The Million-Dollar Wound (5 page)

Even for us Chicagoans, the chill San Diego morning came as a shock. That was Dago: freezing your ass off at dawn, and by noon you were roasting. The days were long and hard, brutally hard: calisthenics, close-order drill, marching, long hikes over rough terrain, bayonet training, judo, breakneck runs over obstacle courses, gas-mask drills, infantry training under combat conditions with live ammo whizzing overhead. McRae had his own special brand of sadism, unique to him among the Dago DIs: he’d double-time us to an area near the beach at San Diego Bay. There, while the beautiful, indifferent water watched, we’d drill back and forth on the hot, soft sand. My legs ached so, I would cry myself quietly to sleep in my rack on such nights.

McRae followed no pattern; we never knew what indignity or when it would be inflicted—in the midst of most any activity, we could take a break for rifle inspection, close-order drill, or a run in the sand by the bay. Sometimes in the middle of the night. It all seemed so chickenshit.

Barney was getting extra KP, garbage duty, and other dirty details, all because he was a “celebrity.” And, since I was his pal, I caught some of that duty, as well.

My major run-in with McRae was on the rifle range, though, where I made the mistake of referring to my M-1 as my gun. Soon I was running up and down in front of the rows of barracks with my rifle in one hand and my dick in the other, shouting, “This is my rifle,” as I hefted my M-1, “and this is my gun,” as I gestured with my, well, my other hand. “This is for Japs,” M-1, “and this is for fun,” well.

Thirty-six years old, running around with a rifle in one hand and my dick in the other. Telling everybody about it.

Barney’s moment came when McRae noticed him reading in his bunk before lights out; Barney was always poring over these books on religion and philosophy he lugged around with him. And he kept his mother’s picture propped somewhere he could see it.

“The celebrity is religious, I see,” McRae said.

Heads bobbed up, ears perked, all ’round.

“That’s right,” Barney said, bristling a little. All the religion and philosophy books in the world couldn’t completely put his fighter’s fire out.

“You pray a lot, celebrity?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You better give your soul to God. Your heart may belong to mother, but your ass belongs to the United States Marines.”

The corporal strutted off, leaving a trail of laughter behind. Not Barney’s.

Eight weeks later, we were physically fit—even two old fogies like Barney and me—and mentally prepared for what lay ahead. Or as close to it as possible.

Wearing service greens—rifles and cartridge belts left behind—we each received three Marine Corps globe-and-anchor emblems, which we pocketed, and were marched to an amphitheater, to sit with other recruits.

Or I should say Marines. We were Marines, now. The short, friendly major on the stage smiled at us and told us so and we reached in our pockets and pinned an emblem on either lapel of our green wool coats and one on the left side of our caps. Then the major told us the one about the farmer’s daughter and the three traveling salesmen, and we all laughed, and he said, “Good luck, men,” and that was the first we’d been called men since we got here.

I passed McRae, later, and he nodded. I stopped and said, “Could I ask you a question?”

He nodded again.

“Why’d you get us up in the middle of the fucking night to go run in the fucking sand?”

Something nearly a smile touched his tight lips. “Combat allows sleep to no man, Private Heller.”

I thought about that.

I thought about it on that Higgins boat, gliding toward a tropical “paradise” called Guadalcanal.

I sensed, even then, that McRae was wrong. Combat allowed sleep to just about anybody. Waking was something else again.

It was a peaceful landing, a beachhead having been long since established by the 1st Marines—many of whom were there to greet us as we waded ashore, hollow-eyed scarecrows with mud on their faces, oddly amused by our identifying shouts: “B Company here!” “A Company here!” The first 1st GI I encountered—just a kid, really, but older in his way than me—immediately asked me for a smoke, despite the gear I was shouldering. I told him I didn’t smoke. He laughed in a curiously empty way and said, you will, mac, you will.

