Goodbye, Darkness

  It would be inaccurate to say that names of the old battlefields mean nothing out there today. The truth is more ironic. Incredibly, tourism has become a major industry in New Guinea. Places which were dreaded in the early 1940s have acquired new identities. In tourist brochures Lae, for example, has become a city offering every visitor “an air-conditioned fun time”; one brochure reveals that it now “feasts both the eye and the heart with its abundant evidence of prosperity and civic pride” in “a lush tropical setting” which “encourages golfers to both enjoy and practice their favorite sport.” Rabaul is also endowed with an eighteen-hole golf course; the former Japanese stronghold is “beautiful and spectacular … with its magnificent harbor” that “could hardly be more spectacular,” and visitors are encouraged to explore the twelve miles of Rabaul caves which once sheltered crack Nipponese regiments. Madang “looks like everyone's dream of a Pacific Island resort — and when you land, you are not disappointed.” Milne Bay offers “idyllic atolls” and “sun fun.” Truk, beneath whose waters Hirohito's Fourth Fleet lies rusting (it may be viewed through glass-bottomed tourist boats), offers “air-conditioning in Eden … the waters of the vast lagoon are smooth and clear, a skin-diver's dream, a water skier's delight, a fisherman's paradise.”

  It is as though European veterans were invited to “Ski at Bastogne!” or “Surf at Anzio!” The circular for Wewak, where MacArthur bypassed thirty-five thousand Japanese troops, is more evocative; it is said to possess “one of the most remarkable reservoirs of animal, reptile, insect and bird life anywhere.” New Guinea's overall recreation slogan comes even closer — “Papua: it's like every place you've never been” — though in my case even that is inapplicable. New Guinea is very much like another place I have been, a Solomons island which James Michener described as “that godforsaken backwash of the world”; which was known as Pua Pua to the natives; which the Japanese called Gadarukanaru, “KA,” or “The Island of Death”; which Americans knew as Guadalcanal; and which we Marines who served there simply referred to as The Canal.

  EASY

  The Raggedy Ass Marines

  In those days all marine corps recruits were assigned to one of the Corps' two boot camps. Those enlisting west of the Mississippi River were sent to San Diego; those who joined up east of the Mississippi went to Parris Island, South Carolina, an isle whose reputation was just marginally better than those of Alcatraz and Devil's Island. So I was going to see the Deep South after all. Having signed up for four years, or more if the war lasted longer; having sworn that “I will bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America; that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whomsoever; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the Rules and Articles for the Government of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps of the United States” — having, in short, put my life in hock to the most fearsome and hazardous of the country's armed forces — I boarded a special train occupied by other young men who had done the same. We had hardly begun to roll from Springfield when I made a friend in Lawrence Dudley, of Bowdoin. Dudley was heavy, flaxen-haired, and round-shouldered. He knew that once his poor posture had caught the eye of our drill instructor (“DI,” we later learned, was the salty term), he would be in for a hard time. But becoming a Marine was important to him. During his college summers he had worked in the Springfield arsenal as an assistant to John Garand, who had invented the Garand, or M1, rifle, which had replaced the Springfield '03 as America's basic infantry weapon. I had fired the '03 in an ROTC course. Dudley said the M1 was better (he was wrong) and felt, as a testament to his faith, that he should carry one in combat instead of tinkering away the war years in the arsenal, which could have been easily arranged by his friends there.

  In Washington we paused for three nighttime hours and were told we could go “ashore” instead of waiting in Union Station. Dudley and I repaired to a nearby nightclub. Neither of us had ever been in one before, and we were appalled. All I can remember is a drunken brunette, apparently a customer, who insisted on taking off all her clothes, and a comedian with a voice that grated like a file who kept breaking himself up by saying: “Damon went out and got Pythias drunk.” It was an introduction to the kind of wartime entertainment available to American enlisted men. Back on the train we slept, and I awoke, trembling with anticipation, in the sacred soil of the old Confederacy. I rushed for the rear platform. Everything I had been told had led me to expect plantations, camellias, and darkies with banjos strumming “Old Black Joe.” Instead I looked out on shabby unpainted shacks and people in rags, all of them barefoot. No Taras, no Scarletts, no Rhetts; just Tobacco Road. And this was Virginia, the state of Robert E. Lee. I felt cheated; disinherited; apprehensive. What awaited me on Parris Island, which was grim even by Southern standards? Despair swept me as we reached our destination, heard departing, newly graduated sea soldiers yelling, “You'll be sorreeee!” and saw noncoms in field hats carrying menacing swagger sticks. The NCOs stared at us as though we were some low and disgusting form of animal life. They spat tobacco at our feet and kept calling us “shitheads.”

