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

  I said not a word as all hope withered inside me. Oh Jesus, I thought, I hope the fuck it’s never. I couldn’t even work up a falsely brave remark, and I felt twisted with envy at their breezy offhandedness. That wasn’t all that I envied about Stiles and Veneris, both of them blandly efficient athletic mesomorphs who could do with maddening grace what I could do only with dogged effort: strip down a weapon, set up a mortar emplacement, follow a compass heading on a night march, quickly find fields of fire for a machine gun, carry out a snappy rifle inspection, even keep their dungarees looking crisp and clean. I wasn’t a bad platoon leader; in fact, I was pretty good. I was certainly not a fuckup—I was too desperate to avoid failure and disgrace for that—but in facing certain petty military challenges, duck soup for most lieutenants, I often barely squeaked by. I was happy to be just average. I was happy too that I got along so well with these guys. I’d been boringly and single-mindedly an aesthete in college, a devotee of quality lit and chamber music, with tendencies that might have been known as “neurasthenic.” My tentmates had each been standout jocks and were also gorgeous—the blond Stiles on a champion swimming team at Yale; the Greek Veneris, with skin like dark enamel, an all–Big Ten tackle at Ohio State. Such looks and pedigrees gave them a big leg up with the kids in their platoons, while I, skinny and knobby-kneed, almost dared not let my troops see me reading anything so sissified as The Pocket Book of Verse.

  The amphitheater, a natural coral bowl surrounded by palm trees, was already partly filled with the hundreds of officers and warrant officers of every rank in our division. This vast space served the needs of the army and navy personnel on the island as well as the marines. The week before, Bob Hope had entertained all the troops from the stage, and the week before that we’d sat through an evening of Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, featuring among other warblers Ish Kabibble and Wee Bonnie Baker, whose infantile voice in a song called “Oh Johnny!” had been one of many dim-witted numbers that had held me captive during my pubescence. If two hours of Kay Kyser had been an ordeal, the same could not be said for Bob Hope; he’d been extravagantly, bigheartedly funny and had brought along a troupe of showgirls, gorgeous long-legged creatures in feathers and G-strings who displayed a stupefying amount of bare flesh as they wiggled their butts down upon the screaming mob. It was another surreal dimension added to this ghoulish Pacific war: the bimbos debarking from gargantuan transport planes, flashing their teeth and gyrating their groins, then becoming almost instantly airborne again, leaving behind thousands of doomed devils with aching gonads. As Stiles observed, the Jap army had at least one thing: they supplied their troops with girls you could actually stick something into.

  We waited and fidgeted, minding our behavior. Officers were supposed to exhibit decorum, so we spoke in low voices; when enlisted men had to wait for long they usually became a little raucous and horsed around, grab-assing—it was one of their privileges. I thought I’d managed to dominate my fear but I was wrong. The despondent mood I’d been trying to ward off all day overtook me while we waited, sitting on the hard benches. I was seized by a somber unfocused anxiety; I tried to make it disappear but there was no way I could beat back the waves of panic. I kept talking to myself, falling into a little monologue: Just stay calm, relax, everything’s going to be all right. Suddenly I saw our battalion commander, Colonel Timothy Halloran (“Happy” was his nickname), take a seat on a nearby bench, and the mere reality of his presence soothed me a bit, as so often happened when he hove into sight. We young officers were all nuts about Happy Halloran, who had a carefully cultivated, corny Irish brogue, a waxed handlebar mustache, a Navy Cross he’d won at the terrible shambles of Tarawa (where, badly wounded, he’d led an assault on a Jap pillbox, killing a slew of the enemy with their own machine gun), and, above all, an intuitive sense of leadership that allowed him to wield strict authority without losing the common touch. Unlike the other services, the Marine Corps has always harbored flamboyant characters and nonconformists, and Happy Halloran filled that bill; we loved him for his slightly wacky heterodoxy, always playfully challenging the System. I happened to glance at the colonel just as he happened to glance at me, and he gave me a wink; I felt a little better.

