men were killed and a dozen wounded in the firefight.
Within a few days we were ordered to patrol the same area. In the morning, the section set out with Scotty in charge. The rain had let up and the road was dry, so we made good time moving along between rows of fragrant pine trees. But soon we passed the first sign of the Seventh Marines’ scrape. A dead Jap was sprawled in a wooded ravine beside the road. A little farther along we came upon bloodied bandages and wrappings, and knapsacks that corpsmen had cut from injured Marines. There were about twenty more Jap bodies scattered around, along with empty ammo boxes and clips and lots of brass. Dark clots of blood soiled the ground. This had been more than a skirmish. We were all sharply reminded, if any of us needed reminding, that we were on Japanese soil. We were still in a war that could turn bloody any minute.
I sent a couple men forward to check the road where it dipped into a deep, tree-shaded cut. Scotty, our lieutenant, had wandered off into a nearby farmyard.
There was a shot, a pause, then another shot. Everyone dove for cover. The shots had come from the farmyard, not from the road, and my first thought was that Scotty had run into trouble.
I rose up to get a better look and spotted Scotty calmly standing in the open, taking aim with his carbine at the carcass of some dead animal. Just then he fired again.
I had no idea what the man was doing. But I knew it couldn’t be very helpful. We picked ourselves up and gathered around while he cheerfully explained that he was trying to shoot the teeth out of the skull one by one. A regular shooting gallery.
Suddenly I was furious. The rest of the patrol standing around, white-faced, looked from me to Scotty and back to me again.
I decided to take him aside where we wouldn’t be overheard.
“Lieutenant, what the hell did you think you were doing?” I said. “Now every Jap in ten miles is going to know exactly where we’re at.”
He looked down and shuffled his feet.
“You’re responsible for the lives of twenty-two men here, and we’re in the middle of God knows how many Japs. We don’t need to hang up a billboard to tell them where to look for us.”
He mumbled something about remaining alert while on patrol. I told him I didn’t think being alert included taking target practice at dead animals.
It was a typical Scotty episode, the kind of dumb thing he’d probably think about later and come to regret. Scotty still had a lot to learn. I was doing my best to educate him.
He would give me another opportunity pretty soon after that.
Third Battalion got word to get ready to move out for another operation. Trucks drove us to the east coast, where amtracs waited on the shore. A cluster of five or six islands lay a few miles out in the bay, and while intelligence was pretty sure none of them harbored Japs, it was felt the enemy might use them in the future to launch a sneak attack.
While we waited to board the amtracs, we built a small fire to keep off the chill. Some of us were squaring away our gear when there was a familiar
“Who’s the stupid son of a bitch who pulled the pin on that grenade?” I yelled.
We all looked at Scotty, who was grinning sheepishly.
“Heh, heh. I guess I didn’t get all the powder out of it,” he said.
It was the old joke on maneuvers. Unscrew the detonator, pour the powder out of a grenade, screw the detonator back on, pull the pin and toss it to somebody. Everybody scatters, then everybody has a good laugh. But this time he hadn’t poured out all the explosive charge, and we weren’t laughing. And we weren’t on maneuvers.
This time I didn’t bother to take him aside.
“Well, how stupid can you get, Scotty?” I yelled at my section leader.
For once, he apologized.
We boarded the amtracs in a sour mood. Accompanied by a destroyer escort, they took K Company about four miles out to the largest of the islands, Takabanare. It didn’t take us long to sweep the place, shore to shore. Whenever we came upon a house we’d check it out like a SWAT team, going from room to room with our pistols drawn. We turned up a few Okinawan natives but no enemy soldiers.
The first night Scotty and I dug in together. We took the split-bamboo mats the natives used for rugs and put them in the bottom of the foxhole to keep us dry. As it started to get dark, I noticed Scotty’s .45 was still cocked.
“Scotty! Your pistol’s cocked.”
“God a-mighty,” he said. “You know, I cocked that thing when we came ashore this morning, and never did uncock it.”
For the next three nights we slept in the open. Our mortars were set up on a rocky hillside overlooking the beach, which was a fine place for swimming. A few swam out to the destroyer escort, which was anchored just offshore, and enjoyed the Navy’s hospitality. Then, without explanation, the amtracs took us back to Okinawa, where we resumed our patrols.
With the Marine fighters onshore, things started getting interesting overhead. In my time overseas, I’d never seen planes tangle in dogfights before. On New Britain, there was so much jungle you couldn’t see the sky most of the time, and during our time on Peleliu, the Japs had never been able to put a single plane into the air.
But on Okinawa the country was open, and we were close enough to Japan that they could fly in, fight, and then turn around and fly home. So we witnessed several dogfights, right over our heads. They were awesome.
Often they were so high you couldn’t tell which planes were enemy and which were ours. They were just specks circling around up there. Then you’d see one get shot out of the air, and a wing would come spiraling down, or chunks of metal burning and trailing smoke. We’d just stand there staring upward.
On April 13, they passed the word along the lines that President Roosevelt had died the day before. It was a shock. Most of us hadn’t spent much time thinking about events back home, what was going on in Washington and so forth. I guess we just assumed when we got back home he’d still be president. None of us knew a thing about this new man, Harry Truman.
I remember the day because that morning a Jap plane had come in low over our positions, treetop level. You could almost see his eyeballs. I thought, Oh, shit. He’s after somebody. And just as I was thinking that, here came one of our Corsairs right on his tail. You could see the Marine pilot just as clearly. He was looking straight ahead, hunched over slightly. He hadn’t started firing yet, but he was moving faster than the Zero. They disappeared behind the trees and I didn’t get to see how it turned out. But I’d be willing to bet money that Marine caught him. And if he didn’t catch him, somebody else did. Little by little we started to see fewer Jap planes.
Except for the dogfights, K Company had been on Okinawa almost a month now without seeing any combat. We’d been roaming the countryside, going out on patrol. Sometimes we’d just go out on our own, poking around farmhouses looking for chickens or pigs. Anything to relieve the monotony of K rations.
Toward the end of April I went out on my own to see what I could scare up. I came to this farmhouse with a shed built onto the side. The shed was about twenty feet long and six to eight feet deep with a door in front. It looked like the kind of place you might keep chickens, so I opened the door and went in. There was a ragged pile of pine limbs stacked near the door and I reached down and kind of shook one, hoping to scare up a chicken. And this man popped up instead.
You talk about West Texas quick-draw. The flap of my holster was down and snapped, but in one split second I had my .45 out and in that guy’s face.
Then I saw that he was a civilian, an Okinawan. He just bowed, and bowed again and came out from behind the woodpile. I’m not sure which one of us was more startled. I patted him on the shoulder and bowed myself and left him standing there. I don’t know where he went after that, whether he crawled back behind that woodpile or went somewhere else.
It was a nice farmhouse, wood frame, well kept. I don’t think the Okinawans were happy to see us in the beginning. The Japs had kind of brainwashed them to think we were barbarians. But after they were in contact with
