Goodbye, Darkness

  Appropriately, the Japs then made their last stand astride the prewar rifle range of Guam's old Marine Corps barracks. Here the conflict was very different, U.S. tanks versus Japanese pillboxes. GIs of the Seventy-seventh played the key role. Friday afternoon nearby Orote Airfield fell, and on Saturday, with the enemy in full flight, an honor guard of the Twenty-second Marines presented arms still warm from fighting while the Stars and Stripes was hoisted to the top of the Marine barracks flagpole. The issue had been decided, though the fighting was far from over. Surviving Nips crept off through dense thickets of bonsai, those dwarf evergreens which, revealing the oriental gift for miniaturization, mimic great gnarled trees in every detail, down to the writhing angles of limbs twisted in their joints by the rheumatism of time. At bay in their bokongo, as the Chamorros called the island's caverns, the enemy shouted abuse at their tormentors and fired out at anything that moved. But they were quickly flushed, completing a clear triumph for the Americans. The cost was 7,081 U.S. casualties — half Saipan's. The friendly population had helped. So had the frog-men, a sign of the navy's growing wisdom in the ways of amphibious warfare. Had the enemy commanders continued their stop-them-at-the-waterline tactics, the Marine Corps would now have had the bloodiest of its World War II battlefields behind it. But the Japanese didn't oblige. Tokyo was beginning to learn the lesson of Biak. Though the Nipponese were losing the war, they vowed to kill as many of the foe as possible before falling themselves. Thus the war's greatest slaughters lay in the future.

  Not all Japanese liquor was stashed away on Orote, as we discovered our first day ashore on Irammiya. We were digging in for the night when little Mickey McGuire's entrenching spade hit a wooden box. “Buried treasure,” he panted, unearthing it. “Bullshit,” Horse said excitedly. “That looks like schnapps!” We counted twenty-four bottles, each in its cardboard compartment. Herr von der Goltz, having advertised himself as Maine's finest epicure, was permitted to uncork the first of them and sip it. “Rice wine,” he said, smacking his lips. “Marvelous. Absolutely terrific.” This presented me, for the thousandth time, with the problem of leadership. I never tried to inspire the section by example. Never did an NCO run fewer risks than I did, except, perhaps, on Sugar Loaf Hill, and that came later. In the words of Walter Affitto, a Marine sergeant on Peleliu, “I was not very military. I tried to lead the men by being a prankster, making jokes.” Obviously, turning the box in wouldn't tickle the Raggedy Ass Marines. The only sidesplitting would come at our expense, from the rear-echelon types who would dispose of it. Since any SOP order I gave would have been ignored by the Raggedy Asses, since we were already dug in, and since I was thirsty myself, I told each man that he could drink one bottle. Straws would be drawn for the five remaining bottles. What no one had noticed was that the labels were not quite identical. We couldn't read the complicated kanji characters; it didn't seem to matter. Actually it mattered a great deal. Twenty-three of the bottles, bearing white labels, were wine, all right, but the label on the twenty-fourth was salmon colored. Doubtless this had been reserved for an officer or senior NCO. It contained 110-proof sake. And I drew the straw for it.

  Because my taste buds had been dulled by the wine, or my throat dried by the fear that, in combat, never lay more than a millimeter from the surface of my mind, I gulped the sake down chug-a-lug, like a beer. I remember an instant numbness, as though I had been hit by a two-by-four. Then suddenly I felt transported onto the seventh astral plane, feasting upon heaven on the half shell. I recall trying to sing a campus song:

