sometimes in dreams Hickock suddenly turned and told him he was okay. Let up. In daily life Hickock was always there, watching him the way a farmer looks at a varmint he means to kill the first day of hunting season.

  The 8th Marines were finally being used, to clean out some nearby islands thought to shelter Japanese troops and wanted in any case for a radar installation to take some of the heat off the radar picket ships the kamikazes kept blowing up. On one of those islands, Ie Shima, Murray heard that the correspondent Ernie Pyle had been killed by a sniper. Their battalion was being sent into Iheya, north of Okinawa, where a scout plane had reported a Japanese position. They were all so bloody sick of being on the transport, they were pleased to be landing on anything. They were standing so many general quarters they were getting no sleep anyhow, so they might as well be fighting with land under their feet and escape the exploding ships.

  Murray felt less cheerful than Jack or Slo Mo, because several times he caught Hickock’s gaze on him. Tiny was depressed too: he had been sleeping badly, tormented by violent nightmares. The order to land the landing force was given at dawn and the amphtracs started for shore. They were fine until they got to the narrow beach. Then shells started landing all around them, no cover, no defilade available, nothing but the shining flash of beach with shells throwing up sand and occasional fragments of coral or metal. Nothing but shells, no machine-gun fire, no mortars. Maybe the Japs were dug in somewhere inland, back with their artillery. Hickock ordered Murray out first as they grated on bottom.

  He had Slo Mo on his right and Jack on his left. Still no machine-gun or riflery fire. Ah, now it began, to the left, sweeping over them. They hit the sand, but they were exposed. A shell knocked him unconscious. He wakened deafened and groggy. When he recovered a little from the concussion, he made a dead run for the fringe of trees, expecting the machine-gun fire to start and to feel himself torn apart. He saw the bottom half of Tiny upended from the shell hole. There was no upper half. He landed in the undergrowth, Jack beside him and then Slo Mo joined them, no longer virgin in combat and not slow under fire.

  “Fucking monkeys,” Murray said. “Those shells are coming from out there, not from in front of us.”

  “Friendly fire, you’re just as dead,” Jack said. “Is anybody going to let them know?”

  “Dig in,” Murray said, “or we’ll get shot by our own people. Everybody’s going crazy.” Indeed, from their perspective among the trees, they could see that Easy Company was shooting not at any Japanese but at them, Fox. Murray saw Sergeant Hickock standing there yelling at the men back on the beach.

  Without haste and feeling stone cold, he got Hickock in the sight of his rifle. He was on the rifle range perfecting the sighting that would give him the bull’s-eye. God knows how many Japs I’ve killed who never did anything more than get drafted and try to stay alive. Now I’m going to kill one for me and mine. He took careful aim as if he were trying for a sharpshooting medal. The shells were landing on the beach. The screams of the dying came faintly to his injured ears. Only Jack lay with him in the shallow foxhole they had dug and only Jack saw what he was doing. Slo Mo was dug in ten feet over. Still he could not shoot. Hickock’s face leaning into him. “Take a good look at this island, Jew-boy.” His Molly Goldberg imitation reading Ruthie’s letters. He looked at Jack.

  Jack looked back at him steadily. Murray turned toward Hickock and pulled the trigger. Hickock dropped to his knees and then fell forward. Murray had hit the bull’s-eye. “Come on,” he said to Jack, “you and Slo Mo get the fuck inland. I’m going to find Sergeant Reardon and make sure he knows it’s us and not the Japs. I got the dirty suspicion there’s not two Japs on this island. Somebody’s got to radio those ships.”

  In fact there were no enemies present. Except themselves.

  The second week in June they were landed on Okinawa to relieve the 1st and 6th divisions, what was left of them. In some companies, there were three men surviving. They could smell the line as they came up to it. It was trench warfare Okinawa-style and the whole front stank like a backed-up toilet. It had been raining for weeks and the mud they slogged through was compounded of earth, of blood, of maggots, of bits of metal and burnt detritus, of shit and garbage. It was June but the trees were bare, stripped by the shelling.

  The Japanese had an immense amount of artillery. Seventy thousand men on one side and fifty on the other had been bearing down on a strip of land about five miles wide, a barren but wet moon of rocks and mud, heavily cratered. Burnt tanks littered every hillside, for the tankmen had taken as bad a beating as the infantry.

  When they collapsed for a rest, they were told that their provisions, their food, their water had been landed four miles overland on the beach, but that in between were the Japanese. They were told if they wanted their rations and their water, they had better start fighting.

  The Marines always viewed the Army with a cold eye, for to them it looked fat, oversupplied, overcautious, with too many people behind the line in proportion to those on the line. The Army was rich in equipment, always hauling trucks, jeeps, half-tracks, vast tonnages of supplies and mechanics and subarmies of clerks with them. The Marines had a few tanks with them, some artillery, and that was about it.

