With the Old Breed (44 page)

We pushed past Shuri over some muddy hills in the army's zone of action and came across a group of about twenty Japanese prisoners. Each man was stripped except for a G-string. They stood barefooted in the mud alongside a trail winding along the slope of a barren hill. Several dirty and battle-weary army infantrymen guarded them. The captured enemy had been ordered by an interpreter (army lieutenant) to stand off the trail so Company K's column could pass.

We slipped and slid wearily toward the sound of firing up ahead. A grizzled rifleman in front of me and I had been cursing the mud and exchanging remarks about how glad we were to be past Shuri. Suddenly a Japanese prisoner stepped in front of my friend, blocking his way.

“Get outa the way, you crazy bastard,” growled the Marine.

The soldier folded his arms calmly, raised his chin, and displayed a picture of arrogance. My buddy and I heated up fast. He pushed the Japanese backward and sent him sprawling into the mud. The enemy soldier sprang up quickly and assumed his former position.

“What's that crazy bastard doin’?” I yelled as I dropped my mortar ammo bag and reached for my .45 pistol.

My buddy unslung his rifle, grasped it by the stock with his left hand and by the pistol grip with his right hand. He planted his muddy feet firmly on the trail, flexed his knees, and growled, “Git outa my way, you bastard.”

Other Marines behind us had halted when we did. Seeing what was happening, they started cursing the Japanese.

“What's the hold up? Move out,” someone behind us yelled.

The army first lieutenant (he was actually wearing his silver bars on his collars), clean-shaven and spotless except for muddy combat boots, came along the column to ascertain the problem. Seeing my buddy's stance and realizing he might soon have one less prisoner, he said, “You can't mistreat these men. They are prisoners of war. According to the Geneva Code, POWs must be treated humanely.” He looked desperate; the whole column of muddy, raggedy-ass Marines glared at and cursed the prisoners strung out alongside us on the trail.

“Screw the Geneva Code. If that slant-eyed sonofabitch don't move outa my way, I'll give him a vertical butt stroke in his big mouth and knock out every one of them goddamn buck teeth.” My buddy slowly moved his rifle back and forth, and the enemy soldier's arrogant expression began to fade. The army lieutenant knew he had a bad problem on his hands, and he obviously didn't know how to solve it. (It was commonly said that Marines rarely took prisoners.) A couple of GI riflemen of the prisoner-guard detail stood by relaxed and grinned their endorsement of our sentiments. They obviously had been in the “meat grinder” long enough to have no more love for the Japanese than we did. The lieutenant obviously wasn't one of their officers but from some rear-echelon outfit.

Just then, one of our officers hurried up from the rear of the column. The army lieutenant was mighty relieved to see him and explained the situation. Our officers went over and quietly told my buddy to get back into ranks. He then told the army language officer that if he didn't get his prisoners out of the way, he (our officer) couldn't guarantee that some of them wouldn't get hurt. The army officer spoke kindly in Japanese to the POWs, and they all stepped farther back away from the trail, giving us plenty of room. The language officer acted and sounded more like an elementary school teacher giving little children directions than an officer giving orders to a bunch of tough Japanese soldiers.

During the whole episode, most of the Japanese never appeared afraid, merely chagrined or ashamed because they had acted disgracefully by surrendering. Perhaps the one who acted so arrogantly thought that one last act of defiance
would soothe his conscience somewhat. Most Americans at the time couldn't comprehend the Japanese determination to win or fight to the death. To the Japanese, surrender was the ultimate disgrace.

We didn't feel that POWs should be mistreated or handled roughly, but neither did we feel that one should be allowed to block our path and get away with the act. My view that some language officers were often overly solicitous about the comfort of prisoners and unduly courteous to them was shared by other infantrymen in the “meat grinder.” We were too familiar with the sight of helpless wounded Americans lying flat on their backs on stretchers getting shot by Japanese snipers while we struggled to evacuate them.

After the breakthrough, we moved rapidly through areas where the opposition was light or absent. Our supply lines, communications, and casualty evacuation had a difficult time keeping up with us because the mud was still such a serious problem. Although the rain fell less frequently, it hadn't ceased.

