from the book The Democracy of Violence
by Tom Sant
Chapter One
Rex Laird sat in a small boat, rocking as it rose and fell in the heaving waters of the South Pacific. He was thinking about the men he was going to kill. And about the men who wanted to kill him.
It was just past daybreak on Friday, August 7, 1942. Around him, heavy artillery boomed and men scrambled across the grey decks of warships. The massive guns of destroyers and cruisers belched flame intermittently, bombarding several islands to the south. Strapped into combat packs, rifles at port arms, helmets pulled low, six thousand men shifted across the decks of troop carriers, assembling into rough formations, slinging their weapons over their shoulders, climbing down nets into Higgins boats.
To a bird floating on thermals above the ocean, or to a Zero cruising on a scouting run, or even to a god perched among the thin clouds with thunderbolts tucked beneath his arm, the armada below would have appeared formidable indeed: eighty-two large ships and innumerable small landing craft assembled in a remote corner of the Pacific, holding thousands of men armed for combat. But there were no birds watching. The bombardment had scared them away. And there was no Jap Zero. The Japanese had been unaware of the armada perched on the horizon until the shelling started. And there were no gods watching, either. The gods were neither interested nor amused.
“Thumbs up! Thumbs up!” the Marine platoon leaders screamed. “Keep your hands vertical! You can’t kill no Japs with broken fingers! Thumbs up!”
And the men crawled over the sides of the ships, down the netting, dropping the final few feet into bobbing boats. Dog tags flopping around their necks, they were loaded with equipment: most had rifles, bayonets, and cartridge belts; the riflemen all had two hand grenades clipped to their belts; others carried the forty-pound tubes and water jackets of heavy machine guns; while others humped Browning automatic rifles, mortar tubes, bipods, base plates, shells and boxes of ammunition, survival rations, canteens and mess kits, first-aid pouches, shovels, and brass compasses. They carried personal items, too, stuffed in waterproof combat packs: extra socks, pictures of wives and girlfriends, hunting knives brought from home, lucky pennies, packs of cigarettes and lighters, and even a few pocket-sized Bibles.
All together several thousand Marines crouched in hundreds of landing craft. Thousands more strained against the railings of transport ships. Some of them were shouting and whooping, eager to start the biggest adventure of their lives. Some fidgeted with their equipment, tightening a strap or checking the bolt on their rifle. Some just stared stonily at the distant island they were scheduled to attack.
A few of them prayed for divine help in slaughtering as many of the enemy as possible. They no longer identified as farmers or truck drivers or gas station attendants or students or grocery store clerks. They saw themselves as divine warriors. They were United States Marines. They were champions. They were invincible. They wanted to kill. Burning with hate for the Japanese, they wanted to avenge Pearl Harbor and Wake Island and Bataan. They envisioned fighting their way through enemy troops, mowing them down like hay before a scythe, leaving corpses splayed on the beaches and in the jungle, rotting banquets for crabs and rats. That was their vision. To these few, hatred blazed like a divine calling. For them, there was no fear of dying, only a sense that they must avoid being killed so that they could be more efficient in delivering the savage wrath of their nation and their god against an implacable enemy. And since the vast majority had never seen combat, it was easy to fantasize about delivering the wrath of America and of God on the heads of the Japanese.
But many more prayed just to survive. Their visions were darker: crawling out of the Higgins boat to be cut down immediately in the sand, bleeding out as the surf rolled their body back and forth beneath the sweltering sun.
And hundreds of them were simply numb, stunned by the unbelievable situation they were in. Ears ringing from hours of shelling by Navy destroyers, crammed shoulder to shoulder in a landing craft with three dozen other Marines, they stared glassily at the empty distance, at the immediate future, at nothing.
Sgt. Rex Laird was one among those thousands of Marines. From his position near the front of a landing craft, he peered over the edge at the island in the distance. As a squad leader, Laird would go over first. His men would follow.
The island looked exactly like hundreds of other Pacific islands. Lines of dark green palm trees crisscrossing each other in row after row near the shore. A solid mass of jungle behind. Green hills rising steeply in the distance. It looked like any place. It looked like no place. But he expected their target, Beach Red, would live up to its name within a few minutes of their landing.
He looked at his best friend and mentor, Gunnery Sergeant Virgil Merritt. Merritt was twenty years his senior, a combat veteran from the Great War, a man who had seen fighting and death.
Laird asked in a quiet voice, “You were at the company briefing, right? What is this place, anyway?”
