Battle Cry (48 page)

“Pharmacist’s Mate First Class Pedro Rojas, USNR. On a patrol against enemy forces on Guadalcanal he disregarded his own wound and gave aid and comfort to another wounded member of the patrol…in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service….

“And we therefore posthumously award the Navy Cross for gallantry above and beyond the call of duty to Private Constantine Zvonski….”

“Regiment, tenshun!”

“Pass in review…eyes right! Present arms!”

We marched in tribute past them and the battalion and company standards dipped in salute. They returned the salute. And as the Third Battalion passed in review, marching in precision, the band played the Marine’s Hymn.

“Come on,” said the Injun after we fell out, “let’s go over and congratulate Pedro.”

“Yeah,” said Andy.

“What the hell for?” Speedy spat.

“He rated it,” Andy said.

“Oh sure, give the goddam medals to the officers and the corpsmen.”

“Don’t be a wedgeass, Speedy,” Lighttower said.

“That goddam Mexican didn’t deserve it no more than Seabags. What about Seabags?”

“Hell,” I said, “if they passed out medals to everybody who rated them, we’d need one for pretty near every guy in the regiment.”

“Yeah, but that don’t cut no ice. If the Spik got one, Seabags should have got one. And what about Red Cassidy?”

Seabags walked into our circle. “Come on Speedy,” he said.

“Where you going?”

“I’m going to buy Pedro a beer,” he said.

Hardly a night passed when I wasn’t roused from my sack in the small hours of the morning. “Hey, Mac,” a voice would whisper in the dark, “Spanish Joe has got the bug.”

“Get a corpsman.” I climbed half asleep from my cot, lit the coal lamp and took it over to the sack of the stricken Marine. The scene seemed to play itself over a hundred times.

“Hey, Mac, the Injun has the bug….”

“Hey, Mac, Seabags has the bug….”

“Hey, Mac. Better come quick. Danny has the bug. He’s off his rocker now. Screaming something about not liking to shoot rabbits.”

Their faces would be sweaty and torture-wracked and they’d roll and groan to wipe out the nightmare. Then came the pain in the guts and they’d start shaking like a dog crapping. They wasted away quick. It was nasty to see and I hated to stand by and not be able to help them. I could only give them quinine and let them lie there, trembling and moaning about home and things like that, till the fever broke. Then they’d awake with sheet-white faces and black circles under their eyes, too weak to stand up with the goddam bells from the quinine blasting in their heads.

Ninety-five per cent of the Second Division had the bug at one time or another. I had ten recurrences, myself. Most all of us went around with it five or six times.

Each regiment had a small hospital unit but it was soon crowded to capacity, and the division hospital could be used only for a severe case. There was a big base hospital at Silverstream near Upper Hutt, complete with Navy nurses. Silverstream handled casualties from all over the Pacific. It was a beautiful place, the real thing. Big clean wards and a Red Cross and recreation center. You had to be close to dead or an officer to get in, though. I finally made it on my eighth recurrence.

Navy nurses for the most part were little more than ornamental—pretty social butterflies. The corpsmen did ninety-nine per cent of the work. As a group, they were arrogant and ordered us around more sharply than the officers. But you can’t have everything and we all hoped to get sick enough to rate Silverstream in spite of the nurses.

With every hospital bed, makeshift or otherwise, filled with the malaria-riddled division, each battalion set up a shack full of cots to handle the milder cases. Even these facilities bogged down under the capacity load and we were handed some pills and told to go back to our tents and sweat it out.

In a tent, with a hundred and four fever and chills and pains ripping him up, a man finds out what the word
buddy
means—to bathe a sick kid and feed him and attend to him. Guys that loved each other in a way that no woman could understand. Guys who had been through hell together, and could give a tenderness to each other that even a woman couldn’t duplicate. Many a night I lay half shivering on my cot with my head on the lap of L.Q. or Danny or Seabags while they tried to force some fruit juice into me. “Come on, you salty old fart, open up your ugly mouth before I ram it down you sideways.”

