The Evolution of a Soldier

There was Never any question about the beginning of World War Two for the United States. Pearl Harbor began it crisply and decisively and without discussion.

Absolutely nobody was prepared for it. At Schofield Barracks in the infantry quadrangles, those of us who were up were at breakfast. On Sunday mornings in those days, there was a bonus ration of a half pint of milk, to go with your eggs or pancakes and syrup, also Sunday specials. Most of us were more concerned with getting and holding on to our half pints of milk than with listening to the explosions that began rumbling up toward us from Wheeler Field two miles away. "They doing some blasting?" some old-timer said through a mouthful of pancakes. It was not till the first low-flying fighter came skidding, whammering low overhead with its machine guns going that we ran outside, still clutching our half pints of milk to keep them from being stolen, aware with a sudden sense of awe that we were seeing and acting in a genuine moment of history.

As we stood outside in the street, huddled back against the dayroom wall, another fighter with the red suns on its wings came up the boulevard, preceded by two lines of holes that kept popping up 80 yards in front on the asphalt. As he came abreast of us, he gave us a typically toothy grin and waved, and I shall never forget his face behind the goggles. A white-silk scarf streamed out behind his neck and he wore a white ribbon around his helmet just above the goggles, with a red spot in the center of his forehead. I would learn later that this ribbon was a hachimaki, the headband worn by medieval samurai when going into battle, usually with some religious slogan of Shinto or emperor worship inked on it.

Battleship Row was turned into a living inferno and men there, precipitated into full-scale war without previous experience and with no preparation, performed feats of incredible heroism and rescue that seemed unbelievable later. Men dove overboard from red-hot decks to try to swim 100 yards underwater beneath the oil and gasoline fires that spread over the surface. Some made it, God knows how. One sailor told of seeing a bomb land beside a buddy who was just starting to climb an exterior ship's ladder. When the fumes cleared, he saw that the concussion had blown the buddy completely through the ladder and into neatly rectangular chunks the size of the ladder openings. "But I don't think he ever knew what hit him," the sailor said with a shaky smile.

•

There is always that exciting feeling about the beginning of a war, or even of a campaign. I guess the closest way to depict the feeling is to liken it to a sudden, unexpected school holiday. All restraints are off, everyday life and its dull routines, its responsibilities are scratched and a new set of rules takes over. True, some people are going to die, but probably it will not be oneself. And for a while, at least, adventure will reign.

Some men thrived on it. Whether they thrived or not, all of it was aimed at and directed toward that evolution of a soldier of which these were the first faltering child's steps, although the men did not yet know they were taking them. And which had as its purpose the sole concept of teaching each numbered individual, by the numbers, that he was a nameless piece of expendable materiel of a grateful Government and its ideals of freedom just as surely as any artillery shell, mortar round or rifle bullet. And the men who thrived on it got promoted. Those who wept could write letters home. Censored letters, if that need arose, too.

Add to this the gross privilege accorded their sadistic sergeant overseers, which they were constantly having their noses rubbed in, and you had at least the beginnings, hopefully, of a soldier so bitter he would gladly take on both Jap and Nazi simultaneously.

The men who reported to camp each arrived harboring in his secret core of cores his harrowing, never-shared knowledges and ignorances of himself. His panic terrors and his carefully held-in-check brutalities. Would he do well? Would he die? Would he be able to kill another man? Would he not be able to kill another man? Did he really know himself? These things could not be talked about. All that was taboo in America. And only the paradox of humor could function as a safety valve, pull together the split in the national personality.

The only real difference, the main difference, between World War Two and later wars was the greater over-all social commitment and, therefore, the greater social stigma attached to refusing to go. Besides, in World War Two, there was nowhere to run. Just about every nation was involved, one way or another. The whole world was caught up. Had some sanctuary existed, transportation to it would have been impossible under the Government control being exercised. Conscientious objectors went to camps. The mere awareness of this was perhaps a further step in that evolution of a soldier.

The question remained, always, that if idealistic America had birthed a new man incapable of killing his fellow humans, who was going to protect him from those nations that had not yet evolved such a type?

•

It was not until the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 7 and 8, 1942, that the United States and its allies in the Pacific achieved a victory over the Japanese, and then it was a questionable one, because we lost the carrier Lexington in it, in the first sea battle of carrier forces. On the day before, however, May 6, Corregidor had fallen and the United States' mighty Philippines had become Japanese. And it was not until June 3--6, when a U. S. carrier fleet sank four Jap carriers in the great Battle of Midway (though losing the carrier Yorktown and a destroyer in the process), that the United States gained a decisive, course-of-the-war-changing victory in the Pacific.

Historically, the Battle of the Coral Sea was a type of milestone historians love, in that it was the first naval battle ever to be fought between two carrier fleets. All fighting was carried out by aircraft, without surface craft firing on each other at all. Tactically, it was a Japanese victory. The sinking of our carrier Lexington, plus the U. S. naval tanker Neosho (yes, Neosho was an American ship, not Japanese) and the destroyer Sims far outweighed the sinking of the Japanese light carrier Shoho. Strategically, however, Coral Sea was an American victory. The Japanese invasion sortie to take Port Moresby had to turn back, the first such withdrawal of the war, and for the first time the United States had sunk a major Japanese ship.

I first heard of the Battle of the Coral Sea from a drunken sailor in a bar in Honolulu. If news of it had come out in the papers or over the radio, nobody in my outfit had read about it or heard it. We didn't see many newspapers out in the field on the beaches, but we had radios. Wherever there was electricity available.

I was on my first pass since December seventh. After six months of martial law and living in the field far from the fleshpots, guarding Oahu's beaches from invasion, my outfit had begun to receive a few daytime passes as restrictions were gradually loosened. The only difference from the old days was that we had to be back at six o'clock, before sundown and the nighttime curfew and blackout.

The sailor was sitting at the bar of the old Waikiki Tavern, now long gone, which used to sit east of the Moana Hotel on Waikiki. He was with two other salts, all three curiously sun-blackened and with deep hollow eyes. And though it was nine o'clock in the morning of a glorious sunshiny day, all three were already drunk as hoot owls. I knew the moment I walked in and saw the three of them by themselves there that I was looking at somebody different. Different from me.

