I yearned for a better view. It did not seem to be an impossible dream. Before our invasion the island had supported 400,000 Okinawans, and a few relics of civilization had somehow endured. War which displaces civilizations always leaves a few odd reminders of the peaceful past — a half-demolished wall, say, or the front door of a home which no longer exists. Until L-day a large concrete sugar mill had flourished in western Okinawa, on what was now our end of the Machinato Line. Bombardments had destroyed all of it except two tall brick chimneys which overlooked the entire battleground. The Japanese were using these smokestacks for observation posts, and despite our naval gunfire, artillery, and aerial bombardment the chimneys had miraculously survived. If only I could get up there, I thought, I would know what was going on. I now know that was wrong. I would have seen the blackened ruins of Naha, still thickly toothed with Japs, to the southwest, and looking down on the line I would have had a stunning view of the fighting, emanating a sullen burning glow like a kitchen range. But the key features would have escaped me because their significance would have been invisible from the smokestacks. The whole history of war is a story of men moving closer and closer to the ground and then deeper and deeper in it. The anchor of the line, which Ushijima considered the key to it, was an undistinguished mound now known to history as Sugar Loaf Hill.
Sugar Loaf, which was actually shaped more like a bread loaf, was a height of coral and volcanic rock three hundred yards long and one hundred feet high. It was vital because it was almost impregnable. Not in itself; few summits are unscalable if attackers can reach their slopes. But this ugly hive was supported on the southeast by another mound, Half Moon Hill, and to the south by yet another, Horseshoe Ridge. Thus Sugar Loaf, a spear pointed at the advancing Sixth Marine Division, was merely the most visible feature of a triangular system connected by hidden galleries. Each of the three peaks could deliver murderous fire from heavy 15-centimeter guns on any other peak attacked by us. Moreover, a deep trough of ground within Horseshoe Ridge gave the Japanese mortar positions which could be reached only by grenades and small-arms fire, and our riflemen couldn't get that close because the three hummocks rose abruptly from a bare plain, providing no defilade. Assaulting troops charging one precipice would be cut down by converging interlocking fire from the rest of the triangle. In addition, the complex could be raked by Jap artillery, mortars, and machine guns emplaced in Shuri Hill, to the east, which had stopped the First Marine Division in its muddy tracks. Shuri was bigger, but it was the Sugar Loaf complex that cracked the whip of the Machinato Line. There the hills stood, piled in great, weighty, pressing, heaped, lethal masses, oppressive beyond words for us who studied the maps and knew that one way or another the peaks must be taken.
My first grasp of what the immediate future held for me, provided I had a future, came when my battalion relieved the battered Third Battalion, which had been fighting on a smaller mound called Charlie Hill. We were moving up in a coiling line, single file, as the Third, uncoiling, moved out. I was struck by the Third's faces: haggard, with jaws hanging open and the expressionless eyes of men who had left nowhere and were going nowhere. There was little conversation on either side, but in one of those lulls that come in any march, when there was no movement in either column, I found myself opposite John Baker. I knew Baker well. He was a former newspaperman, a cheerful, sturdy corporal whom I had never seen not chomping on an unlit cigar. In fact, I suspected it was always the same cigar. He had been stationed in San Diego at the time of Pearl Harbor, and his company had been detailed to dig trenches on the beaches because the Californians were convinced that an invasion armada was steaming toward them. I doubt that it disturbed him or even dislodged his cigar. He was a solid, imperturbable man, as steady as though he carried a binnacle in his chest. I had often wished I had him in my section, but he had remained in the Third Battalion, and now he was coming out of combat, and I asked him, “Baker, what's it like up there?”
I had thought he was looking at me. Now I realized that he was really looking through me in a thousand-yard stare. Slowly he focused on my face, removed the cigar, spat on the mud, replaced the cigar, and replied flatly: “You really want to know?” I turned away, and turned back. I noticed that this file was much shorter than ours. I asked him, “Where's the rest of your battalion?” In that same dull voice he said, “This isn't a battalion. These are the survivors of a battalion.”