  When at last, long after nightfall, the glittering bright lights went up on the stage and the presentation commenced, and a parade of high-ranking Fleet Marine Force officers—big shots from Hawaii—made their speeches, we began slowly to realize a cold fact: they had nothing new to tell us. “Security” and “secrecy” were the watchwords. The assault date was set, announced one intelligence colonel, but for security reasons it could not be revealed. Another officer took the stage. The site of the invasion of Japan had been selected, he proclaimed, and the beaches had now been carefully evaluated for all pertinent factors bearing upon the successful amphibious landing, but secrecy prevented an announcement of their location. “Then why the fuck are we sitting here?” I heard Happy Halloran mutter. I could see the back of his neck redden; he was stewing. A couple of officers near him snickered. Drops of rain spattered our brows, the palm trees thrashed in the rising wind. Still another officer from Pearl Harbor, a brigadier general, spoke from the podium; his gravelly voice boomed over the loudspeakers: “Gentlemen, we are faced with a difficult paradox. It would be reassuring if, after the destruction wrought upon the Japanese army at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it could be reported that the morale of their troops had been shattered, and their resources undermined, making the coming invasion easier on us. But the plain truth is—and our intelligence reports are clear on this matter—the Jap forces are prepared more than ever before to die for the emperor, to fight to the last man …” He droned on. “More fucking blather,” I heard Colonel Halloran say. “Everybody knows the fucking Jap cocksuckers are a bunch of suicidal apes.”

  Even the star of the evening, an admiral, had nothing new to say, or rather, what he did have to say was, we all sensed, ripe hokum. He appeared under the brilliant klieg lights, the first admiral most of us junior officers had ever laid eyes on. His name was Crews. Dressed in khaki, silver stars glittering on his open collar, chewing on a meerschaum pipe, he ambled to the center of the stage with a sheaf of notes clutched in his hand. He was angular and professorial-looking, and he peered at us owlishly through steel-rimmed glasses with lenses that grotesquely magnified his eyes. Plainly he was a desk admiral whose seagoing days were far in the past, and plainly, too, his propaganda mission was to bring us tidings of hope and cheer. Happy Halloran gave a jolly cackle and pounded his fist in his hand as he identified the lecturer, whom he’d encountered before. “I’ll be a son-ofabitch if it isn’t Good News Crews,” he said to those nearby. “The fucking windbag, he’s going to feed us the same load of garbage!” And when the admiral began to speak—“Good news, gentlemen!” was his salutation—Halloran muttered hoarsely: “We had this guy just before Tarawa. He told us he had good news. He said after the navy shelled the island it would be a piece of cake. And look what happened!” Halloran needed to say no more. The Tarawa calamity was already a Pacific legend: how naval intelligence, relying on obsolete charts, had miscalculated the tides so flagrantly that the marine troops in their landing vessels were forced to disembark on coral reefs and then wade ashore for hundreds of yards through seas, exposed to killing fire from Japanese machine guns. In the history of warfare no amphibious assault had witnessed such bloodletting. Scores of slaughtered men caused the white-capped waves to turn incarnadine. Small wonder that Happy Halloran detested the navy and its spokesmen. “Listen to this creep!” he said.

  “Gentlemen, it’s good news indeed,” Admiral Crews continued. “I’m here to describe the manner in which naval forces will support you in your operation against the Japanese homeland. Let me say that our support cannot, of course, supplant in any way the marines’ incomparable mastery of amphibious warfare, yet we are prepared to make your task easier.” He spoke for nearly an hour. He said that while the present war had seen invasions that were comple
x and audacious enterprises—North Africa, Normandy, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—they would be dwarfed by the magnitude of the coming event, doubtless the mightiest naval offensive in history. He told of the armada of vessels that would be involved—the battleships, the cruisers, the destroyers, the submarines—and the titanic fleet of aircraft carriers with their hundreds of planes, altogether the largest assembly of ships ever set afloat on any ocean. He dwelt on the thousands of tons of supplies the cargo ships would deliver, transported to the Japanese shores from depots across the breadth of the Pacific, from California to Hawaii, the Philippines, Espíritu Santo, and the Solomons. But chiefly the admiral extolled the might of naval gunfire, whose concentration on the landing area, he said, gesturing heavenward with his meerschaum, would be the heaviest ever to support American troops. Together with precision attacks from carrier-based planes, the pre-invasion bombardment would pour fire day after day onto the beaches with such intensity—he paused, weighing the phrase, then said, “with such stupendous intensity”—that the very ground upon which the Japanese defenses stood would be entirely obliterated. Furthermore, he added, should the marines be properly apprehensive about underwater obstacles, these would be effectively eliminated well before D-day by teams of naval frogmen who would clear the beaches …