They were not at all reluctant to talk. All three were off the carrier Yorktown. They had pulled into Pearl the day before, armor plate blackened and torn, to refit and repair bomb damage received in a sea battle off New Guinea and Australia. The area where the battle had taken place was called the Coral Sea. As soon as the Yorktown was in shape, they would be pulling right back out again, because "something was up." They did not know what. But right now they were putting away all the booze they could put away and were going to drink themselves into a stupor, and when they couldn't stand up anymore would get themselves driven back to the base. "Might not ever get another chance," the chief spokesman, a junior petty officer, said grimly. There was no self-pity in his voice. He had gone far beyond that. It was a flat simple statement of fact, and with it he gave me a bleak look of knowledgeable resignation.

As I listened, fascinated, the story of the wild, desperate battle slowly emerged. The sinking of an enemy carrier the first day and the rise of hopeful elation. On the second day, the "Lady Lex" taking two torpedoes on her portside while a dive-bombing attack developed overhead. The Yorktown, with her tighter turning circle, avoided seven or eight torpedoes, only to take an 800-pound bomb hit that penetrated to her fourth deck. At that, they had almost saved the Lex, and except for a series of internal explosions caused by fuel vapors, they would have.

"Listen, we better not be telling him all this," one of the sailors said anxiously.

"Aw, shit," the petty officer snarled.

"Look at him. You think he's some Jap spy?"

"What about that bartender?" the sailor said.

"Fuck it," the petty officer said. "I've known that bartender for ten years."

I stayed with them through the morning and part of the afternoon. When I left them, they were Well on their way to fulfilling their promise to themselves, particularly the petty officer, who was no longer able to walk by himself. But the two others, though rolling well themselves, were looking after him and would take care of him till the taxi got them all back to their ship, and I had an old friend in one of the whorehouses I wanted to see once more. At the moment, women did not seem to be one of my sailors' problems. It was as if, for now, women meant nothing to them.

With their sun-blackened faces and hollow haunted eyes, they were men who had already passed on into a realm I had never seen and didn't particularly want to see. As the petty officer said, factually, it wasn't the going there the one time but the going back again and again that finally got to you.

A few days later, when the news of the victory at Midway came in, and with it the news of the sinking of the York-town, I wondered if any of the three of them got off or if all three had gone down with her. I never saw any of them again to find out. I was very young then and the whole encounter had been intensely romantic for me. More than anything in the world I wanted to be like them.

I had no idea what the date was that day. Years later, after the war, I learned that it must have been May 28. The Enterprise and Hornet had come in on May 26, the Yorktown on May 27. On May 28, Task Force Sixteen sailed with Enterprise and Hornet for Midway. The Yorktown, incredibly, was repaired and ready to sail on May 29, and did sail with Task Force Seventeen on the 30th, to join her sisters. The broken Japanese code, unbeknownst to all of us, had informed our Intelligence of Yamamoto's plan to draw our carriers into a last-ditch fight.

The Battle of Midway has been almost universally acclaimed as the turning point of the Pacific war against the Japanese. In four days, from June third to sixth, the outnumbered torpedo-bomber and dive-bomber squadrons from the three U. S. carriers accounted for four of Japan's fleet carriers, sinking the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu and Soryu, over half of the entire Japanese elite carrier strike force. It was a crippling loss, which would force Japan back from a highly successful offensive strategy into a defensive strategy for the rest of the war.

Most of this near-ruinous damage was done in a single flaming five-minute attack begun at 10:22 A.M. on June fourth, by the dive-bomber squadrons from Enterprise and Yorktown, after the torpedo squadrons from the three U.S. carriers had tried and failed and been shot down. Coming on high overhead, unnoticed by the Japanese, who were occupied with the U. S. torpedo bombers that were making their runs, the dive bombers were able to swoop down like avenging hellions and deliver their loads on the Akagi, Kaga and Soryu, without losing a single plane. The three Jap carriers, turning into the wind with their flight decks crowded with rearmed and refueling torpedo planes and bombers readying for a second take-off, were reduced to blazing shambles in seconds, setting off the same dread series of internal fires and explosions that had done in the Lexington. So the suicidal attacks of the U. S. torpedo-bomber squadrons were not in vain.

There is no doubt that the three torpedo-bomber attacks were suicidal. The first two, by the Hornet's planes and by those of the Enterprise, were delivered singly, unaided and totally alone, without expectation of help. Of the 15 TBDs off the Hornet, only one pilot survived, by-clinging to a rubber cushion from his (continued on page 220)Soldier(continued from page 158) crashed plane. Of the 14 from the Enterprise, the commander and nine others of his force were shot down. It was sheer luck that the dive bombers of the Enterprise and the dive bombers and torpedo bombers of the Yorktown, these last already veterans of the Coral Sea, arrived just at that moment. Of the Yorktown's 12 TBDs, two survived. The few torpedoes that got launched at all were easily avoided by the Japanese carriers. No Japanese kamikaze pilot later in the war ever went to his death more open-eyed or with more certain foreknowledge than these men.

It is hard to know what was in the depths of these men's minds. It is plain, though, that the suicidal nature of their mission was clear to them. We can only speculate about the rest. Certainly, professionalism was a factor. Many were regular Navy men, and the rest had the benefit of the semiprofessionalism of the U. S. Naval Reserve. A certain sense of sacrifice would help. But they could not be sure their sacrifice would aid anything; and, indeed, those who died in the attacks almost certainly did not know whether their deaths had helped their cause. Esprit de corps? Surely; they were America's elite: the fly boys, and Naval carrier pilots in addition. Then, too, personal vanity and pride are always important factors in situations of this kind, and the sheer excitement of battle can often lead a man to death willingly, where without it he might have balked. But in the absolute, ultimate end, when your own final extinction is right there only a few yards farther on, staring back at you, there may be a sort of penultimate national, and social, and even racial masochism--a sort of hotly joyous, almost sexual enjoyment and acceptance--that keeps you going the last few steps. The ultimate luxury of just not giving a damn anymore.