The two lines of men began to move again. We rounded a bend, and suddenly I understood Baker. On the right side of the path lay about a hundred dead Marines. Each had been wrapped in his poncho, now his shroud. These had been secured with communications wire and then the bodies had been stacked as you would stack cordwood. You could see the boondockers jutting out; the rest of the bodies were covered by the ponchos. The stack was neatly made, as though ready to pass inspection. Probably I knew some of the men, but covered as they were I couldn't identify any. Every pair of boondockers looked like every other pair. I looked down at my own. They were the same.
The sounds of enemy artillery were becoming louder and louder; we were well within mortar range. Once we were in position, on the reverse slope of Charlie Hill, I set up the Raggedy Ass base in one of the little courtyards that led to the lyre-shaped tombs; every courtyard was encircled by a three-foot wall, with an entrance at one end of it and the tomb itself at the other end. Blue ceramic jars, containing the ashes of ancestors, stood on shelves within the tombs. At night we moved the ancestors out and ourselves in — these mini-mausoleums made superb bomb shelters — and in the morning we moved the vases back. During the battle we changed tombs several times, but for the time being we weren't going anywhere, because the battle wasn't moving. The Japanese still had us deadlocked here, and had even regained some ground on the left with a fifteen-thousand-man counterattack. By the end of that first week on the line, we had begun to understand the maze of hills. Sugar Loaf had changed hands fourteen times. Every time we took it, the tremendous firepower from Half Moon, Horseshoe, and Shuri drove us off. The Japs would retake it, and our artillery would do the same to them. But we couldn't see how they could be completely dislodged. They always had men on some part of the hill. And they had others in the hill, because their sappers, starting with foxholes, had dug deeper caves and tunnels, all in our direction.
Now I enter a period of time in which a structured account of events is impossible. Continuity disappears; the timepiece in the attic of memory ticks erratically. These pages in my war diary are glued together with blood which hardened long ago. Certain incidents and impressions can be recalled, but only as a kaleidoscopic montage. Somewhere in here occurred the Truce of the Fucking Dogs; one of our war dogs got loose, ran out on the killing ground north of Sugar Loaf, somehow met an Okinawan pye-dog, and mounted her while both sides, astounded by this act of creativity in the midst of annihilation, held their fire. Then there was the Matter of the Everlasting D Ration, a chunk of bitter chocolate, supposedly packed with nutrition, which looked like and tasted like modeling clay and was all I ate for five days, combat having destroyed my appetite. More darkly I remember the Execution of the Two Pricks, a supercilious pair of junior army officers who were reconnoitering the front, addressing us as “bellhops,” and ordering us to direct them to the best view of the battle. A gunny pointed toward the Horseshoe, and off they went, covering about thirty feet before they were slain. There was also the Great Helmet Debate between me and Bubba. Both of us were wearing our steel chamber pots at the time, facing each other, sitting on the reverse slope of a little rise overlooking no-man's-land. Bubba said helmets were an unnecessary encumbrance and dampened the offensive spirit. The Army of Northern Virginia hadn't needed them, he said. I was trying to introduce the subject of Appomattox when a large chunk of shrapnel whirred through the air and hit Bubba's helmet. He took it off and fingered the dent. No doubt about it; if he hadn't been wearing it, he would have been dead. He carefully put it back on, fastened the strap — and then took up where he had lef
t off, his finger wagging and his voice rumbling, insisting that helmets were completely useless.
One of my clearest memories is of the Arrival of the Six Replacements. Rain was still pelting us mercilessly when we were taken off the line briefly, and I found us a dry cave near Machinato Airfield. The cave faced the shore. I was exhausted, and once inside my dry sanctuary I lay on my side for a few minutes, watching the kamikazes diving and exploding on our warships. It was one of the war's most extraordinary spectacles, but I was too weary to keep my eyes open. I took off my boondockers and lapsed into a coma of sleep without even removing my pack or helmet. Then I felt someone plucking at one of my leggings. A reedy, adolescent voice was saying urgently, “Hey, Sarge! Sarge!” I looked up and saw a half-dozen seventeen-year-old boys who had been brought here directly from boot camp. I vaguely remembered the Top having told me that they were on their way to me. We had heard that back home men were being drafted into the Marine Corps, which was outrageous, if true — every Marine had always been a volunteer — but sending these children was worse. Between Iwo Jima and Okinawa the Marine Corps was running out of fighting men, so these kids were here, disturbing (I was selfish enough to think of it that way) my siesta. They weren't much of an advertisement for the Corps. All of them looked pallid, mottled, and puffy. “What'll we do?” their spokesman asked anxiously in a voice which was still changing. He wanted orders, and I had none. I knew I should give them a full briefing; if they went into the line without one, they could die fast. It was my duty to protect replacements from that. That was what I was being paid for. I didn't do it; I turned over and again drifted off into deep sleep.
