The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps Read online

  “It’s just more garbage from that little New York Jew,” said Isabel in a flat exasperated tone. “He certainly loves the limelight.” Her remark, while fairly typical of her diction, was not as anti-Semitic as it sounded since Isabel was neither less nor more prone to bigotry than numberless nicely bred Virginia women of her place and time. She was far less anti-Jewish than madly pro-everything that Jews were not and that she was blessed enough to be: an alumna of Randolph-Macon Women’s College (which had enrolled only Anglo-Saxons) and a member of both the Episcopal Church and the Tidewater Garden Club, two sublimely Virginian and goyish institutions. In fact, giving her credit, which I honestly tried to do at every turn, I had noted that from time to time she had spoken with some warmth of various local Jewish citizens whose names cropped up over the dinner table. She was a passionate churchgoer and devotee of the Gospels. Southern Baptists and other lower-class sects might have bred anti-Semites, but her brand of well-mannered Episcopalianism would have not permitted the vulgarity of overt prejudice concerning Jews. Thus, “that little New York Jew” was pretty innocuous, and not so much intolerant as ignorant since the New York Jew in question, Lou Rabinowitz (whose picture in the paper she had not seen, as I had), was actually well over six feet tall, towering above his spindly client Booker Mason, the rapist singled out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as the principal in a constitutional test case. He really did love the limelight, Lou Rabinowitz, with his cape, his ascot tie, and Barrymore profile, but he fascinated me, and as I followed him in the news I perceived that he was bent on turning the justice system of Virginia upside down.

  “It’s not garbage!” I answered back, a little too loudly. “And so what if he loves the limelight! He’s trying to bring this dumb state into the twentieth century!” Rabinowitz’s incessantly spouted facts and statistics came pouring out of me. “Did you know, Isabel, that Virginia is one of just five states—all of them southern—that keep the death penalty for rape? And what about this! Did you know that over the years in Ole Virginny four hundred and seventy-five white men have been convicted of rape with no executions, while forty-eight colored rapists have gone to the fucking electric chair? It’s a fucking scandal!”

  “Mind your language!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Daily life in the marines had been so foul-mouthed that in the aftermath I had trouble curbing my tongue. “I’m sorry but I don’t think you understand, Isabel, how medieval it is to have such a law!”

  Over her face there came a drawn and long-suffering expression I had come to know well. It usually foretold commentary that subtly burnished her own image. “By and large I’ve had nothing but the most cordial relationship with nigra men. The orderlies at the hospitals where I’ve served have been mostly hardworking, responsible men with whom I’ve worked side by side and to whom I’ve always made the gift of my trust!” (“Gift of my trust.” Jesus! I thought.) “But you must keep in mind that here in the South male nigras have had some kind of unnatural sexual need to dominate white females—”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” I interrupted, aware that the situation was beginning to veer out of control. From my mouth flew a piece of French toast. Fearful that this morning we might, finally, be at each other’s throats, knowing that I’d better throttle back my accelerating rage, I nonetheless helplessly charged on. I threw my napkin down and rose to my feet, overturning the coffee cup and the syrup crock, simultaneously, catastrophically, spreading the dark unholy mess across the table. “This idea I just can’t bear! This idea in the head of every cretinous blonde in Dixie—that around the next corner lurks a rampaging black beast ready to get into her hot little twat—” I turned and fled.

  But I was almost instantly aware of a need to salvage the situation. Standing on the screened-in front porch, pulse pounding and in the throes of hyperventilation, I realized I’d made a mistake. It was I, after all, who had flown off the handle, lost aplomb, and therefore lost the skirmish, and I knew I’d have to make amends. And better now than even a few moments later. I whirled about and returned to the table, whispering my apologies as I clumsily helped her clean up the spill. “Paul, let’s just drop the subject,” she muttered. I sat down again and gloomily resumed chewing and reading. So I’d lost the skirmish. But I felt that neither of us had won or lost important points. We were at our customary tense stalemate.

