On the first day of November the Second Division left Wellington, presumably on maneuvers at Hawkes Bay again, but ending up instead at Nouméa on the French island of New Caledonia. By the thirteenth Ishmael’s regiment was on board the Heywood, a transport ship traveling with more than half of the Third Fleet – frigates, destroyers, light and heavy cruisers, half a dozen battleships – all headed for an unknown destination. On the second day his company was assembled on the top deck and told that they were moving toward Tarawa atoll, where they would go ashore at Betio, a strongly defended island. A major stood in front of them sucking on his pipe stem, with his right elbow tucked into his left palm. The idea, he explained, was to let the navy obliterate the place – it was less than two square miles of coral sand – then wade in and mop up the leftovers. The Jap commander, he said, had boasted that Betio could not be successfully invaded by even a force of a .million soldiers with a thousand years to do battle. The major pulled his pipe from his mouth and proclaimed the Japanese commander laughable in this regard. He predicted a battle lasting two days at most, with few if any marine casualties. It was a matter the navy guns would take care of, he repeated, a tailor-made place for shipboard artillery to do the dirty work.
On the night of the nineteenth a quarter moon rose over the sea while the fleet stood seven miles off Tarawa. Ishmael ate a last meal on the Heywood’s messing deck with Ernest Testaverde, a boy he liked, an anti-tank gunner from Delaware. They ate steak and eggs, fried potatoes and coffee, and then Testaverde put down his plate and took a pad of paper and a pen from his pocket. He began to write a letter home.
‘You better write one yourself,’ he said to Ishmael. ‘Last chance you’re going to get, you know.’
‘Last chance?’ answered Ishmael. ‘There’s no one I really want to write to in that case. I – ’
‘It isn’t up to you,’ said Testaverde. ‘So just in case – write a letter.’
Ishmael went below and got his pad of paper. He sat on the top deck with his back against a stanchion and composed a letter to Hatsue. From where he sat he could see twenty other men, all of them writing intently. It was warm for so late at night, and the men all looked comfortable with their collars open and the sleeves of their uniform shirts rolled up. Ishmael told Hatsue how he was about to go ashore on an island in the South Pacific and that his job was to kill people who looked like her – as many of them as he could. What did she think about that? he wrote. How did that make her feel? He said that his numbness was a terrible thing, he didn’t feel anything except that he looked forward to killing as many Japs as possible, he was angry at them and wanted their deaths – all of them, he wrote; he felt hatred. He explained to her the nature of his hatred and told her she was as responsible for it as anyone in the world. In fact, he hated her now. He didn’t want to hate her, but since this was a last letter he felt bound to tell the truth as completely as he could – he hated her with everything in his heart, he wrote, and it felt good to him to write it in just that way. ‘I hate you with all my heart,’ he wrote. ‘I hate you, Hatsue, I hate you always.’ It was at this point that he ripped the sheet from his writing pad, crumpled it, and threw it into the sea. He watched it floating on the water for a few seconds, then threw his pad in after it.
At 3:20 in the morning, wide awake in his bunk, Ishmael heard the order delivered to the troop hold: ‘All marines lay topside to your debarkation stations!’ He sat up and watched Ernest Testaverde lace his boots and then began to lace his own, stopping once to drink from his canteen – ‘Dry mouth,’ he said to Ernest. ‘You want some water before we die?’
‘Lace up,’ said Ernest. ‘Get topside.’
They went up, dragging their gear along with them, and Ishmael felt wide awake now. There were already more than three hundred men squatting and kneeling on the top deck of the Heywood, rearranging their equipment in the dark – C rations, canteens, entrenching tools, gas masks, rounds of ammunition, steel helmets. There had been no firing yet, and it did not feel so much like war – another nighttime exercise in tropical waters. Ishmael heard the whine of the landing craft plummeting over the sheaves of the boat blocks; then men were going overboard into them, snaking their way down the cargo nets with packs on their backs and their helmets strapped on and timing their lunges to coincide with the bobbing of the boats below.
Ismael watched a half-dozen navy corpsmen busily packing medical field kits and stacking ambulatory litters. This was something he hadn’t seen on maneuvers, and he pointed it out to Testaverde, who shrugged and went back to counting antitank rounds. Ishmael turned on his TBX, listened for a moment to the static in the headphones, then switched it off and waited. He did not want to strap it to his back too early, then have to stand around with its weight burdening him until his turn came to crawl down the cargo net. Sitting beside his gear, peering out to sea, he tried to make out Betio, but the island could not be seen. Each of the LCP landing craft that had left the Heywood in the past half hour appeared as a dark spot against the water, though – Ishmael counted three dozen of them.