Of course, patriotism has to be taken into account, too. Despite the milking of that word to death. And perhaps some of them had wives they didn't care about anymore and were glad to get rid of. Though probably they were all too gentlemanly to say so openly. But whatever it was, these men went in and died, and they were relatively healthy young Americans with no tradition of medieval warrior Bushido, and with good fortune, their sacrifice was a big factor in the Midway victory. They were probably not the first, and certainly they were not the last, to carry out a deliberately suicidal mission, but they were the first large group whose suicides were blessed with success. Much was made over them in the press and in the national propaganda services. They were given about the fullest coverage the media of the time allowed. At least one movie was written about them. And in its secret heart, America heaved a sigh of relief to know that its humping parents could still produce men like them. None of this detracted from what they did. Or from what they gained for themselves, in their own private satisfactions.

•

It is scarcely believable that I can remember Guadalcanal with pleasure, and affection, and a sense of beauty. But such are the vagaries of the human head. One can hardly credit that a place so full of personal misery and terror, which was perfectly capable of taking your life and on a couple of occasions very nearly did, could be remembered with such kindly feelings, but it is by me. The pervasive mud, and jungle gloom and tropical sun, when they are not all around you, smothering you, can have a haunting beauty at a far remove. When you are not straining and gasping to save your life, the act of doing so can seem adventurous and exciting from a distance. The greater the distance, the greater the adventure.

But, God help me, it was beautiful. I remember exactly the way it looked the day we came up on deck to go ashore: the delicious, sparkling tropic sea, the long, beautiful beach, the minute palms of the copra plantation waving in the sea breeze, the dark-green band of jungle and the dun mass and power of the mountains rising behind it to rocky peaks. Our bivouac was not far from the ruined plantation house and quarters, and you could look at its ruin--not without awe--and imagine what it must have been like to live there before the armies came with their vehicles and numberless feet and mountains of supplies. Armies create their own mud, in actual fact. The jungle stillnesses and slimes in the gloom inside the rain forest could make you catch your breath with awe. From the mountain slopes in mid afternoon, with the sun at your back, you could look down to the beach and off across the straits to Florida Island and one of the most beautiful views of tropic scenery on the planet. None of it looked like the pestilential hellhole that it was.

The day we arrived, there was an air raid, trying to hit our two transports. Those of us already ashore could stand in perfect safety in the edge of the trees and watch, as if watching a football game or a movie. Around us, Marines and Army old-timers would cheer whenever a Jap plane went smoke-trailing down the sky, or groan when one got through and water spouts geysered up around the transports. Soon we were doing it with them. Neither transport took a hit, but one took a near miss so close alongside it sprang some plates and had to leave without finishing unloading. Almost immediately after, a loaded barge coming in took a hit and seemed simply to disappear. A little rescue boat set out from shore at once, to pick up the few bobbing survivors. It seemed strange and curiously calloused, then, to be watching and cheering this game in which men were dying.

Later, after our first time up on the line, we would sit out in our bivouac on the hills above Henderson Field and watch the pyrotechnic display of a naval night battle off Savo Island with the same insouciance and not feel calloused at all. They took their chances and we took our chances.

•

Everybody, at least everybody of my generation, now knows how the Marines landed virtually unopposed on the 'Canal itself, after heavy fights on two smaller islands, Tulagi and Gavutu; how the Japanese, for reasons of their own, deciding not to accept their first defeat, kept pouring men and equipment onto the island; how Major General Vandegrift's tough First Marine Division, learning as it went along, fought them to a standstill, while the Navy sank their loaded transports of reinforcements behind them--until in the end they were finally forced to evacuate it anyway. Not many, even of my generation, know that from about mid-November 1942 on, U.S. Infantry was doing much of the fighting on Guadalcanal, and from mid-December was doing it all. The doughty First Marine Division, dead-beat, ill and tired, decimated by wounds and tropical diseases, but evolved into soldiers at last, had been relieved and evacuated.

The first elements of the Americal Division had landed in mid-October. The first elements of my outfit landed in late November, the rest in early December. No living soul looking at us, seeing us come hustling ashore to stare in awe at the hollow-eyed, vacant-faced, mean-looking First Marines, could have believed that in three months from that day we would be known as the famed 25th Infantry Tropic Lightning Division, bearing the shoulder patch of the old Hawaiian Division Poi Leaf, with a streak of lightning running vertically through it. In the interim, we had taken over from the First Marines, prosecuted the final offensive on the 'Canal, chased the Japanese to Tassa-faronga in the whirlwind windup that gave us our name and begun to move up to New Georgia for the next fight of our campaign. By then we would have had a fair number of casualties and sick and, as a division and as individuals, have made our own evolution of a soldier.

My own part in all of this was relatively undistinguished. I fought as an infantry corporal in a rifle company in a regiment of the 25th, part of the time as an assistant squad leader, part of the time attached to the company headquarters. I went where I was told to go and did what I was told to do but no more. I was scared shitless just about all of the time. On the third day of a fight for a complex of hills called The Galloping Horse, I was wounded in the head through no volition of my own, by a random mortar shell, spent a week in the hospital and went back to my unit after the fight and joined it for the relatively little that was left of the campaign. I came out of it with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for "heroic or meritorious achievement" (not the V-for-Valor one), which was given to me apparently by a process as random as that of the random mortar shell that hit me. At least, I don't know anything I ever did to earn it. I was shipped out after the campaign for an injured ankle that had to be operated on.

It's funny, the things that get to you. One day a man near me was hit in the throat, as he stood up, by a bullet from a burst of machine-gun fire. He cried out, "Oh, my God!" in an awful, grimly comic, burbling kind of voice that made me think of the signature of the old Shep Fields Rippling Rhythm band. There was awareness in it and a tone of having expected it, then he fell down, to all intents and purposes dead. I say to all intents and purposes because his vital functions may have continued for a while. But he appeared unconscious, and of course there was nothing to do for him with his throat artery torn out. Thinking about him, it seemed to me that his yell had been for all of us lying there, and I felt like crying.

