Islands of the Damned (28 page)

Back in Melbourne, Florence took the tram to the American consulate every Saturday, where she sat waiting patiently for the papers that would allow her to come to the United States. Women who had married American servicemen came and went, but there was nothing else either one of us could do but wait.

My sisters and mother were almost as eager as we were. They had been exchanging letters with Florence for more than a year. As soon as my mother found out we planned to marry, she wrote Florence that we were a simple farm family, not rich or glamorous. Florence wrote back that that was fine with her. She, too, came from a simple working-class family. After that, they hit it off just fine.

The year was almost over before we learned that the gate was finally open. In early January 1947, Florence said good-bye to her family and boarded a ship at Port Melbourne. There were five hundred passengers on board, and four hundred of them were the fiancées of American servicemen. I found us an apartment. It wasn’t the little cottage I’d envisioned those hours daydreaming in tents and foxholes halfway around the world. But it was a start. I had a good job, and she was on her way. She managed the whole thing, lining up passage on the ship and a railroad ticket from San Francisco to Dallas, and wrote me to expect her the morning of January 27.

Riding east on the train she made friends with an older woman, also bound for Dallas. Florence told the woman how she met this American Marine in Australia, how love had triumphed and that she was headed to Dallas to marry him.

The woman looked doubtful.

“Are you sure he’s going to be there at the station?”

“He’ll be there.”

As it turned out, I wasn’t.

I got to the Dallas Union Station that morning in plenty of time for the train. But it wasn’t the train she was on. I inquired when the next train would be in, then went back to the boardinghouse and had breakfast. I got back to the station fifteen minutes late for the next train and finally found Florence standing in the waiting room with her luggage, her new friend standing by her side in case I didn’t show up. Florence looked just like I remembered her, only better. We hugged like any couple in love who haven’t seen each other for years. The woman from the train disappeared. We never did get her name.

Florence had assumed we would be married on February 15, her twenty-first birthday. But we had an apartment. The refrigerator had been delivered. My family had even arranged for the church and a cake. And so on January 29, 1947, two days after she stepped off the train, three years and nine months after we met in Melbourne, my Australian bride and I were married in the Saner Avenue Church of Christ.

Though we had gotten off to a late start, we were like tens of thousands of other new couples in 1947, struggling to realize the American dream. Florence loved my family, and they loved her. She learned all my mother’s favorite recipes and fit right in. Our oldest, Margaret Ann, was born that November. We lived in the apartment for a few more months—T. L. Hudson was our upstairs neighbor—and then bought our first house, a two-bedroom in a quiet neighborhood close in. Vicki Lynn came along in 1950, then Vanessa Jo in 1953. Florence always told her mom she was going to have eleven boys and one girl. When our fourth girl came along in 1955, we said, That’s it, and gave her a boy’s name, Terrie Lee. A few years later we bought a three-bedroom a little farther out. And in 1965, we built our dream house in the country, on a wooded tract overlooking a stream.

I put the war out of my mind and buckled down to work at the Post Office. In 1947 I had my last episode of malaria, which landed me in the veterans’ hospital for a week. I got off the mail route that summer and became a postal clerk. A few years later I started studying for the supervisor’s exam. I went from clerk to line foreman to general foreman to tour superintendent and finally to superintendent of registered mail. Each step of the way I found my old Marine experience stood me well. It was like being a section leader. As I moved from one supervisor’s job to the next, I always made it my business to find out who were the natural leaders, the ones you could depend upon, and who were the troublemakers. And like my old San Diego drill instructors, I never had to yell at anyone to get anything done.

Three of our girls graduated from college. One went to a junior college. Florence and I became grandparents four times over. And then great-grandparents, three times so far. The girls are everything we could want, smart and successful.

In 1956 I took a leave of absence from the Post Office and Florence and I took the girls to Australia to meet her side of the family. We picked up a drive-away car in Dallas and motored up through Colorado and Utah, then on through Lake Tahoe to San Francisco, where we were to board our ship. It was a station wagon, so there was plenty of room for four active children.