The three squads of Third Platoon were briefed on the top deck by a First Lieutenant Pavelman from San Antonio, who explained in detail the role of B Company in the larger scheme of things. He had before him a relief model of the island made out of three square sections of rubber and with a pointer began to point out its topographical features, doing so with no flourishes. Amtracs, he said, were going in first, followed by waves of Higgins boats. There was going to be air cover – dive-bombers and Hellcats on strafing runs, then B-24s from out of Ellice Island, right up to the point of attack. B Company would go ashore at a place called Beach Red Two, he said, and the mortar section would place itself at the disposal of the weapons platoon leader, a Second Lieutenant Pratt, for the purpose of establishing a base of fire. Second Platoon would come in simultaneously on Pratt’s right and advance over the seawall behind its light machine guns, then collect on higher ground and move inland. There were bunkers and pillboxes, said Lieutenant Pavelman, directly south of Beach Red Two; marine intelligence was furthermore of the opinion that the Jap command bunker was perhaps located in this area, possibly at the eastern end of the airfield. Second Platoon should look for it and fix the location of air vents for the demolitions teams, who would come in directly behind. Three minutes after Second went ashore, Third Platoon – Ishmael’s – would beach and come in close or, according to the judgment of Lieutenant Bellows, go to the support of whichever platoon appeared to have made a solid advance. The platoon could expect support from K Company, which was scheduled to come in with the headquarters group and a heavy machine-gun platoon just behind the Third. They would land from more amtracs, which could be used against the seawall; the theory, said Lieutenant Pavelman, was to come in fast and hard with full support behind the initial wave of riflemen. ‘Another name for it is suckers first,’ someone in Third Platoon called out bitterly, but no one laughed at this. Pavelman pushed on mechanically with his briefing: rifle platoons, he explained, would cut a careful but persistent advance, followed by reinforcements in the second wave, command and support in the third tractor wave, then more rifle companies and more support and command, until the beachhead was well established. Then, with his hands at his belt, Lieutenant Pavelman called on a Chaplain Thomas to lead them in a recitation of the twenty-third psalm and in the singing of ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’ When they were done, everyone fell silent on the deck and the chaplain called on the men to contemplate their relationship to God and Jesus. ‘That’s fine,’ a soldier called out in the darkness. ‘But, look here, I’m an atheist, sir, the exception to the rule that there ain’t no atheists in foxholes or firefights, and I’m gonna stay a goddamn atheist to the goddamn end, goddamn it!’
‘So be it,’ Chaplain Thomas answered softly. ‘And may God bless you just the same, my friend.’
Ishmael began to wonder how any of this would direct him once he hit the beach. He had listened to Lieutenant Pavelman as close
ly as he could but had not discerned the relationship between his words and the specific direction in which his own feet should move once he landed on Betio. Why was he going there? To do what exactly? The chaplain was passing out pieces of lucky candy and rolls of military toilet paper, and Ishmael took one of each from him chiefly because everyone else had done so. The chaplain, a Colt .45 strapped to his belt, encouraged him to take more of the candy – ‘It’s good stuff,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ They were peppermints, and Ishmael popped one in his mouth, then strapped his radio onto his back and pulled himself into a standing position. The entire weight of his equipment, he guessed, was more than eighty-five pounds.
It was not easy to crawl down the cargo net so loaded, but Ishmael had been able to practice on maneuvers and had taught himself to relax. Halfway down he spit out the peppermint and leaned out over the water. A whistling had begun to sound in his ears, growing louder by the second. He turned to look, and at the same moment a shell plunged into the sea seventy-five feet to stern. A spray of salt water broke across the boat, dousing the soldiers there; the phosphorescence boiled up green and luminous against the darkness. The boy next to Ishmael, a Private Jim Harvey from Carson City, Nevada, swore softly under his breath twice, then leaned in against the net. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘A goddamn shell. I don’t believe this shit.’
‘Me neither,’ said Ishmael.
‘I thought they blew the shit out of this place,’ Jim Harvey complained. ‘I thought they dusted all the big guns off before we had to go in. Jesus fucking Christ,’ he added.
