Gone to Soldiers (118 page)

“The south end,” Murray said. “That's mountainous. The other end is too flat and cultivated. Not good cover.” Seen from the water, Okinawa was a green and pleasant land, hilly, well built up, with cities and towns and villages, roads and beaches, rice paddies, quaint-looking stone tombs. There seemed to be no jungle, fetid and fierce, like Guadalcanal, and it was not just a volcanic heap like Iwo, or a wreath of jagged coral flung down around a lagoon, like Tarawa. It was one of those attractive islands like Saipan, and that made him shudder. However, these people did not seem eager to jump off the cliffs to get away from Americans. Perhaps they should have. As the weeks went by, civilian casualties of the heavy shelling and the crossfire were at least as high as military casualties. Out of the loudspeakers on the ships came the news that the President had died. Murray was stunned, dizzied by a huge uneasiness, wondering what kind of country he would return to. If he did.

They were still being held in reserve, although fighting began to toughen on the island. The Army was still stuck before the first Japanese lines they had come against, while the Marines had fought a brisk engagement on the Motobu Peninsula, but still the 2d Division remained on its transports, waiting. Not that they were out of the line of fire.

Every couple of days, clouds of several hundred Japanese planes came at the huge armada, which was fifteen hundred ships strong: battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, troop transports, ammunition carriers, supply ships, tankers, hospital ships, ships on radar picket. The heart of the raids were the suicide pilots in simple planes not designed to return, loaded with a five-hundred-pound bomb meant to explode when the little plane plowed into the big superstructure of the American ships or crashed into the flight deck of a carrier. Those kamikazes were surrounded by a swarm of everything the Japanese had to throw: Zeros, Bettys, Juds, Oscars, to protect them and inflict damage of their own.

The raids were constant and each time they sank at least a couple of ships and damaged many more. When they hit the ammo ships, the seamen on board never had a chance. You were lucky not to be nearby and get taken out by the exploding shells and rockets. “Fucking sitting ducks,” Slo Mo said. Why couldn't the brass just unload them so they could be in reserve on land? They were taking more casualties as part of that huge floating shooting gallery than they would in the fighting, all the marines said, until they saw the wounded being brought out. It was beginning to look bad. Mostly the marines blamed the doggies. They never seemed to strike and move forward, but Murray noticed he saw a lot of doggie casualties coming out.

The kamikaze pilots hit everything: they knocked out carriers, they knocked out cruisers, destroyers, LSMs and LSTs. They hit the transports, the freighters, the tankers, the hospital ships. The ships fired back downing a lot of the bastards, but there were always more swarms coming. Twelve to twenty of them might attack the same ship at once, till at least one got through, and that ship was blown out of the water.

It was perfect hell being cooped up on the transport with Hickock always watching him, finding rotten details for him, trying to goad him into striking back again. He could not move or speak without looking around cautiously, trying to fade back among the men, trying to efface himself. He stuck as tight as he could to Jack and to Slo Mo and Tiny, the survivors from Saipan. Sometimes he half wished the ship would be hit and the waiting to die be over.

On the ship, he and Jack had got tighter with Slo Mo Mazzini. He came from Akron, which struck Murray as kind of a little Detroit. Slo Mo was just as thoughtful as he had been, but he moved faster now.

Murray's nickname was King. The newer guys in the outfit couldn't figure out why Murray was called King, because he wasn't the biggest or the meanest or the bossiest, and everybody saw how much Sergeant Hickock hated his guts. Maybe somebody would explain he'd been called King David ever since he poked Sergeant Hickock in the chin, because he wouldn't take no shit about the Jews. He was still the only Jew. Every time they got a fresh load of recruits he looked them over, hoping, but no luck. Jack was Frenchy, of course, just as Tiny was six feet four.

The men on board sharpened their knives and bayonets, took apart their rifles and cleaned them, did their laundry in the sea, wrote letters, gossiped, slept, played cards, read comic books, killed time. They were taken out of the armada and sailed toward Saipan. Then they were transported right back to Okinawa, only the 8th Marines of all their division. Tough luck.

Murray was standing by a bulkhead watching Hickock, himself in shadow and Hickock full in brief sunshine between the increasingly torrential rains. The sun fell on his close-cropped blond hair that looked white, his squared-off jaw and grey eyes squinted against the rare sun: tall, lean, careful of his appearance and affecting the swashbuckling Marine style, he looked like the minor lead in a Hollywood movie about the war. Why couldn't Hickock simply take the plateful of goodies life had put in front of him and let him live in peace?

