Goodbye, Darkness (35 page)

In Washington's new Pentagon building, officers studied the pictures of dead Marines on Tarawa, debating whether to release them to the press. They decided to do it; it was time, they felt, to shock the home front into understanding the red harvest of combat. The published photographs touched off an uproar. Nimitz received sacks of mail from grieving relatives — a mother wrote, “You killed my son” — and editorials demanded a congressional investigation. The men on Tarawa were puzzled. The photographers had been discreet. No dismembered corpses were shown, no faces with chunks missing, no flies crawling on eyeballs; virtually all the pictures were of bodies in Marine uniforms face down on the beach. Except for those who had known the dead, the pictures were quite ordinary to men who had scraped the remains of buddies off bunker walls or who, while digging foxholes, found their entrenching tools caught in the mouths of dead friends who had been buried in sand by exploding shells.

Time
trumpeted the defense of the American tactics: “Last week some 2,000 or 3,000 United States Marines, most of them now dead or wounded, gave the nation a name to stand beside those of … the Alamo, Little Big Horn, and Belleau Wood. The name was Tarawa.” That made everyone on Betio stand tall, but it deserves second thoughts. The Alamo and Little Big Horn were massacres for Americans, and the Fifth and Sixth Marines had been cut to pieces in Belleau Wood.
Time
's comment may be attributed to a curious principle which seems to guide those who write of titanic battles. The longer the casualty lists — the vaster the investment in blood — the greater the need to justify the slain. Thus the fallen are honored by hallowing the names of the places where they fell; thus writers enshrine in memory the Verduns, the Passchendaeles, the Dunkirks, and the Iwo Jimas, while neglecting decisive struggles in which the loss of life was small. At the turn of the eighteenth century the Duke of Marlborough led ten successful, relatively bloodless, campaigns on the Continent, after which he was hounded into exile by his political enemies. In World War I Douglas Haig butchered the flower of England's youth on the Somme and in Flanders without winning a single victory. He was raised to the peerage and awarded 100,000 pounds by a grateful Parliament. Every American child is taught how Jackson's brigade stood like a stone wall against the waves of Union assault troops at Bull Run, but only the most zealous Civil War votaries know how, husbanding his strength, Jackson flashed up and down the Shenandoah Valley in 1862 with brilliant diversionary tactics, preventing the dispatch of reinforcements to McClellan, who, had he had them, could have taken Richmond. Similarly, in World War II Anzio and Peleliu are apotheosized, though neither contributed to the defeat of Germany and Japan, while the capture of Ulithi, one of the Pacific's finest anchorages, is unsung since the enemy had evacuated it, and Hollandia, MacArthur's greatest triumph in that war, is forgotten because the general's genius outfoxed the Japanese and limited his losses to a handful of GIs.

In the Pacific we received “pony” editions — reduced in size, with no ads — of
Time
and the
New Yorker
. The comparison of Tarawa with great battles of the past didn't impress most of us; we saw it for what it was: wartime propaganda designed to boost the morale of subscribers, a sophisticated version of rhapsodies about the Glorious Dead who had Given Their All, making the Supreme Sacrifice. Our sympathies were with those who protested the high casualties. Even so, neither we nor they were prepared to answer the ultimate question: What happens to the dead? Death's shadow falls on every man in combat, but he is, almost without exception, blind to it. If one is brave enough to try facing it, his mind comes to a shattering stop. Hemingway believed he knew what lay ahead:
“Nada, nada, nada.”
He was in his forties then, however. Youth who haven't reached their twenty-fifth birthday seldom grasp the concept of their own mortality. Like eternity and infinity, it is beyond them. They think: “It will happen to you, and you, and you, but not me.” Indeed, virtually no one can come to terms with his own extinction until the very end, if then. This is especially true of fighting men. The mystery of war enshrouds the deeper mystery of death. And they are in no hurry to solve it. Yet its fascination lurks just outside the perimeter of their consciousness, as it has throughout the history of the human race.

