The trucks picked us up early in July and we rode north through a landscape that we could hardly recognize. The Seabees and construction crews were at work everywhere. Roads were being surfaced with crushed coral, huge stockpiles of supplies were being built up. Planes were flying in and out of the airfields constantly. Okinawa was being transformed into a base for the invasion of Japan.
The enlisted men settled into a camp on Motubu, a large peninsula just north of the beaches where we had landed on April 1. NCOs were driven farther north almost to the tip of the island, where a camp was already set up. Tents were in place, roads surfaced. A short runway for the spotter planes ran through the center of the camp.
It’s a funny thing, but I don’t remember much about that camp. I can’t remember where the chow hall was, where the heads were. The two most important places in camp. I can remember where the doctor’s office was. But there’s just so many things that I can’t recall. I guess I was just wiped out by then. I think from thirty months of combat, from losing men from my platoon, guys that I had known since Melbourne, guys that were gone. Hillbilly Jones, Captain Haldane, and the others. I was pretty stressed out, no doubt. Just flat numb.
I slept with Florence’s picture under my pillow, and thought of the days when we would have a home of our own, and children to call us Mother and Dad. I was sure I had accumulated enough points to be rotated back to the States. The problem was, Florence was in Melbourne. Our plans were to make a home together in Texas, and I was trying to work it out. Thousands of American servicemen had married Australians. When travel was possible again, wives with children would get first priority to go to the States. After that would come wives without children. Only after they’d been accommodated would fiancees be allowed to travel.
“I just talked to my company commander about the papers,” I wrote her in mid-July, “and he is going to see about them in the morning. I hope I can get them fixed up before I go home. Oh how I hope & pray I can. I want to have your name on the list, knowing it won’t be too long before you can come home to me forever, Darling, & I do mean forever.”
Some of the guys were being married by proxy, and Florence and I had talked about it in our letters. But when it came down to it, I didn’t want to get married that way. I wanted a real wedding in a church and a real life again.
We hadn’t seen each other in almost two years. I could tell from her letters she was as anxious as I was. And she still worried about my wound.
“Really, Darling, it didn’t hurt me,” I wrote her. “I hardly have a scar to show for it. I have been hurt a lot worse in a football game, and never stopped playing.”
I have no memory of hearing about the atomic bomb. I guess I heard about it on Armed Forces Radio. Of course, I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, so it didn’t mean a whole lot to me. They said it did terrible damage, but that’s about all we knew. A week or so later we got word that the Japs had surrendered. It was over, and that was a good feeling. We knew we’d be going home, though we didn’t know when. But there wasn’t a lot of hooting and hollering, no big celebration. The folks back in the States probably celebrated more than we did.
I did see one Marine celebrate. The day the war ended or the next, a Corsair came buzzing down our little runway, upside down all the way. The pilot could have opened his canopy, stuck out his hand and dragged his fingers along the ground. That’s how low he was. I just knew he was going to crash, but he flew on down the runway, pointed the nose of that Corsair up and flew straight up into the air. Then he turned around, did a nosedive, flipped that plane over again and made the trip back down the runway in the opposite direction, upside down all the way again. He pulled up and ended with several rolls, then flew off.
I stood there gawking, as I had back in boot camp when those fighters came roaring off the runway at North Island. I thought, You crazy son of a bitch. You’re going to crash. Those Marine pilots, they were good. They were something else.
I had nothing to do now but wait. The sergeants were all bunking together. I was still in charge of the mortar section, but they were bunking down the street. If I needed anybody to do anything, I just hollered. I was tired, but my wound had healed. Then one day I suddenly felt a chill. Within minutes I was shivering violently. I couldn’t seem to get warm. The feeling passed but a short time later I started sweating. I was burning up with fever. I went down to the camp doctor’s office, my knees so wobbly I could hardly walk.
I knew very well what it was. I’d seen it often enough in others. Like so many Marines, I’d come down with malaria. The doctor started me on quinine and increased the Atabrine tablets I’d been taking, like everyone else. I went back to my tent to lie down, alternately shivering and sweating for the rest of the day. All week I lay in my cot or, when I felt strong enough, got up and wandered around a bit. The fevers and chills gradually lessened. But the truth of it is, you never really get over malaria. The symptoms go away. But months and even years later they can come back. Malaria was to be an off-and-on presence in my life for some time to come.
It was September 14 before I finally learned I was being shipped back to the States. The rest of the First Marine Division were going to China. The next day I went down to the enlisted men’s camp and looked for my old buddies. I spent most of the day going from tent to tent saying my good-byes. Some were already on board ship. Late in the month the First Marine Division left Okinawa for China. Jim Burke, Sledgehammer, Hank Boyes, Snafu Shelton, Sarrett, Santos—the guys I’d fought alongside, all my old buddies—were gone. I was on my own.
In the weeks afterward I moved from the NCO camp to another camp, where I sat through a raging typhoon. When it was safe to go outside the first thing I saw was a cargo ship blown right up onto dry land. It was a foretaste of what the sea can do. After the typhoon I moved closer to the harbor, with the Eleventh Artillery Regiment, where I bunked until it was time to ship out.
The eighty-two-day battle for Okinawa had taken more than twelve thousand American lives, and left more than thirty-eight thousand wounded. Nobody has ever been able to calculate exactly how many Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians died in that campaign. Even after the surrender, small pockets of Japs went on fighting, just as they had on Peleliu.
CHAPTER 10
Home Port
I came off watch on the pitching deck of the USS
It certainly hadn’t turned into any bon voyage.
I had witnessed what a typhoon could do the week before on Okinawa, when a storm parked a ship on dry land, practically at the doorstep of my tent. That morning I went out and walked around. It looked like a good old Texas tornado had passed through. Two-byfours were driven slantwise into the ground, trees uprooted and tipped over, roofs peeled away in ragged strips. The transport that was to take the Fifth Marines to China had sailed out of the harbor to weather the typhoon at sea, rather than risk being driven aground.
Just before I left the island I hooked up with another Texan, Ernest Schelgren, a platoon sergeant in the Eleventh Artillery who was also awaiting shipment home. He was from a farm and I was from a farm, and we hit it off. On October 16 we boarded the USS
The
Topside, I clipped on to the fore and aft line, a rope three or four inches thick that ran from the bow to the stern. It was the only thing you could hang on to.
The wind strummed the wires and the
