Gone to Soldiers (66 page)

Daniel was on night duty when the amphibious invasion at Tarawa began—dawn in the central Pacific. The mood among the men on the night watch was excited optimism. This ought to be a walkover. All that intelligence could hand to the command, they had: the cryptanalysts had even identified the four biggest guns as eight-inch coastal guns taken by the Japanese from the British defenses at Singapore, where they had pointed the wrong way to help when the Japanese attacked from inland.

The command knew the strength and the location of individual Japanese units, even the officer in charge. The decoders in Washington and in Hawaii had passed on details of the fortifications, the weaponry available to the Japanese, estimates of ammunition and of food on hand. This was no improvised slap-bang operation like Guadalcanal. Daniel expected, along with everybody else in the office, that the invasion would be over, if not by the time they went off duty, surely before they came on again.

Yet it became clear, before the night was half through, that nothing was working out right. It was harder for them to follow than a battle at sea, but progress was simply not happening. When Daniel returned the next day, a disaster for the Marines was coming down on the other side of the world. The casualty figures were bad. Japanese sub I175 reported that it sank a carrier,
Liscombe Bay
. In the ensuing explosion, the seven hundred men on board were all lost. The Marines had casualties of about one man in four. It was the third day before the Japanese garrison sent out their last message. “Our weapons are gone and now everyone will attempt a final charge. May His Majesty the Emperor and may Japan live ten thousand years!”

As near as Daniel could piece it together, the Navy had used nineteenth-century maps and expected the amphibious assault to go in on high tides that never came. Moreover, reporting on numbers and types of weapons turned out to be useless when they were carefully concealed and dug in.

As for the Japanese casualties, they were total. All died except for one officer and sixteen enlisted men. Tarawa was taken, but hideously. It daunted them all. Daniel imagined the war slogging toward Japan with enormous casualties on each tiny isle. There was no celebration among the signals intelligence people. It felt as much a disaster as a victory.

At Thanksgiving Daniel went home briefly to his parents in the Bronx. Haskel brought a woman he had been seeing, extremely nervous in the full family presence. Judy was there with her baby on her lap. Her husband was in the Italian campaign. Judy kept asking Daniel what he was doing hanging around Washington, while he attempted to deflect her questioning and pass her off with bland answers and little jokes. “I think it's a disgrace,” she said. “You've got an office job, a cushy office job, while other men are out there fighting.”

“Why should you wish your own brother to be in danger?” their mother asked, kneading her hands.

“If he wasn't a coward, he'd want to be out there too.”

Nobody suggested Haskel should go overseas. Daniel kept his mouth shut, but his appetite was poor. That night he must return. The war would not wait. Still he found himself depressed. His parents' apartment felt claustrophobic to him, overfurnished, overstuffed, overheated. His parents seemed to feel more secure, with his father managing a small blanket factory, and they mentioned plans for postwar acquisitions. He wondered if he would still feel close to his Shanghai uncle as he could not to his own parents. They asked him about nice Jewish girls; he passed them off with the promise, after the war. After the war, they would buy a refrigerator and a couch and he would shop for a wife. He felt suffocated, guilty for his alienation.

When he returned to Washington, Operation Flintlock was in preparation, the attack on the Marshalls. It was early December before he realized he had not heard from Abra in a while. In wartime, many events could impede correspondence, but he guessed that she was annoyed with his last letter, in which he had mentioned Louise favorably. He knocked off a quick funny letter to her about wartime Washington and the jokes going around. Just before Christmas he got a reply, friendly and flirtatious. He was apparently forgiven.

Louise confided in him that she had not decided what to do about Christmas. She had never cared for it herself, but Oscar had thought they should celebrate it for Kay's sake, so that she would not feel deprived. Louise would just as soon let it lapse, but she felt with Oscar abroad, she ought to make up for his absence. Kay was annoyed about coming home to Washington instead of New York, where she could see her old friends from Elizabeth Irwin, but Louise had sublet her New York apartment to a couple in OWI New York.

“How come you feel so guilty in front of your daughter?”