Possibly prehistoric man first became aware of the puzzle when he saw that some sleepers never awoke and that their bodies subsequently underwent unpleasant transformations. We know that man, the only creature to bury his dead, began to do so before 50,000
b.c.
, and that Stone Age corpses were given food and interred in the fetal position, possibly to prepare them for rebirth, or possibly to shackle them, for a recurring theme in the history of thanatophobia is the belief that the dead may become possessed by evil and thus become a threat to all who are still alive. Over two thousand years before Christ strong stone coffins were pieced together for interments. At the same time, despite the horrors of rotting flesh, survivors were convinced that the dead lived on in one form or another. Two traditions evolved. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have held that souls carry on elsewhere, in
sheol
, hell, or heaven, and that all will be judged one day; Buddhists, Orphics, Pythagoreans, and Platonists, on the other hand, have believed in reincarnation. Egyptians, among others, went to great lengths to provide cadavers, particularly if they had been powerful in life, with meals and equipment to see them through to the other world. Since we are not dealing with reason, it is unsurprising that few cultures have looked upon death as natural. Usually it has been attributed to a demon. In Etruscan sepulchral art a terrible god called Charon is the slayer; in the Dark Ages the skeletal figure of Death was armed with a dart; Christians believe that Cain, the farmer son of Adam and Eve, committers of the original sin, introduced death into the world. Sinners, all agreed, are dealt with harshly after their demise. Judaism's Last Judgment is largely a vindication of Israel; Arabs, for example, are treated mercilessly in Jewish apocalyptic literature.

The geography of the next world varies from one creed to another. In Athens and Rome a coin was placed on the tongue of the corpse as payment for a dark guide waiting near the grave to lead him over a barrier. In ancient Egypt dead pharaohs flew up to join the sun-god Ra, but later Egyptians discovered the idea of passing across an infernal river on the way to the afterlife, with a fearsome ferryman at the tiller. Ancient Greeks and Romans, following suit, thought their dead crossed the Styx, or the Acheron, carrying with them delicious cakes to give Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to the hereafter. But since corpses have usually been interred, most peoples have believed that the dead lived somewhere under the earth. In ancient Crete, graves were provided with pottery pipes from above, so that rainwater could slake the corpses' thirst while they awaited passage to the underworld. The Scandinavians envisaged a huge pit, ruled by a dreadful king. Others followed pretty much the same line: the awful sovereign was called the Yama by Buddhists and Hindus; Nergal in Mesopotamia; and Hades in Greece. As epoch succeeded epoch, the inevitability of hell, a joyless, gloomy underworld, became too terrible to contemplate, and the Buddhists, Hindus, Gnostics, and Christians conceived of a way station, a purgatory, where good souls could pay the price for excusable misdeeds before ascending into a divine realm. The form in which the human spirit expressed itself is conceptualized in Saint Paul's use of the Greek word
soma
, which might be roughly translated as gestalt, and Dante's account, in his
Purgatorio
, of the trials
somata
must endure as preparation for paradise.

The twentieth century has extended these threads. The followers of now-forgotten death cults, with their devotion to iconography (Etruscan effigies, early Christian art in the catacombs), would understand, and approve of, Moslems' deification of Mecca, Israel's enshrining of the ashes of those who died in the Holocaust, and Communists who make pilgrimages to the tombs of Marx and Lenin. A majority of mankind, which does not necessarily rule, is still convinced that there must be a life after death. In today's sophisticated cultures, however, there seems to be a silent but concerted effort to hide man's grief for the departed and his apprehension over his own eventual departure, as if both were shameful, or at least in poor taste. Deaths occur in hospitals, where children are “shielded,” or “protected,” from them. Undertakers disguise corpses to make them as lifelike as possible. Heaven, hell, and eventual judgment are rarely mentioned, even by clergymen. Funerals are almost stealthy. Mourning is seldom worn. Graveyards are landscaped, like parks. None of this is helpful to those who must do the dying, which, of course, means, sooner or later, everyone. The mortally ill must still pass through the five final stages of natural death: disbelief, rage, prayers for postponement of the end, depression, and acceptance. Modern society even deprives the dying of their final solace, when those breathing their last want their families gathered around the deathbed.

Violent death, including death on the battlefield, is unsparing on next of kin. The man killed in action cannot observe the five stages, so those who loved him must do it for him, or at least try to. Those who succeed are fortunate, and few. I wrote many letters to the parents of Marines who had died in my section. One came from the mother of an Iowa horticulturist. She was furious with me because I was alive and her son was not. I envied her; she was passing through a strengthening catharsis. Most relatives could not. They repressed their anguish, at great cost to themselves. We on the line did the same. It was bad form to weep long for a fallen buddy. We moved on, each of us inching along the brink of his own extinction, never speaking of what we considered the unspeakable. Today's children are baffled by our acquiescence then in what, to them, appears to have been a monstrous conspiracy against our lives. They are bewildered by those waves of relentless young men who plodded patiently on and on toward Betio's beach while their comrades were keeling over on all sides. They ask: Why? They are convinced that they couldn't do it.

