Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (4 page)

From where I sat, that left us uncomfortably close to being up shit creek without a paddle.

I
SHARED A FOXHOLE
that night with PFC Bill Landrum, an assistant squad leader from Tallahassee, Florida. He was a good Marine who’d been in the Corps a little longer than I had. But even under normal circumstances, he was a quiet guy who never seemed to have much to say. That night, he was quieter than usual.

I was, too. I guess both of us were thinking about people and things that were far, far away. I told him I’d take the first watch and
for him to try to get some sleep. Pretty soon, he was snoring, and I was alone, staring into the darkness in front of me.

The longer I stared, the more I started seeing things. Phantom things that weren’t really there. And I could tell that other guys up and down the line were doing the same thing.

Now and then, I’d hear some trigger-happy Marine fire a round or two from his ’03 at something he thought he saw moving in the brush, and when one guy opened up, others around him tended to follow suit. This wasn’t very wise use of our limited ammo supply, but the jitters that caused it were understandable. Several times, I barely kept myself from joining in, but I managed to hold my fire.

My mind was pretty much blank for a while. Then I started thinking about my mother and sister back home in Brooklyn. I could never forget how tough a life my mom had led when I was a kid. In a way, it had been as tough as the lives of any of the Marines around me.

Ever since I’d joined the Corps, I’d been sending almost half of my monthly paycheck home to Mom. It had cramped me a little to do it, especially when I was still stateside and getting weekend liberties. But since shipping out for the Pacific in May of ’42, I hadn’t had much need for money—not nearly as much as Mom and my sister, Lillian. (Actually, my mother’s name was Lillian, too, but to me she was always just Mom.)

For as long as I can remember, my mother always had to struggle financially. She worked long hours and cut every corner she could, but it seemed like there was never enough money to go around. That was one of the things that started me thinking about joining the service.

I’d thought about it for several years, and when I was sixteen, I asked Mom to let me join the Navy. At the time, she said “nothing doing” and refused to sign the papers. But four years later, she agreed to sign for me if I was still determined to enlist. By then, I guess she knew it was only a few weeks till my twenty-first birthday, anyway. Then I’d be old enough to enlist without her permission. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, but I probably would have joined anyway.

That first night on Guadalcanal was one of those times when you start mulling over stuff like that and piecing parts of your past together. Then the next thing you know, you’re asking yourself how you ended up in such a dangerous, uncomfortable, foodless hellhole in the first place.

After a while, my thoughts drifted to Charlie Smith, my best friend as a kid back in Brooklyn. Charlie and I had joined the Marines together on the same day, and I started wondering where he might be right now. We wanted to stay together in the same outfit, but we’d gotten separated after boot camp, and Charlie had moved around a lot since then.

The last I’d heard, he was somewhere in the South Pacific with the Second Marines. By now, I thought he might’ve been on American Samoa. A bunch of Marines had been sent there because the brass thought it might be the Japs’ next target.

The actual truth, though, was that Charlie was on one of those islands just across Sealark Channel from where I was sitting on Guadalcanal at that very moment. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.

When we were in our teens, Charlie and I talked for months about joining the Army. Finally, after Mom gave in and agreed to
sign for me, we got up enough nerve to take a bus and then a train to the recruiting station on Broadway in downtown Manhattan. I never knew why, but the Army recruiting office was closed that day. So we went up to the Navy Building at 90 Church Street, where a middle-aged Marine sergeant in dress blues talked us into joining the Corps.

Looking back on it, it must’ve been fate.

The recruiting posters never showed any Marines in sweaty green dungarees with mud up to their ears. They were always dressed to the nines in those snazzy dress blues. Charlie and I could picture ourselves strutting down Broadway in those knocked-out uniforms. That convinced us on the spot that we wanted to be Marines.

When we walked out of the recruiting depot, a bunch of young guys started yelling at us from across the street. I guess they could tell what we’d just done by the looks on our faces.

“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?

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.

T
HE 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.

O
NE 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 until I actually joined the Marines thirteen years later.

F
OR 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.