  Silently and, I thought, with a promptness that seemed a little too dutiful, she poured me a fresh cup of coffee. This I sipped with one hand while with the other I flattened the copy of the New Yorker and continued reading. I absorbed the early ordeals of Dr. Fujii, Father Kleinsorge, and Miss Toshiko Sasaki: Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

  The first chapter ended there. It was terrific stuff. Hersey’s writing was so chiseled, so detailed, and, in its laconically low-keyed way, so urgent that I had to force myself to stop, knowing I’d be able to savor the rest of the text later on in the day. I got up, uttered a “thank you” to Isabel that was a touch too polite (an unctuousness verging on parody that I really didn’t intend) and wandered back out onto the front porch again. The morning was breathless, windless, like the mouth of an oven. Over the vast expanse of the harbor there was a curtain of hot shimmering haze. In the channel five or six freighters and tankers, looking like small model ships from this distance, moved sluggishly toward the sea. Far beyond them there was a battleship and the outlines of what appeared to be two heavy cruisers, anchored in the calm waters off the naval station. I couldn’t be sure but the big one, the leviathan, the battlewagon with its guns jutting in lethal profile, had the look of the Missouri. Hersey’s description had left me a little feverish, having tapped into some fragile ancient memory, and I was struck by an immediate association: only last year, less than a month after the ceiling fell on Miss Toshiko Sasaki, two of her midget countrymen, dressed ludicrously in top hats and full-dress suits and looking less like diplomats than undersized undertakers, had stood on the deck of that selfsame ship—the Missouri now riding on the far horizon—and signed papers ending the war that nearly ended the life of Paul Whitehurst …

  I suddenly remembered how fucking scared I’d been, there on Saipan. I remembered the lagoon beach and the glorious sunsets sliding down over the Philippine Sea. I remembered, too, how the beach itself was still littered with the jagged metal junk from the American assault the previous summer, although with caution, pussyfooting among the rocks and debris, you could always find a decent enough spot for swimming. The tents of our company bivouac were laid out alongside a dusty road the Seabees had bulldozed through the coral after the marines and army troops had wrested the island from the Japs, months before we replacements arrived. A thousand miles northwest lay Okinawa, and from that battle the wounded were being transferred from huge floating infirmaries with names like Comfort and Mercy to the naval hospital not far down the coast from our encampment. Along the road, night and day, a stream of ambulances came with their freight: the gravely hurt, the paralyzed and the amputees and the head trauma cases and the other wreckage from what turned out to be a mammoth land battle.

  Actually, I’d just missed the battle. During the landing in April our division had been employed in a diversionary operation—a feint—off the southeast coast of the island. Our presence had been intended to draw the Japs off balance while our other two divisions went ashore (unopposed, as it turned out) on the western beaches. Then we steamed back to the safety, the calm, the virtual stateside coziness of Saipan. Here began to brew my desperate internal conflict. For while the warrior in me—the self-consciously ballsy kid who’
d joined the marines for the glamour and danger—lamented not seeing action, there was another, more sensible part of myself that felt immense relief at this reprieve. And reprieve it was. For all of us knew that the invasion of Japan was in the offing and we’d be involved in no more feints or diversions. We’d be in the vanguard. For the first time, I was terribly afraid. And I was ashamed of my fear.

  In the evenings we’d spend our last weary moments—our respite from hours of combat training—lolling around in our tents and watching with morbid fixation the parade of ambulances; our eyes tracked these dust-caked vans through a thick haze of cigarette smoke that rose and fell in bluish undulations. My Pocket Book of Verse, which I’d lugged around in my seabag all through my Marine Corps career—from the V-12 unit at Duke to boot camp at Parris Island to Hawaii and, finally, Saipan—had bulged out and was close to decomposition in the humid air, but on these evenings I’d lie on my cot and read again from A. E. Housman and Swinburne and Omar Khayyám or some other moony fatalist or master of Weltschmerz, while the tropical dusk would grow murky blue and Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” or a Tommy Dorsey tune, would sound faintly from a portable record player or radio, drawing forth from my breast a spasm of hopeless, cloying homesickness.