“I suppose no mother ever feels she did an adequate job. And if your marriage has come apart, part of you thinks you failed, even if the rest of you thinks it was probably all to the good.”

He was curious about the daughter. He expected her to be a young version of the mother, but he was disappointed. She wasn't bad looking, sleek dark brown hair curled on her shoulders, pleasant enough features in repose, but she was awkward and sullen with him. When he first presented himself at the door to have Sunday dinner with them, with a gift of a quarter pound of real butter and half a dozen fresh eggs, she said, “Who's that?” in a loud and rude voice, in spite of what he was sure had been her mother's briefing.

He could see that Louise was disappointed too. She hoped that he would be drawn to Kay, he suspected. Perhaps she thought he would be good for her daughter, but neither he nor Kay liked each other. They both addressed almost all remarks to Louise. He found Kay self-engrossed and pedantic, as if a few weeks of college had given her insight into every subject raised. My professor says, was her constant outcry. She had none of her mother's charm, none of her warmth or her wit.

Once his Shanghai uncle had told him, when he was flirting with the daughter of a Turkish attaché, to look at the mother to see how the daughter would turn out in a few years. Kay should be so lucky. Now he understood Louise's guilt over her daughter. Whatever Louise had done, she must judge insufficient, because look at the results.

After that, although Louise invited him to the movies with them, on walks, skating at an indoor rink and out to supper, he begged off until he saw Kay shipped back to school. The operation known as Flintlock was fast approaching and he would be in for another bout of crisis at OP-20-G. Before then, he persuaded Louise to come up for a genuine Shanghai feast. He bribed Rodney into disappearing for the rest of Sunday by taking out all their mutual garbage and cleaning up the kitchen and bathroom.

Louise came, Louise ate and enjoyed but was not conquered. All he could get off were her shoes, but persuading her upstairs alone with him was a great step forward, he told himself. It was only a matter of time. She liked his company, and he had as yet no rival. Gentle persistence would win her. A lust as great as his had to prove catching.

MURRAY 2

A Little Miscalculation of the Tides

In the hospital, the doctors decided that Murray had hepatitis—not apparently the worst kind, but bad enough. Still it was curable and not a million-dollar wound. They would not send him home, assuring him he would be fine in two or three months.

He was sick and feverish and weakened. He turned out to have parasites as well as the fungal infection. Nonetheless, he liked being in the hospital, where he refound himself, as if he were waking and discovering he had dreamed himself to be someone entirely other. He read; he enjoyed reading; he could prefer one book to another, judging, comparing. He began to have ideas again, thoughts focused beyond the moment, beyond anxiety. He could contemplate something more than filling his belly, discharging his ragged bowels and trying to catch a safe snooze. He could think of Ruthie without reaching for his cock. He could be silent when the other men would let him be.

Unfortunately, the doctors decided all too soon he was sufficiently recovered. He did not feel well. He could scarcely remember what it had felt like to be entirely without pain, to walk easily, to run up a flight of steps without dizziness, without nausea.

In the mysterious ways of the Marines, he was not returned to his old outfit, but posted to the 2d Division, 8th Marines, who were almost all San Diego boot camp marines, not Parris Island like his old outfit. He felt mistreated, shoved among a lot of guys who knew each other. The 2d Division was based out of Wellington, New Zealand, where he'd been in the hospital, so maybe they had just decided not to bother shipping him any farther. He reported to Camp McKay and his quiet time was over. A lot of the men had been in New Zealand awhile, so it felt like home to them. They had friends, they had girlfriends, they had taken up the local slang and called each other cobby. He felt as much an outsider as he had in boot camp.

He was assigned to a tarpaper hut heated by a kerosene stove. He still became easily chilled. Some men here had been on the Canal too, and still had malaria. At least he had been spared that, thanks to the Atabrine that gave him a yellowish cast and had probably masked the hepatitis from the corpsmen—what the Marines called medics—on the Canal.

The major in command of his new outfit believed in hiking. They went on sixty mile and eighty mile hikes in the mountains. The first time, Murray couldn't make it. His feet had softened up in the hospital and soon began to bleed. In the Marines, nobody was ever supposed to be weak, even two days out of the hospital, and he was punished like a goldbricker. Still, a lot of men dropped out, because so many had been sick.