And they are right. The United States was a different country then, with half today's population, a lordly father figure in the White House, and a tightly disciplined society. A counterculture didn't exist, as a word or as a concept. The thought of demonstrating against the war, had it crossed anyone's mind, would have been dismissed as absurd. Standards were rigid; everyone was determined to conform to them because the alternatives were unthinkable. Girls who became pregnant, or boys who cheated on examinations, were expelled from school and cast into outer darkness. Their only hope lay in moving to another part of the country, where they were unknown. Social criteria had to be met, and the Protestant work ethic was very strong. Although the Great Depression was plainly a national disaster, social workers had repeatedly observed that the jobless were suffering from feelings of guilt. “I haven't had a steady job in more than two years,” a man facing eviction told a
New York Daily News
reporter. “Sometimes I feel like a murderer. What's wrong with me, that I can't protect my children?”

The bastion of social stability was the family. Children were guided, not by radar beams picking up trends and directions from other children, but by gyroscopes built into their superegos at home. Parents had a tremendous influence on them. If adolescents wanted to read pulp magazines, or smoke, or listen to Ben Bernie or the Lucky Strike Hit Parade on the radio, they needed parental permission; if they wanted to see
The Philadelphia Story,
their fathers decided whether or not it would be bad for their morals; if they made money shoveling snow or cutting lawns, their fathers, again, told them whether they should save it for college, or, if it was to be spent, what they could buy. (Usually it was clothes.) There was no teenage ethos; indeed, “teenage” meant “brushwood used for fences and hedges.” Young people were called “youngsters,” and since the brooding omnipotence of the peer group had not yet arrived, children rarely felt any conflict between their friends and their families. No youngster would dream of discussing familial conflicts with other youngsters. An insult to either parent had to be avenged. The master bedroom, in upper-middle-class homes, was off limits. Fathers had always ruled homes like sultans, but the Depression had increased all family activities over which patresfamilias reigned; a study of over a hundred families in Pittsburgh discovered that a majority had increased family recreation — Ping-Pong, jigsaw puzzles, checkers, bridge, and parlor games, notably Monopoly. There was also plenty of time for the householders, the doughboys of 1918, to explain to their sons the indissoluble relationship between virility and valor.

Sheathed in obedience, reinforced by Marine Corps pride and the conviction that the war was just, the men wearing green camouflaged helmets could outfight the Japanese, and they did it again and again. Home-front America was shocked by Jap kamikazes, but its own sons were capable of similar sacrifices, and not just Marines; the Devastator torpedo bombers who crashed Nip warships at Midway knew they were diving to certain death, and so did Air Corps pilots over Ploesti. Today their sons wonder why.
I
wonder why. The chasm between generations is one explanation. Perhaps it is the only one. Yet on one level of the subconscious, too deep for me to reach it, I am unsatisfied. So I have nightmares, and so I have returned to the islands to exorcise my inner darkness with the light of understanding.

But not on Tarawa. This visit in the fall of 1978 is my first here; like the journeys to the Philippines and New Guinea, it is useful in re-creating the Pacific war, but since I left none of myself here, there is nothing of me to find. Yet it has one advantage; I come without bias. Leaving the cinder-block hotel after breakfast, I cross from Bairiki to Betio on the 8:15
a.m
. ferry. Next to Guadalcanal, Tarawa is the battle natives remember best, and on the opposite shore I question islanders until I find Itaaka Bamiatoa, who was here during the battle and whose capped teeth give him a glittering plastic smile. Bamiatoa, in turn, takes me to Taute Takanoi, a handsome, immaculately groomed native police officer. Takanoi has just what I want: a Land Rover. Idle at the moment — the chief local offense now is drunkenness, and all the local topers are in jail — he agrees to chauffeur us, creeping along at twenty miles per hour, the local speed limit, taking little side trips for my benefit. Because of its isolation, the isle has changed little in a third of a century. There are two stone moles, one of them built by Seabees before they left. Hawkins Field, the battle's prize, no longer exists, and erosion has revealed sunken wrecks which were formerly invisible. It is a balmy, calm day. Under a canopy of coconut trees we pause at the Nano-Lelei supermarket for Australian soft drinks, my treat — nagged by my
déjà vécu
thirst, I gulp down two — and as we finish them Bamiatoa tells me that the historic beach is within strolling distance. We pass a silvery British Petroleum storage tank, several sago-leaf-thatched huts, and the wreckage of the
Saeda Maru,
an abandoned Japanese freighter which island women are using as a clothes rack. Then, suddenly, we are on the shore. The scene has appeared in a hundred photographs of Tarawa, but like the Berlin Wall it must be seen to be believed.