The palms lining the beach greeted us as well, bending to us as if in deference, when really they were just swaybacked seaward from the tropical winds, their fronds shredded from shelling; these evenly spaced, precisely aligned palms weren’t, as you might assume, the handiwork of God on one of His more particularly inspired days—they’d been planted by Lever Brothers, on whose once (and, if the war went right, future) plantation grounds we were entering. This made our first approach, to Henderson Field, an easy one, the soap company having kept the ground in the groves cleared for harvesting purposes.

The crushed-coral airfield was the hub of activity, with two large air stations, machine shops, and electric-light plants, among other buildings inherited from the Japanese, fewer now than before the Nip bombing raids, of course. Repair sheds, hangars, and retaining walls had been built by American hands. And occasionally rebuilt.

The field, we were told, was shelled every night; its two airstrips were in understandably lousy condition, and under constant maintenance. Much of what had been crushed coral was filled in with dirt and packed down, and on hot dry days the runway swirled with dust, and on rainy ones sloshed with mud. No such problem on a humid sunny day like this one. The field was abuzz with warplanes, including F4F Wildcats, and it had been a long time since a Zero, Betty, or Zeke had dared try anything here in the daylight.

Night, however, was a different story; “Maytag Charlie,” as one nightly Japanese visitor had been nicknamed due to his noisy, washing machine of an engine, dropped his 250-pound turds in an ongoing effort to keep the Marines on the Island awake, and to give them something to do the next morning.

Some of the battle-weary scarecrows of the 1st were filling in craters left by last night’s raid, as we trooped in around noon, the transports at the beach having been unloaded of machinery, equipment, supplies. The living corpses halfheartedly jeered at us.

“We’re safe now,” a Southerner drawled, leaning on a shovel. “Here come the Howlin’ Marines.” Our division commander was General Holland “Howling Mad” Smith.

“Fuckin’ A,” a buddy of his said, shoveling. “Just in time for the Japs.”

“I hear they’re servin’ tea today,” said another.

I glanced at Barney; he smiled and shrugged. But I’m sure he was as unnerved as I was. Not by these lame, fairly good-natured jabs; but by the punch-drunk palookas throwing ’em. Would we look like they did, after a few months on this island?

We went through a chow line and received Atabrine tablets, a supposed malaria preventive, a corpsman flicking a tablet in our mouths and then peering down in to make sure we swallowed it. Later I learned this was because many had mutinied against the pills, suspecting them to be saltpeter. Whatever they were, they tasted bitter, but then so did our lunch, which was a bowl of captured Jap rice, to supplant our K rations. A few months on Spam and rice, and we no doubt
would
look like the skinny, grizzled 1st Marines. The deadness in their eyes, however, wasn’t from something they ate.

Some of the 1st, preparing to be relieved, were bivouacked near Henderson, pup tents under coconut trees, nestled among the jungle growth—liana vines, twisting creepers, and smaller trees, many of them just overgrown weeds with bark, slanting skyward for no good reason, hogging space, making life tough for nearby plants, which assumed defensive postures, leaves fanning out into knifelike blades. In front of the tents were often bamboo makeshifts, racks to put things on and/or under, a pole to rest a helmet on. This was home to the 1st, though I doubted, having left, any of ’em would feel homesick.

“Ever seen combat?” one asked Barney and me; he was sitting out in front of his tent on a makeshift bamboo stool. He had light blue eyes, somehow very out of place in the tanned, mud-stained face. The eyes seemed more alive than some, albeit somewhat feverish. The most alive thing about him was the glowing tip of his Chesterfield.

We shook our heads no to his combat question; Barney added, “Nate here was a cop.”

That same wry, weary smile the entire 1st seemed to share crawled onto his face. “You won’t be writing any traffic tickets out here, Pops.”

Barney got defensive, jerked his thumb toward me. “He was a
detective!
He’s been in his share of shoot-outs.”

I nudged him, embarrassed. “Please.”

Barney gave me a disgusted look. “Well, you have.”

“Any experience is better than nothing,” the leatherneck granted.

“We just came from gettin’ jungle training on Samoa,” Barney said. “They told us how at night the Japs creep through the brush like ghosts and then all of a sudden jump right up in front of ya and blow your head off or slash your throat or cut off your…is that really true?”

