Islands of the Damned (20 page)

Maurice Darsey, our first sergeant, and Snafu were our regulars, the real players. For a time I was company clerk. Mo would give me $1,000 and tell me to go to the post office and buy money orders. I had to buy ten because you couldn’t get a money order for more than $100 at the time. So I’d buy ten money orders and bring them back and Mo would put them in an envelope and mail it home. He’d say, “Ah, that’s another mule on the farm.”

We played poker mostly evenings in the tents. And it was a rare tent that didn’t have a coffee can of jungle juice brewing somewhere out in back. We’d take any kind of dried fruit we could get our hands on, usually raisins, prunes or apricots. Put a little sugar and water in, partly seal it and let it ferment. Some of the guys would hang their can in a palm tree. In a week or so it would be ready.

Jungle juice was pretty bad stuff, but it would do the job. I remember the first time T. L. Hudson, a private and ammo carrier, got drunk on that stuff, maybe the first time he got drunk in his life. Some Marines had a can of jungle juice they’d made with dried peaches. They’d already drunk all the juice, and there was nothing left in the can except the fruit at the bottom. Hudson kept sticking his hand in there, pulling out those alcohol-soaked peaches and eating them. We called him “Peaches” for a long time after that.

Four times a year, the Marine Corps would lay out a feast for the men—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and November 10, the anniversary of the creation of the Corps. We had refrigeration units on Pavuvu now, so we had fresh meat a couple times a week, plus a kind of mutton stew we called “corn-willie.”

For Christmas they brought over turkeys from Banika and roasted them, with dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, pea soup, cranberry sauce, apple pie and coffee. While we ate, the loudspeakers played Bing Crosby Christmas carols and big-band music by Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey.

Tommy Dorsey brought up old memories. Back at Camp Elliott near San Diego, whenever we got weekend liberty a buddy and I would hitchhike up to Los Angeles. In those days anybody would pick you up if you were in uniform. On Saturday nights we would go to the Hollywood Palladium. They had all the big-name bands there. I remember Tommy Dorsey played two nights, and one of the nights Betty Grable was in the club. I was just another lowly Marine, rubbing shoulders with all that Hollywood glamour.

For New Year’s Eve, the Corps repeated the turkey feast. Someone decided we were going to get at least one of those turkeys, maybe two, and bring them back to K Company. I don’t remember everyone who was in on that scheme, but I know Peter Fouts and Howard Nease were involved, both corporals. Fouts had been wounded in the arm by a machine gun on the beach at Peleliu, but he had recovered and was back with us. Nease would soon be killed by shrapnel on Okinawa.

We finished dinner and were back in our tents when we heard cries of “Fire! Fire!” We looked out and saw a bunch of people running around the battalion mess hall. A pretty good fire was going in a brush pile near the entrance.

Later that night somebody shook my shoulder, waking me up. “Psst, Burgin! You want some turkey?”

I said, “Yeah, yeah.”

“Well, come on!” I hopped off my cot and followed him to a nearby tent, where everybody was sitting around eating turkey and drinking beer. Nease carved off a couple slices with his KA-BAR and handed them to me while they told and retold the whole story.

It seems somebody had carelessly left a can of gasoline in that brush pile. While the mess crew was cleaning up after supper, the brush had mysteriously burst into flame. The sentry on duty yelled “Fire!” and while everybody was running around trying to put it out, two leftover turkeys vanished from the galley.

We finished our midnight snack.

“Make damn sure you don’t leave any of this stuff lying around,” somebody reminded us. We took the bones and carcasses over to I Company’s bivouac and dumped them in their trash can.

Guess who got the blame the next day for stealing the turkeys.

As the new year began the rumor mill kicked into high gear. There were the usual stories that somebody had shot himself. For a time there was speculation that the Marines were about to be absorbed into the Army. That one had popped up again and again over the years. There was a tale they were putting saltpeter into our food to cool down our sex drive. I don’t know what they thought we might do, with only a handful of Red Cross girls on the island, safe behind barbed wire most of the time. Our tents were about three-quarters of a mile from the beach, and I didn’t bother to go down to the USO canteen just to be hanging out there. From time to time I’d go to company headquarters to visit a friend of mine I’d gone to school with. Whenever I went down there I’d see the Navajo code talkers hanging around, but I never got acquainted with any of them.

Mostly the rumors were about where we were going next.

Our training now emphasized street fighting and mutual support between tanks and infantry. That led some of us to think that we were headed for Formosa or mainland China, or even to Japan itself. There was a map of a long, narrow island in circulation, but none of us recognized it.

In late January the whole division shipped out to Guadalcanal for amphibious maneuvers in LCIs—Landing Craft, Infantry. These were a newer and smaller version of the LSTs we’d taken to Peleliu, but with ramps running down the side instead of bow doors. They could carry an infantry company plus a couple of jeeps. We’d go out and make a run for the beach. When we got on shore we’d bail out and move in a few dozen yards. Then we’d get back on the LCIs, go out and do it all over again, eight or ten times a day. The mortar platoon also practiced setting up with three guns until we could do it in our sleep.

Guadalcanal had the same long, thick kunai grass we’d seen around the airfield at Cape Gloucester. It reminded me of the Johnson grass back home. In the grass we found these big lizards, about two feet long, with flickering tongues, like a snake’s. The natives called them goannas, and we had a lot of fun with those things. When we came up on one we’d all gather around a circle daring each other to grab him. Of course when that rascal came charging, we all gave him plenty of space.

