Goodbye, Darkness (17 page)

After two weeks of deadlock at Ioribaiwa, the momentum shifted to the Allies. On the fifth day of toe-to-toe slugging, Horii disengaged north of the Imita Ridge and began withdrawing. The terrain was just as merciless going the other way, with the additional handicap that the worst of what Australians call “the Wet” — the rainy season — was upon them. The orderly retreat of the Japanese suddenly turned into a rout. Abandoning their weapons and trampling one another underfoot, they fled northward. Elsewhere the Diggers of the Seventh Division and the American GIs of the Forty-first and Thirty-second divisions might have fallen on their rear, but the precipices of the Owen Stanleys made that impossible. And at the end, at Buna, Gona, and, between them, Sanananda Point, the regrouping Nips made a savage, murderous last stand. MacArthur's men, having hacked their way through Papua's dense rainforests, forded its deep rivers, shinnied up its banyan trees for observation, scaled its cliffs, and descended the slopes of the foothills on the far side of the mountains, debouched on a low, flat coastal plain of coconut plantations, missionary settlements, and clusters of thatched shanties. Awaiting them was a desperate army — seventy-five hundred Japanese in front of Buna alone — trained bush fighters at home in the tangled swamps and kunai patches of the Buna plain, entrenched in coconut-log bunkers sheltering Nambus with interlocking fields of fire. Enjoying good lateral communications, they were easily reinforced by fleets of destroyers from Rabaul. In the early weeks of the battle American warplanes from Moresby were turned back over the Owen Stanleys by prodigious cloudbursts in the mountains. Japanese pilots faced no such obstacle; swarms of them flew down from Rabaul's teeming airdromes, making life even more miserable for the drenched Allied soldiers. It says much of the terrain that at one point one of MacArthur's field commanders, a two-star general, had to swim two miles to reach his troops.

Gona was overrun in the second week of December 1942, and Buna and Sanananda in January 1943. “No more Bunas!” MacArthur vowed. The key fight, however, was for the air overhead. In early March B-24s and B-17s of the U.S. Army Air Corps won the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, sinking at least eight transports bringing enemy reinforcements from Rabaul to Papua. The few Japanese who reached New Guinea from the lost ships had to swim ashore. Tokyo wrote off Papua. Having retaken Milne Bay, MacArthur now seized one Japanese stronghold after another: Wau, Salamaua, Lae, Nadzab, Madang, Aitape, Wewak — bastions which the enemy had thought could hold out for years. Part of the reason for the Allied successes was superior generalship and improved aircraft. But neither of these was responsible for the victory in the Owen Stanleys. That was the feat of MacArthur's finest military weapon, the unsung infantryman, the GI and Digger who endured the cruel jungle and outfought the Japanese man for man. The Allies were, quite simply, better soldiers than the enemy's.

Those of us who fought in the Pacific believed we would be remembered, that schoolchildren would be told of our sacrifices and taught the names of our greatest battles. But we didn't anticipate the velocity of postwar history; didn't realize that events would succeed one another more and more rapidly, in a kind of geometric progression, swamping the recent past in an endless flood of sensationalism; didn't know that instant celebrities would glitter blindingly and then disappear overnight. One of them, Andy Warhol, has prophesied: “In the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.” The fame of most Papuan clashes didn't last even that long. Readers ignorant of New Guinea, preoccupied with the European theater, flipped past newspaper stories of the remote struggle and remembered only the name of MacArthur, who had seen to it that his own name dominated communiqués from the southwest Pacific.