“Fuckin’ A a doodle de do,” the leatherneck said. He smiled the wry, weary smile again, sucked on the cig. “Like some pointers?”

“Sure,” we said.

He gestured to the ground, or anyway the brush and trees that clung to it. “Watch for trip wire. Those little bastards can set wires up in the jungle that can wipe out half a platoon.”

It looked hopeless to me. I said as much: “How the hell do you spot a wire in undergrowth like this?”

“You either spot it or it spots you. And never go by a bunch of so-called dead ones without spraying the little fuckers. They like to play possum and then open up on you, when you walk on by.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Anything else?”

“The most important thing. If they capture one of your men, write the poor bastard off. They’ll tie him to a tree and go to work on him. They’re experts at it. You’ll hear him holler, probably beg you to come rescue him. This is exactly what they want. They want your men to come running in like big-ass birds. ’Cause they’re waiting for you and not a man one of you will survive, mac. Not a one.”

Then he just sat there and smoked his cigarette.

“We appreciate the advice,” Barney said, after a while.

“They feed you rice today?” he asked us.

“Yeah,” we said.

He almost shivered. “I had a gutful of that swill. You know what winning this fuckin’ war means to me? Never having to eat rice again.” Wistfully, he added, “I could sure go for some of that Jap pogey bait, though. Hard and sweet—like the dame that ditched my Uncle Looie.” Pogey bait was Marine for candy. “But you guys don’t need to worry. You’re gettin’ the tail end of the rice, anyway.”

“Why?” we asked.

He sucked on the cigarette, made a face. “The First’s been cut off since we landed, the fuckin’ Navy all but deserted us, what little supplies we got come in from flyboys and destroyers that broke the Nip blockade. If it wasn’t for the food the Japs left behind, we’d’ve been eating roots and bark. But
you
ain’t gonna have to eat no fish heads and rice; supplies and men are comin’ in every day, now.”

“The tide has turned, then,” I said.

“It’s turnin’. But you still got your work cut out for you.”

“Henderson seems well secured,” I said.

Barney, glancing back toward the busy airstrip—planes taking off, troops trooping in, supplies being unloaded—nodded.

“Boys—if you don’t mind my callin’ older gents like you ‘boys’—my last piece of advice for ya is keep thinking like that and you’ll be deader’n Mr. Kelsey’s nuts by nightfall.”

He was right, of course. The Nips were all around the perimeter, including Sealark Channel—or Ironbottom Sound, as it was informally known, referring to the sixty-five or so major warships resting there, about half-and-half American/Japanese. Nightly shelling from the Sound meant Henderson Field was virtually surrounded. Its security was as false as the orderliness of the plantation palms.

Soon we were moving up, past Henderson, toward the Matanikau River just five miles away, the west bank of which belonged to the Nips, and across which they weren’t shy to come. Shells exploded all around us, shaking the earth and those creatures crawling on it, us included, on our bellies, inching through thick underbrush, thorns and brambles nicking us, marking us, shell smoke drifting over us like dark dirty clouds.

But we weren’t the only crawling creatures. We crawled past snakes, and they crawled past us; we met bugs the likes of which the worst Chicago tenement never dreamed of, but is “bugs” the word when it’s a spider the size of your fist, or a wasp three inches long? Lizards flitted by, forked tongues flicking; land crabs skittled along, like dismembered skeletal hands clawing frantically at the earth. And most of all mosquitoes. Ever-present, less than swarming, but so constant there soon came a point where you couldn’t swat at them any longer.

Finally we reached the forward foxholes, where more of the 1st waited to be relieved. We did that, crawling in as they crawled out, into the two-and three-man holes. Barney and I and that kid from Chicago, D’Angelo, another veteran of Corporal McCrea back at Dago, shared a foxhole with the mosquitoes. Before us was a row of sandbags, stacked, beyond which was a double-apron barbed-wire fence. From our position you couldn’t see the river, but I could hear it, and smell it. The smell of the jungle and the rivers and streams that cut through it was not nature’s finest hour; it was a fetid perfume made from equal parts oppressive humidity, rotting undergrowth, and stink lilies.