As our column moved along the base of a road embankment on one occasion, a Marine walking along the road above us carrying a field telephone and a small roll of wire shouted down and asked for the identity of our unit. His buddy followed him along the road at a little distance carrying a roll of wire. These men were clean-shaven and neat. They looked suspiciously like rear-echelon people to us.

“Hey, what outfit you guys in?” shouted the first man up on the road.

“K/⅗,” I yelled.

His buddy behind him asked him, “What outfit did he say?”

“K/⅗, whatever the hell that means.”

The effect on us was instant and dramatic. Men who had paid little attention to what seemed a routine inquiry looked angrily up at the man. I flushed with anger. My unit and I had been insulted. The mortarman next to me threw down his ammo bag and started up the embankment. “I'll show you what the hell it means, you rear-echelon sonofabitch! I'm gonna whip your ass.”

I wasn't given to brawling. The Japanese provided me with all the excitement and fighting I wanted. But I lost my head completely. I threw down my ammo bag and started up the embankment. Other mortarmen started up, too.

“What's the dope?” I heard a man back along the column shout.

“That rear-echelon bastard up there cussed K Company,” someone answered.

Immediately other Company K men started up the bank. The two men up on the road looked utterly bewildered as they saw bearded, muddy Marine infantrymen cursing, grounding their weapons, dropping their loads, and surging angrily up the embankment. One of our officers and a couple of NCOs saw what had happened and rushed up ahead of us.

The officer turned and yelled, “You people get back in ranks on the double! Move! Move!”

We stopped, each of us knowing that to disobey orders invited severe disciplinary action. The two men on the road had become frightened, and we saw them hustling along the road to the rear. They looked back anxiously several times to see whether they were being followed. We must have been an angry, menacing-looking bunch from their viewpoint. I suspect those two Marines knew the real meaning and essence of esprit de corps after that experience.

We picked up our weapons and gear and moved out again below the road only to halt shortly. The officers consulted their maps, held a critique, and decided that place was as good as any for the company to leave the muddy low ground, go up the bank, and take advantage of the coral-surfaced road (probably the east-west Naha-Yonabaru highway, a segment of which our regiment captured about then). We moved up onto the road, took off our gear, and settled onto the side of a large ridge with a wide grass- and tree-covered crest. Oki-nawan burial vaults and emplacements lay all along the slope of the ridge, but the Japanese hadn't left many men to defend it. However, they gave a good account of themselves before being wiped out.

Toward dusk, I was examining a Japanese 75mm dual-purpose gun which they had abandoned in perfect condition.
Several of us had a lot of fun turning its cranks and wheels, which we didn't understand but which moved the big barrel up and down, right and left. Our play was interrupted by the shriek of several enemy artillery shells that exploded up on the ridge crest near a group of Company K men.

“Corpsman!”

We raced up onto the ridge, hoping no more shells came in but wondering who was hit and knowing we might be needed to help with the casualties. We could see the smoke from the shells and the Marines scurrying around to aid the casualties and to disperse.

In the gathering twilight, I ran up to a little knot of Marines bending over a casualty. To my dismay, the wounded Marine was good-natured, cigar-chewing Joe Lambert, a demolitions expert I had known so long. I knelt beside him and was distressed to see that he had multiple wounds from shell fragments in his body.

The men had eased a poncho under Lambert and were preparing to carry him down the ridge for evacuation. I wished him luck, made the usual jokes about not being too romantic with the nurses on the hospital ship, and asked him to drink a beer and think of me when he got Stateside—the usual comments one made to a badly wounded friend who had little chance.

Lambert looked up at me in the gathering darkness. With the stump of an unlighted cigar clenched in his teeth, he said with irony in his voice, “Sledgehammer, ain't this a helluva’ thing—a man been in the company as long as me, and hafta get carried out on a poncho?”

I made some feeble attempts to comfort him. I knew he was going to die, and I wanted to cry.

“Wish I could light that cigar for you, Cobber, but the smokin’ lamp is out.”

“That's OK, Sledgehammer.”

“One of those good-lookin’ nurses'll light it for you,” I said as they picked up the poncho and started off down the slope of the ridge with him.