It would be inaccurate to say that names of the old battlefields mean nothing out there today. The truth is more ironic. Incredibly, tourism has become a major industry in New Guinea. Places which were dreaded in the early 1940s have acquired new identities. In tourist brochures Lae, for example, has become a city offering every visitor “an air-conditioned fun time”; one brochure reveals that it now “feasts both the eye and the heart with its abundant evidence of prosperity and civic pride” in “a lush tropical setting” which “encourages golfers to both enjoy and practice their favorite sport.” Rabaul is also endowed with an eighteen-hole golf course; the former Japanese stronghold is “beautiful and spectacular … with its magnificent harbor” that “could hardly be more spectacular,” and visitors are encouraged to explore the twelve miles of Rabaul caves which once sheltered crack Nipponese regiments. Madang “looks like everyone's dream of a Pacific Island resort — and when you land, you are not disappointed.” Milne Bay offers “idyllic atolls” and “sun fun.” Truk, beneath whose waters Hirohito's Fourth Fleet lies rusting (it may be viewed through glass-bottomed tourist boats), offers “air-conditioning in Eden … the waters of the vast lagoon are smooth and clear, a skin-diver's dream, a water skier's delight, a fisherman's paradise.”

It is as though European veterans were invited to “Ski at Bastogne!” or “Surf at Anzio!” The circular for Wewak, where MacArthur bypassed thirty-five thousand Japanese troops, is more evocative; it is said to possess “one of the most remarkable reservoirs of animal, reptile, insect and bird life anywhere.” New Guinea's overall recreation slogan comes even closer — “Papua: it's like every place you've never been” — though in my case even that is inapplicable. New Guinea is very much like another place I have been, a Solomons island which James Michener described as “that godforsaken backwash of the world”; which was known as Pua Pua to the natives; which the Japanese called Gadarukanaru, “KA,” or “The Island of Death”; which Americans knew as Guadalcanal; and which we Marines who served there simply referred to as The Canal.

EASY

The Raggedy Ass Marines

I
n those days all marine corps recruits were assigned to
one of the Corps' two boot camps. Those enlisting west of the Mississippi River were sent to San Diego; those who joined up east of the Mississippi went to Parris Island, South Carolina, an isle whose reputation was just marginally better than those of Alcatraz and Devil's Island. So I was going to see the Deep South after all. Having signed up for four years, or more if the war lasted longer; having sworn that “I will bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America; that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whomsoever; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the Rules and Articles for the Government of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps of the United States” — having, in short, put my life in hock to the most fearsome and hazardous of the country's armed forces — I boarded a special train occupied by other young men who had done the same. We had hardly begun to roll from Springfield when I made a friend in Lawrence Dudley, of Bowdoin. Dudley was heavy, flaxen-haired, and round-shouldered. He knew that once his poor posture had caught the eye of our drill instructor (“DI,” we later learned, was the salty term), he would be in for a hard time. But becoming a Marine was important to him. During his college summers he had worked in the Springfield arsenal as an assistant to John Garand, who had invented the Garand, or M1, rifle, which had replaced the Springfield '03 as America's basic infantry weapon. I had fired the '03 in an ROTC course. Dudley said the M1 was better (he was wrong) and felt, as a testament to his faith, that he should carry one in combat instead of tinkering away the war years in the arsenal, which could have been easily arranged by his friends there.

In Washington we paused for three nighttime hours and were told we could go “ashore” instead of waiting in Union Station. Dudley and I repaired to a nearby nightclub. Neither of us had ever been in one before, and we were appalled. All I can remember is a drunken brunette, apparently a customer, who insisted on taking off all her clothes, and a comedian with a voice that grated like a file who kept breaking himself up by saying: “Damon went out and got Pythias drunk.” It was an introduction to the kind of wartime entertainment available to American enlisted men. Back on the train we slept, and I awoke, trembling with anticipation, in the sacred soil of the old Confederacy. I rushed for the rear platform. Everything I had been told had led me to expect plantations, camellias, and darkies with banjos strumming “Old Black Joe.” Instead I looked out on shabby unpainted shacks and people in rags, all of them barefoot. No Taras, no Scarletts, no Rhetts; just Tobacco Road. And this was
Virginia
, the state of Robert E. Lee. I felt cheated; disinherited; apprehensive. What awaited me on Parris Island, which was grim even by Southern standards? Despair swept me as we reached our destination, heard departing, newly graduated sea soldiers yelling, “You'll be sorreeee!” and saw noncoms in field hats carrying menacing swagger sticks. The NCOs stared at us as though we were some low and disgusting form of animal life. They spat tobacco at our feet and kept calling us “shitheads.”