The rest of the afternoon we stayed dug in, listening to and watching artillery shells explode, as our side traded fire with the unseen Japs across the river. It never became a passive experience—with every explosion, you knew that if the direct hit didn’t get you, the flying red-hot shrapnel could, and if neither got you, it was getting some poor bastard just like you, down the line. And you knew most of all that you could be next.

In the lulls we’d talk and D’Angelo smoked; he was a thin, dark kid with a sensual mouth that the girls back in the Windy City no doubt loved, for all the good it did him here. We sat beating our gums, comparing bug bites and agreeing that Chicago was a pretty tame place to live, compared to this hellhole, anyway.

Then we watched a sunset paint the sky red and orange, in an impressionistic, tropical dream right out of Gauguin. The moment was a peaceful one; it was enough to make you forget bug bites and shrapnel and humidity, and darkness fell.

Generally speaking, I’m not afraid of the dark. But I’m here to tell you I’m afraid of the dark in a jungle. The rustle of leaves, the flutter of wings, the skittering of land crabs, indiscernible yet ominous shapes moving, looming out there. We’d been ordered not to shoot unless the Japs fired first, so as not to give our positions away. So we crouched in the foxholes with bayonets at the ready, and if I thought this was making
me
nuts, Barney was truly ready for a padded foxhole.

Seemed like every minute or two, he’d half rise and lunge forward, across the sandbags and barbed wire—a leaf moved in the wind, or an animal rustled in the brush, and Barney was out there slashing, stabbing, destroying imaginary Japs. Some of these nonexistent enemies would sneak up behind us, and Barney lunged to the rear, stabbed, slashed; you never knew when or from whence one of the yellow bastards was going to strike next.

It spread to the other nearby foxholes, and soon our whole platoon was going crazy slashing and stabbing little yellow men who weren’t there. Finally I touched Barney’s arm and said, “Take it easy. There’s lots of sounds out there. If it’s Japs, we’ll know it.”

I’d barely finished the sentence when an ungodly screech ripped the night apart, and I was on my feet, yelling,
“Banzai charge!,”
bayonet flashing in the moonlight.

From a foxhole down the way, a voice that could only have belonged to one of the combat veterans of the 1st, a handful of which had stayed behind with us, whispered harshly, “It’s a fuckin’ bird, mac. A cock or two. Put a lid on it.”

Cock or two? Oh. Cockatoo. Well. I was too scared and tired to be embarrassed. I sat down in the foxhole and pushed my helmet back on my head and the mosquitoes zoomed in for virgin territory.

They came at us the next morning. For real. They came up a slope of golden
kunai
grass, shoulder-high, the blades of which cut you like a knife, but the Nips didn’t care. They were screaming,
“Banzai,”
and they weren’t cockatoos, either. They were savage little men in uniforms the color of brown wrapping paper. Many in the first wave weren’t even carrying rifles; they had big mats in their little hands, rushing through the grass lugging those mats, screaming like hopped-up madmen, as were those coming up behind them with rifles in hand, firing past their mat-bearing brethren. Some had machine guns, chattering like a child’s toy gun, but there was nothing childish about the bullets they were spitting at us, kissing the sand through the cloth of the sandbags nearby. There was mortar fire, too, ours and theirs—ours was landing amongst them, scattering them in the air like tenpins; where theirs was landing I couldn’t say. Not near us, thank God.

Barney and I were side by side, firing our M-1s; D’Angelo, too.

We were cutting the Japs down like weeds, like they were the very
kunai
grass into whose spiky golden sea their bodies sank as our bullets hit the mark.

There was a moment when D’Angelo was firing and Barney and I both were pausing to reload our rifles, the barrels of which were red hot.

“What are those things those little bastards are hauling?” he asked.

“Mats,” I said. “I think they plan to throw ’em over the barb wire, so the ones behind ’em can crawl over it and on top of us.”