Goodbye, Darkness (3 page)

Why had I returned to terror? To be sure, I had been gung ho at the outbreak of war. But I had quickly become a summer soldier and a sunshine patriot. I was indifferent toward rank, and I certainly sought no glory. “We owe God a death,” wrote Shakespeare. So we do, but I hoped God would extend my line of credit indefinitely. I was very young. I hadn't published a short story, fathered a child, or even slept with a girl. And because I am possessed, like most writers, by an intense curiosity, I wanted to stick around until, at the very least, I knew which side had won the war.

So, craftily, I became the least intrepid of warriors, a survivor, not a hero, more terrier than lion. If there was a coward's way I took it. The word
hero,
to me, is redolent of Nelson Eddy in his Smokey Bear hat, with Jeanette MacDonald shrieking in his ear, or of John Wayne being booed in a Hawaiian hospital by an audience of wounded Marines from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, men who had had macho acts, in a phrase of the day, up their asses to their armpits. To be sure, I was not an inept fighter. I was lean and hard and tough and proud. I had tremendous reserves of stamina. I never bolted. I was a crack shot. I had a shifty, shambling run, and a lovely eye for defilade — for what the Duke of Wellington called “dead ground,” that is, a spot shielded from flat-trajectory enemy fire by a natural obstacle, like a tree or a rock — coupled with a good sense of direction and a better sense of ground. To this day I check emergency exits immediately after registering in a hotel, and in bars you will find me occupying a corner table, with my flanks secure.

But that was the sum of my military skills. I had walked through the valley of the shadow of death and had been terribly frightened. Afterward, those few of us in my unit who had survived received a document from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal citing us for “gallantry,” “valor,” “tenacity,” and “extraordinary heroism against enemy Japanese forces,” but those shining words didn't really apply to me. Indeed, at times it seemed to me that they applied to no one except the dead. I agreed with Hemingway: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” For us, they had been Buna and Suribachi; the Kokoda Trail and Tarawa; the First Marine Division and the Eleventh Airborne; the Kumusi and the Asa Kawa; December 7, 1941, and V-J Day. I honored them while hating the whole red and ragged business of war.

By the summer of 1978 I knew that I had to return to the islands. I had to find
out,
and the fact that I couldn't define what I sought merely made the journey inevitable.

So: once more unto the breach.

But first let me introduce myself to myself.

ABLE

From the Argonne to Pearl Harbor

A
t daybreak on friday, november 1
, 1918 —
all saints' day
— the American Expeditionary Force in France launched its final offensive of World War I, sending a huge wedge of fifty-six thousand doughboys to break the back of Erich Ludendorff's last-ditch defenses on the west bank of the Meuse River. At the point of the wedge crouched its spearhead, the Fifth Marines. After five days of waiting in the wilderness of the Forêt d'Argonne, cloaked and soaked in a blinding fog, the leathernecks sprang forward behind a creeping artillery barrage and quickly overran the main trench line on the heights overlooking the Meuse. The Germans fled; their scribbly ditches caved in; apart from stolid machine gunners, who kept their murderous barrels hot to the end, the enemy soldiers became a disorderly mob of refugees. The army commander of the AEF drive, Major General C. P. Summerall, USA, praised the Marines' “brilliant advance,” which had succeeded in “destroying the last stronghold in the Hindenburg Line.” He called it “one of the most remarkable achievements made by any troops in this war. … These results must be attributed to the great dash and speed of the troops, and to the irresistible force with which they struck and overcame the enemy.” “Nothing,” crowed the
New York Times
, “could stop our gallant Devil Dogs.”

That was not entirely true. It never is. Generals and war correspondents are preoccupied with the seizure of objectives, but attacking troops, however victorious, take casualties, individual fighting men who are, in fact, stopped in their tracks. One of the Fifth Marines who fell in no-man's-land that morning was a twenty-two-year-old runner, Lance Corporal William Manchester of Attleboro, Massachusetts, the father of this writer. Lance Corporal Manchester had survived the drives on Soissons and the Saint-Mihiel salient, but this was his unlucky day.

Before dawn he and the rest of his company had stealthily crawled out of their trenches, advanced a thousand yards, and lain down in the mud. Then flares had burst overhead, opening the battle. In a letter dictated to a nurse, Manchester wrote his mother afterward: “At 6:30
A.M.
we started, and believe me we had some barrage. … But the Heinies were chucking over a few themselves, and it was the worst they had — overhead shrapnel. We had advanced about two miles when one busted that had my initials on it. I say initials because it had a chap's name on it that was about ten feet away. He was killed instantly. The first that I realized I had been hit was when my arm grew numb and my shoulder began to ache. One piece went through the shoulder, just missing the shoulder blade. Another went in about 4½ inches below the other, but by some miracle missed my lung. The two wounds together are about eight inches long. The bones were missed but the cords and nerves were cut connecting with my hand.” Later, in what he called a “left handed puzzle,” he told his family that he would soon be sent “to a nerve hospital in Washington D.C. and have another operation. … The operation will be a very slight one for the purpose of tying the nerves when they were out of my shoulder.”

