The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (12 page)

He paused and I saw him reflectively rub his scarred palm along the edge of his cheekbone. “Well, just as we moved out of the fields toward the edge of the village we began to get clobbered from a Jap mortar position which had somehow missed getting finished off by our guns. They were
suicidal little bastards, you know—this was also along about the time of the kamikaze attacks—and they were determined to take us with them; that’s why it was such miserable fighting. Anyway, we hit the deck at the edge of the road, I slid into a shallow little ditch full of muck, and that mortar began to pound the shit out of us. It was as dirty a barrage as I’ll ever want to go through. They were zeroed in on us, firing for effect, and why or how I didn’t get hit I’ll never know. It must have gone on for a full five minutes or more when suddenly I looked up from where I was lying and saw, on the other side of the road, directly opposite and no more than four or five yards away, a big black skinny dog, standing there with his four legs sort of akimbo, simply out of his mind with fear at this bombardment going on around him.

“I must have made some sort of motion with my body then, raising up slightly. Although of course I fire from my right shoulder, I’m left-handed and was holding my carbine in my left hand, trying to keep it out of the muck. As I raised up then, the dog just
flew
at me from the road, and before I knew it he had his jaws clamped down and completely through the palm of my free hand. It was utterly insane, a nightmare, you see—this mortar barrage, with guys getting chopped up all around me, and here this wild terrified dog had sunk his fangs into my hand, so tight that I could not make him let go, as much as I struggled and yanked and pulled. The dog didn’t make any noise, didn’t growl, didn’t snarl, simply glared at me with these mad wet eyes and chomped away at my hand. The pain was—well, beyond description; I don’t recall whether I screamed or not. My platoon sergeant was not far away but even if he had seen all this he couldn’t have done anything, pinned down like all
the rest. Ah Jesus, every time I think of it my hand begins to ache all over again.”

“What in God’s name did you do finally?” I asked.

“I knew I had to shoot the dog, but it’s damned hard to fire a carbine, you know, or at least aim it well with one hand, and besides for some dumb reason I had the weapon on safety. Yet I knew I had to shoot him. And God knows I was trying to. And I kept looking at that goddam dog, kept looking into those crazy eyes. There was something—something, well, retributive, demonic about those eyes. How can I say it? It was as if for a moment I felt I was getting in a curious way my just deserts—that this dog represented all those innocent victims who are crazed and mutilated by war and finally have to lash out at their tormentors, seizing upon the first poor uniformed slob that comes to hand. A fantasy, of course—the poor beast was simply berserk with terror—but that’s what did flash through my mind.”

“And of course you finally got him?” I said.

“Yeah,” he went on, “I finally got that carbine around, and somehow worked it off safety, and shot him through the head. It was sickening, ghastly. And after the Jap mortars slackened off and the company could move ahead it took the corpsman at least five minutes to pry that dog’s fangs out of my hand. And that was the end of the war for me, because that same afternoon I was evacuated to the rear and sent out to a hospital ship for precautionary anti-rabies treatment. It was while I was getting this long course of shots—a bloody painful business, I might add—that the campaign ended on Okinawa.”

He fell silent for a moment. We were not far now from the camp, and the early-morning traffic had begun to fill the
roads—farmers in pickup trucks, tourists with Florida license plates heading north for the summer, marines commuting to work at the base. Lacy drove very slowly, and with extreme care.

“Ah God,” he said at last, in a somber, grieving tone. “We’ll
never
make it through
this
war.”

MY FATHER’S
HOUSE

O
NE MORNING IN THE YEAR AFTER
the end of the war (the Good War, that is, the second War to End All Wars) when I had returned to my father’s house in Virginia, and had slept long merciful hours, I woke up after completing a weird megalomaniacal dream. Not that I was unaccustomed to dreams touched with megalomania. A few years before, for example, when I was a writing student at college, I had a dream about James Joyce. In this particular reverie I was sitting at a café table somewhere in Europe, probably Paris, having a cup of coffee with the Master. There was no hesitancy in the way he turned his purblind gaze upon me, no embarrassment in the sudden light touch of his hand on the back of my own, nor was there anything but nearly mawkish admiration in his Hibernian brogue as he uttered these words: “Paul Whitehurst, your writing has been such an inspiration to me! Without your work I could not have finished
Dubliners!”