  Astonishingly, I adored Parris Island. Boot camp is a profound shock to most recruits because the Corps begins its job of building men by destroying the identity they brought with them. Their heads are shaved. They are assigned numbers. The DI is their god. He treats them with utter contempt. I am told that corporal punishment has since been banned on the island, but in my day it was quite common to see a DI bloody a man's nose, and some boots were gravely injured, though I know of none who actually died. I recall being baffled later when Patton was reprimanded for slapping a GI. All of us had endured much more than that. The gentlest punishments were those for dropping a rifle (sleeping on eight of them) and for eating candy (carrying an oozing mass of chocolate for two days). If the boot called it “candy” he would have been punished further, the proper expression being pogey bait. The Corps had its own language, and boots were required to learn it, just as the inhabitants of an occupied country must learn the conqueror's tongue. A bar was a slopchute, a latrine a head; swamps were boondocks, and field boots, boondockers. A rumor was scuttlebutt, because that was the name for water fountains, where rumors were spread; a deception was a snow job, gossiping was shooting the breeze, information was dope, news was the scoop, confirmed information was the word. You said “Aye, aye, sir,” not “Yes, sir.” The nape of the neck was the stacking swivel, after a rifle part. An officer promoted from the ranks was a mustang. Your company commander was the skipper. You never went on leave; you were granted liberty, usually in the form of a forty-eight or a seventy-two, depending on the number of hours you could be absent. If you didn't return by then, you were over the hill. Coffee was Joe; a coffeepot, a Joe-pot. Battle dress was dungarees. A cleanup of barracks, no matter how long it lasted, was a field day; a necktie was a field scarf, drummers and trumpeters were field musics. Duffle bags, though indistinguishable from those used by GIs, were seabags. To be under hack meant to be under arrest. To straighten up was to square away; a tough fighter was a hard-charger; underwear was skivvies; manipulating people was called working one's bolt. Lad was a generic term of address for any subordinate, regardless of age. One of my people, a twenty-eight-year-old Vermont school principal, was known, because of his advanced age, as “Pop.” An officer five years his junior would summon him by snapping, “Over here, lad.”

  Some of these terms have crept into the language since World War II, but no one outside the service knew them then. Boots had to pick them up fast. They were courting trouble if they described their combat hardware as anything but 782 gear, that being the number of the form you had to sign as a receipt. It was equally unwise to call a deck a “floor,” a bulkhead a “wall,” an overhead a “ceiling,” a hatch a “door,” or a ladder “stairs.” Every Marine was “Mac” to every other Marine; every U.S. soldier was a “doggie” and was barked at. The Corps'
patois was astonishingly varied. To “sight in” or “zero” was to determine, by trial and error, the sight setting necessary to hit a bull's-eye with a given weapon. “Snap in” could mean sighting and aiming an unloaded rifle; it could also mean breaking into, or trying out for, a new job, somewhat like the army's “bucking for.” As a noun, “secure” described an outdated movement in the manual of arms; as a verb, it signified anchoring something in place or ending an activity — thus, when the Battle of Tarawa was won, the island was “secure.” “Survey” was even more flexible. It could mean, not only a medical discharge from the Corps (anyone feigning combat fatigue was “snapping in for a survey”), but also retirement from the Corps, disposing of worn-out clothing or equipment, or taking a second helping of chow. There was even a word for anything which defied description. It was “gizmo.”