  Take a neck from any old bottle

  Take an arm from any old chair …

  Suddenly I was out, the first and oddest casualty of Irammiya. I lay on my back, spread out like a starfish. Night was coming swiftly; the others had their own holes to dig; there seemed to be no Japs here, so I was left in my stupor. Despite intermittent machine-gun and mortar fire throughout the night, I was quite safe. Around midnight, I later learned, the heavens opened, long shafts of rain like arrows arching down from the sky, as was customary when I arrived on a new island, but I felt nothing. One of our star shells, fired to expose any infiltrating Japs, burst overhead, illuminating me, and Colonel Krank, dug in on the safest part of the beachhead (like the Raggedy Ass Marines), saw me. He asked an NCO, “Is Slim hit?” By now everyone else in the company knew what had happened. Krank, when told, erupted with Rabelaisian laughter — nothing is as funny to a drunk as another drunk — and dismissed the adjutant's proposal for disciplinary measures, explaining that I would be punished soon enough. Since I was comatose, I felt neither embarrassed nor threatened then. The next day, however, was another story. The colonel was right. I regained consciousness when a shaft of sunlight lanced down and blinded me through my lids. After a K-ration breakfast, in which I did not join, we saddled up and moved north with full field packs on a reconnaissance in force. I wasn't fit to stand, let alone march. My heartbeat was slower than a turtle's. The right place for me was a hospital, where I could be fed intravenously while under heavy sedation. I felt as though I had been pumped full of helium and shot through a wind tunnel. It was, without doubt, the greatest hangover of my life, possibly the worst in the history of warfare. My head had become a ganglion of screeching, spastic nerves. Every muscle twitched with pain. My legs felt rubbery. My head hung dahlialike on its stalk. I thought each step would be my last. During our hourly ten-minute breaks I simply fainted, only to waken to jeers from the colonel. I needed an emetic, or, better still, a hair of the dog. Knowing of the colonel's fondness for the grape, aware that he carried a flask which would have brought me back from this walking death, I prayed he would take pity on me. When he didn't, I prayed instead that Jap bullets would riddle his liver and leave him a weeping basket case. They didn't, but after the war I learned, with great satisfaction, that one of his platoon leaders, by then a civilian, encountered him in a bar and beat the shit out of him.

  As we advanced, opposition continued to be light. The next day we reached the village of Nakasoni. There was still no sign of enemy formations, so we were told we were being held there in temporary reserve. The Raggedy Asses, always adept at scrounging, bivouacked in a spacious, open-sided, pagoda-roofed house whose furnishings included phonograph records and an old Victor talking machine with a brass horn. Because I was blessed with the rapid recuperative powers of youth — and because by then I had sweated out every drop of the sake — I felt rid of the horrors. Rip and I waded across to the adjacent island of Yagachi. We had a hunch there were no Nips there, and we were right, but we had no way of making sure; it was one of the foolish risks young men run, gambles in which they gain nothing and could lose everything. When we returned to our oriental villa we brightened upon hearing dance music; Shiloh, the officer-hater, had liberated several records and cranked up the Victrola. One tune, which haunts me to this day, was Japanese. The lyrics went: “Shina yo, yaru. …” Two of the records were actually American: “When There's Moonlight on the Blue Pacific (I'm All Alone with Only Dreams of You),” sung by Bea Wain or some other thrush, and Louis Armstrong belting out “On the Sunny Side of the Street”:

  Grab your coat and get your hat,

  Leave your worry on the doorstep,

  Life can be so sweet

  On the sunny side of the street

  Wally Moon, he of MIT, had quickly put the record player in A1 shape, and as we came up Pisser McAdam of Swarthmore was extracting a case of Jap beer from beneath a trapdoor. The sergeant who commanded these fine troops instantly appropriated two bottles and, using his Kabar knife as an opener, beat his closest rival by three gulps. Even Bubba was enchanted with Armstrong. He said he always liked to hear darkies sing.

  I used to walk in the shade,

  With those blues on parade

  The light was beginning to fail. I made my usual footling attempt to impose discipline, reading orders on sanitation from field manuals (“Men going into battle should wash thoroughly and wear clean clothing to prevent the infection
of wounds”), and they, as usual, responded with “Heil Hitler!” I shrugged. I think we were all feeling the first moment of tranquillity since the death of Lefty. We were on a lee shore and about to break up fast, but we didn't know it then; there was a kind of sheen about us: the glow of health and with and the comfort of knowing that we were among our peers. Except for Wally, the prewar physicist, and Bubba, who at the time of Pearl Harbor seemed to have been studying some kind of KKK theology, we were mostly liberal arts majors from old eastern colleges and universities. We looked like combat veterans and that, on the surface, is what we were. But we knew campuses and professors better than infantry deployments. We belonged to the last generation of what were once called gentlemen. In our grandfathers' day we would have been bound by a common knowledge of Latin and Greek. Several of us had indeed mastered the classics, but what really united us was a love of ideas, literature, and philosophy. Philosophically we had accepted the war, and we could still recite, sometimes in unison, the poets who had given us so much joy, ennobling sacrifice and bravery. In time disenchantment would leave us spiritually bankrupt, but for the present it was enough to just loll back and hear Armstrong, croaking like Aristophanes' frogs, telling us to:

  Just direct your feet

  To the sunny side of the street

  On the landward side of our little villa, a rock shaped like a griffin loomed over us like a misshapen monster, grimacing down. Little patches of fog, like gray suede, flecked the view of Yagachi; a mackerel sky foretold rain. But we were too grateful for the present to brood over the future. And in fact the sky cleared briefly for a splendid moment, revealing a carpet of damascened crimson mist suspended among the stars and the moon sailing serenely through a long white corridor of cloud, setting off the villa's flowering quince against a background of mango, jacaranda, and flamboyant trees.

  In the absence of the enemy we freely lit up our Fleetwoods, talking among ourselves, the talk growing louder as the various conversations merged into a full-blown bull session, our first and last of the war. There was a little talk about combat, quickly exhausted when Swifty Crabbe said that true steel had to be tempered in fire. (Hoots silenced him.) Inevitably we also expatiated on quail, though not as coarsely as you might think. My generation of college men, I've been told over and over, enjoyed clinical discussions of coitus — “locker-room talk” — in which specific girls were identified. I never heard any of it, with one exception: a wheel in my fraternity who described foreplay with his fiancée and was therefore and thenceforth ostracized. He married the girl, stayed married to her, and is a major general today, but he is still remembered for that unforgivable lapse. I wouldn't have dreamed of mentioning Taffy to the section. I might have told them about Mae, had not the denouement been so humiliating, but that would have been different, partly because she advertised her horizontal profile but also because no one there knew her. Descriptions of vague, even imaginary, sexual exploits were OK; the important thing was never to damage the reputation of a girl who would be vulnerable to gossip.

  We kept beating our gums by candlelight hour after hour, looking, I think now, for some evidence that one day the human race was going to make it. Somebody, Blinker, I think, said that war was a game of inches, like baseball; the width of your thumb could determine whether you were killed, wounded, or completely spared. I remember sprawling on my left hip, looking almost affectionately at my gunsels, one by one. There was Barney, of course, closer to me than my brother, and whippy Rip, who had almost broken my record on the Parris Island rifle range. Either of them, I believed, would have made a better sergeant than I was; I think they both knew it, but they rarely argued with me unless a life was at stake. Others in the section approached mutiny from time to time but were absolutely dependable in a crisis: Knocko, Horse, Mickey, Mo Crocker, who was always “Crock,” Swifty Crabbe, Pip, Izzy, Blinker, Hunky, Pisser McAdam, Killer Kane, and Dusty, a dark, animated youth whose quick eyes were useful on patrol. I could always count on lard-faced Bubba, despite my dislike of his racism and despite his bulbous head, which was shaped exactly like an onion. I felt protective toward Beau Tatum, Pip, Chet Przyastawaki, and Shiloh. Pip was just a kid, Beau was married, and the other two were engaged. Emotional attachments complicate a man's reactions in combat. Only two men really troubled me: Pisser and Killer Kane. Pisser was a biologist who resembled a shoat; he covered his lack of moxie, or tried to, with an aggressive use of slang which was already passing from the language: “snazzy,” “jeepers,” “nobby,” “you can say that again,” and “check and double-check.” Kane was fearsome only by name. He was a thin, balding radish of a youth with watery eyes; loose-jointed, like a marionette; who shuddered at the very sight of blood. Neither Pisser nor Kane had developed that ruthless suppression of compassion which fighting men need to endure battle. Neither, for that matter, had Wally Moon, but with Wally you couldn't be sure; none of us understood him; he played the absentminded scientist with brio. Wally was always wise about mechanics — cams, cogs, flanges, gaskets, bushings — but I knew he had been taught more than that at MIT. To me his outer man was rather like an unoccupied stage, with the essence of his character invisible in the wings. I had long ago forsaken hope of seeing him perform. But that night in Nakasoni the curtain parted a little.

