R. Burgin - Islands of the Damned

“Do you think you can walk?” Katz asked.

I felt a little light-headed, but I thought I knew where I was. I nodded and he pointed the way to the first aid station, a few hundred yards off. I stumbled in that direction with the battle still going on all around me, bullets singing and shells falling. I don’t know how the heck I made it, but I did.

I stayed at the first aid station until it started to get dark. Then a jeep ambulance came and took several of us to the forward field hospital. I remember on the ambulance holding a plasma bottle for a guy who really was in a bad way, but I don’t remember much else. I’m sure he was dying.

The field hospital was little more than a big tent with stretchers on the bare ground. They brought me in and I lay down on one of the stretchers. An Army medic eventually came by and gave me a couple of shots. I thought, That’s good. That’s for the pain and for tetanus. After a while, another corpsman came by and gave me another shot. A little while later, I got one more shot.

When I looked up again, there was another medic standing there. He said he was going to give me a shot.

“Hell, I’ve already had three shots,” I said. “What’s going on?”

He stared at me. “You’ve had three shots already?”

“Hell, yes. I’ve already had three. And now you’re wanting to give me a fourth.”

He stood there a moment. Then he shook his head and walked away.

The next morning they picked me up on a stretcher and put me in an ambulance and took me to another hospital, farther from the front. It was a tent, but it had a floor and real doctors and nurses. I was lying in a bed. For some reason my whole abdomen hurt. A nurse came by and said she was going to give me a sponge bath. I told her about the pain.

“Let’s see what the problem is.”

She pulled back the covers and started to sponge me gently. My stomach was so sore I could hardly stand to be touched.

“Have you been close to an exploding shell?” she asked.

I remembered diving into the crater just as the 150mm shell went off, and being buried in dirt.

“Yes, ma’am. Artillery shell yesterday morning, just about as close as you can get and still be here.”

“You’ve had a concussion,” she said. “That’s your problem. A couple days will take care of it.”

She sponged me gently, and the dirt and dead skin came rolling off. You never realize in combat just how filthy you get. But I won’t ever forget her tenderness and kindness. She gave me some pills for the pain, and three or four days later it eased up, just as she said.

As soon as I was able I got some Red Cross stationery and wrote to Florence.

“Just a few lines to let you know I was hit Sunday May 20th, but don’t worry, Darling, I am not suffering & haven’t been at all.”

I told her I’d just been scratched, no serious damage done, which was mostly true.

Now that I was out of combat, I found myself thinking about her almost all the time.

“I sure wish I had you here, Darling, to change the bandages & give me about a million sweet kisses a day or more. I am sleeping on nice white sheets with the softest pillow. It sure beats a wet foxhole.”

They showed a movie to some of us who could get around, In Old Oklahoma , with John Wayne and Gabby Hayes. I was able to relax and enjoy it.

I don’t remember that they ever stitched me up. I think they just let the skin grow back over the wound. There was no infection. I had been lucky.

A doctor came in every morning to make his rounds. My cot was the second or third one on the right. After he’d seen everybody else, he’d stop and sit on my bunk and we’d talk for ten or fifteen minutes. It turned out he was from San Antonio, so we hit it off right away. All through the war, it was that way whenever I ran into someone from Texas, an instant bond. We were buddies.

Doc Moore was his name. He told me I had been very lucky.

“Why is that?”

“If that fragment had gone any deeper it would have hit your thyroid.”

“Would that be bad?”

He showed me where my thyroid gland was located, right behind the voice box, and explained how the thyroid affected everything from digestion to energy level. A damaged thyroid could affect me in several ways, he said.

“You might become real, real thin. Or you could become grossly obese. Either way, it would have messed you up for life.”

So I guessed I was luckier than I thought.

Pretty soon I started feeling restless and eager to get back to K Company. I had written Florence a couple more letters, but I didn’t get any replies. In fact, I hadn’t received mail from anybody while I was in the hospital, so I figured the mail system had screwed up and lost track of me. On June 9 Doc Moore gave me a clean bill of health and the hospital turned me loose. It had been twenty days since I’d been wounded. I asked around if anybody knew the location of Third Battalion’s K Company, and the next day I hitched rides on Army trucks headed south toward the front.

In my pocket I still carried the shell fragment that had cost me so much trouble.

Gene Sledge described the fight for Shuri Castle as a time of “mud and maggots.” The rains started up again the day after I was wounded and went on for the next ten days without a letup. I could hear them drumming on the roof of the hospital, but I had no idea how bad it was out on the battle line.

For K Company these were some of the worst days of the war. The fighting was so intense that neither side had time to gather its dead, which were left to rot in the mud on the battlefield. Maggots were everywhere. If a man slipped in the mud, he stood up covered with maggots. They filled his pockets. The Japs were shelling anything that moved, and the sheer noise and force of the explosions left men dazed and deaf. Stumpy Stanley, our company commander, came down with malaria. He was so delirious he refused to leave his command post until a corpsman dragged him to a first aid station. Lieutenant Loveday took his place.

On May 29, while I was on the road to recovery, Companies L, K, and I captured the area around Shuri Castle and flew a Confederate flag from the ramparts. Most of the Japs fled south. First Regiment relieved the Fifth Marines on June 4. The next day the rains ended.

I found my old company several miles south of where I’d left them. We were in a bad way. We’d lost thirty-six men in the fighting around Shuri Castle and we were down to about a hundred enlisted men and three or four officers. The word was that the Fifth Regiment would not be sent into combat again.

Because the rains had gummed up the roads, the Navy had been air-dropping food, water and ammo from TBM Avenger dive-bombers. Somebody found a cache of Jap rations. Everything was in cans. I ate some of their tuna fish and mandarins, little orange sections. It wasn’t too bad. We ran across saki quite often. A lot of the guys drank it. I couldn’t stand the taste.

Most of the time we were going out on patrol, sealing caves and trying to find pockets of Jap stragglers. The Japs had been squeezed into an area maybe three miles long by four miles wide, their backs were to the coastline. There was no place else to go.

We’d been warned not to go into the caves, but I got curious. I put a Sterno can on the end of a stick, like a candle, and felt my way down into one cave we had come across. You couldn’t see three feet in front of you. Some distance inside I came upon a cot. I put my hand down to feel it and it was still warm.

I stopped, listening. Somewhere close by I could hear a clock ticking. I thought, Burgin, get the hell out of here. When you’re in a cave looking out, you can see anything between you and the opening as plain as day. But if you’re looking in, you can’t see a thing, even holding a little Sterno candle in front of you. So I started backing out very slowly. Thank God, I didn’t get killed. When I got outside, I called the demolition people, and they sealed up the whole thing with a satchel charge.