Then black comedy, whose role in war is rarely appreciated, solved the problem. Water was dripping on my face. Incredulous, I opened my eyes and realized that the cave was leaking. Over the past week the porous limestone overhead had become saturated. Now it was raining indoors. I ripped out all the filthy words I knew, repeated them, and then noticed that my new wards were still there, earnestly hoping that I could spare a few minutes of my valuable time for them. So I did. I told them how to learn about shell-fire on the job, and the tricks of Jap snipers, and booby traps, and how doubt is more fatal than slowed reflexes, and where they might avoid being enfiladed on the line, adding, however, as gently as I could, that they would seldom be in a position to benefit from that information because they would spend most of their time as runners, and a runner is exposed far more often than a rifleman. Their boondockers, I said, were their best friends; they should dry them whenever possible. If they were overrun by a Jap charge they should play dead, affecting a grotesque pose of death; they would probably be bayoneted anyway, but there was always that chance they might be overlooked. They should be alert for the sharp click of steel on steel, which probably meant trouble, because that was how Japs armed grenades. If they heard it, they should move fast. (I should have told them to leap toward the sound, getting the Jap, but this was a lesson in survival, not heroism.) I saw they were beginning to tremble, but it was better to have it out here than there. Feelings of elation in the moments before combat were normal and OK as long as men didn't become suicidal; the moth-in-the-flame threat was always there. Also OK was the instinct to fantasize, to dramatize your actions to yourself. This was actually helpful and should, in fact, be encouraged. To be avoided, and if necessary ignored, were gung-ho platoon leaders who drew enemy fire by ordering spectacular charges. Ground wasn't gained that way; it was won by small groups of men, five or six in a cluster, who moved warily forward in a kind of autohypnosis, advancing in mysterious concert with similar groups on their flanks. These young Marines were going to lose a lot of illusions, but if they lost faith in everything else, including the possibility of winning this fight, including the rear echelon and even the flag, they should keep faith with the regiment. It had an outstanding record, and all its men were proud of it. If it was any comfort to them, I ended, they should know that unfounded fears were worse than founded fears and that this battle was the toughest struggle in the history of the Corps. They nodded dumbly, kneeling there like novitiates, steadied by hands grasping upright Mis propped on the wet cave floor. I wondered whether they had understood any of what I had said or whether I had become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
Had anybody told me all this on my first day, I would have thought he was Asiatic, snapping in for a survey, or, as it was sometimes put, one who had “missed too many boats.” Since then I had become a disciplined fighter, however, though until now my own survival had been more a coefficient of luck than of skill. There was just one moment in the war when I saved my own life, and it came right after my soggy nap in that defective cave. Back on our own little amphitheater of war, still soaked to the skin, I started a routine tour of the line companies that afternoon, covering it much as a mailman covers his route, except that I had company, because, if possible, we always moved in pairs. My buddy that day was Chet Przyastawaki, the Colgate athlete with the shrill voice. We followed the embankment as far as it went and then moved from one local feature to another: the Long Square, the Blue Icicle, Grable's Tit, the X, the Iron Claw, Thurston's Trick, and the V, also known as the Hairless Pussy. This was a time when the Japanese were constantly challenging us, trying to infiltrate every night and sometimes, brazenly, by day. If their purpose was to keep us off balance, they were succeeding. This surging back and forth quickened the pulses of the Raggedy Asses. People like us, moving from one CP to another, could get caught by occasional Nips who were testing us, penetrating as deeply as they could and then, when found, trying to slip back.
