snapped that blade in the razor and tightened it down. Then he said, “Crawl under that bunk.” He handed him the razor and he made him dry shave lying on the floor beneath that bunk.
No doubt about it. They had ways to get our attention. They broke us down. They didn’t only train us physically. They trained us mentally. Boot camp was normally a twelve-week course. They put us through it in six weeks. We were an experiment. They worked us, as this younger generation likes to say, 24-7.
When I went into the Marines, I never thought about killing anybody. By the time that six weeks was up I was lean and I was mean. I can honestly say I could have cut a Jap’s throat and never blinked an eye.
When we graduated from boot camp we were given the Marine Corps Globe and Anchor to wear on our collars. Only after that did they finally call us Marines. Later classes got a week’s leave to go home and show off to the folks after graduation, but we never got a leave, and my folks never got to see me in uniform. Instead we were trucked twenty or thirty miles over to Camp Elliott, an old Navy base the Marines were using for advanced training. We were assigned to the Ninth Replacement Brigade. The first day or so someone came along and told me, “You’re going to be in the sixty mortars. Report to that tent over there.”
The mortar. I didn’t even know there was such a weapon. That first day they had it set up behind a tent, and we all got acquainted.
The M2 60mm mortar—the 60—is a deadly weapon. One mortar shell can pretty much be depended on to kill everyone within a forty-five-foot radius. It’s a little slower than an artillery shell, but it’s reliable and very effective. The biggest battlefield killer is not the rifle, and not artillery. It’s the mortar. If you’re firing artillery, you fire straight to the target, and it hits at a low angle. But you can fire a mortar at a high angle and it comes almost straight down. It can get into places that artillery and rifle fire can’t. A man can’t hide from a mortar. They said that on Guadalcanal a gunnery sergeant named Lou Diamond put one right down the smokestack of a Japanese ship.
Our classroom was in an open pavilion about thirty feet long, with a metal roof and rows of picnic tables. They had set up a mortar just outside, and the instructor started by giving us the breakdown on the weapon: the base plate, the firing tube, the bipod, the M4 sight, and the rounds themselves. We learned there were six men in a mortar squad— three ammo carriers, a gunner, assistant gunner and the squad leader, who is usually a corporal. In battle the gunner carries the base plate, which weighs about twelve pounds. His assistant carries the tube, which is eight or ten pounds. The squad leader carries the sight, which has a level indicator and is marked for degrees right and left.
A 60mm round weighs three pounds. Around the base of the round there are four firing charges, or increments, tabs of propellant about the size of postage stamps and maybe an eighth of an inch thick. You leave the increments on or pull them off depending on how far you want to fire the round. If your target is, say, fifteen hundred yards away, you leave all four of them on. If it’s fifty yards, you take off all but one.
They call mortars “hip pocket artillery.” The whole deal—base, bipod, tube and sight—sets up in seconds. The most complicated thing is getting the round on target. When you’re dug in, you set an aiming stake out in front of the mortar and zero in the sight on that. The squad leader is probably twenty-five or thirty yards ahead, on the front lines with the riflemen. He’s wired in to the gunner by what we called a sound-powered phone. He calls in the range to the target, number of degrees right or left of the aiming stake, and gives the commands to fire. The gunner makes adjustments on the tube and his assistant drops in the round. The kill radius is about forty-five feet.
At Camp Elliott they trained us and trained us. I got to where I could set up the mortar in my sleep. But I didn’t get to fire the 60 but once or twice all the time I was in the States. I began to wonder if we would ever get to put this skill to use.
The Marines never gave you advance warning when they were about to send you someplace. You were the last to know. One morning at Camp Elliott we got word, “Fall out. We’re shipping out.” For all we knew, it might have been another drill, but this time it wasn’t. We rode trucks down to the San Diego docks and climbed aboard the USS
The next day, March 12, 1943, we sailed.