Murray resented hating Hickock, like a parasite that hollowed him out from the inside. Life was hardly sweet, but it was his own, and he had not borne it through all these bloodbaths and stinking fetid jungles and jagged coral rocks pitted with fortified caves to spill it for one man's idiot prejudice. Sometimes in dreams Hickock suddenly turned and told him he was okay. Let up. In daily life Hickock was always there, watching him the way a farmer looks at a varmint he means to kill the first day of hunting season.

The 8th Marines were finally being used, to clean out some nearby islands thought to shelter Japanese troops and wanted in any case for a radar installation to take some of the heat off the radar picket ships the kamikazes kept blowing up. On one of those islands, Ie Shima, Murray heard that the correspondent Ernie Pyle had been killed by a sniper. Their battalion was being sent into Iheya, north of Okinawa, where a scout plane had reported a Japanese position. They were all so bloody sick of being on the transport, they were pleased to be landing on anything. They were standing so many general quarters they were getting no sleep anyhow, so they might as well be fighting with land under their feet and escape the exploding ships.

Murray felt less cheerful than Jack or Slo Mo, because several times he caught Hickock's gaze on him. Tiny was depressed too: he had been sleeping badly, tormented by violent nightmares. The order to land the landing force was given at dawn and the amphtracs started for shore. They were fine until they got to the narrow beach. Then shells started landing all around them, no cover, no defilade available, nothing but the shining flash of beach with shells throwing up sand and occasional fragments of coral or metal. Nothing but shells, no machine-gun fire, no mortars. Maybe the Japs were dug in somewhere inland, back with their artillery. Hickock ordered Murray out first as they grated on bottom.

He had Slo Mo on his right and Jack on his left. Still no machine-gun or riflery fire. Ah, now it began, to the left, sweeping over them. They hit the sand, but they were exposed. A shell knocked him unconscious. He wakened deafened and groggy. When he recovered a little from the concussion, he made a dead run for the fringe of trees, expecting the machine-gun fire to start and to feel himself torn apart. He saw the bottom half of Tiny upended from the shell hole. There was no upper half. He landed in the undergrowth, Jack beside him and then Slo Mo joined them, no longer virgin in combat and not slow under fire.

“Fucking monkeys,” Murray said. “Those shells are coming from out there, not from in front of us.”

“Friendly fire, you're just as dead,” Jack said. “Is anybody going to let them know?”

“Dig in,” Murray said, “or we'll get shot by our own people. Everybody's going crazy.” Indeed, from their perspective among the trees, they could see that Easy Company was shooting not at any Japanese but at them, Fox. Murray saw Sergeant Hickock standing there yelling at the men back on the beach.

Without haste and feeling stone cold, he got Hickock in the sight of his rifle. He was on the rifle range perfecting the sighting that would give him the bull's-eye. God knows how many Japs I've killed who never did anything more than get drafted and try to stay alive. Now I'm going to kill one for me and mine. He took careful aim as if he were trying for a sharpshooting medal. The shells were landing on the beach. The screams of the dying came faintly to his injured ears. Only Jack lay with him in the shallow foxhole they had dug and only Jack saw what he was doing. Slo Mo was dug in ten feet over. Still he could not shoot. Hickock's face leaning into him. “Take a good look at this island, Jew-boy.” His Molly Goldberg imitation reading Ruthie's letters. He looked at Jack.

Jack looked back at him steadily. Murray turned toward Hickock and pulled the trigger. Hickock dropped to his knees and then fell forward. Murray had hit the bull's-eye. “Come on,” he said to Jack, “you and Slo Mo get the fuck inland. I'm going to find Sergeant Reardon and make sure he knows it's us and not the Japs. I got the dirty suspicion there's not two Japs on this island. Somebody's got to radio those ships.”

In fact there were no enemies present. Except themselves.

The second week in June they were landed on Okinawa to relieve the 1st and 6th divisions, what was left of them. In some companies, there were three men surviving. They could smell the line as they came up to it. It was trench warfare Okinawa-style and the whole front stank like a backed-up toilet. It had been raining for weeks and the mud they slogged through was compounded of earth, of blood, of maggots, of bits of metal and burnt detritus, of shit and garbage. It was June but the trees were bare, stripped by the shelling.