  “I’m glad they kept us out on the LST so long, getting crazy and playing poker, because I’m sure pleased that we missed Sugar Loaf and Chocolate Drop and all those fun places,” Slo Mo said.

  “You may be slow, but you aint stupid,” Jack said. They saw the guys they were replacing, dazed and battered zombies. They looked as if they were cattle marching to the slaughterhouse instead of away from it. Life was not always sweet after a battle, Murray thought; if it was a bad enough battle and you lost enough people around you, close to you, living could seem pointless. Murray was now a corporal again; he had been given a stripe back, credited with figuring out the carnage on the islet was from their own side. He was promoted for making it through the rain of friendly fire to Reardon, before Easy and Fox finished each other off. He thought his stripe was a peculiar award for shooting his sergeant, but he was not about to complain.

  They camped that night in a tomb.
They had learned quickly to take cover in the tombs from the constant shelling and the equally constant rain. The Okinawans kept their ancestors in coral block huts built into the hillsides, with entrances shaped like vaginas, for the dead were returned to the womb of earth. Surrounded by little stone walls, they would not stand up to a direct hit, but offered protection from blast and shrapnel. In fact, the Okinawans used them as shelter from typhoons. The three of them moved the big blue urns of the dead outside and crawled in. It was close but the fresh air gradually filtered in, such as it was. Murray thought the polluted air on Okinawa could give a bad day in Detroit serious competition.

  Jack lay near the door reading a Captain Marvel comic book. The captain was fighting the Nazis still—two months ago’s comics. The day the war in Europe had ended, all the ships fired three rounds into the Jap positions to celebrate. It meant little to them.

  “Maybe we’ll get some help invading Japan, which is going to be like Iwo Jima and Saipan and Tarawa and this bloody muck all balled together,” Murray speculated.

  “Or maybe it means they’ll let those guys go home and grab all the jobs and all the women while we keep doing this one foot at a time for the next five years.” Slo Mo sounded depressed. “They say the Japs plan to arm women and babies, and everyone of them’ll kill themselves trying to kill us.”

  How long does anybody have to do this? Murray asked himself. How long? Outside, not too near, there was a scream. Infiltrating Japs. Either a marine or a Japanese infantryman had just been knifed. Murray shifted to a more comfortable position. One reason he could not keep himself from hating the Japanese, no matter how hard he tried to tell himself that it was not the Japanese who were killing Jews, and that all armies fought dirty, and that they were amazingly brave and tough, was that they kept him from sleeping. They never seemed to lie down at night and go to sleep the way they ought to. No, all night they were infiltrating the lines, slitting marines’ throats in their foxholes, sometimes drinking and working themselves up for a suicide charge. Why didn’t they just lie down and sleep and fight tomorrow? If only they would leave the nights alone and let him sleep, every other night, even just one night in three.

  He waited for Sergeant Hickock to rise before him, but Sergeant Hickock didn’t put in his appearance. Instead when he was trying to sleep, he found himself haunted not by the man he had killed but by those he had been unable to save, the kids who had died beside him, the kids who had bled to death before they could be carried back to battalion aid, the kids instantly blown apart. He was haunted by Tiny and by Harvey, who died in his head again and again. Hickock was simply gone, and he could not find regret in himself. He had killed he had no idea how many hundred men including thirty-odd at once with a barrel of gasoline thrown into a cave on Saipan and lit; they had died horribly. He felt worse about them than about Hickock. He had killed countless men and one. It was a cosmic joke.

  He realized he could probably kill anybody, except his buddies. The only emotions he seemed to feel any longer were loyalty to them, brute fear and sometimes anger, and then once in a while, relief. Relief that he was alive. Relief when they could eat something hot and sleep through a night. Relief when the shells finally, finally stopped for an hour. That shell on Iheya had left him with impaired hearing in the left ear. Would it ever come back? Relief that Hickock was gone. The Marines had taught him to kill well and efficiently and without thinking, and he had done so. If Jack thought the worse of him for it, he never said a word. Murray trusted Jack, he had trusted him with his life a thousand times and he would trust him a thousand more.

  The incoming mail was heavy that night. They heard one coming, the swish and then a great thud that shook that tomb but no explosion. They looked at each other, waiting to die. Murray mumbled that maybe it was time delay, but nothing happened. Just at dawn they crawled out. There it was, a .90 millimeter, stuck in the mud halfway. The mud was so deep it hadn’t exploded, or else it was a dud. Jack crossed himself. Murray could only stare at it. One of the clichés the movies liked was there were no atheists in foxholes, but he had completely lost his faith. Any world like this had no god, that much was clear. The only lord was death. Jack prayed for them, but Murray could not. His sky was empty except for kamikazes and fighters and lobbed shells.

  They had flamethrowers, and each tank proceeded with a group of riflemen around it. The tank commander stuck his head out. “Okay, Mac, I’m set up for flamethrowing, but don’t you go leaving me on my lonesome when the Japs pop out of their caves with satchel charges.”