I stood up and looked at a nearby group of beautiful pines silhouetted against the darkening sky. The wind blew their
fresh scent into my face, and I thought how much like Southern pine it smelled. But poor, brave Lambert would never get back home again. I was thankful that when his luck finally ran out and he was fatally wounded, it happened on a high, clear, grassy ridge crest near a clump of fragrant pines and not back in the stinking muck of the quagmire around Shuri.

Corporal Lambert was a great favorite in Company K. Any of us who had fought on Peleliu's Bloody Nose Ridge had seen him numerous times standing above some Japanese cave, swinging a satchel charge of explosives on a rope until he got it just right, then releasing the rope and yelling, “Fire in the hole”—just before the muffled explosion. He would grin, then climb down and rejoin us wringing wet with sweat from his face to his boondockers. He would relight his cigar (which served in turn as a lighter for his satchel-charge fuses) and discuss the damage done to the cave. He was big, round-faced, and jovial. Rumor said that he had been scheduled to return to the States after Peleliu but refused because he wanted to remain with Company K. Not long after he was carried out, we learned that Lambert had died. It's one of the war's many personal tragedies that he was killed after having served so long and so bravely.

Next day we moved out into a wide valley below the ridge. We saw Japanese equipment and dead on several roads destroyed by the big U.S. bombardment the last week of May when the enemy had evacuated Shuri. We also encountered numerous Japanese supply dumps. Most of the food and rations didn't suit our tastes. The Japanese iron rations, which I had seen first in gauze sacs on Peleliu, tasted like dog biscuits. But I found several cans of preserved Japanese deep-sea scallops which were delicious. Several cans of these stored in my pack were a welcome change from C and K rations.

We made one rapid advance across a wide grassy valley only to be halted by snipers in some rocks on the crest of the opposite ridge. We set up the guns, registered in on the areas where snipers were, and began firing. Stretcher teams came and went up and down the slope of the open ridge. Four of us
were ordered off for a stretcher team to pick up a corpsman who had been hit by sniper fire.

We went up the gently sloping, grass-covered ridge and came to the “doc.” Another stretcher team passed us carrying the Marine whom the doc had been tending when he himself was wounded. The Marine had been shot by a sniper, and the corpsman had come to administer medical aid. While he was working over the wounded Marine, a Japanese shot him in the thigh. Although wounded painfully, he continued to work on his patient. Then the sniper had shot Doc in the other thigh. As we arrived, he cautioned us to be careful or we would get hit, too.

We quickly got him on a stretcher and took off as fast as possible. Doc was a fairly tall, well-built man, larger than any of us. We carried him a long distance: down the ridge and across the wide valley to a steep-sided ditch spanned by a footbridge. An ambulance jeep was waiting on the other side of the footbridge. We were all nearly exhausted from the exertions and lack of sleep of the past two weeks, and it was quite a struggle. Twice wounded though he was, he kept insisting we stop and rest for a while. But we four felt obligated to get him to the jeep and evacuated as soon as possible.

Finally, we agreed to stop for a breather. Setting the stretcher down, we fell out flat on the grass, panting for breath. Doc talked to us calmly, admonishing us to take it easy and not to overexert ourselves. I felt ashamed. That unselfish, dedicated corpsman was more concerned because we were so tired from carrying him out than he was with his own wounds.

We picked up the stretcher and got to the ditch. There on the bank I saw a bush with several small red tomatoes. I managed to grab three or four tomatoes and put them on the stretcher as we got Doc across the narrow footbridge. I told him to eat them, that they'd make him feel better. He thanked me, but said we should eat them, because he would get good chow in the hospital.

Who should walk around the jeep just as we were loading our corpsman but Doc Arrogant, notorious for painful shots
on Pavuvu. “I'll take those,” he said, reaching for the tomatoes.

“The hell you say!” I exclaimed, snatching them out of his hand.

One of my buddies went up to him and said, “You bastard, you'd take candy from a baby, wouldn't ya?”

Arrogant looked surly, turned around, and went back around the jeep. Our Doc handed me the tomatoes and insisted we eat them. We said we would and wished him luck as the jeep bumped off to the rear.