Chet and I had covered the companies, Fox to Easy to Dog, as smoothly as Tinker to Evers to Chance. Positions around Sugar Loaf were in constant flux — at one time or another nine Marine battalions fought on the hill — and we had been told to skirt enemy lines on our way back, scouting every dip, crease, cranny, and rut in the ground that might be useful in combined attacks. The last leg of our journey, before we reached the lee side of the railroad embankment, took us past the crevice called McGee's Closet and down Windy Alley, a rock gulch which, like Sugar Loaf itself, had changed hands repeatedly. We arrived there at the worst possible time. The Japs had launched a reconnaissance in force; no sooner had we entered the lower throat of the alley than we heard the unmistakable sounds of an enemy patrol sealing it off behind us, closing our option of retracing our steps. Then we heard a familiar, husky sob in the air, directly overhead. We hit the deck, and a mortar shell burst a hundred feet away, followed by another, and then another. Silence followed. Chet crossed himself. Another shell burst. The stupid Japs were falling short of their targets, our lines, mortaring us in. When mortared, you are supposed to flee in almost any direction, but, as we were about to discover, it is not always that easy. As we rose cautiously, we heard jabbering on the opposite slopes of both sides of Windy Alley. So much for our flanks. We darted ahead, toward the embankment, and that was when the pneumatic whuff of the first bullet from that direction sang between us. It wasn't from an M1; it had that unmistakable Arisaka whine. We hit the deck again and rolled rightward together, toward the protection of a huge boulder, a rough slab of rock. Two more bullets whuffed past before we made it. Our problem now, and I cannot begin to tell you how much it discouraged me, was that a Nip sniper was in position at the alley's upper throat, behind another boulder, blocking the maze of intersecting paths there, cutting us off at the pass. We were trapped, the nightmare of every foot soldier. All I had going for me was sheer desperation. Warning: this animal is vicious; when attacked, it defends itself.
Lying in tandem, Chet and I exchanged wide-eyed glances. The coral had cut both his hands, but I was in no mood to comfort him. I felt a wave of self-pity. For several seconds I was completely mindless. Fear is the relinquishment of reason; we yield to it or fight it, but there are no halfway points. Then I struggled and shook off the panic. It was one of Napoleon's maxims that in war you must never do what the enemy wants you to do. This Jap expecte
d us to stay put. So we wouldn't. Each of us had two grenades hooked on his harness. I hunched up and reached for one. Chet shook his head. “Too far,” he whispered. If the range was too great for a Colgate halfback, a scrawny sergeant didn't have a chance, but I already knew the distance was too great; reaching the Nip with a pitch wasn't what I had in mind. I didn't tell Chet now what was there, because as I unlooped the grenade I had to think about a weapon which would reach our man. I was carrying a carbine and a .45, both useless in a sniper's duel. Chet had an M1. I asked, “Did you qualify?” He said, “Sharpshooter. Under three hundred.” I shook my head. It wasn't good enough. For once I was going to do what the Marine Corps had taught me to do best. I said to Chet, “Give me your weapon and an extra clip.”
My problems were complicated. I knew nothing, for example, of the Japs' timetable. If this was a quick in-and-out operation, the sniper might disappear, running back to his hole in Sugar Loaf. But that wasn't the way their snipers worked; if they had quarry, they usually hung around until they flushed it. And this one now confirmed his personal interest in us in a thin, falsetto, singsong chant, a kind of liquid gloating: “One, two, three —you can't catch me!” Chet muttered in an even higher register, “No, but he can catch us.” I was looking up at the sky. The light was clouded. Soon waves of darkness would envelop us, and conceivably it could come to the knife. I couldn't even think about that. Instead, I asked Chet, “Is your piece at true zero?” He said, “It throws low and a little to the right.” I took it, leaving him the carbine, and said, “His piece must throw high, and he probably doesn't know it. He had three clear shots at us and drew Maggie's drawers every time.” Chet said, “But from where he is …” I nodded grimly. That was the worst of it. An invisible line lay between his position and ours. It was diagonal. The azimuth of his lair was about 45 degrees west; mine was 135 degrees east. On a clock this would put him at eight minutes before the hour and me at twenty-three minutes past — northwest for him, southeast to me. Since both our slabs of rock were set dead against the alley's walls, I couldn't use my weapon and my right arm without stepping clear of my boulder, exposing myself completely. All he needed to show was an arm and an eye, unless, by some great stroke of luck, he was left-handed. I had to find that out right now.