William Manchester, Sr., Fifth Marines, at age twenty-two, in 1919

Like many another casualty trying to spare his parents, he was putting a bright face on what was in reality a desperate business. Indeed, his entire Marine Corps career, beginning with his enlistment in Boston, had been a compendium of American military incompetence. He had spent less than four weeks as a recruit on Parris Island, the Corps' boot camp, and most of that had been occupied building a road. Somehow he had qualified as a sharpshooter with the Springfield 1903 rifle; otherwise he was untrained and unprepared for the fighting in France. Then his voyage across the Atlantic was interrupted when his troopship, the U.S.S.
Henderson
, caught fire three days out of New York; leaving all his personal possessions behind, he was transferred to the U.S.S.
Von Steuben
. As a replacement at Soissons and in the salient he learned something of combat on the job, but he still lacked the animal instincts of the veteran. His worst experience of official ineptitude, however, came after his November 1 wound. It was grave but not mortal; nevertheless, the surgeon at a casualty clearing station, following the French triage principle — concentrating on casualties who could be saved and abandoning those who couldn't — judged his case to be hopeless. Appropriately, on November 2, All Souls' Day, the Day of the Dead, his litter was carried into a tent known as the “moribund ward”; that is, reserved for the doomed. Gangrene had set in. He was left to die.

He lay there in his blood and corrupt flesh for five days, unattended, his death certificate already signed. Three civilians passed through the tent, representing the Knights of Columbus, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army. The first, distributing cigarettes and candy, saw the Masonic ring on his left hand and skipped his cot. The Red Cross man tried to sell him — yes,
sell
him — a pack of cigarettes; Manchester had no money, so he got nothing. This outrageous exploitation of casualties was common in World War I. YMCA men were cigarette salesmen, too, though they had an excuse; at the request of the War Department, they were acting as agents of the army commissary, and the AEF gave nothing away to fighting men who had been so negligent as to get wounded. But millions of Americans had contributed to the Red Cross to ease the lot of the soldiers, and the conduct of some of its agents in hospitals behind the lines was nothing short of criminal. It was the Salvation Army man who finally gave the penniless, suffering lance corporal two packs of Lucky Strikes and tried to cheer him up. As long as he lived, Manchester reached for coins when he passed a Salvation Army tambourine. But he never forgave the Red Cross. Long after his death, his eldest son and namesake, lying in a Saipan hospital, was lent ten dollars by the Red Cross and given specific instruction on how it should be repaid. The son repaid none of it. He felt he owed this default to his father.

On the sixth day in the Argonne a team of navy medical corpsmen, carrying out the dead, found that Lance Corporal Manchester was still alive. They expressed astonishment; much vexed, he testily replied that he had no intention of dying and wanted to be removed from this canvas charnel house. But by now there was no chance of saving his right arm. Although amputation proved to be unnecessary, the limb would be almost useless, a rigid length of bone scarcely covered by flesh, with a claw of clenched fingers at the end. The hole through his shoulder, surrounded by hideous scar tissue, could never be closed.

Transferred to an evacuation hospital and then a base hospital, he was carried aboard the transport
Princess Matoika
in the first week of February 1919, and carried off it in Newport News, Virginia, on February 12. That same day he was admitted to the Norfolk naval hospital. On April 11 a physician noted that “there is complete paralysis and atrophy of the muscles of the right forearm.” On May 30 the Marine Corps reduced him to his precombat rank of private and discharged him as No. 145404, “unfit for service.” Note was made that his eyes were blue, his hair light brown, his vision 20/20, and his height 68 and 3/4 inches. His weight was unmentioned; he had hardly any. Because his signature bore no resemblance to that on his enlistment papers, he had to make his mark,
X
, like an illiterate. Regulations also required that he impress upon his discharge certificate the prints of his right fingers. That being impossible, he had to write awkwardly: “My right hand is paralyzed because of wound received in France, and therefore I cannot make plain fingerprints, so I am using my left hand for this.” In a typical touch of Corps gracelessness, his papers carried the final comment: “Not thought likely to become a public charge.”

The small but plucky Manchester clan is one of New England's oldest, though certainly not richest, families. Thomas Manchester arrived from Yorkshire, England, in 1638, and three generations later, on August 16, 1723, in Little Compton, Rhode Island, Benjamin Manchester married Martha Seabury, a great-granddaughter of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, who, as every schoolchild knows, told her future husband to “speak for yourself” when he came to speak for Myles Standish. Thereafter candor became a family trait, together with piety, belief in the Protestant work ethic, and a powerful sense of sin. Over the next two centuries the tribe produced a score of clergymen, historians, and educators. During the Revolutionary War eighteen Manchesters served under George Washington, including
two
William Manchesters. In the early 1800s the bloodline took to the sea. Its most extraordinary skipper was Amos Manchester, who plied the China trade, walked across Russia on a bet, amassed eighty thousand dollars in 1810, lost it all in a swindle, and wound up digging clams for a living in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Gambling was a family weakness and eventually its undoing. Between them, Richard and his brother Seabury Manchester, grandfather of the World War I Marine and therefore my great-grandfather, owned two stagecoach routes, most of what is now downtown Attleboro, Massachusetts, and a stable of racing horses. They were fascinated by cockfights, however, and they lost their shirts as a result; Seabury's son Raymond inherited nothing. With Raymond the family touched bottom. He was a tubercular manual laborer at the Attleboro railroad depot. Entering this world during the Franco-Prussian War and leaving it during World War II, he spent most of his life putting away a fifth of Scotch a day and warring with his wife, Mary Logan Manchester. He never had a chance against Mary. No one did, not even the Pope. She was one of ten Roman Catholic sisters who emigrated from Ireland during the potato famines. After reading a tract by Mary Baker Eddy, she became a Christian Scientist, never saw a doctor, and buried all her sisters. She lived to be ninety-nine. At the age of ninety-five she was found shingling the roof of her farmhouse. A little Irish blood, like Irish whiskey, goes a long way; her drive was the saving of the family. She passed it along to her four sons, the third of whom was the Argonne casualty.