The Japanese had an immense amount of artillery. Seventy thousand men on one side and fifty on the other had been bearing down on a strip of land about five miles wide, a barren but wet moon of rocks and mud, heavily cratered. Burnt tanks littered every hillside, for the tankmen had taken as bad a beating as the infantry.

When they collapsed for a rest, they were told that their provisions, their food, their water had been landed four miles overland on the beach, but that in between were the Japanese. They were told if they wanted their rations and their water, they had better start fighting.

The Marines always viewed the Army with a cold eye, for to them it looked fat, oversupplied, overcautious, with too many people behind the line in proportion to those on the line. The Army was rich in equipment, always hauling trucks, jeeps, half-tracks, vast tonnages of supplies and mechanics and subarmies of clerks with them. The Marines had a few tanks with them, some artillery, and that was about it.

“I'm glad they kept us out on the LST so long, getting crazy and playing poker, because I'm sure pleased that we missed Sugar Loaf and Chocolate Drop and all those fun places,” Slo Mo said.

“You may be slow, but you aint stupid,” Jack said. They saw the guys they were replacing, dazed and battered zombies. They looked as if they were cattle marching to the slaughterhouse instead of away from it. Life was not always sweet after a battle, Murray thought; if it was a bad enough battle and you lost enough people around you, close to you, living could seem pointless. Murray was now a corporal again; he had been given a stripe back, credited with figuring out the carnage on the islet was from their own side. He was promoted for making it through the rain of friendly fire to Reardon, before Easy and Fox finished each other off. He thought his stripe was a peculiar award for shooting his sergeant, but he was not about to complain.

They camped that night in a tomb. They had learned quickly to take cover in the tombs from the constant shelling and the equally constant rain. The Okinawans kept their ancestors in coral block huts built into the hillsides, with entrances shaped like vaginas, for the dead were returned to the womb of earth. Surrounded by little stone walls, they would not stand up to a direct hit, but offered protection from blast and shrapnel. In fact, the Okinawans used them as shelter from typhoons. The three of them moved the big blue urns of the dead outside and crawled in. It was close but the fresh air gradually filtered in, such as it was. Murray thought the polluted air on Okinawa could give a bad day in Detroit serious competition.

Jack lay near the door reading a Captain Marvel comic book. The captain was fighting the Nazis still—two months ago's comics. The day the war in Europe had ended, all the ships fired three rounds into the Jap positions to celebrate. It meant little to them.

“Maybe we'll get some help invading Japan, which is going to be like Iwo Jima and Saipan and Tarawa and this bloody muck all balled together,” Murray speculated.

“Or maybe it means they'll let those guys go home and grab all the jobs and all the women while we keep doing this one foot at a time for the next five years.” Slo Mo sounded depressed. “They say the Japs plan to arm women and babies, and everyone of them'll kill themselves trying to kill us.”

How long does anybody have to do this? Murray asked himself. How long? Outside, not too near, there was a scream. Infiltrating Japs. Either a marine or a Japanese infantryman had just been knifed. Murray shifted to a more comfortable position. One reason he could not keep himself from hating the Japanese, no matter how hard he tried to tell himself that it was not the Japanese who were killing Jews, and that all armies fought dirty, and that they were amazingly brave and tough, was that they kept him from sleeping. They never seemed to lie down at night and go to sleep the way they ought to. No, all night they were infiltrating the lines, slitting marines' throats in their foxholes, sometimes drinking and working themselves up for a suicide charge. Why didn't they just lie down and sleep and fight tomorrow? If only they would leave the nights alone and let him sleep, every other night, even just one night in three.

He waited for Sergeant Hickock to rise before him, but Sergeant Hickock didn't put in his appearance. Instead when he was trying to sleep, he found himself haunted not by the man he had killed but by those he had been unable to save, the kids who had died beside him, the kids who had bled to death before they could be carried back to battalion aid, the kids instantly blown apart. He was haunted by Tiny and by Harvey, who died in his head again and again. Hickock was simply gone, and he could not find regret in himself. He had killed he had no idea how many hundred men including thirty-odd at once with a barrel of gasoline thrown into a cave on Saipan and lit; they had died horribly. He felt worse about them than about Hickock. He had killed countless men and one. It was a cosmic joke.