Islands of the Damned (25 page)

I ignored him.

“Mortar section, fire on my command! Commence firing!”

Whatever Scotty had to say was drowned out in the
bump-bump-bump
of mortar fire.

Bill Sloan wrote in his book
The Ultimate Battle
that I told Scotty to go to hell. I want to clarify that. What I said was, “Scotty, if you’re going to be so damned observing, get your ass up here on the front line where you can see what’s going on.”

That’s exactly what I told him. But I didn’t tell him to go to hell. He was my lieutenant.

K Company took the ridge without further trouble, and I didn’t hear any more from Scotty. But when I got to the top I took a few minutes to look around. Sure enough, there was a narrow gully running right behind the crest. And laid out in the gully, almost side by side, I counted the bodies of more than fifty Japs.

We moved on, ridge to ridge, until we hardly knew anymore which was which. After days of shelling they were all as bare as plucked chickens. We moved along a narrow road between stone walls, always five paces apart. Keep moving! Don’t bunch up! All the time we were working our way closer to Wana, the last ridge before Shuri Castle.

We were to relieve the First Marines, who had cut around the west end of the ridge and had been working their way east up Wana Draw. Three times they had been forced back under intense fire from the heights. Now they were exhausted. While the Seventh Marines concentrated on the ridge itself, to our left, we started fighting our way back up the draw, supported by tanks. The walls of that thing were two hundred feet high in places, and we saw more of the strange, horseshoe-shaped tombs the Okinawans carved out of solid rock. Whole families were buried in them, going back generations. The Okinawans considered them sacred ground. But the Japs fortified them and set up their antitank guns and mortars to fire down on us. They quickly knocked out two of our tanks and forced us back, but not before we were able to call in fire on two of their positions from the battleship
Colorado
.

Our Second Battalion managed to get a foothold on Hill 55, which anchored the west end of the draw. On the next morning, May 20, we started up Wana Draw again, making progress.

I felt a little uneasy that morning. It wasn’t a feeling I could describe. As I said, I never for a moment believed I wouldn’t come home from the war. But I was no fool. I knew that I could come home wounded or crippled.

The Japs started firing at us from the left, with a 150mm gun up on the ridge. Jim Burke and I were up front observing, and when those big shells started landing around us we thought we’d better get the hell out of Dodge. We ran down the slope to where there were a couple shell holes and Jim jumped into one and I tumbled into another. Just as I hit the bottom, there was a terrific
crack
just behind me, on the edge of that thing. I felt that force go right through me, and then dirt and rock come raining down. For a moment I couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t breathe. I was buried. I clawed my way out, caked with dirt, bruised and sputtering. I don’t remember being relieved, thinking I’d had a close call. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember much from the rest of that morning.

That afternoon about two o’clock we were sitting somewhere nearby, out in the open. That big ridge was still right in front of us and Marine and Navy planes were working it over, strafing and dropping bombs. Artillery was going on both sides. We were in the middle of it.

For some reason our new corpsman, Wesley Katz, took it into his head at that moment to start praying. Doc Caswell, who had been with us since Peleliu, had been wounded a couple days earlier, during the push up Wana Draw with the tanks.

I had nothing against prayer. I’d prayed myself from time to time, always quickly and silently. But Doc Katz was praying loudly. You could hear him over the roar of the airplanes and the rattle of shells. I reached over and patted him on the shoulder and said, in a soft voice, “Let’s just have a silent prayer here, son. It’s not doing the other troops any good.”

He bowed his head and finished his prayer in silence.

A short time later I was sitting on my helmet eating ham and lima beans from a can when a big shell smacked down maybe fifty or a hundred yards away. Just a flash and a
crack!
The impact knocked me off my helmet and at the same time I felt something sting the back of my neck.

I sat on the ground for a moment, then reached up to brush away whatever was on my neck. I felt something hard and sharp, and this chunk of metal fell on the ground. It was about as long and as big around as my finger, tapered and real jagged. I reached down to pick it up but it was hot and I dropped it. I waited a second and picked it up again. I looked at it and put it into my pocket. I felt blood trickle down my neck.

Katz was at my side. He started dressing the wound. It had been numb but now it was starting to really hurt. Three or four minutes had gone by. Doc poked me with a syrette. I stood up and turned my neck just to make sure everything still worked. Nothing was broken.

“Do you think you can walk?” Katz asked.

I felt a little light-headed, but I thought I knew where I was. I nodded and he pointed the way to the first aid station, a few hundred yards off. I stumbled in that direction with the battle still going on all around me, bullets singing and shells falling. I don’t know how the heck I made it, but I did.

I stayed at the first aid station until it started to get dark. Then a jeep ambulance came and took several of us to the forward field hospital. I remember on the ambulance holding a plasma bottle for a guy who really was in a bad way, but I don’t remember much else. I’m sure he was dying.

The field hospital was little more than a big tent with stretchers on the bare ground. They brought me in and I lay down on one of the stretchers. An Army medic eventually came by and gave me a couple of shots. I thought, That’s good. That’s for the pain and for tetanus. After a while, another corpsman came by and gave me another shot. A little while later, I got one more shot.