The scuttlebutt was that they were going to retake Wake Island, where marines had been captured. Murray's strength was seeping back. At least the climate in New Zealand was bracing and healthy. He made friends, one of the other Parris Islanders who had ended up in this outfit, Jack Robelet from Maine, and the only other Jew, Harvey Meyerhoff from San Diego, who had joined up because he thought of the Marines as a local service, with the boot camp only a few miles from his parents' gas station.

Harvey had sandy wavy hair, light brown eyes and a nose that swerved slightly left from an accident in a high school wrestling match. He spoke in a nasal voice with a slightly melancholy air, a spaniel who had learned to mistrust but found it against the grain of his good nature.

Jack was short and sleek, otterlike. His hair was dark, his eyes dark, his complexion ruddy. He was brighter than Harvey but less educated. He had grown up bilingual, his parents speaking French at home but school conducted entirely in English, in a town where the lower classes were solidly French. He had expected to go to work in the paper mill where his father worked, but what he loved to do was play the fiddle. He could also whittle dogs, cats, a mermaid, a man in the moon with Harvey's leftward leaning nose. Jack was the youngest of the three, as Murray at twenty-two was the oldest, but Jack seemed older than Harvey.

Jack had married a girl named Gisele who looked enough like him in photos to have been a sister or cousin. They corresponded in French. Gisele had a job in a shoe factory, making boots for the Army.

Murray had worked hard to establish those two friendships fast, because he couldn't survive without buddies. As a Jew, as some kind of intellectual, he would be the butt of every sadistic joke if he stayed aloof. Jack for all his small size had a reputation for being fast and hard in a fight and for attracting girls without apparent effort. At the local dances, women always found him. Murray had only to stand with Jack and pretty soon women were flirting with him too.

The first time he had to make a decision was after a dance near Camp McKay. He kept thinking he would just let the evening drift a little longer, because it felt good to be with a woman, even a plain young woman who laughed too much. He ended up in bed with her. It was fast and furtive, in her friend's house. He had to be back at camp by curfew. The next day, he waited to see if he would feel guilty, but he felt nothing in particular, except that he had had a mildly good time. He saw her a few times more and then they were shipped out. They were taken to the New Hebrides to practice amphibious landings. Except for that time hitting the beaches, they spent eighteen days on the transports, jammed in.

He had a dream one night that he came home, and Ruthie was an old, old woman, skinny as a bag of bones with long stringy white hair. It scared him more than his nightmares of combat. Some of the guys in his outfit had got married in New Zealand, including Sergeant Reardon, but none of those women touched Ruthie's hem. Then he had that nightmare.

He believed she was faithful to him, but every time a guy in his outfit got a Dear John letter, he'd wonder if he was taking too much for granted. He also wondered if he should have pressed her to have sex with him, considering that if she did it with him, maybe she would then do it with somebody else. In the hospital, he had felt confident, but now he felt less sure of her, less sure of his judgment in choosing her.

The campaign sounded straightforward. It was not to be Wake Island, but some little bitty island Betio that was part of an atoll called Tarawa, wherever that was. The brass was always picking some dot on the map to jump on. Every one of them seemed to be boiling with Japs, so it didn't seem to matter. This one was supposed to be a healthier climate than the Canal, but hell had a better climate than the Canal. It was described as two miles long and half a mile wide, an island that they could swarm over and clean up in one day.

The Navy was blasting the shit out of the Japs, a bombardment that wouldn't leave a structure standing, and then they would just waltz in and mop up. No jungle here. It sounded almost too good to be true. For three days the ships and the carrier based bombers had been pounding the hunk of dirt and coral rock. Their mission was described to them in their briefing as a police action. They were wakened in the night for a breakfast of steak, potatoes and eggs. Then before five
A
.
M
. came the signal, “Land the landing force.” Murray followed Harvey and Jack over the side into a Higgins boat. Then they transferred into an amphtrac, an amphibious tractor.