We were driving across the Oakland Bay Bridge. Vicki Lynn, who was in her second year of school, was sitting behind me looking out the window at a car in the next lane, when she called out, “Look, Daddy, look! There’s Chineses!”

I glanced to my left. There was a car full of Asians. Chinese or Japanese, I didn’t know which. Instantly this cold chill came over me. They were the first I’d seen since the war.

We stayed in Australia ten months. The Australians are great people. They had three jobs waiting for me when we arrived. They made us feel welcome. But in the end, we came home, to the United States.

For thirty-five years I pushed the war out of my mind. I never talked about it to anyone, period. There were two or three Marines that worked down at the Post Office. Sometimes we’d joke about the funny things that had happened. But we never really talked about the war. I just held it all back.

In 1979, I got a phone call. Stumpy Stanley, our old company commander, Bill Leyden and a few others from the First Marine Division had been sitting in a New York bar having a drink. One of them said, “We should get everybody together again.” Before they split up, each promised to call other Marines he knew from the war and pass the word along. When the call came around to me, I started calling the guys I knew. I’d kept up with Jim Burke, of course. He was living in Clinton, Iowa. I remembered John Redifer lived in Portland, Oregon. Marmet lived in Ohio. Tom Matheney lived in Monterey, Tennessee. When I didn’t know their number, I called information. And so it went until I’d found twelve people.

In 1980 twenty of us from K Company went to the Marine Association First Division reunion in Indianapolis. Gene Sledge was there, Mo Darsey, our old gunny sergeant. Johnny Marmet. Tom Matheney. The whole crowd. Guys I had spent months and even years with, guys I had fought alongside.

We’d sit around and talk. One of them would say, “Hey, Burgin, do you remember the day such-and-such happened?”

I’d say, “No, I don’t remember that.”

And they’d say, “You ought to. You were there.”

They’d talk about how this happened, how that happened. Go into details about what went on. I’d just sit there.

Then, all of a sudden it would flash through my mind, and I could see it again as plain as day.

I started attending the reunions every year after that.

At the 1983 reunion, Stumpy Stanley said to me, “I talked to Jim Kornaizl the other day. He said to tell you hello.”

“Who? You talked to who?”

“Jim Kornaizl.”

“I don’t know a Jim Kornaizl.”

“He sure knows you. That’s for sure.”

It bugged me after that that I could not recall Jim Kornaizl. The next year, 1984, we held our reunion in Milwaukee.

A guy was coming down the hallway toward me in the hotel. The moment I saw him, it all came back. The flash of the shell. He and T. L. Hudson on the ground, wounded, and Kornaizl twitching from head to foot.

Why I had put that out of my head I do not know. I had remembered Hudson getting hit. But not Kornaizl.

We talked for a while. He had spent eighteen months in the hospital. They had put a steel plate in his skull, and when he started having convulsions again they opened him up and cleaned it out and put in another steel plate.

Within a few years I got to the point where I could talk about the war any time, any place, with anybody. It got me thinking: This needs to be told, what we went through.

Florence and I had the air-conditioner man out to the house the other day for a little preseason maintenance. He was looking at the pictures on my wall, at my KA-BAR in its frame, at the flag and the Bronze Star I got in 1946.

I asked him if he’d ever heard of Peleliu.

No, he’d never heard of Peleliu.

I didn’t figure he had. I told him we’d had sixty-five hundred casualties in thirty days on that little island. I didn’t tell him about the flies and the maggots and the rot, the bad water and heat and caves, about how you never knew where the next bullet was going to come from.

The big famous battles—Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Okinawa. Everybody’s heard about them. Nobody’s heard of Peleliu. They don’t teach history anymore.

So I made up my mind to teach it. There’s only a few of us left who know anything about Peleliu. When we started our reunions we had 250 on our roster. Now we’re down to forty. We lost five since our last reunion. Only a few of us are left who remember. We have to tell the stories, so this and future generations will know what happened. So it doesn’t get forgotten.

What sticks with me now is not so much the pain and terror and sorrow of the war, though I remember that well enough. What really sticks with me is the honor I had of defending my country, and of serving in the company of these men. They were good Marines, the finest, every one of them. You can’t say anything better about a man.

Semper Fi!

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