Astonishingly, I adored Parris Island. Boot camp is a profound shock to most recruits because the Corps begins its job of building men by destroying the identity they brought with them. Their heads are shaved. They are assigned numbers. The DI is their god. He treats them with utter contempt. I am told that corporal punishment has since been banned on the island, but in my day it was quite common to see a DI bloody a man's nose, and some boots were gravely injured, though I know of none who actually died. I recall being baffled later when Patton was reprimanded for slapping a GI. All of us had endured much more than that. The gentlest punishments were those for dropping a rifle (sleeping on eight of them) and for eating candy (carrying an oozing mass of chocolate for two days). If the boot called it “candy” he would have been punished further, the proper expression being
pogey bait
. The Corps had its own language, and boots were required to learn it, just as the inhabitants of an occupied country must learn the conqueror's tongue. A bar was a
slopchute
, a latrine a
head;
swamps were
boondocks
, and field boots,
boondockers
. A rumor was
scuttlebutt
, because that was the name for water fountains, where rumors were spread; a deception was a
snow job
, gossiping was
shooting the breeze
, information was
dope
, news was
the scoop
, confirmed information was
the word
. You said “Aye, aye, sir,” not “Yes, sir.” The nape of the neck was the
stacking swivel
, after a rifle part. An officer promoted from the ranks was a
mustang
. Your company commander was
the skipper
. You never went on leave; you were
granted liberty
, usually in the form of a
forty-eight
or a
seventy-two
, depending on the number of hours you could be absent. If you didn't return by then, you were
over the hill
. Coffee was
Joe
; a coffeepot, a
Joe-pot
. Battle dress was
dungarees
. A cleanup of barracks, no matter how long it lasted, was a
field day;
a necktie was a
field scarf
, drummers and trumpeters were
field musics
. Duffle bags, though indistinguishable from those used by GIs, were
seabags
. To be
under hack
meant to be under arrest. To straighten up was to
square away;
a tough fighter was a
hard-charger;
underwear was
skivvies;
manipulating people was called
working one's bolt. Lad
was a generic term of address for any subordinate, regardless of age. One of my people, a twenty-eight-year-old Vermont school principal, was known, because of his advanced age, as “Pop.” An officer five years his junior would summon him by snapping, “Over here, lad.”

Some of these terms have crept into the language since World War II, but no one outside the service knew them then. Boots had to pick them up fast. They were courting trouble if they described their combat hardware as anything but 782
gear
, that being the number of the form you had to sign as a receipt. It was equally unwise to call a deck a “floor,” a bulkhead a “wall,” an overhead a “ceiling,” a hatch a “door,” or a ladder “stairs.” Every Marine was “Mac” to every other Marine; every U.S. soldier was a “doggie” and was barked at. The Corps' patois was astonishingly varied. To “sight in” or “zero” was to determine, by trial and error, the sight setting necessary to hit a bull's-eye with a given weapon. “Snap in” could mean sighting and aiming an unloaded rifle; it could also mean breaking into, or trying out for, a new job, somewhat like the army's “bucking for.” As a noun, “secure” described an outdated movement in the manual of arms; as a verb, it signified anchoring something in place or ending an activity — thus, when the Battle of Tarawa was won, the island was “secure.” “Survey” was even more flexible. It could mean, not only a medical discharge from the Corps (anyone feigning combat fatigue was “snapping in for a survey”), but also retirement from the Corps, disposing of worn-out clothing or equipment, or taking a second helping of chow. There was even a word for anything which defied description. It was “gizmo.”