On nights like that I opened my eyes, still full of the chill, and a fire was going on the potstove, made with stolen wood, and the cold drizzly rain beat a tattoo on the tent and it was good to look up and see a smiling face watching. A cool cloth would be passed over my face and I’d drink some stuff they had swiped for me. Soon Pedro, or one of the other tired, beat-out corpsmen, would check into the tent on late rounds and try to make me comfortable. They worked around the clock, those sailors, trying to ease the suffering of the Marines as best they could.

When quinine in pill form ran out, we were given doses of liquid quinine. It was near impossible to stomach. I sometimes thought it would be better to die of malaria than drink it.

On and on it went during those weeks in New Zealand, cycle after cycle of malaria leaving a wake of weak and wrecked men. When we hit the hard training it would be tougher this time than anything we had ever known before. Homesickness and loneliness sets in quick when a fellow isn’t feeling right. We’d get pissy drunk on a weekend just to bring on the malaria and to be able to escape the drudgery of soldiering. Malaria at least gave us a two-week rest.

Not only were we the best singers and ball players in the regiment but there was never a closer-knit bunch of men in the Corps than Headquarters Company. Sure, we had our inter-platoon rivalry with intelligence and the corpsmen but we stuck together almost to a man. Friendship was infectious. New transferees into the company were astounded by it.

As our company was smaller than the line companies we needed only half the space in our mess hall. L.Q., a great pep boy and organizer, came up with a plan. We put it to the other sections in the company and it was greeted with enthusiasm. He planned to cut the mess hall in half and build a recreation room for our own use. Without bothering to await official sanction, we sent out scouting parties and stole wallboard and lumber wherever we could locate it. The project went into high gear almost immediately.

We all turned to after duty hours. Spanish Joe was invaluable on the “borrowing” parties. He could sniff out a pound of nails or loose lumber in the remotest and best guarded places in camp. When we had walled off half the mess hall we “borrowed” a potbellied stove, and wood from which a ping-pong table, several chairs, and writing tables were built.

Highpockets, at first aggravated over the thefts, finally blessed the project provided we paid for the equipment in the future.

We held a powwow and after a stirring talk by L.Q. decided to build the finest club in New Zealand. Each man would chip in a pound a month from his pay and deposit it in Pucchi’s safe. Marion, Paris, Pedro and me were chosen as trustees. The dues were strictly voluntary, but each squad leader was warned to see that his men volunteered at pay call.

After the first pay call any skepticism vanished. A party scoured Wellington for secondhand furniture and the clubroom boasted six overstuffed sofas and a dozen comfortable armchairs. A big radio was purchased and we erected an aerial that enabled us to get reception from any part of the world. Next came a phonograph and hundreds of records. After Marion protested and got up a petition from the music lovers, we bought a few albums of good stuff, too. Lamps, rugs, writing paper, footstools, another stove, several hand-painted nudes, typewriters, and many other items poured in after each pay call.

L.Q. had an uncle who was a minor-league official in one of the Hollywood studios. From him we received a package of two hundred photographs of almost every star and starlet in filmland, personally addressed to the company. They covered the entire wall space.

We bought oilcloth for the mess tables and set up spice racks. Then came our crowning glory. We cut off a corner of the club and built a bar. It was the best bar in the country, at least it was the only one that had a foot rail. Pine walls, varnished, the biggest and best mirror that money could buy, and a statue of the sexiest broad the country could offer adorned it.

Huxley broke all tradition by allowing the company to purchase its beer ration in a unit. Because there were many non-drinkers and some men were always on liberty a large portion of our allotment was never purchased. By buying all rations at once we benefited by several extra cases. Originally it was feared that unlimited beer each night would lead to trouble. We were anxious to maintain the privilege and we policed each other thoroughly and slapped limits and severe fines or temporary bans on heavy drinkers. The beer was sold at a profit which enabled us to drink in luxury and cut our dues to six shillings a month.

There was nothing like our club in the entire Corps. We guarded it jealously. No men were welcome but our own. A twenty-four-hour guard was posted and a two-man detail was released from duty to clean up each morning. The escape from the drab tents to the warmth of the club gave the company some of the happiest moments they spent in the service. After a tough hike or field problem it was wonderful to clean up and enter this little private domain, built on a rock of comradeship. The men could bat the breeze, write, drink, play cards, listen to command performances from the States, or for laughs tune in on Tokyo Rose. She gave us some food for thought one night. She said the clock on the Wellington Parliament was two minutes slow…. It was.

