Islands of the Damned (5 page)

They worked us day and night. They’d come into the barracks at eleven o’clock at night. You hadn’t been in bed maybe an hour, and they’d shout, “We’re moving out! We’re shipping overseas. Get it all together.” We had to get our seabag, our full transport pack, our shelter half, the whole nine yards. We’d hit the streets and they’d march us for an hour and a half. Then we’d come back and get a little sleep and maybe at three o’clock they’d get us up again. We did a lot of running in the sand, and if you weren’t in pretty good shape that was tough. Your foot was slipping back every time it hit the sand. It was like trying to run in one of those dreams where your feet move but you don’t get anywhere.

Our DIs were named Stallings and Simon. Stallings stood about five feet eleven and straight as an arrow. He was an athletic type, and you knew not to mess with him.

Simon was soft-spoken and wore dark glasses. I had a little trouble with him one time in the chow line. When you’re in the chow line you’re at ease. You can move around but you can’t talk.

Fighter planes were buzzing off the runway on North Island, sometimes two at a time and flying real low. I was standing there stargazing at those airplanes, and I said, half to myself, “My God, watch them go!”

Simon walked up to me and stuck his face right up in mine. “You are at ease. Do you understand that?”

Whenever he had something to say to you, Simon got right up in your face and looked you straight in the eye and spoke very softly. I doubt if the third man down the line heard what he said. But
you
heard what he said. And you knew he meant business.

I thought then, That’s a good tactic. You don’t need to yell and scream at somebody to get something done. Later on I was to make good use of that lesson.

We had school and if anybody dozed off during class, it was so many laps around the parade ground.

Whenever the sleeper would get back, the DI would say, “Are you tired?”

“No, sir!”

“Well, go again.”

He’d come back with his tongue hanging, absolutely give out. And the DI would say, “Are you tired now?”

“A little bit, sir!”

“Do you think you can stay awake, now?”

“Yes, sir!”

We had two sets of fatigues, and whenever we quit for the day we went to the laundry, where there were scrub benches, brushes and soap. We washed the clothes we had worn that day, and put on the fresh set.

One kid thought he could get away with something. He would just wet one set of clothes and hang them out to dry and wear the old set again. The DI caught him and made him strip down to his underwear. Then he lined up the whole platoon in formation out in the street. He took both sets of that guy’s clothes, soaked them, and laid them in the sand and marched us down and about-face and back over those clothes maybe ten times. Then he made the kid go wash them.

Another morning, a guy didn’t shave. Or maybe he shaved, but it wasn’t a close shave. His jaw bristled. The DI got up in his face. “Oh, you forgot to shave this morning.”

He said, “No, sir. I shaved but my face was sore and I didn’t do too good a job.”

“I don’t think you did, either,” the DI said. “Come down and see me this afternoon whenever we get through.”

That afternoon he went in and the DI was sitting there whittling on a piece of wood with a razor blade. He snapped that blade in the razor and tightened it down. Then he said, “Crawl under that bunk.” He handed him the razor and he made him dry shave lying on the floor beneath that bunk.

No doubt about it. They had ways to get our attention. They broke us down. They didn’t only train us physically. They trained us mentally. Boot camp was normally a twelve-week course. They put us through it in six weeks. We were an experiment. They worked us, as this younger generation likes to say, 24-7.

When I went into the Marines, I never thought about killing anybody. By the time that six weeks was up I was lean and I was mean. I can honestly say I could have cut a Jap’s throat and never blinked an eye.

When we graduated from boot camp we were given the Marine Corps Globe and Anchor to wear on our collars. Only after that did they finally call us Marines. Later classes got a week’s leave to go home and show off to the folks after graduation, but we never got a leave, and my folks never got to see me in uniform. Instead we were trucked twenty or thirty miles over to Camp Elliott, an old Navy base the Marines were using for advanced training. We were assigned to the Ninth Replacement Brigade. The first day or so someone came along and told me, “You’re going to be in the sixty mortars. Report to that tent over there.”

The mortar. I didn’t even know there was such a weapon. That first day they had it set up behind a tent, and we all got acquainted.

The M2 60mm mortar—the 60—is a deadly weapon. One mortar shell can pretty much be depended on to kill everyone within a forty-five-foot radius. It’s a little slower than an artillery shell, but it’s reliable and very effective. The biggest battlefield killer is not the rifle, and not artillery. It’s the mortar. If you’re firing artillery, you fire straight to the target, and it hits at a low angle. But you can fire a mortar at a high angle and it comes almost straight down. It can get into places that artillery and rifle fire can’t. A man can’t hide from a mortar. They said that on Guadalcanal a gunnery sergeant named Lou Diamond put one right down the smokestack of a Japanese ship.