  Then I’d get distracted by the ambulances. The cavalcade was hypnotic to watch and just as harrowing. There was a particular hummock of coral that caused the green vans to slow to a crawl, clashing gears as they shifted down. At first these passages over the coral had been uneventful, but the big bump became more ragged and worn away, and I still had the memory of one ambulance that stalled, then jerked back and forth, jostling its poor passenger until the voice from within screamed “Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus!” again and again. I heard screams like this more than once. Poetry was no remedy for such a sound, and so I’d close the book and lie there in a numb trance, trying to shut out all thought, all thought of past or future, focusing on the tent’s plywood deck, where usually there was at least one huge greenish snail with a shell the size of a ping-pong ball propelling itself laboriously forward and trailing a wake of mucilaginous yellowish-white slime with the hue and consistency of semen. Great African snails they were called and they slid all over the island, numberless, like a second landing force; they woke us up at night and we actually heard them dragging, sibilantly, their tracks across the flooring, where they collided against each other with a tiny report like the cracking open of walnuts.

  The fucking snails were always getting squashed beneath our field boots, making a tiny mess that reminded me of the fragility of my own corporeal being. It didn’t take long for the instruments of modern warfare to turn a human body into such a repulsive emulsion. Would I be reduced to an escargot’s viscous glob? Or did one escape, almost literally, by the skin of one’s teeth? One of the riflemen in my platoon, a big muscular farm boy from South Dakota, had seen, strewn on the Tarawa beachhead, a string of guts twelve feet long belonging to the marine who, only seconds before the mortar blast, had been his best buddy. Nearly all the combat vets had endured such grisly traumas. Here during last year’s landing on Saipan my new platoon sergeant, a onetime trapeze artist from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had survived (with only a cut lip and a lingering deafness) the explosion from a Jap knee mortar shell that vaporized the other two occupants of his foxhole. Would I avoid the worst like these guys or would I, when I finally stumbled ashore on the Japanese mainland, be immolated in one foul form or another, consumed by fire or rent apart by steel or crushed like a snail?

  Gazing across the water at the distant outline of the Missouri, I recalled that stifling tent. Such thoughts had been torment. As I lay on my cot, The Pocket Book of Verse would slip from my hand and fear—vile, cold fear—would begin to steal through my flesh like some puzzling sickness. I actually felt my extremities grow numb, as if the blood had drained from my toes and fingers, and the sensation caused me both alarm and shame. Did my tentmates, Stiles and Veneris, the two platoon leaders whose cots lay so closely jammed next to mine, feel the same terror? Did their bowels loosen like mine at the mere thought of the coming invasion? I knew they were scared. We joked, God how we joked—we joked all the time about our future trial—but this was a form of wisecracking, smart-ass bravado, cheap banter. I could never know the depths of their fear. It was a region I dared not explore. In our smothering proximity we shared everything else—snores and farts and bad breath and odorous feet. Even the clumsy stealth of jerking off was a matter for shared joking—the unsuppressed moan, the vibrating sheet glimpsed in the dawn light. Beatin’ your meat again, Veneris! But somehow I knew we could never share real fear. Was theirs as nearly unbearable as mine, this dread that wrapped me in a blanket woven of many clammy hands? Or was their mastery over their fear simple bravery in itself—something I could never possess?