  He said crisply: “War has nothing to do with inches, or millimeters, or anything linear. It exists in another dimension. It is time. Heraclitus saw it five hundred years before Christ, and he wasn't the only one.” Wally talked about the Chinese yin and yang, Empedocles' Love and Strife, and, shifting back, Heraclitus's belief that strife — war — was men's “dominant and creative force, ‘father and king of us all.’” Hegel, he continued, picked this up and held that time was an eternal struggle between thesis and antithesis; then Marx, in the next generation, interpreted it as an inevitable conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Jews, Christians, and Moslems all agreed that time would reach its consummation in a frightening climax. Before you could understand war and peace, Wally said, you had to come to grips with the nature of time, with awareness of it as the essence of consciousness. He said that the passage of time was probably the first phenomenon observed by prehistoric man, thus creating the concept of events succeeding one another in man's primitive experience.

  Then the mechanic in Wally reemerged in what at first seemed an irrelevant tangent. Once men had perceived time as a stream of experience, he said, they began trying to measure it, beginning with the sun, the stars, the moon, the two equinoxes, and the wobbly spinning of the earth. In 1583 Galileo discovered the pendulum; seventy-three years later a Dutchman built the first pendulum clock. Splitting the day into 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds, followed. A.M. (ante meridiem, “before noon”) and P.M. (post meridiem, “after noon”) became accepted concepts on all levels of society — the week, having no scientific validity, varied by as much as three days from one culture to another — and in 1884 the world was divided into twenty-four time zones. The International Date Line, electromagnetic time, confirmation of Newton's laws of motion and gravitation, and the transmission of time signals to ships at sea, beginning in 1904 as navigational aids, united the civilized world in an ordered, if binding, time structure.

  Thus far Wally had held us rapt. There were four Phi Beta Kappas in the section; he was talking the language we knew and loved. He hadn't come full circle yet — the pendulum clock's relationship to the battlefield was unclear — but that was the way of college bull sessions in my day, leading the others through a long loop before homing in on the objective. Unfortunately the loop sometimes went too far into uncharted territory and the speaker lost his audience. For a while there Wally was losing his. Chronometers and the value of rational time for navigation and geodetic surveys were understandable; so was Parmenides' argument that time is an illusion; so were the conclusions of Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson that passing time could be comprehended only by intuition. But when Wally tried to take us into the fourth and fifth dim
ensions, citing Einstein's theory of special relativity and William James's hypothesis of the specious present, we began to stir and yawn. Like the old vaudeville act of Desiretta, the Man Who Wrestles with Himself, Wally was pinning himself to the mat. In my war diary I retained, but still do not understand, his equation for Minkowski's clock paradox:

  It meant nothing then; it means nothing now. But bull sessions rarely ended on boring notes. Either someone changed the subject or the man with the floor, sensing the lethargy of the others, took a new tack. Wally quickly tacked back to his original objective. I had read Heraclitus and remember best one fragment of his work: “No man crosses the same river twice, because the river has changed, and so has the man.” Now Wally was reminding us that Heraclitus believed that the procession of time is the essence of reality, that there is only one earthly life. The riddle of time, Wally said, was baffling because no one knew whether it flowed past men or men passed through it — “If I fire my M1, does that mean that firing it is what the future was?” The point was not picayune; it was infinite. Either life was a one-way trip or it was cyclical, with the dead reborn. The life you lived, and the death you died, were determined by which view you held. Despite all evidence to the contrary, most thinkers, with the exception of the Egyptian era and the twentieth century, had come down hard on the side of rebirth. Plato, Aristotle, the fourteenth-century Moslem Ibn Khaldun, and Oswald Spengler believed men and civilizations were destined for rehabilitation. So did the biblical prophets: Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and Jesus. All used the same evidence: the generational cycle and the cycle of the seasons.