Goodbye, Darkness (54 page)

The odd thing, or odd to those who have never lived in the strange land of combat, is that I never had a clear view of Sugar Loaf. I was on its reverse slope, on the crest, and eventually on the forward slope, but there were always coral dust, high-explosive fumes, and heavy clouds of bursting ammunition on all sides. It would be interesting to see a study of the air pollution there. I'll bet it was very unhealthy. In that smog, grappling with whatever came to hand, we were like the blind man trying to identify an elephant by feeling his legs. After the war I saw a photograph of the hill, but it had been taken from a peculiar angle and was out of focus. That was also true of my memory, which was blurred because, I think, there was so much that I did not want to remember. There, as in the months following my father's death, I suffered from traumatic amnesia. Some flickers of unreal recollection remain: standing at the foot of the hill, arms akimbo, quavering with senseless excitement and grinning maniacally, and — this makes even less sense — running up the slope, not straight up, but on a diagonal, cradling the gun of a heavy machine gun in my left elbow, with a cartridge belt, streaming up from the breechblock, draped over my right shoulder. The gun alone weighed forty-one pounds. Nobody runs uphill with such an awkward piece of machinery. And where was the tripod? I don't know where I had acquired the gun, or where I was taking it, or why I was there at all.

Mostly I remember a lot of scampering about, being constantly on the move under heavy enemy fire, racing from one company CP to another, always keeping an eye open for the nearest hole. Usually I was with either Alan Meissner, skipper of Easy Company, or Howard Mabie, Dog Company's CO until he was hit. There were dead Japs and dead Marines everywhere. Meissner's company went up the hill with 240 men and came back with 2. On the slopes the fighting was sometimes hand-to-hand, and some Marines, though not I, used Kabar knives, the knives being a more practical implement for ripping out a man's guts than a rifle or bayonet. At close range the mustard-colored Japs looked like badly wrapped brown-paper parcels. Jumping around on their bandy legs, they jabbered or grunted; their eyes were glazed over and fixed, as though they were in a trance. I suppose we were the same. Had I not been fasting I'm sure I would have shit my pants. Many did. One of the last orders before going into action was “Keep your assholes tight,” but often that wasn't possible. We were animals, really, torn between fear — I was mostly frightened — and a murderous rage at events. One strange feeling, which I remember clearly, was a powerful link with the slain, particularly those who had fallen within the past hour or two. There was so much death around that life seemed almost indecent. Some men's uniforms were soaked with gobs of blood. The ground was sodden with it. I killed, too.

By sundown of May 17 we had just about lost heart, ready to withdraw from the hill because we were running out of ammunition. There wasn't a hand grenade left in the battalion; E Company had used the last of them in two futile charges. As it happened, we not only stayed; we won the battle. That night Ushijima tried to reinforce his troops on the opposite slope, but our flares lit up his counterattack force just as it was forming, and twelve battalions of Marine artillery laid down so strong a concentration that he withdrew. Our battalion commander called Whaling on the field telephone and said, “We can take it. We'll give it another go in the morning.” His faith was largely based on news that other Marines had captured Horseshoe Ridge, while our Third Battalion — Baker's, beefed up with replacements and back on the line — was digging in on the slope of Half Moon. At 8:30
a.m
. on Friday, May 18, six U.S. tanks tried to reach the hill but couldn't; all were destroyed by enemy mines. New tanks arrived, however, and maneuvered their way through the minefield. At 10:00
a.m
. a combined tank-infantry assault, half of Mabie's D Company swarming up one side of the hill while the other half lunged at the other side, sprang at the top. It worked. There was a terrific grenade battle at close quarters on the summit, and the Japanese sent a heavy mortar barrage down on our people, but the remnants of D Company, with the fire support from F Company, which was now on the forward slope of Horseshoe, didn't yield an inch. As night fell on the embattled army, the Twenty-ninth Marines held the hill. The Twenty-ninth holds it still.

Newsweek
called Sugar Loaf “the most critical local battle of the war,” but I felt no thrill of exultation. My father had warned me that war is grisly beyond imagining. Now I believed him. Bob Fowler, F Company's popular, towheaded commander, had bled to death after being hit in the spleen. His orderly, who adored him, snatched up a submachine gun and unforgivably massacred a line of unarmed Japanese soldiers who had just surrendered. Even worse was the tragic lot of eighty-five student nurses. Terrified, they had retreated into a cave. Marines reaching the mouth of the cave heard Japanese voices within. They didn't recognize the tones as feminine, and neither did their interpreter, who demanded that those inside emerge at once. When they didn't, flamethrowers, moving in, killed them all. To this day, Japanese come to mourn at what is now known as the “Cave of the Virgins.”