  “I cannot believe this dingbat!” I heard Happy Halloran burst out, a little too loud, just before the admiral wound down his spiel in a monotonous statistical stutter of tonnages, man-hours, payloads, cubic yards. I could sense a tropical downpour in the offing. Greenish lightning flashed across the ocean darkness, and there was a distant grumble of thunder. Halloran had risen from his bench and was clowning around in the shadows, mimicking the admiral’s pipe gestures and delighting the younger officers who, like me, were as much in awe of his maverick brashness, his contempt for the brainless minutiae and hollow trumpery of military life, as they were of his ability to command for himself—when needed—absolute respect. Few senior officers had the capacity to give their troops a big laugh, and the single feature that made tolerable my vision of D-day, if there was such a feature, was having Happy Halloran lead me into the jaws of death.

  Now I saw that, having come to the period of questions and answers, the admiral—who appeared slightly deaf—had cupped a hand around one ear and was attempting to answer a question from Halloran; it was a query delivered across the arena in a voice deliberately pitched a little too low for the admiral to hear. Beneath his huge handlebar the colonel’s teeth flashed a malevolent grin. The excremental trope was, I thought, stunning: “Are you aware, sir, that you are full of ostrich shit?”

  It was wonderfully deft in its controlled daring: a lieutenant colonel baiting a rear admiral in public was a scary tightrope act even in a community as notably hostile to navy brass as the marines. The impertinence was astounding, courting severe punishment. But somehow Happy Halloran pulled it off; a ripple of laughter rolled through the crowd of officers, then became a sustained roar as the admiral persisted with the puzzled “What did he say? What did he say?” and the wind squall out of the ocean blew stronger, scattering papers and maps and adding its own sudden savage bluster to the general din.

  Shortly after this, when the assembly broke up, we found ourselves running. We were running like hell; that is, the battalion officers—eighteen or twenty of us platoon leaders and company commanders and a major named Williams, the battalion exec—were trailing Happy Halloran at full speed down the hard sands of Rat Beach through a rainstorm so dense that the water filled our mouths as we ran and half-blinded our sight. Lightning bolts struck the ocean and the bordering jungle, and we hollered with alarm. We ran like maniacs. We were alone in this weird spree; only our colonel in his dotty genius would have had the gall to lead his officers on such a gallop after a mind-deadening lecture and a sixteen-hour day that had already left us aching with fatigue. But though we were in misery over what was happening, there was not one of us, gasping for breath and choking on rain, who wasn’t somehow secretly proud that the colonel’s inspired whim was testing our endurance to the breaking point. To patiently absorb this extra shred of suffering was one reason we’d joined the marines. And so, glad masochists all, we fled down the sand in the darkness, following our dungaree-clad leader with his Jerry Colonna mustache and his comically off-pitch baritone that suddenly burst forth with “The Marines’ Hymn,” which we all joined in singing, or tried to in the heavy pain of our breathing. I recall thinking what a blessed release this was, what a deliverance from the demons of my fear. If I could be caught up in pure motion like this, or if, as sometimes happened to me in the jungle, I could stay focused on some knotty weapons problems or question of tactics, I’d manage to keep the terror perpetually at bay. Action freed me. It was only in the quiet hours that I felt the lethal dread.

