The Godfather Returns (41 page)

Every Marine in the platoon loved him. Many shed unashamed tears.

Michael, who shed nothing in boot camp but a few harmless pounds, again marveled at the genius of what had been inflicted upon him.

A few months later, Tony Ferraro was securing an island so small it didn’t have a name or a military purpose either when a Japanese sniper shot him right in the heart.

Before dawn, the men grabbed their rifles, shouldered their seabags, and stood at attention beside a row of idling trucks. A corporal with a thick southern accent called out names and assignments. He butchered
Corleone,
which Michael had expected. He was shocked, though, about what the corporal said next.

Camp Elliott, M1 rifle, infantry.
Michael Corleone was going to the Pacific.

His dream of helping to liberate Italy was shattered. But what was he going to do, write his congressman? It was probably his congressman (after no more than a nod from Michael’s father) who’d rigged this in the first place.

Michael let nothing show. A Marine goes where he’s sent.

A southerner already on the Camp Elliott truck extended his hand. “Welcome aboard, Dago boy!” he said, pulling Michael up.

That was the Marine name for San Diego:
Dago.
Michael knew how else the man meant it, but he didn’t rise to the bait. They were Marines first, Americans second. Whatever else they were came after that.

Michael had never seen the West before, either. He spent the better part of the trip at the troop-train window, mesmerized. It was a good way to see what he was fighting for. Nothing could have prepared him for the size, grandeur, and beauty of this country. The farther west he went, the more he fell in love with the craggy, improbable landscape.

They stopped for a desert training session about thirty miles from Las Vegas, where the first big casino had opened months earlier. That night, Michael killed a rabbit with his bare hands and ate its stringy meat in a cold arroyo, staring at the otherworldly glow from the town that visionary men like him were destined to transform into an industry that would still be there, thriving, long after the fall of the Axis powers, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union, after most of America’s factories and steel mills went broke or moved to Southeast Asia.

In San Diego, Michael went through another few weeks of lectures and training, hand-to-hand combat, swimming tests, all the finishing touches, but when it came time to ship out, his heart again sunk. He’d been assigned to guard detail. Indefinitely.

The first chance he got, he went to a pay phone and called Tom. The Hagens were having dinner. A baby screamed in the background.

“I’m going to ask you something, Tom. If you lie to me, I’ll know. Things will never be the same between us.”

“Any question that starts out like that,” Tom said, “is one a man shouldn’t ask.”

Michael was young and undeterred. There would come a time when he’d have understood that Tom had just answered the question Michael was about to ask: “Did Pop have anything to do with my assignment?”

“Your assignment to do what?” Tom said.

Michael lowered his voice. “I did
not
join the Corps to be a cop.”

“You’re a cop?” Hagen said.

Michael hung up on him. A few days later, Michael pulled shore patrol and stood on the docks with his rifle shouldered, watching as men he’d come to trust shipped out, the air thick with bragging about all the Japs they were about to kill. He never saw any of those men again.

The worst guard detail job was making civilians follow the blackout law. People think their circumstances are special, and it’s impossible to reason with them. The first few exasperating nights of this, Michael wanted to smash in their smooth, self-important faces with the butt of his rifle, but he soon came up with a better idea. His CO, who had an even lower opinion of civilians, thought it was brilliant. “I never thought I’d say this to an Italian fella,” the CO said, “but you may be officer material.”

Michael took two other men and went to an oil storage facility north of the city, right on the coast. Two big oil tanks, both empty. It was a nice change of pace to be away from the whiny civilians and also to have a chance to make use of the training he’d had in explosives.

The next day, the newspapers and the radio (their anonymous source was Michael himself, pretending to be the CO) reported that the oil tanks they’d blown up had been hit by a Jap sub that—because of the illegal city lights—had no trouble hitting its target.

The blackout was much easier to enforce after that.