Another time, I heard a man yell out, "I'm killed!" as he was hit. As it turned out, he was, although he didn't the for about 15 minutes. But he might have yelled the same thing and not been killed.

One of the most poignant stories about our outfit was one I didn't see myself but only heard about later. I was in the hospital when it happened. One of our platoon sergeants, during a relatively light Japanese attack on his position, reached into his hip pocket for a grenade he'd stuck there and got it by the pin. The pin came out, but the grenade didn't. No one really knows what he thought about during those split seconds. What he did was turn away and put his back against a bank to smother the grenade away from the rest of his men. He lived maybe five or ten minutes afterward, and the only thing he said, in a kind of awed, scared, very disgusted voice, was, "What a fucking recruit trick to pull."

A lot of the posthumous Medals of Honor that are given are given because men smothered grenades or shells with their bodies to protect the men around them. Nobody ever recommended our platoon sergeant for a Medal of Honor that I know of. Perhaps it was because he activated the grenade himself.

I think I screamed myself when I was hit. I thought I could vaguely remember somebody yelling. I blacked out for several seconds and had a him impression of someone stumbling to his feet with his hands to his face. It wasn't me. Then I came to myself several yards down the slope, bleeding like a stuck pig, with blood running all over my face. It must have been a dramatic scene. As soon as I found I wasn't dead or dying, I was pleased to get out of there as fast as I could. According to the rules, my responsibility to stay ceased as soon as I was hurt. It really wasn't so bad and hadn't hurt at all. The thing I was most proud of was that I remembered to toss my full canteen of water to one of the men from the company headquarters lying there.

•

When all the patriotic slogans and nationalistic or ideological propaganda are put aside, all the straining to convince a soldier that he is dying for something, I think the evolution of a soldier is perhaps one's final, previous acceptance of the fact that one's name is already written in the rolls of the already dead.

That is easy enough to say. It's not all that easy to do. And yet it is easy to do, because it is with himself or with fate that he is lost. Only then can he function as he ought to function, under fire. He knows and accepts beforehand that he's dead, although he may still be walking around for a while. That soldier you have walking around there with that awareness in him is the end product of the evolution of a soldier.

Between those two spectator episodes I described earlier, that first air raid we watched and cheered, albeit guiltily, and the naval night battle we watched and cheered with callous pleasure, something had happened to us. Between those two points in time, sometime during our first long tour up on the line, we changed. Consciously or unconsciously, we accepted the fact that we couldn't survive. So we could watch the naval battle from the safety of the hills with undisguised fun.

There is no denying we were pleased to see somebody else getting his. Even though there were men dying. Being blown apart, concussed, drowning. Didn't matter. We had been getting ours, let them get theirs. It wasn't that we were being sadistic. It was just that we had nothing further to worry about. We were dead.

Now, not every man can accept this. A few men accept it immediately and at once, with a kind of feverish, self-destructive joy. The great majority of men don't want to accept it. They can accept it, though. And do accept it, if their outfit keeps going back up there long enough. The only alternative is to ask to be relieved and admit you are a coward, and that of course is against the law. They put you in prison.

And yet, strangely, for everyone, the acceptance and the giving up of hope create and reinstill hope in a kind of reverse-process mental photo-negative function. Little things become significant. The next meal, the next bottle of booze, the next kiss, the next sunrise, the next full moon. The next bath. Or, as the Bible might have said but didn't quite, Sufficient unto the day is the existence thereof.

This is a hard philosophy. But then, the soldier's profession is a hard profession, in wartime. A lot of men like it, though, and even civilian soldiers have been known to stay on and make it their life's work. It has its excitements and compensations. One of them is that, since you have none yourself, you are relieved of any responsibility for a future. And everything tastes better.

•

Something strange seems to happen when a man is hit. There is an almost alchemic change in him and in others' relationship to him. Assuming he isn't killed outright, and is only wounded, it is as though he has passed through some veil isolating him and has entered some realm where the others, the unwounded, cannot follow. He has become a different person, and the others treat him differently.

The dead, of course, really have entered a different realm, and there is a sort of superstitious mystique of dread and magic about the dead. Where do people really go when they die? Do they go anywhere? Nobody has ever gone through death and lived to tell the tale. So it can only remain a question. There is a sort of instinctive dislike of touching them, as though what has happened to them has contaminated them and might contaminate the toucher.

Perhaps part of this feeling passes over to the wounded as well. Perhaps we think some of their bad luck might rub off, too. In any case, while they are treated as tenderly as humanly possible, and everything to make them as comfortable as possible is done for them that can be, they are looked at with a sort of commingled distaste, guilt and irritation, and when they are finally moved out of the area, everybody heaves a sort of silent sigh of relief without looking anybody else in the eyes.

The wounded themselves seem to acquiesce in this attitude, as though they are half-ashamed for having been hurt in the first place and feel that now they can only be a drag and a weight on their outfit. Nor do the wounded seem to be less isolated from one another. Being in the same fix does not make them closer but even farther apart than they are from the well.

The first wounded I ever saw were the remnants, picked up by the rescue boat, of the bombed-out barge that was hit in the air raid the day we arrived at Guadalcanal. Of course, we were all totally green hands at the time, so perhaps we watched with more awe than we would have later. But only a short time before, some of us had been talking to some of these men on the ship. With practical comments as to the extent of the various injuries in our ears from nearby old-timers who had been there longer, we watched as the survivors were landed and led or carried up from the beach to where a field dressing station had been set up at dawn. A few of them could walk by themselves. But all of them were suffering from shock as well as from blast, and the consummate tenderness with which they were handled by the corpsmen was a matter of complete indifference to them. Bloodstained, staggering, their eyeballs rolling, they faltered up the slope to lie or sit, dazed and indifferent, and allow themselves to be worked on by the doctors. They had crossed that strange line and everybody realized, including themselves dimly, that now they were different. All they had done was climb into a barge and sit there as they had been told. And then this had been done to them, without warning, without explanation, perhaps damaging them irreparably; and now explanation was impossible. They had been initiated into a strange, insane, twilight fraternity where explanation would be forever impossible. Everybody understood this. It did not need to be mentioned. They understood it themselves. Everybody was sorry, and so were they themselves. But there was nothing to be done about it. Tenderness was all that could be given and, like most of our self-labeled human emotions, it meant nothing when put alongside the intensity of their experience.