All this time we were listening to the Armed Forces Radio Service, so we got word whenever the Marines hit another island. I didn’t know how many of those islands there were out there, but I knew every one of them was on the way to Tokyo. We’d gone from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Tarawa, to Kwajalein, Saipan, Guam and Peleliu. When we returned to Pavuvu from maneuvers, the Third, Fourth, and Fifth divisions invaded Iwo Jima. We listened closely to every news report. Once again the Japs had holed up in caves and fought to the last man. It sounded a lot like what we had been through on Peleliu, but shorter and with three times the casualties. We knew we would be next. And we knew we were in for a helluva fight.

In February we went back to Guadalcanal for two more weeks of exercises and maneuvers off Tassafaronga Point, where the Navy had suffered a big defeat by the Japs in 1942. They worked us even harder, adding cliff climbing to our exercises because, they said, we would be climbing a seawall to get onshore at our next destination. We camped in what had been the Third Division’s bivouac before they left for Iwo Jima and hoped that wasn’t an omen.

During our stay on Guadalcanal some of us discovered the Seabees’ mess hall, where the chow was better and more abundant than what the Marines had been feeding us. The Seabees were pretty generous, allowing us to join the chow line after they had been through.

T. L. Hudson—“Peaches”—and I discovered the PX at Henderson Field, where we could buy ice cream bars, something we’d never seen on Pavuvu. They were four inches long, two inches wide and half an inch thick, covered with chocolate, and they cost a nickel. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven. T.L. and I would get in line and buy one each—they’d only sell you one at a time. We’d eat those then get in line and get another one. Then we’d come back around again. They never caught on or they didn’t mind. Either way, we made four or five trips through that line.

We almost didn’t make it off of Guadalcanal. At the end of the last day of maneuvers, our squad waited on the beach for the Higgins boat that was to take us back out to our mother ship, the USS
McCracken.
We were dog tired. The sun was getting lower and lower until we were the last bunch left on the beach. The wind had come up and the sea was getting choppy. Finally the boat came nosing in and dropped its ramp on the sand. We climbed aboard wearily and stowed our weapons. The bay was full of ships, and we passed several on our way out, bouncing on the waves. I looked down and saw water sloshing beneath the deck. We were overloaded and taking on water. I went forward and told the coxswain, “We better get this thing to a ship.” He took one look and turned toward the nearest ship. Meanwhile the water was coming up under our feet and the Higgins boat was riding lower and lower in the waves. The coxswain started the bilge pumps. We pulled alongside an attack transport and yelled for help. They yelled back, asking where we were from and what was the problem. Our coxswain explained that we were from the
McCracken
and we were taking on water and they threw a couple lines down to us. The water was creeping up our ankles now. As our boat started going down we got the lines attached. We scrambled up the cargo net and spent the night on the transport. The next morning a Higgins boat took us back to the
McCracken.

Things were moving faster. The
McCracken
took us not to Pavuvu, but to Banika, where we spent a week loading ships and getting the usual round of inoculations that come before a major campaign. Troopships began appearing offshore. On March 14 we boarded the
McCracken
again and the next morning sailed out of the harbor and north to Ulithi.

Ulithi had been secured without a fight by the Army’s Eighty-first Wildcat Division about a week after we went ashore at Peleliu. It was really a cluster of small islands surrounding a deepwater port, where the fleet for our next operation was coming together.

We knew by now we were headed for Okinawa. For once they didn’t wait until we got on board ship to tell us. Scotty showed us a map of the island. It was only 350 miles from Tokyo.

Now we understood why they had pushed street fighting and tank warfare in our training. Unlike Cape Gloucester and Peleliu, Okinawa had a lot of open cultivated ground, including not just villages but real towns.

If we hadn’t been told, we would have known anyway that this was going to be bigger than any operation we’d had so far. From the deck of the
McCracken
all we could see was ship after ship, hundreds of them spread all the way out to the far horizon. It was as though they had assembled the entire U.S. Navy at Ulithi, from the biggest battleships and aircraft carriers down to escorts and patrol boats.

While we were at Ulithi, the battered hulk of the USS
Franklin
limped in and docked right next to us. I was standing only thirty or forty feet away. While we had been under way to Ulithi on March 19, a single Jap bomber had appeared out of the clouds and dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the carrier. She was just fifty miles off Kyushu, the westernmost of Japan’s main islands. The bombs went right through the flight deck and exploded in the hangars, setting off ammunition and fuel. Almost 725 of her crew died and more than 250 were injured. We heard that many of the wounded were still on board.

The survivors fought the raging fires, dodging exploding bombs and ammo, and managed to bring the ship hundreds of miles into Ulithi. She was listing 13 degrees to starboard when they got her docked, so we had a close-up view from the deck of the
McCracken
. Her sailors were crowded on her ruined flight deck, leaning against the tilt. Smoke still oozed from her side where the explosions had torn holes the size of a garage door. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the
Franklin
and her crew had been through. I guess every sailor who ever lived is also a firefighter. I had watched them hold drills on our transports. Every man knew exactly what to do and when to do it. I thought, At least on land we could dig foxholes and had some room to maneuver. On shipboard, there’s nowhere to go.