Michael went up the chain of command at Camp Elliott, trying to get reassigned. He applied for pilot training. At the beginning of the war, pilots had to be college graduates, but the rule was changed so that anyone with a 117 on his college entrance exam was eligible. Michael took the test, got a 130, but nothing happened. After one of the many times he stood at attention for a four-hour shift outside Admiral King’s office, Michael managed to get a word with him. The admiral promised to look into it personally. He even sounded optimistic about a transfer to the European theater. Nothing came of it. Michael was there a year but it felt like ten.

Finally it dawned on him that the admiral’s clerk filled out all the admiral’s paperwork and signed most of it. Michael noticed the clerk’s taste in music and arranged front-row seats at the Hollywood Bowl for the clerk and his wife to see the one and only Mr. Johnny Fontane.

Days later, Michael was reassigned to a combat battalion.

It shipped out on a converted luxury liner, painted battleship gray and fitted with guns. The troops were packed on that ship for weeks. They were almost in the harbor before there was any official word they’d be going ashore at Guadalcanal.

The fighting had been going on for months, Jap cruisers still lobbed shells onto the beach at night, and there were still pockets of resistance, including hundreds of men in underground tunnels, but the battle was all but over.

The beach at Guadalcanal was a junkyard of burned vehicles of all kind—tanks, jeeps, amtracs—but when Michael first set eyes on the place, with all those green coconut trees and white sand, it still looked to him like a tropical paradise, minus the girls.

Michael climbed down the cargo nets into a Higgins boat. He heard shelling in the distance, but no one shot at him as they landed. When he reached the beach, he tripped on something soft and went flying. He got up and ran for the tree line. He dove for cover next to a heap of tangled fencing wire and a pile of blackened corpses. The stench wasn’t so much a smell as a taste—burned, decaying meat, far up the nose and back in the throat. Michael looked back at the beach and realized that what he’d tripped on was a body, too.

The Japs left their dead to rot or wash out to sea. Those corpses were the first dead bodies he’d ever seen outside a funeral home.

The salty Marines who greeted the new troops seemed identically filthy, bearded, and tired. They said little. All the loud talk the new arrivals had done in their clean uniforms suddenly seemed like boys playing cowboys and Indians. Those men were
warriors.
When they took Michael on his first patrol, he blasted away at every rustling leaf. They just smirked and kept humping through the jungle. When they hit the dirt, Michael hit it, too. He could be sure a split second later there’d be tracers, bullets, shells, bombs—something coming to kill him.

Michael’s second day on Guadalcanal, he was on sentry at the perimeter of the airstrip. He heard a plane coming. A Navy Hellcat, scraping the treetops and spewing smoke. The pilot crash-landed a hundred yards away. The plane burst into flame. Michael broke into a sprint to try to help the pilot out of there. By then two jeeps full of people had pulled up, and Michael’s platoon leader, Sergeant Hal Mitchell, yelled at him to get back. The flames were too hot. Their fire truck had been bombed. The equipment they used instead could have barely put out a campfire. Michael could see into the cockpit. The pilot, trapped and screaming, looked right at Michael and begged to be shot. Michael gripped his rifle, but his sergeant gave no orders. The screams stopped soon after that. Michael needed to get burn treatment just from standing nearby.

Victory was declared at Guadalcanal a week or so later. The Marines who’d done most of the fighting were rotated out, sent home or at least for some R and R in New Zealand. The replacement troops were left behind to secure the island. On the map Guadalcanal’s just a dot, but it’s a hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, heavily forested with rough terrain and the destruction left behind by a battle that went on for months. Not to mention all the caves.

The caves were a nightmare. Dead bodies of course, deep crevices full of sewage, biting ants an inch long, rats the size of raccoons. The Marines went into the caves in groups of four plus a Doberman. Michael loved the first dog, but after a couple of them got blown up by booby-trapped corpses, he stopped getting attached.

Michael himself captured a grand total of one Jap, emaciated and near death. He propped the man up. The Jap pointed at Michael’s Ka-Bar. “Knife,” he said. He pantomimed shoving it in his guts. Michael wouldn’t give it to him. The man looked relieved.