When I looked up again, there was another medic standing there. He said he was going to give me a shot.

“Hell, I’ve already had three shots,” I said. “What’s going on?”

He stared at me. “You’ve had three shots already?”

“Hell, yes. I’ve already had three. And now you’re wanting to give me a fourth.”

He stood there a moment. Then he shook his head and walked away.

The next morning they picked me up on a stretcher and put me in an ambulance and took me to another hospital, farther from the front. It was a tent, but it had a floor and real doctors and nurses. I was lying in a bed. For some reason my whole abdomen hurt. A nurse came by and said she was going to give me a sponge bath. I told her about the pain.

“Let’s see what the problem is.”

She pulled back the covers and started to sponge me gently. My stomach was so sore I could hardly stand to be touched.

“Have you been close to an exploding shell?” she asked.

I remembered diving into the crater just as the 150mm shell went off, and being buried in dirt.

“Yes, ma’am. Artillery shell yesterday morning, just about as close as you can get and still be here.”

“You’ve had a concussion,” she said. “That’s your problem. A couple days will take care of it.”

She sponged me gently, and the dirt and dead skin came rolling off. You never realize in combat just how filthy you get. But I won’t ever forget her tenderness and kindness. She gave me some pills for the pain, and three or four days later it eased up, just as she said.

As soon as I was able I got some Red Cross stationery and wrote to Florence.

“Just a few lines to let you know I was hit Sunday May 20th, but don’t worry, Darling, I am not suffering & haven’t been at all.”

I told her I’d just been scratched, no serious damage done, which was mostly true.

Now that I was out of combat, I found myself thinking about her almost all the time.

“I sure wish I had you here, Darling, to change the bandages & give me about a million sweet kisses a day or more. I am sleeping on nice white sheets with the softest pillow. It sure beats a wet foxhole.”

They showed a movie to some of us who could get around,
In Old Oklahoma
, with John Wayne and Gabby Hayes. I was able to relax and enjoy it.

I don’t remember that they ever stitched me up. I think they just let the skin grow back over the wound. There was no infection. I had been lucky.

A doctor came in every morning to make his rounds. My cot was the second or third one on the right. After he’d seen everybody else, he’d stop and sit on my bunk and we’d talk for ten or fifteen minutes. It turned out he was from San Antonio, so we hit it off right away. All through the war, it was that way whenever I ran into someone from Texas, an instant bond. We were buddies.

Doc Moore was his name. He told me I had been very lucky.

“Why is that?”

“If that fragment had gone any deeper it would have hit your thyroid.”

“Would that be bad?”

He showed me where my thyroid gland was located, right behind the voice box, and explained how the thyroid affected everything from digestion to energy level. A damaged thyroid could affect me in several ways, he said.

“You might become real, real thin. Or you could become grossly obese. Either way, it would have messed you up for life.”

So I guessed I was luckier than I thought.

Pretty soon I started feeling restless and eager to get back to K Company. I had written Florence a couple more letters, but I didn’t get any replies. In fact, I hadn’t received mail from anybody while I was in the hospital, so I figured the mail system had screwed up and lost track of me. On June 9 Doc Moore gave me a clean bill of health and the hospital turned me loose. It had been twenty days since I’d been wounded. I asked around if anybody knew the location of Third Battalion’s K Company, and the next day I hitched rides on Army trucks headed south toward the front.

In my pocket I still carried the shell fragment that had cost me so much trouble.

Gene Sledge described the fight for Shuri Castle as a time of “mud and maggots.” The rains started up again the day after I was wounded and went on for the next ten days without a letup. I could hear them drumming on the roof of the hospital, but I had no idea how bad it was out on the battle line.

For K Company these were some of the worst days of the war. The fighting was so intense that neither side had time to gather its dead, which were left to rot in the mud on the battlefield. Maggots were everywhere. If a man slipped in the mud, he stood up covered with maggots. They filled his pockets. The Japs were shelling anything that moved, and the sheer noise and force of the explosions left men dazed and deaf. Stumpy Stanley, our company commander, came down with malaria. He was so delirious he refused to leave his command post until a corpsman dragged him to a first aid station. Lieutenant Loveday took his place.

On May 29, while I was on the road to recovery, Companies L, K, and I captured the area around Shuri Castle and flew a Confederate flag from the ramparts. Most of the Japs fled south. First Regiment relieved the Fifth Marines on June 4. The next day the rains ended.

I found my old company several miles south of where I’d left them. We were in a bad way. We’d lost thirty-six men in the fighting around Shuri Castle and we were down to about a hundred enlisted men and three or four officers. The word was that the Fifth Regiment would not be sent into combat again.

Because the rains had gummed up the roads, the Navy had been air-dropping food, water and ammo from TBM Avenger dive-bombers. Somebody found a cache of Jap rations. Everything was in cans. I ate some of their tuna fish and mandarins, little orange sections. It wasn’t too bad. We ran across saki quite often. A lot of the guys drank it. I couldn’t stand the taste.