  Often I thought it was creepy to feel this fear in such a seductive place. Saipan was really a bowl of tropical Jell-O. Even in the muggy rainy season there were glowing days that made me mourn the recent fate of this lush Technicolor landscape, shattered by gunfire and trampled by so many boots and fires and tank treads. Most of the islands that marines had fought over and secured had been jungle horrors infested by disease and rot or were sun-scorched coral outcroppings worthless as real estate and in strategic terms scarcely worth being conquered, much less being the cause of the thousands of American lives destroyed in their capture. But Saipan was actually—I couldn’t resist the word—lovable, or would be under peacetime conditions, with a jungle of hibiscus and flame trees and bougainvillea exuding an urgent exotic odor that was dispersed on balmy breezes and conjured up visions (whenever I allowed myself to think the war might ever end) of Pan American Clippers bearing their cargoes of hot honeymooners panting to get laid or otherwise to disport themselves in swank palm-thatched huts on the very beach of our company bivouac. Jesus, I thought, they’d probably even be getting sex that was air-conditioned. As I lay in the tent on some mornings, just at dawn, inhaling the flowered air was like the sweetest aphrodisiac and I’d get tremendously stirred up with lewd fantasies that for a single moment, arresting me in rapture, would wipe out my fear. It was the merest instant but it helped. Only a self-induced sexual climax had the capacity to obliterate the future, and the unspeakable dread of it dwelling in my heart.

  As July wore on, the daily procession of ambulances dwindled down to one or two every few hours, then ceased altogether—a sign that the Okinawa battle was now history. But an ambulance was not the only memento mori, and there were other auguries capable of scaring us shitless. The word came down through dispatches on the Armed Forces Radio, and spread rapidly as scuttlebutt all through the encampment, that on the Japanese mainland the civilian population had gone berserk; they were arming themselves to the teeth—old men, women, and hysterical kids. The Jap defeat on Okinawa, far from crushing the national spirit, had aroused the citizens to a new resolve, and they’d be waiting for us with every primitive weapon they could lay their hands on. On a bright morning after hearing this freakish news I had one of those strangling nightmares from which one awakes with heartbeat amok. The dream had a jerky clarity, like a newsreel clip. In some Osaka suburb I was leading my platoon through clouds of smoke as we roamed about in house-to-house fighting. All of a sudden there rushed at me a murderous little woman in a kimono and with one of those ivory doodads in her hair; screaming banzais and on the point of harpooning me with a bamboo stick, squarely through the gut, she instantly metamorphosed into a nattering wee manicurist busily attending to my nails.

  One evening startling news circulated: all the officers in the division were being ordered to assemble immediately in the huge amphitheater at the far end of the beach. Such a muster of officers had never happened before. Almost at once the rumor flew about that we were gathering to learn about the invasion, though precisely what no one could even guess. Just after chow in the mess tent, at around six o’clock, I walked with Stiles and Veneris down a path through a sc
rubby pandanus-pine grove bordering the lagoon beach and onto the beach itself, a stretch of clean powdery sand cleared of the landing rubble and set apart for swimming. I’d been there many times and so was familiar with the droll monstrosity on the giant poster an engineer outfit had stuck up on a stanchion—a creation executed by some marine who had been a cartoonist in civilian life. It was a bespectacled squinty-eyed Jap soldier portrayed as a dementedly grinning rat. KNOW YOUR ENEMY was the legend beneath the profoundly repulsive effigy complete with shitty-looking cap, buck teeth, whiskers, pink watery eyes, a coiling pink tail, and—drawn with such subtlety that one didn’t immediately notice it—an elongated pink cock gripped in a hairy paw. It was this last detail, usually eliciting a slow double take, that got at everyone’s funny bone, especially the old-timers who’d been through the meat grinders on Guadalcanal and Tarawa and here on Saipan and whose hatred for the Japs was like an ongoing lust. Aided by the Marine Corps habit of uglifying, whenever possible, the names of natural splendors it encroached upon, the poster had caused this portion of the shoreline to be called Rat Beach, and as we trudged along its edge, mostly silent, I think all of us felt the same desperate unease, aware that in the amphitheater we were doubtless being prepared to receive momentous tidings.

  Finally Stiles spoke up. “Jesus, I hope this is it. We wait around any longer we’ll go nuts.”

  Veneris put in: “Maybe they’re going to give us a landing date. I hope the fuck it’s soon.”