Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

Michael’s suspicion that the Corps’s height requirement had been instituted in part to keep Italians out of the elite forces was borne out when he found only one other person of Italian origin in his platoon. Tony Ferraro, also from New York, was a minor-league ballplayer-a catcher. He looked it: stocky, bald on top. Like Michael, he’d volunteered as soon as he heard about Pearl Harbor, but what he really wanted was to go into Italy and send Mussolini to hell.

Tony and Michael were the two shortest men in the platoon. They were slow-footed and weak marksmen, but they’d arrived at PI in better physical condition than most of the other men-happily, since everything they’d ever heard about Marine boot camp was true. Men collapsed, vomited, vomited blood. Michael learned to love it. He felt sorry for the platoons whose DIs sent them back to their barracks after only four hours of marching in the knee-deep sand instead of the eight Sergeant Bradshaw made them do. When boot camp ended, he addressed the platoon-for the first time-as men.

Every Marine in the platoon loved him. Many shed unashamed tears.

Michael, who shed nothing in boot camp but a few harmless pounds, again marveled at the genius of what had been inflicted upon him.

A few months later, Tony Ferraro was securing an island so small it didn’t have a name or a military purpose either when a Japanese sniper shot him right in the heart.

Before dawn, the men grabbed their rifles, shouldered their seabags, and stood at attention beside a row of idling trucks. A corporal with a thick southern accent called out names and assignments. He butchered Corleone, which Michael had expected. He was shocked, though, about what the corporal said next.

Camp Elliott, M1 rifle, infantry. Michael Corleone was going to the Pacific.

His dream of helping to liberate Italy was shattered. But what was he going to do, write his congressman? It was probably his congressman (after no more than a nod from Michael’s father) who’d rigged this in the first place.

Michael let nothing show. A Marine goes where he’s sent.

A southerner already on the Camp Elliott truck extended his hand. “Welcome aboard, Dago boy!” he said, pulling Michael up.

That was the Marine name for San Diego: Dago. Michael knew how else the man meant it, but he didn’t rise to the bait. They were Marines first, Americans second. Whatever else they were came after that.

Michael had never seen the West before, either. He spent the better part of the trip at the troop-train window, mesmerized. It was a good way to see what he was fighting for. Nothing could have prepared him for the size, grandeur, and beauty of this country. The farther west he went, the more he fell in love with the craggy, improbable landscape.

They stopped for a desert training session about thirty miles from Las Vegas, where the first big casino had opened months earlier. That night, Michael killed a rabbit with his bare hands and ate its stringy meat in a cold arroyo, staring at the otherworldly glow from the town that visionary men like him were destined to transform into an industry that would still be there, thriving, long after the fall of the Axis powers, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union, after most of America’s factories and steel mills went broke or moved to Southeast Asia.

In San Diego, Michael went through another few weeks of lectures and training, hand-to-hand combat, swimming tests, all the finishing touches, but when it came time to ship out, his heart again sunk. He’d been assigned to guard detail. Indefinitely.

The first chance he got, he went to a pay phone and called Tom. The Hagens were having dinner. A baby screamed in the background.

“I’m going to ask you something, Tom. If you lie to me, I’ll know. Things will never be the same between us.”

“Any question that starts out like that,” Tom said, “is one a man shouldn’t ask.”

Michael was young and undeterred. There would come a time when he’d have understood that Tom had just answered the question Michael was about to ask: “Did Pop have anything to do with my assignment?”

“Your assignment to do what?” Tom said.

Michael lowered his voice. “I did not join the Corps to be a cop.”

“You’re a cop?” Hagen said.

Michael hung up on him. A few days later, Michael pulled shore patrol and stood on the docks with his rifle shouldered, watching as men he’d come to trust shipped out, the air thick with bragging about all the Japs they were about to kill. He never saw any of those men again.

The worst guard detail job was making civilians follow the blackout law. People think their circumstances are special, and it’s impossible to reason with them. The first few exasperating nights of this, Michael wanted to smash in their smooth, self-important faces with the butt of his rifle, but he soon came up with a better idea. His CO, who had an even lower opinion of civilians, thought it was brilliant. “I never thought I’d say this to an Italian fella,” the CO said, “but you may be officer material.”

Michael took two other men and went to an oil storage facility north of the city, right on the coast. Two big oil tanks, both empty. It was a nice change of pace to be away from the whiny civilians and also to have a chance to make use of the training he’d had in explosives.

The next day, the newspapers and the radio (their anonymous source was Michael himself, pretending to be the CO) reported that the oil tanks they’d blown up had been hit by a Jap sub that-because of the illegal city lights-had no trouble hitting its target.

The blackout was much easier to enforce after that.

Michael went up the chain of command at Camp Elliott, trying to get reassigned. He applied for pilot training. At the beginning of the war, pilots had to be college graduates, but the rule was changed so that anyone with a 117 on his college entrance exam was eligible. Michael took the test, got a 130, but nothing happened. After one of the many times he stood at attention for a four-hour shift outside Admiral King’s office, Michael managed to get a word with him. The admiral promised to look into it personally. He even sounded optimistic about a transfer to the European theater. Nothing came of it. Michael was there a year but it felt like ten.

Finally it dawned on him that the admiral’s clerk filled out all the admiral’s paperwork and signed most of it. Michael noticed the clerk’s taste in music and arranged front-row seats at the Hollywood Bowl for the clerk and his wife to see the one and only Mr. Johnny Fontane.

Days later, Michael was reassigned to a combat battalion.

It shipped out on a converted luxury liner, painted battleship gray and fitted with guns. The troops were packed on that ship for weeks. They were almost in the harbor before there was any official word they’d be going ashore at Guadalcanal.

The fighting had been going on for months, Jap cruisers still lobbed shells onto the beach at night, and there were still pockets of resistance, including hundreds of men in underground tunnels, but the battle was all but over.

The beach at Guadalcanal was a junkyard of burned vehicles of all kind-tanks, jeeps, amtracs-but when Michael first set eyes on the place, with all those green coconut trees and white sand, it still looked to him like a tropical paradise, minus the girls.

Michael climbed down the cargo nets into a Higgins boat. He heard shelling in the distance, but no one shot at him as they landed. When he reached the beach, he tripped on something soft and went flying. He got up and ran for the tree line. He dove for cover next to a heap of tangled fencing wire and a pile of blackened corpses. The stench wasn’t so much a smell as a taste-burned, decaying meat, far up the nose and back in the throat. Michael looked back at the beach and realized that what he’d tripped on was a body, too.