I never thought I’d recapture the mad glee that seized me upon waking from such a cockeyed fantasy. And during the war I had no similar visitations. But the end of that exhausting conflict brought me such relief that I suppose it was inevitable that another such dream should return, rescuing my near-drowned ego. In this sequence I was seated next to Harry Truman as we cruised in a limousine down Pennsylvania Avenue. “Paul Whitehurst”—once again the full name, precisely enunciated—“the best advice you ever gave me was to drop the atom bomb.” Amid pennants snapping in the wind and the blare of military music, I nodded left and right to the adoring throng. “Thank you, Mr. President,” I replied. “I gave it much thought.”

And waking, I lay there for a while, helplessly disgorging cackles of laughter. At last the dream faded away, as dreams do. Then I made my mind a blank. Finally, the sound of breakfast being made was borne upstairs and I inhaled the good smell and prepared for the new day.

Except for a central drawback, which I’ll soon deal with, I was fairly contented in my father’s house. The house itself inspired a kind of contentment. My father had never been a rich man, but the war with its naval contracts had brought prosperity to the sprawling shipyard where he toiled nearly all of his life; his share in the prosperity had allowed him to move from the cramped little bungalow of my childhood to an unpretentious, comfortable, locust-shaded house whose screened porch and generous bay windows faced out on a grand harbor panorama. The enormous waterway, several miles across, was always afloat with an armada of naval ships or seabound tankers and freighters—all distant enough to be dramatic-looking rather than unsightly—and the harbor was
forever being touted by the local boosters as the rival or the superior of San Francisco or Rio or Hong Kong, though to my mind they were exaggerating badly since the panorama was really too monotonous, too horizontal, to be “breathtakingly scenic,” as was claimed.

Nonetheless, it was impressive in its way. Certainly I would concede that my father had bought himself a million-dollar view—he called it that at nearly every opportunity—and so I considered the fine expanse of water, sparkling in the sun or swept by rude squalls or echoing at night with mournful horns, to be one of the more amiable bonuses of my homecoming from the war. Tidewater summers were fiercely hot and dank but the harbor often bestowed on the house an early cooling breeze—“a million-dollar breeze,” my father would say on the more hellish days. I’d awake beneath the sheet and stretch while the odor of coffee and pancakes filled my nose, and then I’d smile. What I mean is that I was conscious of making a genuine, broad, cheek-dimpling smile while I marveled over and over at my healthy living state, in which the primitive ability to smell warm pancakes and coffee was like a surprising gift. There is no mystery why these first waking moments were so luxuriously free of anxiety, why a shiver of pleasure—no, real
bliss
—ran through me when I blinked awake on the sun-splashed bed, listening to the mockingbird in the locust outside my window or, farther off, the gulls and shorebirds piping over the water, a Negro flower peddler, a horse cart creaking (there were still a few horses and carts in those days, though fast vanishing), clip-clopping hooves, the cry of “Flowers, flowers!” skewering my heart as it had done when I was a child. My happiness, my bliss, was quite simple in origin: I was
alive.
I was alive and
home in bed instead of being a moving target on the Kyushu plain, or in the rubble of an Osaka suburb, praying for one more day of life in the cauldron of a war without ending—what a miracle, what a gift! So many times, only months before, death had seemed such a certainty that my very
aliveness
became a recurrent marvel.

It was hard, however, to avoid a shiver of guilt when I reflected on my luck. Over three years before, when I was seventeen, bravado mingled with what must have been a death wish made me enlist in the officer training program of the Marine Corps. Since those in my age group were considerably too callow to lead troops into battle, it was decided at the Navy Department that we be sent to college, where as book-toting privates we would gain a little learning and seasoning, also a year or two of physical and mental growth, before our fateful collision with the Japs. My classmates and I, being the youngest of the young, remained uniformed college students for the longest period, while those who were only a year or so older went off for the officer training and preceded us into those terrifying island battles that marked the last stages of the Pacific war. No group among all the services had so high a casualty rate as we Marine Corps second lieutenants. This is firmly on the record. A harrowing book by an enlisted combat veteran, E. B. Sledge, called
With the Old Breed
, described the situation concisely: “During the course of the long fighting on Okinawa … we got numerous replacement lieutenants. They were wounded or killed with such regularity that we rarely knew anything about them … and saw them on their feet only once or twice. … Our officers got hit so soon and so often that it seemed to me the position of second lieutenant in a rifle company had been made obsolete by modern warfare.”