  We halted at last and the weather cleared suddenly and beautifully, revealing a blazing full moon. It was like coming forth from a stifling tunnel. The colonel would have run us on and on into the night, I thought, had it not been for a stone cliff jutting out into the sea; here we came up short and ceased our sprint, utterly pooped. Happy Halloran shouted “Fall out!” and we let ourselves sprawl on the sand, all of us silent for long minutes in the moonlight. None of us had canteens, and our thirst was fierce. Despite the rain we were sweating. The colonel was as bushed as the rest of us. I saw him squatting at the water’s edge wheezing hard, cooling his face with handfuls of the surf. After a while he stood up, and when we too began to rise to our feet he bade us stay where we were. He said, “Smoking lamp’s lit,” and most of us groped for cigarette packs as we tried to find dry matches amid the recesses of our sodden dungarees. Zippo lighters flared in the dark. For minutes no one spoke while we sat there amid the lavender fumes, awaiting what we all sensed had to be a declaration. And as we gazed up at Happy Halloran we saw that the comedian’s face had been transformed; he looked back at us with rage and sadness. His lips parted to say something but then, before he could speak, we heard a rumble of engines ascending in the air out of the south. It was a squadron of army air force bombers from the airfield on Tinian Island, across the channel, and they cast down upon us their furious vibrations as they gained altitude and made a slow banking turn in their flight toward Japan. It was known as the nightly milk run. We looked up at their undersides as they climbed over the beach, glimpsed the swollen bellies pregnant with bombs that in some hour of the coming day would be unloosed upon Kobe or Yokohama or Tokyo; the noise was brutal but the planes rose with synchronous grace and when they flew past the moon, hugely silhouetted there, I was reminded of their witches’ errand and the awful multitude of deaths down in those paper-and-bamboo cities. It didn’t bother me too much since I had caught the contagion of Jap hatred and, anyway, now (as the planes vanished northward) I was ready to hang on to Happy Halloran’s every word.

  “Never believe the fucking navy, lads,” the colonel said. “They will betray you over and over. Before Iwo, the admirals said that rock would be smashed to smithereens. They said those sixteen-inch guns would destroy every living thing on the island, even the rats and ants. But you know who died on D-day and afterward. You know how many thousands of brave marines were destroyed.” He began to stroll among us, tapping us gently on our shoulders and keeping up a murmurous flow of talk—talk tinged with a melancholy I’d never heard in him before, yet at the same time there was a note that was confident, reassuring. His presence struck some hopelessly romantic chord in me, and I couldn’t help but think of King Harry and those troubled yeoman soldiers in the aching dark before Agincourt. “I’ll be brief,” he said. “We’re all thirsty and tired and we need to go to sleep. But I’ve got to tell you something. You guys have helped make this battalion the best one in the division, probably in the whole Marine Corps. Your NCOs are magnificent. You have wonderful men under your command, and when this showdown comes you’re going to get the kind of performance every battalion commander dreams about.” He paused for an instant, then c
ontinued: “But I don’t want to give you any shit like that admiral. I want to speak the real truth. What we’re facing is the toughest fight in the history of the marines and we right here tonight are going to be in the toughest part of the fight. I’m not telling you something new. Every one of you knows that because we were in floating reserve at Okinawa and only made that decoy landing, it puts us number one in line to be the spearhead division for Japan. Furthermore, lads, because this regiment, and especially this battalion, is such a fucking good one, I have almost no doubt that we will be the first to put foot on shore.”

  I’d more or less been aware of this for weeks, or at least I’d suspected it gravely, like everyone else, but to hear the colonel verify the fact, in effect reading out our death warrant, sent my stomach churning in spasms; I saw some of the other lieutenants stir in the sand, as if his words had gripped them, too, with their desperate meaning. “Japan’s a big stinking fortress now,” he went on, “and you know from Okinawa what kind of fanatic fighting they’re going to put up to the very end. The miserable bastards are fighters whatever the fuck else they are—subhuman, I guess. I don’t know where they are but the landing beaches will be as impregnable as any such beaches can be made. They’ll have guns zeroed in to blow us apart. But we will have to go in and take that beachhead, even if it means that many of us won’t be coming back.” The moon cast Happy Halloran’s shadow over me, enveloping me in darkness as he drew near, and when I felt his fingertips lightly trace their way across my shoulder it was like a sudden benediction, calming—if only for an instant—my sick disquiet. “I don’t have much else to say, lads, except that I think the world of you people.” After a pause he said again, “I really think the world of you. When the time comes I know you’ll do your best—and that’s the best the Marine Corps has to offer. Which is the best in the fucking universe. Now let’s saddle up and walk home.”