The ship stopped off in Honolulu, Fiji, and New Caledonia, but we never went ashore. I figured they were pulling in for supplies or more troops. It was an uneventful trip. For lack of anything better to do, we spent a lot of time just standing on deck trading rumors. At Fiji I looked over the side and watched dark hammerhead sharks swarming around the ship. I got to be pretty good friends with another Marine, Jim Burke. He was from Clinton, Iowa, where his brother owned a bar.
On the last day of March, we pulled into Port Melbourne, Australia. We were trucked forty miles southeast of the city to Camp Balcombe. It was a pretty place with green fields and gentle hills that reminded me of Texas. The camp was full of Marines from the First Division’s Fifth Regiment, resting up and retraining after the Battle of Guadalcanal. We were just raw recruits from the Ninth Replacement Battalion, the newcomers. They put us in with the veterans. In the months ahead they became our teachers.
For the first week or so we didn’t do much. We were assigned to occasional work parties, policing the grounds, picking up trash, dumping the garbage, doing whatever needed to be done. Then I was sent to the Fifth Regiment Headquarters and Service Company, where I was put on KP. Not as punishment for anything I’d done, but just to keep me busy and because somebody had to do the work.
One of the sights around camp was Lou Diamond, the legendary 60mm sharpshooter and one of the Marines’ Old Breed. He had fought in World War I and after that at Shanghai and finally at Guadalcanal. Now he was assigned as sergeant of the guard at the brig while awaiting shipment home because he was too old to fight. He wore a little goatee and the word was he drank Australian beer by the case.
Diamond had an old cat, and every morning you’d hear that foghorn voice of his calling, “Come on, Tom. Come on, Tom.” That cat would follow him everywhere, all day, like a dog.
After I’d been on KP for about three months, they pulled me out and said, “You’re going up to Third Battalion, K Company. Mortars.”
It was my specialty, but in the Marines you never know where they’ll put you. You just wait.
I moved a couple hundred yards from headquarters. The barracks was large enough to hold both the machine gun and mortar sections. Jim Burke was there.
They began to train us constantly. At the rifle range, I shot poorly with the BAR—Browning Automatic Rifle —but finally shot Expert with the M1, which was just being issued. Shortly after that I was promoted to private first class.
We marched. We would head out in the mornings, early, head up the road twenty miles and get back in the afternoons, late, carrying a full pack and our weapons.
One day we had a competition to detail strip a machine gun, an M1, and mortar, see who could tear it down and put it back together the fastest. I could put that mortar together and get it on target faster than anybody. I mean, I was the head dog. I made gunner immediately and was issued a .45, which I wore from then on.
I think that competition was when I was first noticed. I was a gunner on New Britain. On Peleliu I was a corporal, an observer and squad leader. By Okinawa I would be sergeant in charge of the mortar section.
The Australians had been in the war longer than we had. They sent their Diggers—as they called soldiers—to fight the Germans in 1940 when I was still picking cotton and playing high school football. The day before the Japanese bombed us at Pearl Harbor, Australian airplanes fired on a Jap convoy off the coast of Malaya. Two months later, Japanese planes bombed Darwin on Australia’s northern coast. In March 1943, they were expecting a Jap invasion at any time.
Even at Melbourne, on the southern coast, the war seemed pretty close. U.S. Marines were everywhere—the First Marine Division had taken over the new Royal Melbourne Hospital for the wounded and malaria cases from Guadalcanal. The division’s First Marine Regiment was quartered on the city’s cricket grounds, and the Seventh Marines were out at Mount Martha, right up the hill from Camp Balcombe. On weekends and leave days we poured into the city to enjoy the beautiful parks and broad streets, the bars and sweetshops. And to tell the truth, the girls, who were at least as pretty as American girls.
Once I was assigned to KP duty I lost no time working out a deal with the mess sergeant. I would work a straight twenty-four hours, then get twenty-four hours off to go into town. As soon as I was free, I’d shower, put on a fresh uniform, find Jim Burke, and we’d head out.
We’d catch what we called the cattle car, an eighteen-wheeler with a trailer that had board benches along