As the winter bore in there was that warm glow in the club that comes with snoozing in an easy chair by the fire. It helped us forget that we were lonely men. Some nights, though, just before taps, the phonograph would spin some song about home, and the drinking and the talking would stop and the deathly still would hit us. I could see the eyes of my boys, hungry for home, lousy blue and wanting the thing which seemed further and further away with each passing day. They were quiet as the notes and the words knifed in them. Quiet, as they fought off a lump in their throats.

Then, when the field music blew recall, we’d file slowly from the club, through the rain, over the catwalk and into the cold dark tent to get some sleep. Big hike tomorrow.

Every dry day we were in the field and on many of the rainy ones, too. One evening Lighttower and Levin were called to the Special Weapons Company for a pre-dawn field problem. They were interested in the way we worked our walkie-talkies. They were assigned to help repel the mock invasion by the First Battalion near the ocean.

The pair put awkward ponchos on over the radios in the still dark, cold and wet morning and hiked to the weapons area at the far end of the camp.

All morning they sat in water-filled foxholes as a chilling wind swept the hills where the 37 mms were set up to repel the invasion. They were ordered to secure and retreat to another defensive position.

“Man, I’m sure one glad redskin that this problem is over,” the Indian said, shaking. “I’ll get the bug for sure.”

“It ain’t over, Lighttower. We’re supposed to fall back.”

“I can see you ain’t been on many of these problems.”

“What you mean?”

“See that hill?”

“Yeah.”

“In about five minutes the First Battalion will be charging over it.”

“So?”

“So throw up your hands and surrender and you’re a prisoner so they’ll send you back to camp.”

“But we ain’t supposed to do that.”

“Look, Levin, my feet are soaked. I’m getting a chill. If you want to run around the hills all day that’s your business. I’m getting captured.”

“Aw, I’d better not.”

“I won’t say nothing.”

“I’d better not anyhow.”

As the officer finally gave the retreat signal, Levin arose and almost toppled over. He had been sitting in the freezing water for nearly three hours without movement. Lighttower wheeled and threw up his hands. “I quit, prisoner.” A corporal put a POW band on his arm and he limped through the slush back to camp.

Levin came in four hours later. He threw off his soaked gear, unlaced his shoes, pulled off the saturated socks. His feet were icy and numbed. He held them up near the hot fire going in the stove. He sighed as a tingle of feeling came back to them.

I walked into the tent…. “Hey, Levin, what in the hell you doing?”

“Warming my feet, Mac. They’re nearly froze off.”

“You crazy bastard, get them away from that fire!”

“Why?”

“You’ll get frostbite!”

He flopped back exhausted on his cot, drying himself. Then he sprang up and scratched his feet. “They itch!” he screamed and dug his fingers into the flesh. He scratched till tears ran down his cheeks. I helped him into his shoes and walked him to sick bay. He was in agony, begging the corpsmen to scratch them. They stood about dumbfounded; finally Pedro dashed off to get Doc Kyser. “They itch, they itch!” he cried over and over.

Kyser, irate from being pulled away from a poker game, stormed into the aid shack. He bulled through the astounded corpsmen and grabbed Levin’s feet and massaged them vigorously until circulation returned to them. The mad itch disappeared and Levin got off the table and pumped the Doc’s hand gratefully.

“Minor dose of frostbite,” Kyser said. “Called chilblain. Keep him off his feet a couple of days. Don’t wear any colored socks and check in tomorrow morning. And for Christ sake keep those feet away from any stoves. You’ll feel this for months—just massage when the itch comes.”

I helped Levin back to the tent.

“Christ,” he said, “I’m sorry, Mac.”

“For what?”

“The way I acted. The guys will think I’m chicken.”

“Well, quit worrying about it. You should have had better sense.”

He sat disgustedly. I offered him a smoke. “You’d better ride the TCS jeep till the Doc okays you to full duty.”