‘The big boys are still coming out from Ellice,’ Walter Bennett down the net pointed out. ‘They’re gonna dust the Japs with daisy cutters before we ever hit the sand.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ said another voice. ‘There aren’t going to be no daisy cutters coming. You’re a motherfucking dreamer, Walter.’
‘A fucking Jap shell,’ Jim Harvey said. ‘Goddamn it to shit, I – ’
But another shell came whistling down and slammed into the water a hundred yards in front of them, sending up a momentary geyser.
‘Fuckers!’ Private Harvey yelled. ‘I thought they softened the bastards up! Thought we was just mopping up!’
‘They been fucking up for days, lobbing ’em long,’ a boy named Larry Jackson explained calmly. ‘All that softening-up bullshit don’t mean a rat’s ass. They fucked it all up, and now we’re going in, and there’s all sorts of fucking Jap fire.’
‘Jesus,’ said Jim Harvey. ‘I can’t believe this bullshit. What the fuck is going on here?’
The LCP pushed on toward Betio with Third Platoon aboard. Ishmael could hear the whistling of shells now distantly across the water. He sat low beneath a plywood gunnel a navy crew had jury-rigged during down time in Nouméa. He was weighted down now heavily by his pack, with his helmet pulled to his brow. He could hear Jim Harvey chattering hopefully: ‘The fuckers been pounding ’em up for days, right? There ain’t nothing left there but sand and bullshit and a whole lot of little Jap pieces. That’s what everyone’s been hearing. Madsen read it off the radio and Bledsoe was right there in the room with him, it’s no bullshit, they fucking dusted ’em … ’
The seas, as it turned out, contrary to all plans, were running high and choppy. Ishmael did not stand up well on high seas and had become addicted to Dramamine. He swallowed two with water from his belt canteen and peered out over the plywood gunnel with his helmet on but not strapped. The boat thrummed under him, and he saw that they were running alongside three other transports immediately off to the left. He could see the men in the boat next to his; one of them had lit a cigarette and the glow of its tip was visible, though he’d tucked it down inside his cradled palm. Ishmael lowered himself against his pack again, shut his eyes, and put his fingers in his ears. He tried not to think about any of it.
For three hours they pushed toward Betio, the waves coming in constantly over the gunnels and soaking everybody on board. The island became visible as a low black line almost on the horizon. Ishmael stood to stretch his legs now. There were fires glowing all up and down Betio, and a man beside him with a waterproof watch was attempting to rime the battleship salvos being fired on the island. On the other side two men were complaining bitterly about an Admiral Hill who was in charge of things and who had timed matters such that they were going in at daylight instead of under cover of darkness. They could see that the navy was firing heavily – black smoke rose from the island in great billows – and this began to have a positive influence on the disposition of Third Platoon. ‘There ain’t gonna be nothing left of the fuckers,’ Private Harvey asserted. ‘Them five-inch guns’ll do the trick. They’re pounding the shit out of them.’
Fifteen minutes later they ran the big current at the entrance to Tarawa lagoon. They bobbed past two destroyers, the Dashiell and the Ringgold, both of which were firing in waves at the beach; the noise of it was deafening, louder than anything Ishmael had ever heard. Strapping his helmet on now, he decided he was done looking over the gunnel. He had peered up once and seen three amphibious tractors going up on the beach far ahead. They were taking a lot of machine-gun fire; one fell down into a shell hole; another caught fire and halted. There were no more divebombers coming in at all, and the B-24s had not appeared. The best thing to do was to tuck down, strap up, and keep well out of the line of fire. Ishmael had somehow arrived at the war moment little boys are prone to dream about. He was storming a beach, he was a marine radioman, and he felt like shitting his pants, literally. He could feel his rectum puckering.
‘Holy shit,’ Jim Harvey was saying. ‘Goddamn it to hell, the motherfuckers, goddamn those assholes, the fucking shitheads, goddamn it, this ain’t right!’
The squad leader, a man named Rich Hinkle from Yreka, California, who had made Ishmael an excellent chess partner in New Zealand, was the first among them to die. The transport ground up suddenly on the reef – they were still more than five hundred yards from the beach – and the men sat looking at one another for thirty seconds or more while artillery pinged off die LCP’s port side. ‘There’s bigger stuff coming,’ Hinkle yelled above the din. ‘We’d better get the hell out of here. Let’s move it! Move! Let’s go!’ ‘You first,’ somebody answered.