Our classroom was in an open pavilion about thirty feet long, with a metal roof and rows of picnic tables. They had set up a mortar just outside, and the instructor started by giving us the breakdown on the weapon: the base plate, the firing tube, the bipod, the M4 sight, and the rounds themselves. We learned there were six men in a mortar squad— three ammo carriers, a gunner, assistant gunner and the squad leader, who is usually a corporal. In battle the gunner carries the base plate, which weighs about twelve pounds. His assistant carries the tube, which is eight or ten pounds. The squad leader carries the sight, which has a level indicator and is marked for degrees right and left.

A 60mm round weighs three pounds. Around the base of the round there are four firing charges, or increments, tabs of propellant about the size of postage stamps and maybe an eighth of an inch thick. You leave the increments on or pull them off depending on how far you want to fire the round. If your target is, say, fifteen hundred yards away, you leave all four of them on. If it’s fifty yards, you take off all but one.

They call mortars “hip pocket artillery.” The whole deal—base, bipod, tube and sight—sets up in seconds. The most complicated thing is getting the round on target. When you’re dug in, you set an aiming stake out in front of the mortar and zero in the sight on that. The squad leader is probably twenty-five or thirty yards ahead, on the front lines with the riflemen. He’s wired in to the gunner by what we called a sound-powered phone. He calls in the range to the target, number of degrees right or left of the aiming stake, and gives the commands to fire. The gunner makes adjustments on the tube and his assistant drops in the round. The kill radius is about forty-five feet.

At Camp Elliott they trained us and trained us. I got to where I could set up the mortar in my sleep. But I didn’t get to fire the 60 but once or twice all the time I was in the States. I began to wonder if we would ever get to put this skill to use.

The Marines never gave you advance warning when they were about to send you someplace. You were the last to know. One morning at Camp Elliott we got word, “Fall out. We’re shipping out.” For all we knew, it might have been another drill, but this time it wasn’t. We rode trucks down to the San Diego docks and climbed aboard the USS
Mount Vernon
.

The next day, March 12, 1943, we sailed.

The ship stopped off in Honolulu, Fiji, and New Caledonia, but we never went ashore. I figured they were pulling in for supplies or more troops. It was an uneventful trip. For lack of anything better to do, we spent a lot of time just standing on deck trading rumors. At Fiji I looked over the side and watched dark hammerhead sharks swarming around the ship. I got to be pretty good friends with another Marine, Jim Burke. He was from Clinton, Iowa, where his brother owned a bar.

On the last day of March, we pulled into Port Melbourne, Australia. We were trucked forty miles southeast of the city to Camp Balcombe. It was a pretty place with green fields and gentle hills that reminded me of Texas. The camp was full of Marines from the First Division’s Fifth Regiment, resting up and retraining after the Battle of Guadalcanal. We were just raw recruits from the Ninth Replacement Battalion, the newcomers. They put us in with the veterans. In the months ahead they became our teachers.

For the first week or so we didn’t do much. We were assigned to occasional work parties, policing the grounds, picking up trash, dumping the garbage, doing whatever needed to be done. Then I was sent to the Fifth Regiment Headquarters and Service Company, where I was put on KP. Not as punishment for anything I’d done, but just to keep me busy and because somebody had to do the work.

One of the sights around camp was Lou Diamond, the legendary 60mm sharpshooter and one of the Marines’ Old Breed. He had fought in World War I and after that at Shanghai and finally at Guadalcanal. Now he was assigned as sergeant of the guard at the brig while awaiting shipment home because he was too old to fight. He wore a little goatee and the word was he drank Australian beer by the case.

Diamond had an old cat, and every morning you’d hear that foghorn voice of his calling, “Come on, Tom. Come on, Tom.” That cat would follow him everywhere, all day, like a dog.

After I’d been on KP for about three months, they pulled me out and said, “You’re going up to Third Battalion, K Company. Mortars.”

It was my specialty, but in the Marines you never know where they’ll put you. You just wait.

I moved a couple hundred yards from headquarters. The barracks was large enough to hold both the machine gun and mortar sections. Jim Burke was there.

They began to train us constantly. At the rifle range, I shot poorly with the BAR—Browning Automatic Rifle—but finally shot Expert with the M1, which was just being issued. Shortly after that I was promoted to private first class.

We marched. We would head out in the mornings, early, head up the road twenty miles and get back in the afternoons, late, carrying a full pack and our weapons.

One day we had a competition to detail strip a machine gun, an M1, and mortar, see who could tear it down and put it back together the fastest. I could put that mortar together and get it on target faster than anybody. I mean, I was the head dog. I made gunner immediately and was issued a .45, which I wore from then on.

I think that competition was when I was first noticed. I was a gunner on New Britain. On Peleliu I was a corporal, an observer and squad leader. By Okinawa I would be sergeant in charge of the mortar section.