So my feelings about Sugar Loaf were mixed. As I look back, it was somewhere on the slopes of that hill, where I confronted the dark underside of battle, that passion died between me and the Marine Corps. The silver cord had been loosed, the golden bowl broken, the pitcher broken at the fountain, the wheel broken at the cistern. Half the evil in the world, I thought, is done in the name of honor.
Nicht die Kinder bloss speist man mit Märchen ab.
I now caught the jarring notes in the “Marines' Hymn” — which, after all, was a melody lifted from an obscure Offenbach operetta — and the tacky appeals to patriotism which lay behind the mass butchery on the islands. I saw through the Corps' swagger, the ruthless exploitation of the loyalty I had guilelessly plighted in that Springfield recruiting station after Pearl Harbor. On Sugar Loaf, in short, I realized that something within me, long ailing, had expired. Although I would continue to do the job, performing as the hired gun, I now knew that banners and swords, ruffles and flourishes, bugles and drums, the whole rigmarole, eventually ended in squalor. Goethe said, “There is no man so dangerous as the disillusioned idealist,” but before one can lose his illusions he must first possess them. I, to my shame, had been among the enchanted fighters. My dream of war had been colorful but puerile. It had been so evanescent, so ethereal, so wholly unrealistic that it deserved to be demolished. Later, after time had washed away the bitterness, I came to understand that.

On May 19 the Fourth Marines relieved the bleeding remnants of the Twenty-ninth. Wet as it had been, it now became wetter; eighteen inches of rain fell in the next nine days, and twice the weather was so poor that the fighting simply stopped. Nevertheless, the Fourth mopped up Half Moon and Horseshoe and then moved on Naha, or its ruins. Enemy artillery, even back where we now were, continued to be heavy. One new piece was a mammoth eight-inch rocket mortar whose shells shrieked when launched but approached their targets silently. They were variously called screaming meemies, box-car Charlies, and flying seabags, because if you happened to be looking at the right place you could actually see one coming, tumbling end over end. They were launched from crude V-shaped troughs: the propelling charge was detonated by striking it with a mallet. We were told that they were wildly inaccurate, that their sole purpose was to damage our morale. In my case they were a stupendous success. Every time I heard the shriek I hit the deck. Most of the men ignored them, saying, as I'm sure fighting men have said in every battle since the arrows of Agincourt, “It won't hit you unless it's got your name on it, and if it does, you haven't got a prayer.”

Having broken through the Machinato Line, we thought we had won. The Japanese, as usual, refused to concede. Six days after we took Sugar Loaf, Ushijima launched a daring airborne attack on Yontan and Kadena airfields, sending
giretsu
(paratroopers) tumbling down. Both sides suffered casualties; U.S. planes were destroyed. Two American fuel dumps, containing seventy thousand gallons of gasoline, were set off. Kamikazes, launching their seventh major
kikusui
assault, ravaged the Allied fleet and its shore stations. But the Fourth Marines had already waded through the waist-deep waters of the Asato Kawa and entered Naha. Okinawan bodies were everywhere — in shops, in gutters, hanging from windows. Once a city of sixty-five thousand, Naha now teemed with Jap mortars and machine guns. In Tomari, the city's suburb, white phosphorus was fired into the frame buildings to destroy enemy positions, and on May 30 the Twenty-second and Twenty-ninth Marines, strengthened by reinforcements, drove through the Shichina area to the Kokuba estuary, isolating the island's capital. Three days later, on Saturday, June 2, I suffered my superficial gunshot wound. I remember asking a corpsman, “Will I get a Purple Heart?” He nodded, and I thought of my father:
We're even.

So I had my million-dollar wound, the dream of every infantryman. I was moved back to a field hospital where the only reminder of combat was the rumble of artillery on the horizon. I was served hot chow on clean plates, and even heard rebroadcasts of radio programs from the states, including, that Sunday, Jack Benny, Charlie McCarthy, and the Great Gildersleeve. Then I learned that General Shepherd, determined to avoid a repetition of Garapan and Manila, had decided to bypass the city and outflank the enemy with an amphibious landing on Oroku Peninsula, behind Japanese lines. So I left my dry bunk, went AWOL, rejoined what was left of the Raggedy Ass Marines, and made the landing on Monday. It went well. There were a few perilous moments at a seawall, but then the Japs pinning us down with Nambus were rolled up from the right, and we had our beachhead, which rapidly expanded during the day. In the late afternoon I, shamed by the example of others, temporarily abandoned my timidity and stayed on my feet when a screaming meemie screamed. The shell landed close enough to knock me down, thereby renewing my respect for the big mortars and, as it turned out, saving my life.