  On Parris Island these and all other customs of the boot's new way of life were flouted at great risk. You were told that there were three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Marine Corps way. The Corps way was uncompromising. Failure to salute your superiors — including privates first class — brought swift retribution. The worst discipline I saw came during floodlit midnight calisthenics. In one common exercise we paired off; each boot hoisted his rifle as you would hoist a battering ram and placed the butt against his buddy's forehead. The buddy would touch the butt and duck. The man with the rifle was supposed to try to strike his forehead before the other man could drop, but since you knew you were going to reverse roles, the sensible course was to let him get out of the way. Enter the vengeful noncom. He put a rifle butt against the offender's forehead and slugged him before there was time to dodge. The boot who merely suffered a concussion was lucky.

  How could I enjoy this? Parts of it, of course, I loathed. But the basic concept fascinated me. I wanted to surrender my individuality, curbing my neck beneath the yoke of petty tyranny. Since my father's death I had yearned for stern discipline, and Parris Island, where he himself had learned discipline a quarter-century earlier, gave it to me in spades. Physically I was delicate, even fragile, but I had limitless reservoirs of energy, and I could feel myself toughening almost hourly. Everything I saw seemed exquisitely defined — every leaf, every pebble looked as sharp as a drawing in a book. I knew I was merely becoming a tiny cog in the vast machine which would confront fascism, but that was precisely why I had volunteered. Even today, despite the horrors which inevitably followed, I am haunted by memories of my weeks as a recruit. It is almost like recalling a broken marriage which, for one divorced partner, can never really end.

  Our platoon was number 618, and our DI was a leathery corporal from Georgia named Coffey. The Marine Corps had always recruited a disproportionate number of men from the South, where the military traditions of the early 1860s had never died. Later I met many Raiders like that, and Coffey was typical: tall, lanky, and fair haired, with a mad grin and dancing, rain-colored eyes full of shattered light. They were born killers; in the Raider battalions, in violation of orders, they would penetrate deep behind Japanese lines at night, looking for two Nips sacked out together. Then they would cut the throat of one and leave the other to find the corpse in the morning. This was brilliant psychological warfare, but it was also, of course, extremely dangerous. In combat these Southerners would charge fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-grandfathers, and they loved the bayonet. How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.

  Yankee boys were just the kind of meat this Georgian Caesar fed upon. His appetite was further whetted by the fact that many of us had been university students, a fact which triggered the anti-intellectual in him. He himself was illiterate and, apart from his training duties, startlingly ignorant. Even there he sometimes skidded; while specifying the rigors of our calling, he was supposed to teach us a synoptic history of the Corps, and it turned out that he thought the American Revolution had occurred in “nineteen and ten” and World War I in “nineteen and thirty-four,” with the French as our enemies. After this last, a Dartmouth man unwisely laughed. Our DI flushed and declared his own war on all “wisenheimer college eight balls.” He invented sobriquets, most of them scatological, for boots from New England campuses. For some reason — perhaps because I obviously felt that I had found a home in the Marine Corps — I got off lightly. I was merely “Slim,” a nom de guerre which stuck to me throughout my forty-month cruise and was vastly preferable to my fraternity nicknames; I happened to be damned, or blessed, with outsize genitalia, so in college I had been called first “Tripod,” and then “Sashweight.” It embarrassed me then. Not until I joined the Marines did I learn that hefty equipment along that line was admired in some quarters. One day I found myself hip-to-hip at a trough urinal with a former Reno gigolo. He gazed down at me for a long moment and then asked thoughtfully, “Slim, what did you do in civilian life?”