With the Jap planes still in sight above the channel, the doctors began trying to patch up what they could of what the planes had done to them. Some of them would yet the, that much was obvious, and it was useless to waste time on these that might be spent on others who might live. Those who would the accepted this professional judgment of the doctors silently, as they accepted the tender pat on the shoulder the doctors gave them when passing them by, staring up mutely from liquid eyes at the doctors' guilty faces. We watched all this with rapt attention. The wounded men, both those who would the and those who would not, were as indifferent to being stared at as they were to the tenderness with which they were treated. They stared back at us with lackluster eyes, which though lackluster were made curiously limpid by the dilation of deep shock. As a result, we all felt it, too--what the others, with more experience, already knew--these men had crossed a line, and it was useless to try to reach them. The strange, wild-eyed, bearded, crazily dressed Marines and soldiers who had been fighting there since August didn't even try, and stood around discussing professionally which wounds they thought might be fatal and which might not.

Even the Army itself understood this about them, the wounded, and had made special dispensations about their newly acquired honorary status. Those who did not the would be entered upon the elaborate shuttling movement back out from this farthermost point of advance, as only a short time back they had been entered upon the shuttle forward into it. Back out, farther and farther back, toward that amorphous point of assumed total safety: home. Depending upon the seriousness of their condition, they would descend part of the way or all of the way to the bottom of the lifeline home. The lucky ones, those hurt badly enough, would go all the way to the very bottom, and everybody's secret goal: discharge.... (I suppose I should confess here that parts of the above passage about our first air-raid wounded I have excerpted from a longer similar passage in a combat novel I wrote about Guadalcanal called The Thin Red Line. Realizing when I came to write about them that I could never write about them better than I had done there, I used from it.)

Casualties are one of war's grimmer realities. In a way, perhaps, its most important element. An army that cannot take casualties cannot fight. And an army that takes too many will lose. Somewhere in between there is the ultimate fact that whatever you do, you are going to have casualties, if you fight. Like the poor, they are always with us. We got more inured to them, as time went on. But, unless you are too busy yourself to notice, there is always that sense of awe and sorrow when a man you know goes down. Or even a man you don't know. But people, civilians, really don't like to think about casualties. Even combat soldiers don't.

The two casualties I've remembered the most vividly were both men I didn't know and never met. I don't know why these two, instead of some others, but whenever I read or hear that word, casualty, it is my mental pictures of these two that come leaping into my mind.

The first was a man who was not even in my battalion. My company had been ordered up to relieve a company from the other battalion, and my platoon took over along a hilltop from a platoon of the other company. In the confusion of making the relief, and then the excitement of having to repel a light, feeling attack of Japanese almost immediately after, we had paid little attention to our surroundings, and so hadn't noticed our dead friend lying on the down slope behind us. But then, in the quiet following the attack, in the shifting, light hill breeze, a faint waft of him got up to us for a moment. And there was no mistaking that smell.

He must have been killed the day before and been missed by the medics. And it had rained quite a lot during the night. With that uncanny ability the dead have of seeming to fade into and become part of the terrain, in his grimy green fatigues and olive-drab helmet, he was not easy to spot. But the fellows on the line, when they began to look around for him, spotted him easily enough. Then the uproar began.

"Medics! Medics! Where the fuck are those lousy lazy medics? Get this fucking stiff out of here!" They were indignant at his having been left there for them to see and smell. Soon all the rest of us joined in the chorus, and the outcry was so great that battalion headquarters down the rear slope sent somebody up to see what was the matter. It didn't take the messenger long to find out, and he hurried back down to battalion. A few of us walked over to take a look at the stiff. Far below we could see four straggling medics with a stretcher starting the long climb.

He wasn't even swollen enough to be grotesque, only a little. Rigor mortis had obviously set in. He was lying on his side with his knees pulled up and his hands clenched and bent up beside his face. There was no blood, and no visible signs of a wound. He apparently had curled up as he died. But the clenched hands were not touching the face; they were just stuck out there in the air at the ends of the bent elbows. In that manner of all combat dead, he appeared to be faceless. He had all the parts of a physiognomy, eyes, ears, nose, lips, but there was a peculiar indistinct haziness about them when you looked. I don't know what causes this effect. I used to think it was that we did not want to look closely, and so let our eyes slide away from the face. But later I noted the same effect in photos of the dead. He seemed, instead of being a collection of limbs and bones and parts, to have become a single, solid object of the same density and texture all the way through, like a loose boulder or a tree stump or the bole of a downed tree. Anyhow, there he was. And he was not even a man anymore. As short a time ago as yesterday, he had been. But he wasn't now. Subdued, we walked back to the rest of the platoon. We had all seen plenty of dead men by now, but this one seemed to move us more than usual. I think his being alone like that, and from a stranger outfit, all alone on a slope that was supposed to have been already cleaned up, moved us in a way that a whole slope full of our own dead and wounded might not have. I just felt there ought to be something more significant about it all. Suddenly, one of us gagged and went off and puked in the weeds. But nobody kidded him, as they might have done normally. We all seemed to know that his puking was not from the sight and smell of a dead man so much as from a kind of animal protest at the idea itself.

When the medics got up to the dead guy, they couldn't make him stay on the stretcher, in his curled-up position. He kept rolling off it as they lifted, no matter how they placed him. Finally, two of them seized him by the wrists and ankles and carted him off down the hill that way, while the other two brought up the rear with the stretcher. From behind them at the crest, men from the platoon whistled their critical displeasure.

But why should that one man stick in my mind so strongly, all these years?

