Islands of the Damned

be raining and I’d wake up the next morning with water up to my chin. They’d been sleeping on momma’s white sheets in Marine Corps barracks. Now they thought they’d fallen into the hellhole of creation, and I guess from their point of view they had. That’s certainly what Sledge felt years later when he wrote about the experience in With the Old Breed, one of the great combat books of the war.

Overseas Marines and stateside Marines are two different breeds almost. We were a lot more relaxed as far as discipline. We didn’t go in for much of that parade stuff like they did back in the States. But we did calisthenics, and some mornings after roll call we’d fall out and run three miles before breakfast. We had a large field where we played baseball and volleyball. We went to the rifle range.

One thing I want to clear up.

You read in books about suicides on Pavuvu. Someone would get a Dear John letter, and there’d be a shot some night and later everyone would learn he’d put a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I think that’s a crock. I was in the Marine Corps, in the First Marine Division, from 1943 until 1945 and I know of only one suicide in that span. There were always rumors, especially on Pavuvu. For a while somebody was supposedly going around and knifing people at night. Just creep into your tent and slit your throat and vanish. That rumor got thick and heavy.

The funny thing was, it never happened here. It always happened somewhere else. There was no evidence that this was happening anywhere. But the rumors got pretty strong, and spread and grew from there. And to tell the truth, we all got a little edgy.

There was a guy named Al Flame. About the time the rumors of the knifings were going around, he was visiting somebody else’s tent in the next company over—Marines were always socializing from tent to tent at night. One evening, instead of going around the end of the tent rows and bypassing K Company, he decided to cut through. We’d heard all the stories. It was pitch dark when I spotted someone moving among the tents. I pulled my .45 and stuck it in his face and challenged him.

“You take another step and I’ll blow your head off.”

“Burgin,” he said. “This is me! Al Flame, dammit!”

I just said okay. Al went on about his business and I went on about mine. But it shows our frame of mind.

We called it “Going Asiatic.” Going crazy.

Sergeant Elmo Haney was the most Asiatic Marine I knew. He had been in the Corps since World War I and he’d seen it all. He was a platoon sergeant assigned to K Company, but he didn’t have a job—a platoon sergeant without a platoon. Sergeant Haney had gone Asiatic. He would do something wrong, what he imagined was some infraction, and he’d assign himself Extra Police Duty. He’d put on a full combat pack and march down the street muttering to himself, and at the end of the street he’d put himself through a full bayonet drill, all by himself.

You’d see him in the shower scrubbing all over his body with that Marine brush, even his testicles. And I mean those bristles were tough.

We’d heard they had stationed him back home once, and he had gone AWOL. He’d gone down to the docks and caught a freighter to the Pacific and worked his way back to K Company.

After Peleliu he went home for good. I heard he told someone, “This is a young man’s war.”

* * *

About this time I started having trouble with our platoon leader again, the officer we called Lieutenant Legs. The truth is, a lot of us had been having trouble with Lieutenant Legs since the canned peaches incident on New Britain.

As usual, Legs was making up the rules as he went along. We’d made a practice beach landing and gone in. He told us where to set up the mortars, and we did. Pretty soon a battalion commander came along.

“Who the hell set these up?” he barked at Legs. “Why did you set them up there?” Just chewed up his butt.

After he was gone, Legs started chewing me out. “What the hell were you thinking, setting up that way?” he yelled. “They’re supposed to be over there!”

He was getting worse. He’d tell us to do something and then he’d chew our ass for doing what he said. It was demoralizing. Our platoon sergeant, Johnny Marmet, knew something was wrong. Finally he called the mortar section together.

“All right, there’s something going on around here and I want to know what the hell it is.”

He went down the line, asking each man if he had a gripe. “Whatever the hell is on your mind, I want to hear it.”

Some didn’t have a problem with Legs. But some of us definitely did. I was the last one. Marmet dismissed everybody else. I was sitting there, and he said, “Burgin, what is it? What’s going on in this outfit?”

“John, Legs has been riding us for the stuff he’s been doing ever since New Britain,” I said. “He’s passing down the blame to me and everybody else for his own damn mistakes. I’m going to tell you something, John. You get that son of a bitch off of my ass or I’m going to get him off. And if I get him off, both of us are going to be sorry.”

Marmet just said, “I’ll take care of it.”

And he did, I guess. Because after that Lieutenant Legs didn’t give me any more problems for a long time.

A sergeant could do that—you’d better believe it. The first sergeant, gunny sergeant, he pretty well runs the company. Whatever he said went.

He’d just say, “Lieutenant, I need to have a word with you.” A wise lieutenant would listen. Because if he didn’t the sergeant would go to the captain and say, “Hey, we have a problem with Lieutenant So-and-So. This is what he’s doing, and it’s not right. And he’s not listening to me.”

Before long it would be fixed. The word of a sergeant carried a lot of weight. Yes, it did.

I had no trouble with other officers. Sledge, in his book With the Old Breed, was too hard on officers, in my opinion. But even Sledge liked Hillbilly Jones. We all liked Hillbilly.

First Lieutenant Edward A. Jones had been with us on New Britain, and he would be with us on Peleliu, for a time. He was the most—I don’t know what the word is—disciplinary officer I was ever around. He wasn’t a horse’s patoot. He didn’t make up his own rules. He went by the book. His mind-set was, You’re a Marine, and you’re going to act like a Marine whether you’re in the States or out here in combat. That’s the way it’s going to be.

Whenever we’d fall in for morning roll call, standing in ranks, he’d be out in front and he’d inspect the rifles. He’d spent five years as a seagoing Marine, so he was sharp. I mean he would pull that rifle—snap! —and twirl it—snap!—and it would come back to you—snap! He had it all. When you fell in, your collar was buttoned, your cuffs were buttoned. You stood erect. You didn’t slouch. You stood like a Marine. From reveille to recall in the afternoon he was as GI as they ever came, I’ll guarantee you.

But after recall turned us loose at four o’clock, Hillbilly was a different human being. He’d wander down to our tents carrying the guitar he always had with him and sit around and we’d sing and shoot the bull all night. Coming over from New Britain, we’d gather around Hillbilly on the deck of the Elmore singing one song after another. “Waltzing Matilda” was popular, from our stay in Melbourne. We sang “Danny Boy,” and “She’s Nobody’s Darling But Mine.” My own favorite was “San Antonio Rose.”

For some reason I always thought Hillbilly was from West Virginia, because he knew every country and western song. The fact of it is, he was from Red Lion, Pennsylvania, right on the Maryland border. Hillbilly was the leader of K Company’s machine-gun platoon, and the kind of officer you always wanted to have somewhere near you in a battle. He was soft-spoken, always calm and reassuring. Nothing rattled him. When everybody else was sweating and filthy, Hillbilly always looked fresh scrubbed. None of us knew how he did it.

They were working us harder now. More marches, more drills, more inspections. We all knew they were getting us ready for something, toughening us up. In July signs appeared in the galleys: KILL JAPS! KILL JAPS! We’d heard Colonel Lewis “Chesty” Puller posted them. He’d lost a brother in the fighting on Guam.

We were pulling more maneuvers. Just at the squad level first, then working up to platoons, and finally companies. You couldn’t maneuver with anything larger than a company on Pavuvu. The island was only ten miles long and six miles wide. There was a low hill in the center, covered with jungle. That didn’t leave much wiggle room