“It’s called Guadalcanal,” Merritt said.
“Yeah, yeah, I know that. I heard that, too, but I mean what is it? What makes it so damn important? What does Guadalcanal even mean, anyway?”
“Guadalcanal? I think it’s a native word. It means the ass end of nowhere. Or welcome to hell. Something like that.”
Laird couldn’t help snorting with amusement. “Sounds about right.”
Just then a few of the big guns roared again, shaking the wooden walls of the landing craft. Shells whirred overhead with a locomotive racket toward the island. After a pause, the men in the boat could feel the enormous concussion.
The naval bombardment had started before dawn, three hours earlier, leaving a smoky haze on the water. Now the shelling was more staccato. Each blast stood alone, even more percussive for being isolated.
In the murky morning light, the ocean was the color of strong, dark beer. It rolled beneath them in big, slow heaves that made the landing craft lurch up and then skid down into a trough. It was rhythmic, almost like leaning against the breast of some huge animal as it breathed steadily in and out. The landing craft, loaded with nearly fifty Marines, circled in slow, counterclockwise patterns, waiting for the signal to attack.
“So is there a canal there?” Laird asked.
“Couple of rivers, according to the map I saw. But no, no canal.”
In the background, they could hear voices screaming at other Marines who were scrambling down the loading nets: “Hands vertical! Thumbs up! You can’t shoot with broken fingers.”
“Why’s this place so damned important?” Laird asked.
Merritt shrugged. “Fucking Japs are building an aircraft runway on the island which could raise hell with our ships. Anyway, the yellow bastards seem to want it, so we’re not going to let them have it.”
As the landing craft lurched up to a peak, Laird peered over the gunwale again to catch another glimpse of the island that was their destination. All he could see was a bright white line of beach, the black smudge of dense forest, and a mountain in the background. Buttons of flame were stitched across the landscape where the shelling had ignited trees or maybe buildings. Earlier they had seen a huge ball of flame erupt, possibly where a Japanese ammunition dump or fuel depot had been hit. Now that spot just smoldered, sending up a dense column of black smoke.
Laird leaned against his pack and slid down the wall. His Springfield was propped next to him, the fingers of his right hand gently curled around the barrel. He was already soaked with sweat, partly from the humidity and partly from nerves. Virgil Merritt looked all right and sounded all right, too, intense and serious like he usually was, but not panicked.
Laird looked around the craft at the men in his squad. They made up part of Battery C of the 10th Marines, 1st Marine Division. He had been promoted to gunnery sergeant and put in charge of this team a year earlier in San Diego. This was their first combat. He felt protective of the men in his squad. He didn’t feel like their leader, exactly, although by rank he was. But he was the same age as most of them, younger than a couple, and felt more like their older brother than their boss. He thought of them as his “men,” but they were barely more than children. Eighteen, nineteen years old. Sunburned faces still pocked with acne. Skinny arms and legs, even though they were fit and strong. Haunted eyes skittering around the landing craft, looking at other men’s faces, the island, their feet. At nothing.
Cpl. Dominic Salerno was fingering a string of beads, muttering to himself. Laird watched him awhile until Salerno, perhaps sensing his sergeant’s eyes on him, glanced up. He smiled a half-smile and shrugged slightly as if to say, What the hell? Can’t hurt, right?
Laird nodded.
Abner Pullum was crouched against the wall of the boat. A pool of vomit lay at his feet. Whether it was the rolling sea or the sick feeling of terror in his guts, something had made him lose his breakfast.
Elmer Frawley was sharpening the bayonet at the end of his Springfield. Ove Andersson, the biggest man in the platoon, had the BAR in his arms and two spare magazines draped over his shoulders in a double canvas satchel. He was staring straight ahead, looking intently at something only he could see. Arnie Aldridge and George Pennington were jammed in next to Andersson, talking quietly. The two unlikeliest friends in the platoon, Aldridge was barely literate enough to sign his own name; Pennington had enlisted after his freshman year at Yale.
Laird hoped he looked calm. His guts were trembling, the way they used to when he stood in his corner before a fight, smacking his gloves together, waiting for the bell to start round one. But he figured once they hit the beach, it’d be like the ring—the nerves would evaporate and his instincts and training would take over.
Or maybe I’ll just take a bullet between the eyes and it won’t matter.