The other one was a boy I saw as I walked back the day I was wounded. I had had to cross a grassy little gulch and had to climb a long, steep hillside through sparse jungle trees. I was being fired at by snipers--puffs of dirt popped up around me from time to time--but I couldn't climb any faster. Halfway up the hill, I came upon a stretcher with a dead boy in it that had been abandoned. It lay among some rocks, tilted a little, just the way it had been dropped. He had obviously been hit a second time, in the head, and left by the stretcher-bearers, probably under fire themselves. He had certainly been killed by the hit in the head, but I couldn't tell if by a sniper bullet or something else. In any case, blood had run out of him from somewhere until it nearly filled the depression his hips made in the stretcher. And that has always stayed with me. It didn't seem a body could hold enough blood to do that. His hips were awash in it and it almost covered his belt and belt buckle. And somehow, though he was lying on his back, head uphill, blood had run or splashed from his head so that there were pools of it filling both of his eye sockets. All the blood had thickened and almost dried, so he must have been there since early morning. Undoubtedly, he belonged to our sister company, which was making the attack with us, but I had never seen him before. He looked so pathetic lying there, one hand dangling outside the stretcher, that I wanted to cry for him. But I was gasping too hard for breath and was too angry to cry for anybody. It was possible that if he had been hit by snipers, they might hit me also. But even if it was possible, there wasn't anything I could do about it. I couldn't move any faster, and I was so angry I didn't care. I don't even know what I was angry at. Life, I guess. I certainly wasn't angry at the Japanese for sniping wounded; we expected that. I was just angry. And that was all. I went on up the hill and left him.

I suppose every man has his own private casualties he remembers and cannot forget. Perhaps hundreds; who knows? I have plenty of others. But these two I used to dream about, back when I still had the nightmares. But why they became my private images for casualty, I have no answer for. Perhaps it was simply because they both seemed so insignificant and useless. Pointless.

Their deaths weren't pointless, of course. Not statistically. Even if they were killed at random, simply because they were moving forward though not doing anything particularly, they were part of the statistics that were gaining us the ground, and later I realized this.

•

Anonymity has always been a problem for soldiers. It is one of the hardest things about a soldier's life. Old-time regular soldiers (like Negroes, women and other slaves through history) learn ways to cherish their servitude and ingest it and turn it into nourishment for power over the very establishment figures who administer it for the establishment that creates it. The old-timer first sergeant is analogous to the Negro-mammy slave who ran the master's big plantation house and family with a hand of iron, or the modern housewife who carefully rules her lord and master's life with dexterity from behind the scenes.

But to do that, the soldier, like the slave and the housewife, must first learn duplicity. He must immerse himself in and accept wholeheartedly the camouflage position of his servitude--in his case, the unnamed, anonymous rank and file of identical uniforms stretching away into infinity, all of them sporting identical headgear (caps or helmets) to hide the individual faces, which themselves, even, must remain forever fixed and set in expressionless expressions to match all the other expressions. He must work within the mass of anonymity to find his freedom of expression, and this is probably the hardest thing of all for the wartime civilian soldiers to pick up and learn. Most never do learn it.

But to accept anonymity in death is even harder. It is hard enough to accept dying. But to accept dying unknown and unsung except in some mass accolade, with no one to know the particulars how and when except in some mass communiqué, to be buried in some foreign land like a sack of rotten, evil-smelling potatoes in a tin box for possible later disinterment and shipment home requires a kind of bravery and acceptance so unspeakable that nobody has ever given a particular name to it.

Of course, the catch is always there: You may live through it. But the drain on the psyche just contemplating it is so great that forever after--or at least for a very long time--you are a different person just from having contemplated it.

I don't think I ever learned this one of the last steps in the evolution of a soldier, and I think it was just there that my evolution as a soldier stopped short of the full development. I remember lying on my belly more than once and looking at the other sweating faces all around me and wondering which of us lying there who died that week would ever be remembered in the particulars of his death by any of the others who survived. And of course nobody else would know or much care. I simply did not want to the and not be remembered for it. Or not be remembered at all.

I think it was then I learned that the idea of the Unknown Soldier was a con job and did not work. Not for the dead. It worked for the living. Like funerals, it was a ceremony of ritual obeisance made by the living for the living, to ease their pains, guilts and superstitious fears. But not for the dead, because the Unknown Soldier wasn't them, he was only one.

I once served on a grave-registration detail on Guadalcanal, after the fighting was all over, to go up into the hills and dig up the bodies of the dead lost in some attack. The dead were from another regiment, so men from my outfit were picked to dig them up. That was how awful the detail was. And they did not want to make it worse by having men dig up the dead of their own. Unfortunately, a man in my outfit on the detail had a brother in the other outfit, and we dug up the man's brother that day.

It was a pretty awful scene. In any case. Even without the man's brother. The lieutenant in charge of grave registration had us get shovels out of the back of one of the trucks, and pointed out the area we were to cover, and explained to us how we were to take one dog tag off of them before we put them into the bags. He explained that some of the bodies were pretty ripe because the fight had been two weeks before. When we began to dig, each time we opened a hole a little explosion of smell would burst up out of it, until finally the whole saddle where we were working was covered with it up to about knee-deep. Above the knees it wasn't so bad, but when you had to bend down to search for the dog tag (we took turns doing this job), it was like diving down into another element, like water or glue. We found about four bodies without dog tags that day.

"What will happen to those, sir?" I asked the lieutenant. Although he must have done this job before, he had a tight, screwed-up look of distaste on his face.

"They will remain anonymous," he said.

"What about the ones with dog tags?" I asked.

"Well." he said, "they will be recorded."

•

In the early Sixties, on a trip to Italy while living in France, I drove down from Rome to look at Anzio. Today what used to be mine fields is completely built over with seaside villas, restaurants and bars. But it is easy for any old soldier to see the complete hellishness of the position, with the two towns dominated by the Alban Hills and no rear area at all beyond the harbor except the expanse of the open sea.

Afterward, I went around to look at the American Military Cemetery, which is placed off a few miles somewhere else. For a while, I walked around among the crosses that formed the headstones, on the green, well-kept grass. The magnitude of all the long lines of white crosses was truly awesome. I talked to the man in charge of the caretaking, a red-bearded American who lived right there. No, not many people came, he said. It was too far away and off the main tourist routes from Rome. And of course the local Italians had no reason to go there. But he liked to make sure the place was always well kept, anyway. Sometimes it was hard, on the budget the U. S. Government allotted him. But once in a while, somebody might come by who had a relative buried there; or else someone like myself, who was just interested. I thanked him and told him his caretaking was superb, which it was. What else was there to say? I got into my little car and drove back to Rome.