  “Hang loose,” Sergeant Zeeland said. “We’re sticking to you like fleas to a fat puppy. We’re your shadows.” He put Murray on the BAR.

  They passed the night’s KIAs stacked up wrapped in their ponchos, only their boondockers sticking out, anonymous as any other parcels. Jack looked at him from his almost black eyes and he looked back with the same recognition. As they were lying behind the wall of a tomb shooting at another tomb, a runner checking on positions told them that General Buckner had been killed by coral fragments from a shell. Slo Mo was impressed. “Some battle, when generals get killed.”

  “You know, you’re getting more talkative,” Murray said to him.

  “Is that bad?” Slo Mo already had that hollow-eyed half-dead staring look of too much combat. They all looked like that.

  “Watch it.” Shells coming in on them. The concussion struck them and Murray found blood on his face.

  “I saw High Pockets rubbing dirt in his shrapnel wound to get it infected,” Jack said. “That’s one way out.”

  Murray thought of the stack of bodies, ponchos with boondockers stuck out. That was the other. He shrugged. “Hey, the tanker wants to move on up there.”

  “What’s his hurry?” Jack asked, but he got ready to move out.

  “When we get up by that smashed tree, watch to your right,” Murray warned Slo Mo, and then he went out at a crouch. What he felt was scared, and what he felt was that Jack was to his right and Slo Mo was to his left and that was all there was to count on in the world.

  JACQUELINE 13

  Tunneling

  It was the last day of April when Jacqueline came to and stayed conscious. She was in a clean high hospital bed in a ward with sunlight pouring in. When she asked about Rysia, the nurse did not know who she meant. All the patients in her ward were from one or another camp. Some had undergone amputations and many had contracted typhus. She had had a bad infection. “They almost took off your arm,” the nurse said in a funny kind of American English Jacqueline had trouble understanding. It came out like, “Theyee most took off ya ahm.”

  She touched herself, counting, all there but weak, weak. The nurse told her she was in Bad Nauheim in Germany, which frightened her, but the hospital had been taken over by the Americans.

  The nurse was rattling on: “But you responded real nice to the penicillin which I bet you never did hear of before, and that’s what saved your arm and your life, so aren’t you lucky? You weighed exactly seventy-one pounds when they brought you in here, honey, and you don’t weigh a whole lot more now, but we’re going to fatten you up.”

  Jacqueline had no idea how seventy-one pounds translated into kilograms—it sounded heavy—but she was still skeletal. With great effort she sat up, while the nurse, who she saw was redheaded and freckled, plumped up the pillows behind her and brought her milk to drink. Jacqueline had not tasted milk in four years. It was thick and rich like liquid ice cream. Sitting up made her heart pound.

  “Oh, you had typhus too, but not as bad as most of them.”

  She began to look around the ward. Some women were raging with fever, some amputees and some just lying there, grey skeletons under sheets.

  When the nurse had gone away, the woman in the next bed spoke to her in Yiddish. She said that she had been in Gross Rosen. She came from Austria and did not know how it would be to go back. The Austrian government would not give any help to Jews, because it said they had only been racially and not poli
tically oppressed, and UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) would not help Austrian Jews because they were not citizens of any UN country. She felt afraid to go back, afraid of hatred, afraid that nothing was left of her home, her family. “I had a daughter three,” she said, a shriveled woman of indeterminate age with great gaps in her teeth, “and I sent her into hiding with a farm family in forty-one. I want to find her, but I can’t get any help.”

  A daughter of three. The woman might be in her twenties. Jacqueline wondered what she herself looked like. When the nurse came back, she asked for a mirror. “Honeybun, you been mighty sick. Is your hair brown?”

  Jacqueline nodded.

  “It’s beginning to come back that way.”

  In the mirror she saw a skull. “Is that me?” she cried. A gaunt old man looked back, with grey hair three centimeters long and light brown in the last half centimeter. The eyes were enormous. The flesh was hung on the bones, blotchy with an odd purplish cast.

  Jacqueline began to live from meal to meal. She was always hungry, although eating was hard work. She had an appetite that her body seemed fitted around, a cavernous demand to be fed. The nurse began surreptitiously bringing her leftovers that others had not finished, for in the ward many were still dying. She ate everything. There was chicken, dried beef in sauce, fried fish. Sometimes they had ice cream. Often they had canned fruit. She had not tasted anything sweet in a year, except for the jam just after she was shot. She felt a little ashamed, but she could not refuse anything. She felt as if her stomach were in her throat, voracious, screaming, a baby just reborn.

  Every morning when she woke, she was back in the camp. Then she lay with her eyes shut tight feeling the sheets, and that reassured her. Here it was clean and no blockalteste screamed, beating on the sluggards, no shots rang out, no clubs drummed on flesh. She ate and she slept and she had nightmares, from which she woke soaked and shivering. She was sullen, she was angry, she was terrified. When she heard German voices in the hall, she tried to get out of the bed to run, but crashed to her knees, too weak.