  As expected, Coffey's favorite target of opportunity was slope-shouldered, potbellied Larry Dudley. This was partly Dudley's fault. He couldn't help his figure, but he was remiss in other ways, too. The DI liked to say, “God gave you the face you were born with, but I'll give you the face you'll die with.” That was untrue of Dudley. His expression never changed. Even when he was out of step, which was often, he looked bland, nonchalant, slightly pained. His greatest blunder, however, was a spectacular feat of tactlessness. On the evening of the day we were issued our 782 gear, Coffey stood in the doorway of a Quonset hut, facing us vassals, who ranged in a semicircle outside. The only light came from the interior of the hut, at the DI's back. He was holding an M1, fieldstripping it as he talked, naming the parts. Then he reassembled the rifle. “Now,” he said triumphantly, “let's see one of you college kids do it.” He thrust the weapon at the most intent member of his captive audience — Larry Dudley, lately of Garand and Dudley. Oh, God, I prayed; don't let him do it. But Dudley did it. He took that MI apart so fast we could hardly see the blur of his moving hands; then he put it back together with the same blinding speed and handed it to the DI. There were a few stifled chuckles for the avenged shitheads of Platoon 618. Coffey turned the color of a song then popular: deep purple. His loss of face was immense, but being a DI he could strike back in many ways. He swiftly chose one. “OK, wisenheimers,” he said in a pebbly voice, balancing the weapon on the palm of his hand. “If he can do it, you can all do it. Fall out here at 0500 with your pieces, ready to fieldstrip.”

  We were stunned. Our asses were in a sling. None of us had the faintest idea of what Dudley had been doing. We couldn't even tell the difference between the trigger-housing group and the barrel-and-receiver group. Fortunately Dudley, for all his faults, had also learned ingenuity from Garand. Though taps sounded twenty minutes after Coffey had dismissed us, and illumination of any kind was forbidden thereafter, we carried on a night-long seminar with flashlights under blankets. Dudley taught three men, each of them taught three more, and so on. By dawn we were exhausted, but we could do it. At 0450 our DI shrilled his whistle and strode down our line of bunks yelping his usual morning greeting: “OK, shitheads! Drop your cocks and grab your socks!” When we fell out he had already adopted a tragic expression. Clearly he expected us to fail and had rehearsed one of his sinking spells, which were as memorable as the Titanic's. Then, as he blinked in disbelief, each of us in turn took his rifle apart, identifying the bolt camming lug, hammer springs, sears and lugs, and the rest, put the piece back together, and smartly brought it to port arms for inspection. Cheated and smarting, Coffey put us through a grueling day: an hour of calisthenics, a second hour of close-order drill, a third hour of lunging, with fixed bayonets, at straw-stuffed dummies; a session of throwing live hand grenades and then rolling out of a fall (never creep), another session of instruction in how to use short-bladed Kabar knives in hand-to-hand combat (always ripping up, into the gut; a downward thrust can be blocked more easily); a cruel hundred-yard sprint wearing gas masks, suffering from inadequate oxygen; and the
most idiotic drill of all, snapping in with simulated rifle fire at an imaginary enemy warplane flying overhead. Perhaps this had been practical in World War I, when Fokkers drifted lazily over no-man's-land, but since then strafing fighter planes had developed the speed to flash by before an infantryman could set his feet. Yet we were being taught to aim at the horizon, leading hypothetical Zeroes as hunters lead quail. Long before the sunset gun sounded we all knew we were being punished for Dudley's virtuoso performance. He lost a lot of popularity that day.

  None of us, I think, comprehended how all this training would end on battlefields, why we were being taught monstrous things. Our thoughts and our life-style were still largely civilian. Flaked out before lights out, or standing around the lister bag, a container of pure water which resembled a seabag suspended from three te-peed poles, we whistled popular songs — the current hits were “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “Blues in the Night” — and shot the breeze much as we would have done at home. I remember us talking about a news item reporting America's annual consumption of seventeen billion cigarettes a year, none of us suspecting that it might be unhealthy, and what it would be like to shack up with Betty Grable or prong Hedy Lamarr. We scorned conscientious objectors and other hambos. We said inane things like, “Hello, Joe, whaddya know?” “I just got back from the vaudeville show.” We laughed at pink-toothbrush ads and cartoonist Frank King's frenzied press conference, called to scotch rumors that Gasoline Alley's Skeezix Wallett would be killed in action. The more sophisticated of 618's boots yearned for a roll of moola and a seventy-two in New York, where they could wander along West Fifty-second Street and hear, at spots like the Famous Door, the Onyx Club, and Kelly's Stable, a tumultuous crash of drums heralding “In the Mood” or Harry James leading a wickedly fast “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the brass section on their feet, horns swinging like cannon out across the ballroom.