Early the next morning several of us were standing in a tomb courtyard when we heard the familiar shriek. We were on a reverse slope from the enemy; the chances of a shell clearing the top of the hill and landing on us were, we calculated, a thousand to one, and the Nips, we now knew, had no way of controlling the flight of these missiles. I crept into the doorway of the tomb. I wasn't actually safe there, but I had more protection than Izzy Levy and Rip Thorpe, who were cooking breakfast over hot boxes. The eight-incher beat the thousand-to-one odds. It landed in the exact center of the courtyard. Rip's body absorbed most of the shock. It disintegrated, and his flesh, blood, brains, and intestines encompassed me. Izzy was blind. So was I — temporarily, though I didn't know that until much later. There was a tremendous roaring inside my head, which was strange, because I was also deaf, both eardrums having been ruptured. My back and left side were pierced by chunks of shrapnel and fragments of Rip's bones. I also suffered brain injury. Apparently I rose, staggered out of the courtyard, and collapsed. For four hours I was left for dead. Then one of our corpsmen, Doc Logan, found I was still hanging on. He gave me two shots of morphine and I was evacuated to an LST offshore which served as a clearinghouse for casualties. All the beautiful white hospital ships —
Solace, Relief,
and
Comfort
— were gone. There were just too many wounded men; they couldn't handle the casualty traffic. So I sailed off for Saipan on an APA. Goodbye, Okinawa, and up yours.

The gravest Marine cases, of which I was one, were sent to Saipan by ship and then flown in stages to San Diego's Balboa Park. I was on and off operating tables, beginning in Hawaii, until mid-autumn, when the surgeons decided that some of the shrapnel was too close to my heart to be removed. It was safe where it was; they would leave it there. I remember wondering, one bad night, whether the old saw — that men were likeliest to succumb with the coming of dawn and at the turn of the tide — was true. For me the worst part of the day was the doctors' prodding and poking for the shrapnel. They gave me a piece of wood to bite while the long steel instruments probed around. I think I screamed just twice.

But that was the only bad part. In Honolulu's Aiea Heights Naval Hospital I even made a friend, a chief petty officer named Claude Thornhill, who had been a bandleader in civilian life and whose band had, in fact, played at my last college prom. I was still in an Aiea Heights ward when I first heard the voice of the new President, learned that Okinawa had been secured and that 207,283 people had died there. In San Francisco the news of the Hiroshima bombing was read to me. And I was napping in San Diego when I was awakened by church bells ringing all over the city. A nurse ran in, a starched white dragon of a woman. I asked what had happened. She cried, “The war's over! The Japs have surrendered!” I said, “Thank you.” I meant it. I was really very grateful, though why, and for what, I didn't tell.

Returning to Okinawa today is like watching a naked priest celebrate mass. It is so incongruous, so preposterous, that indignation is impossible. Solemn memories suppress the urge to laugh, so you simply stand stunned and helpless, unable to respond or even move. Luckily, two Marine friends of friends, Lieutenant Colonel Jon Abel and his Top Sergeant, Arnold Milton, are there to assure me that I haven't lost my sanity, that there's no need for that stiff drink I've begun to crave. Of course, I could get it immediately. On today's Okinawa one quickly becomes accustomed to instant gratification. Everything on the island seems to be for sale, including female inhabitants. Thus, the greatest of the island battlefields, more precious than Gettysburg — or at any rate more expensive in American blood — at first glance appears to be covered with used-car lots, junkyards, stereo shops, pinball-machine emporiums, and vendors of McDonald's fast food, Colonel Sanders's fried chicken, Shakey's pizza, and Dairy Queen sundaes. All-night drive-in restaurants prosper, including one overlooking White Beach Three, where the Ninety-sixth Division landed that April 1. In an Apollo Motel you and a girl you've just met and will never meet again, with whom you have nothing in common but convexity, concavity, and a few dollar bills, can rent a bed for an hour. The Okinawans who once moved slowly and gracefully among their lovely terraced rice paddies now sweep around cloverleaf intersections in their souped-up Hondas and Toyotas, and race into neoned Naha — which has become a metropolis the size of Indianapolis — on a four-lane freeway. The Okinawan Expressway carries you from Motobu to the central part of the island in two hours. On the peninsula, by a seawall on the Ie Shima side, Top Milton says: “This is Route Fifty-eight. You probably knew it as Highway Number One.” How can I explain that I knew it as an unnumbered path of earth a yard wide?