•

In March of 1943, I left Guadalcanal by ship, evacuated to the base hospital on Efate in the New Hebrides. On Efate, my right ankle was operated on and I was shipped to New Zealand, and from there, I shipped out home to San Francisco aboard one of the hospital ships that plied that long voyage between the United States and Australia.

In March of '43, my division was getting ready for the move up on New Georgia, and everybody who could get out was getting out. This was not so easy, however. Restrictions were being tightened up, and unless you had something pretty serious wrong with you, you didn't stand much chance. In late March, we went through the required division physical examination, before starting a newer intensive assault training, and a few malaria cases and several cases of jungle rot were singled out for evacuation to New Zealand. But most of us passed the rather perfunctory exam without much notice.

Then, a few days after the physical, I turned my right ankle again. I had had a bad ankle quite a long time, since long before Pearl Harbor. And I was used to taping it up before going out on marches or maneuvers or--later--up onto the line. I always carried a couple of rolls of two-inch adhesive tape in my pack for that purpose.

The day I turned it anew, I happened to be walking through the bivouac with our old first sergeant. Old, I say; but he must have been only about 38. In any case, I went down into the mud. I had turned it on one of those thick rolls of half-dried mud turned up by one of the jeeps.

"What the hell happened to you?" the old first said, when I picked myself up and tried to brush some of the wet, gooey mud off my pants. "You're white as a sheet," he added.

It always hurt a lot when I did it. But I had learned to favor the ankle, and it didn't happen very often. I tried to explain to him about the ankle.

"You're crazy," he sneered. "Didn't you show that leg to them up at division?"

I only shrugged. They wouldn't pay any attention to a bad ankle, I said. They'd only think I was malingering.

"You go up there and show it to them at division medical," the first said. "If it's as bad as what I just saw, it could get you out of here. If it's as bad as what I saw, you got no business in the Infantry."

I just stared at him. The funny thing about it was that if I set it down carefully and absolutely straight on the ground, even after I'd turned it, I could still walk on it. It had never occurred to me that it might be bad enough to-get me out of there.

"If you don't, you're crazy," he said, and turned and walked off to his orderly tent.

I stared after his contemptuous back. He had presented me with a serious moral problem. I talked it over with a few of my buddies and with a few of the other non-coms in the company. (I was a corporal at the time.) All of them urged me to go up to division medical with it. They would certainly go up with it if they had it, if they were me, and maybe it could get them out of there. They echoed the first: I was crazy not to try. "But what about the company?" I asked the mess sergeant and the supply sergeant and a couple of the field sergeants. "Would you leave the company?"

"Are you kidding?" the supply sergeant said. "I'd be out of here like a shot."

I was smart enough to understand that if I did go, and did get sent out, it was not going to affect anything in any appreciable way. Some poor-ass, bad-luck replacement would replace me and one of the guys would get my corporal's rating. I understood that numbers were what counted in this war, vast numbers of men and machines, I was intelligent enough to see that. And I had no more romantic notions about combat. On the other hand, if everybody who wanted out got out, there wouldn't be anybody left to fight the Japs or the Germans. Of course, they couldn't all get out. Even if they wanted. They had to stay. The regulations were getting tougher and tougher about that. You had to have something genuinely wrong with you. Finally, I went.

The surgeon at division pursed his mouth into a silent whistle and raised his eyebrows, after he had wiggled my ankle around and bent it in to the point of almost turning it again. Certainly, I had no business in the Infantry. He did not know what they would do with me farther down the line, but he was sending me out. He looked up at me and grinned. I grinned back. If he could only have known how I was hanging on his every word and expression. But perhaps he did.

The head surgeon on Efate was a young man. He said he would like to have a try at operating on it. but he couldn't guarantee that he could fix it completely. He could probably tie it up sufficiently so it would not turn all the way like it used to, but it would almost certainly be partially stiff. It was an interesting problem, surgically. But of course it was up to me to make the final decision. Did I know the evacuation regulations? I nodded; I did: Roughly, the evacuation rules were that if your wound or ailment was such that you would be fit for duty in three weeks, you would be kept at Efate and sent back to your old outfit. If you were going to take six weeks to be fit for duty, you would be sent on to New Zealand and reassigned to a new outfit. Longer than that and you would be sent back home to the States and reassigned there. How long would I be in the cast? I asked. At least two months, or two and a half, he answered and grinned at me. I nodded and grinned back. "Then go ahead and operate."

The next morning, they wheeled me in and put the ether to me. Ten days later, I was on my way to New Zealand on a hospital ship. Three weeks later, on another. I left for the States. I remember that Major James Roosevelt, the President's son, was on the same ship. I saw him once, at a distance. But I don't remember the name of that lovely ship.

When we passed under the great misty pink apparition of the Golden Gate Bridge, I stood on the upper decks on my crutches and watched grizzled tough old master sergeants and chief petty officers break down and cry. I had been away three and a half years.

•

How did you come back from counting yourself dead?

The plans called for 9,000,000 Americans to be demobilized between June 1945 and June 1946. The slow demobilization was necessary. Not only were large numbers required for the armies of occupation until they could be replaced but the sheer physical logistics of transport made it necessary to string out the return. And what would happen to the happily humming economy, buzzing along, if you suddenly dumped 9,000,000 men onto the job market? Already the "veterans" were a problem, even before they got to be veterans. Many home-front assembly-line workers feared for their jobs, as the huge numbers of "vets" flooded back into the country.

If the vets were a problem to the economy and to the society as a whole, they neither minded nor cared. All they wanted was to get there: home. The combat men--the new "professionals"--of course got priority, or were supposed to. Out of the 9,000,000, very few had ever put their lives on the line, and fewer still had ever heard a shot fired in seriousness. There was a lot of payola under a lot of tables, but in general, the plans were followed pretty closely. If out of 9,000,000 men a few tens of thousands got home earlier than they should have, who was going to worry about it, except the men they had got themselves squeezed in front of? And among such huge numbers, who would hear or listen to such a small number of voices? In Europe, they started coming home even before it was finished in the Pacific.