Hinkle went over the starboard gunnel and dropped down into the water. Men began to follow him, including Ishmael Chambers, who was manuevering his eighty-five-pound pack over the side when Hinkle was shot in the face and went down, and then the man just behind him was shot, too, and the top of his head came off. Ishmael wrestled his pack into the lagoon and splashed in hard behind it. He submerged himself for as long as he could, came up only for a single breath – he could see small-arms fire flashing along the shore – then went deep again. When he came up he saw that everybody – the ammo carriers, the demolitions guys, the machine gunners, everybody – they were all dropping everything into the water and going under like Ishmael.
He swam back behind the LCP with three dozen other soldiers. The navy coxswain was still exerting himself, cursing and ramming the throttle back and forth, to free the landing craft from the reef. Lieutenant Bellows was screaming at the men on board who had refused to go over the gunnels. ‘Fuck you, Bellows,’ somebody kept saying. ‘You go first!’ screamed someone else. Ishmael recognized the voice of Private Harvey, now at a hysterical pitch.
The LCP took more small-arms fire, and the crowd of men who had crouched behind it began to wade toward shore. Ishmael kept to the middle of the group, swimming and keeping low, breaststroking, and tried to think of himself as a dead marine floating harmlessly in Betio’s lagoon, a corpse borne by the current. The men were in chest-high water now, some of them carrying rifles above their heads, and they were dropping into seas already tinged pink by the blood of other men in front of them. Ishmael saw men go lurching down, saw the machine-gun fire whipping the water’s surface, and lowered himself even farther. In the shallows ahead of him a Private Newland stood up to run for the seawall, and then ano
ther man he didn’t know made a run for it and was shot dead in the surf, and then a third man ran for it. The fourth, Eric Bledsoe, was shot in the knee and lay down again in the shallows. Ishmael stopped and watched the fifth and sixth men draw fire, then gathered himself and thrashed out of the water while the men ahead of him ran for it. All three of them made the seawall unharmed and crouched there watching Eric Bledsoe; his knee had been shot away.
Ishmael saw Eric Bledsoe bleed to death. Fifty yards away he lay in the surf pleading in a soft voice for help. ‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘Help me, you guys, come on, you guys, fucking help me, please.’ Eric had grown up in Delaware with Ernest Testaverde; they’d gotten drunk together a lot in Wellington. Robert Newland wanted to run out to save him, but Lieutenant Bellows held him back; there was nothing to be done about it, Bellows pointed out, there was far too much gunfire for something like that, the upshot of it all would be two dead men, and everyone silently agreed. Ishmael pushed his body up against the seawall; he was not going to run down the beach again to drag a wounded man to safety, though a part of him wanted to try. What could he have done about it anyway? His equipment was floating in the lagoon. He could not even offer Eric Bledsoe a bandage, much less save his life. He sat there and watched Eric roll over in the surf so that his face was pointing toward the sun. His legs were only partly in the water, and Ishmael could see plainly where one of them had come off and was moving with the undulations of the surf. The boy bled to death and then his leg floated away a few feet on the waves while Ishmael crouched behind the seawall.
At ten o’clock he was still there, unarmed and without a job to do, hunkered down with hundreds of other men who had come ashore and been shot at. There were plenty more dead marines on the beach now, and plenty more of the wounded, too, and the men behind the seawall tried not to listen when they moaned or called out for help. Then a sergeant from J Company, from out of nowhere, it seemed, was suddenly standing above them on the seawall with a cigarette hanging from the comer of his mouth, calling them ‘a bunch of chickenshits.’ He berated them relentlessly, a stream of invective, characterizing them as ‘the sorts of cowards who ought to have your balls chewed off real slow and painful like when this goddamn battle is over,’ men who’d let ‘other men do the dirty work to save your own sorry asses,’ men who ‘aren’t men at all but cornhole-fuckers and jack-off artists with half-inch hard-ons on those days once a year when you can get your sorry dicks to stand at half-mast,’ and so on and so forth, while the men below pleaded with him to take cover and save himself. He refused and was shot through the spine with a shell that ripped open his shirt front and dropped some of his guts onto the beach. The sergeant had no time to be surprised and simply fell over face first into the sand and squarely on top of his own intestines. Nobody said anything.