Thus had I been older only by a year or so I would have been immersed in Iwo Jima’s bloodbath; a mere six months and I would have been one of Sledge’s Okinawa martyrs, obliterated in what turned out to be the deadliest land engagement of the Pacific war, and among the worst in history. I actually escaped this horror by a hair, coming to roost not so many miles away on the island of Saipan, where I began to prepare for the invasion of Japan and where I had ample time to reflect on both what I’d barely missed on Okinawa and Iwo Jima and what I was likely to encounter when I helped storm the fortress beaches of the mainland. The killing grounds of the recent past were for me merely a foretaste of things to come, and the sorry fate of all those scared but uncomplaining guys we’d said good-bye to seemed to foreshadow my own.

At any rate, there in bed I’d begin to grope and caress myself, getting a huge load of tactile satisfaction from the mere act of assessing my body’s well-being. This was not the idle feeling up of one’s self that preoccupies people alone in bed; it was a deliberate, meditative inventory of my precious parts. Consider hands and fingers alone, for example, and place them in the context of the Iwo Jima I so narrowly escaped. Everyone had heard about the landing beach at Iwo: bodies cut in half in the volcanic dust, legs and arms from a single corpse separated by forty feet, a purée of brains splattered among the mess kits and knapsacks. Nearly every marine who survived the war had fixed in his mind the number of Iwo Jima casualties—twenty-six thousand (of which nearly six thousand were deaths)—the entire population of many an American large town or small city, a chilling total of which thousands of components had to be hands and fingers, given the tendency of the hand, with its constant diligence
and exposure, to be so vulnerable. Pondering the tally of fingers lost or mutilated on that infernal ash heap, I’d concentrate on one of my own, extend it, wiggle it, stroke it with my thumb, suck it, rub its tip gently against the skin encasing my rib cage, all the while reflecting on what pleasure it was to be able to perform any one of these small, innocuous, monkey-like operations.

Another matter was the loss of limbs. Leg loss and arm loss had been epidemic in the Pacific. What a delight it was, then, to be able to palpate the supple buttery flesh of the biceps, pressing in so deeply with the thumb that I could feel the sturdy arterial flow of healthy blood as it coursed down the arm, or to vigorously pat the muscles of the thigh—the joy momentarily fading, replaced by a stab of guilt as I wondered what it must be like, at that very instant, to be lying without a thigh in some naval hospital, racked by the phantom pain of the amputee.

You could lose incredible parts of yourself, and be hideously mutilated, yet still live. In college I had known this guy named Wade Hoopes, from a small town in Tennessee, who was also a platoon leader at the time of his calamity. He and his little group had been reconnoitering the outskirts of a shell-shattered village on Okinawa when he stepped on a booby-trapped grenade and instantaneously lost a leg. Only the miraculous ministrations of a medical corpsman saved him from bleeding to death. He had wanted to get a law degree when the war ended and make it big in Tennessee politics like his daddy, a onetime lieutenant governor. Wade was generous and sweet-natured, with an incipient politician’s chatty bonhomie; I don’t think he was brilliant, but that too fitted the political mold. One thing I recall achingly about
Wade Hoopes was the idiot crush he had on June Allyson, and the album of publicity photographs of her that he carried around everywhere—probably even to Okinawa—of June in swimsuits and bobby sox and dirndls, smiling her enchantingly bucktoothed, germ-free smile. It was amazing to think of him whacking off day in and day out over this squeaky-clean sweetheart. A blade of shrapnel from the same booby trap that removed his leg had neatly destroyed his brain’s speech center and he would never utter a word again—not a word, not a sound, not a peep. Literally struck dumb. When news came back to our training base on Saipan about Wade Hoopes we were shocked, and our speculation was that when the war was over an amputee might easily make it as a candidate—the sympathy vote. But a politician without a voice? It was like a beauty queen without tits. Otherwise his vital signs were excellent, which may or may not have been a blessing. But we all thought: At least he made it.