Laird figured the Japs would have the beach well defended. Machine gun emplacements. Artillery. The emperor’s own hand-picked devils waiting for them. Even after a ferocious naval shelling, he figured it’d be a tough landing.
“Whaddya think?” Laird asked Merritt. “You feeling good about this?”
“Sure,” Merritt said. “Hell, yes! Look at how many damn boats we’ve got, how many Marines. More than ten thousand, I heard. I gotta believe we have the Japs seriously outnumbered. So the odds are in our favor. Bound to be a lot of us who make it. Probably most, like ninety percent or more. You know, it’s a craps shoot. But the dice are loaded for us. And anyway, if we don’t make it, then it don’t matter much, right?”
Laird sighed. “Yeah. It’s just that there’s such a shitload of stuff I was planning to do.”
“You will.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
They squatted next to each other in the landing craft for a few minutes. The morning air was already warm, moving toward oppressively hot. Laird felt a trickle of sweat run down his back. He fumbled in a pocket, shook out a cigarette, offered the pack to Merritt.
“Want one?”
Merritt took one, then let Laird light them both from his Zippo.
“The condemned men have a last cigarette, eh?” Laird whispered.
Merritt frowned. “Cut that shit out, Rex,” he whispered. “We’re going to make it. And you don’t want your men hearing that.”
“Sorry. Gallows humor, you know. Just trying to keep myself from puking up my guts like Pullum.”
Merritt nodded. He understood.
“Look, there’s three possibilities,” Merritt said quietly. He stuck out a thick index finger to start the count. “One: we land, we fight, we survive, we get relieved.” A second finger popped out. “Two: we get killed.” He frowned at his fingers for a moment, thinking about that possibility. Then the third finger popped out. “Three: we land, we catch a million-dollar wound, and we go home as heroes.”
Laird considered the options. He had to admit to himself he wasn’t that crazy about any of them. And he could think of a couple of options Merritt hadn’t mentioned. Getting shot to hell, being left a cripple for life. Or landing, fighting, fighting, fighting, but not getting relieved for a long time. Or being taken prisoner. Or…
Laird nodded. “Right. Like you said. We got ‘em outnumbered, Virg.”
Somebody in the boat started shouting. “What the fuck are we waiting for? We’ve been sitting out here for an hour! When the hell are we hitting that goddamn beach?”
Other voices told him to shut the hell up. One comic said, “If you’re in that big a hurry, why don’t you jump over and start swimming? We’ll catch up to you later!”
Merritt and Laird both smiled at that.
Salerno poked Laird in the knee. “Sarge, you ever think about how the hell we ended up here?”
Laird cocked his head at the question and shrugged. “We can thank the Japs, I suppose. They decided to bomb the shit out of Pearl Harbor and the dominoes started falling. Some of ‘em fell our way.”
“Yeah, right. But I don’t mean that exactly. I mean our lives. How’d we end up here? I’ve got buddies from home, back in Chicago, they’re not bouncing around in the fucking ocean waiting to attack some god forsaken island. How come we’re here?”
Laird smiled. “Just fuckin’ lucky, I guess. I mean here we are, an all-expense paid vacation to a tropical island courtesy of Uncle Sam. All we got to do is kill a few thousand Japs and we can lay on the sand and drink rum. Right?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s all we gotta do, Sarge.”
Laird sucked smoke deep into his lungs. He looked at the pilot sitting in the stern of the landing craft. He had a rugged face, all slabs and angles. He sat immobile as a Greek statue, as immobile as death, one hand on the throttle, staring straight ahead. He didn’t seem to blink even. On either side of him, a pair of Marines manned two gun ports, each with Browning automatic rifles.
“You don’t think we’re supposed to tip that guy, do you?” Laird said to Merritt, nodding at the pilot. “I think I forgot to bring a nickel.”
“You only tip him if it’s a round trip,” Merritt said. “One-way trips are free.”
Laird laughed the smoke out of his lungs, then scowled at his cigarette as though it had offended him. “Nice. Real nice.”
Just then shrill whistles came from the other landing boats. Their pilot reached under a greasy T-shirt, pulled out a whistle dangling from a lanyard, and blew his own piercing blast. Suddenly the nose of the boat lurched upward, knocking some of the men off balance as it began roaring up the billowing waves. The three-by-five foot American flag mounted on the stern fluttered to life. Each Marine gripped his weapon, checking that there was a round in the chamber. The landing craft all formed a single line, racing onward at full power, heading toward a scrap of fate called Lunga Point on Guadalcanal.