At first, like nearly all the men on that caves detail, Michael saw it as a salvage operation. He learned to field-strip booty from a dead Jap faster than you could pull out your watch and check the time. Back at camp, the market for these things was flooded, and the best items left the island with the Marines who’d done most of the fighting. But an enterprising man can find a way. For Michael Corleone, it was the native people. Any gear that was useful in the home was easy to sell locally. Michael traded a lot of what he found for fresh fish. All Marines love a brother in arms who can improve on the lousy food, especially in a war zone.

One morning, though, Michael woke up and saw a pet cockatoo he’d gotten from a native for a carton of smokes get swallowed whole by one of those rats. He shooed the rat out of the tent, and when he did he looked up and saw the biggest spiderweb he’d ever seen, stretched between two coconut trees. The spider had caught a seagull in it. The gull was wrapped up, and the spider was eating it. Also, another dog died. Some days go that way. They were about to blow one last cave and go back to the base camp when Michael noticed a crayon drawing on the ground. It struck him as odd that some Jap was in here passing the time coloring a picture. Michael bent over. There was a whole stack of drawings. The one on top had an airplane in the sky with a meatball on the side and smiling people on the ground waving up at it. There was one of a family at a dinner table with an empty place setting, one of a princess, and several more of ponies. Just a regular little girl drawing pictures of ponies to send to her daddy, who probably died fighting a war whose course he couldn’t have changed one way or the other. Michael smoothed them out and set them down. He gave the signal to blow the cave.

He got back to camp and heard that Sicily had been liberated. Michael Corleone never again took anything off the enemy that he didn’t need for his own survival.

Compared to a lot of others, Michael’s battalion had it easy on Guadalcanal. They fared well during skirmishes on some of the surrounding islands, too.

Peleliu was another story. They were going in first. Cannon fodder.

The convoy that loaded onto the ship for the invasion looked like the Okies heading west. Every inch of the deck was crammed with men and machines, stacked high and covered with a patchwork of tarps. The heat was unbearable, a hundred and ten in the day and ninety at night. There wasn’t enough room below for everyone to sleep. They bunked on the deck, in or underneath trucks, anywhere they could find shade. Michael only pretended to sleep. Even the saltiest veterans on the ship looked pale and shaky.

By the time Peleliu came into view all there was to see was a wall of smoke and flame. Dozens of battleships pounded the island with sixteen-inch shells that sounded like airborne freight trains. Cruisers peppered it with smaller mortars. Soon the sound of all the guns bombarding Peleliu became one deafening thunder. The noise felt like it was pressing down on him. The whole ship throbbed with it. The air smelled like diesel fuel. The invasion force piled into amphibious tractors and Higgins boats and squatted down below the gunwales.

They went right into the middle of it. The air was full of the snapping of bullets. The smoke was so thick Michael couldn’t imagine how the driver knew where to go. Michael felt the amtrac scrape coral. Sergeant Mitchell shouted the order to hit the beach. Michael jumped out and ran. Everything was smoke and chaos. He was aware of men falling all around him and screams of pain, but he kept his head down and hit the deck alongside two other Marines behind a fallen tree. Up and down the beach, amtracs exploded and burned and sometimes men staggered out of them and were cut to pieces by machine-gun fire. Michael saw the deaths of at least a hundred of his brothers in arms. Men he loved and trusted, and he was not, even then, a man much given to trust. But all he felt was nothing. A blur. He’d been shot himself, on the side of his neck. Just a nick, but it bled like mad. Michael had no idea until the man beside him, a corporal from Connecticut named Hank Vogelsong, asked if he was all right.

In combat, no one ever really knows what’s going on. Somewhere far behind them was a colonel in charge of all this who didn’t know which way their guns were pointing. Someone Michael didn’t know and who’d probably never lay eyes on him had decided he was expendable. Not Michael
personally.
It’s not personal, just war. And Michael was a pawn. All he tried to do at Peleliu was not die. Nothing smart or brave. He was just luckier than the thousand other guys from his division who died that day.

Once enough of them made it across the beach, they were able to advance inland and start stacking rocks and debris so they could return fire. Enemy fire slowed, but still Michael was pinned down that whole first night. They’d apparently given up on those banzai attacks Michael had trained for, and there was never any chance to mow them down.