Housing was a problem. President Truman begged the public to find living space for the veterans. Getting your old job back, or getting a new one, was less of a problem. And the civilian world went merrily on in its happy, dizzy whirl of prosperity in a booming economy. Articles appeared in women's magazines with titles like "What You Can Do to Help the Returning Veteran" and "Will He Be Changed?" Good Housekeeping said, "After two or three weeks [my italics], he should be finished with talking, with oppressive remembering. If he still goes over the same stories, reveals the same emotions, you had best consult a psychiatrist. This condition is neurotic." House Beautiful recommended that "home must be the greatest rehabilitation center of them all" and showed an apartment fixed up for some home-coming general. Ladies' Home Journal asked, in 1945, "Has your husband come home to the right woman?"

The answer, of course, was no. How could any woman be the right woman for a man who had just spent one year or two years as essentially a dead man, waiting, anticipating having his head blown off or his guts torn out? Even if she was the same woman he had left (and most were not; how could they be?), she was not the right woman for such a man.

Instead of talking about it, most men didn't talk about it. It was not that they didn't want to talk about it, it was that when they did, nobody understood it. It was such a different way of living, and of looking at life even, that there was no common ground for communication in it.

It was like a Ranger staff sergeant I met in St. Louis years ago told me: "One day at Anzio, we got eight new replacements into my platoon. We were supposed to make a little feeling attack that same day. Well, by next day, all eight of them replacements were dead, buddy. But none of us old guys were. We weren't going to send our own guys out on point in a damn-fool situation like that. We knew nothing would happen. We were sewed up tight. And we'd been together through Africa and Sicily and Salerno. We sent the replacements out ahead." He gave me a sad smile. "But how am I going to explain something like that to my wife? She'd think it was horrible. But it was right, man, right. How were we going to send our own guys out into that?" We had some drinks, got pretty drunk, in fact, then he went home to his wife. Who, I am sure, was angry at him for getting drunk.

Another time, an Infantry sergeant who had fought in the Bulge told me over drinks how his platoon had taken some prisoners west of St.-Vith. "There were eight of them and they were tough old-timers, buddy. Been through the mill from the beginning. It was about the fourth or fifth day and we needed some information. But they weren't talking, not those tough old birds. You had to admire them. So we took the first one off to the side, where they could see him, and shot him through the head. Then they all talked. They were eager to talk. Once they knew we were serious. Horrible? Evil? We knew all about Malmédy, man, and Stavelot. We needed that information. Our lives depended on it. We didn't think it was evil. Neither did they. But how am I going to tell my wife about something like that? Or my mother? They don't understand the problems." We went on getting drunk, and talking, until he felt he was ready to go home.

Slowly, bit by bit, it began to taper off. Men still woke up in the middle of the night, thrashing around and trying to get their hands on their wives' throats. Men still rolled out from a dead sleep and hit the dirt with a crash on the bedroom floor, huddling against the bed to evade the aerial bomb or the artillery shells they had dreamed they heard coming. While their wives sat straight up in bed in their new frilly nightgowns bought for the home-coming, wide-eyed and staring, horrified. An old buddy would have roared with laughter. There is no telling what the divorce rate was then, in the early years. Certainly a lot higher than was ever admitted.

A number of men I knew slept for a number of months with loaded pistols or unsheathed bayonets under their pillows. Just made them feel more comfortable, they said shamefacedly, but it sure scared the shit out of their wives. And their wives' psychiatrists.

The de-evolution of a soldier was longer in coming in some than in others. Some never did lose it and some--a few--went off to the booby hatch. But not the vast majority. The majority, as they had survived the process of evolving into soldiers, now began to survive the process of de-evolving.

There was nothing the good old Government could do about that. As with Uncle Sugar's expensive, astonishingly rich, lavish care that was being expended on the wounded and maimed, so with Uncle Sugar trying to fix things up for the returnee. Omar Bradley was put in charge of veterans' affairs, to modernize it and clean up its graft. Not only was the Government sending everybody who wanted to go back to college but it was sending anybody at all to college, anybody who asked, on the GI Bill of Rights. So much so that girls and civilian men who wanted to go had to score enormously high on the preschool exams in order to get in. There simply wasn't room for them. But the Government had never set up a de-evolution-of-a-soldier center, to match its induction centers. When you went in, they had the techniques and would ride you all the way to becoming a soldier. They had no comparable system when you came out. That you had to do on your own.

And with the de-evolving, as with the evolving, the first sign of change was the coming of the pain. As the old combat numbness disappeared and the frozen feet of the soul began to thaw, the pain of the cure became evident. The sick-making thoughts of all the buddies who had died. The awful bad luck of the maimed. The next thing to go was the professionalism. How could you be a professional when there was no more profession? The only way was to stay in The Profession. And some, quite a few, did.

About the last thing to go was the old sense of esprit. That was the hardest thing to let go of, because there was nothing in civilian life that could replace it. The love and understanding of men for men in dangerous times and places and situations. Just as there was nothing in civilian life that could replace the heavy, turgid, day-to-day excitement of danger. Families and other civilian types would never understand that sense of esprit, any more than they would understand the excitement of the danger. Some old-timers, a lot of them, tried to hold on to the esprit by joining division associations and regimental associations. But the feeling wasn't the same, and never would be the same, because the motivation--the danger--was gone. Too many people lived too far away and had other jobs and other interests, and anyway, the drive was no longer there, and the most honest in their hearts had to admit it.

After all, the war was over.

When the veterans began to spend two nights a week down at the local American Legion, the families and parents and wives could heave a sigh of relief. Because they knew then that, after all, it--the war--was truly over.

How many times they had heard the old, long-drawn-out, faint field command pass down the long length of vast parade grounds, fading, as the guidons moved out front.

So slowly it faded, leaving behind it a whole generation of men who would walk into history looking backward, with their backs to the sun, peering forever over their shoulders at their own lengthening shadows trailing across the earth. None of them would ever really get over it.