Mark Winegardner - The Godfather returns

The Japs left their dead to rot or wash out to sea. Those corpses were the first dead bodies he’d ever seen outside a funeral home.

The salty Marines who greeted the new troops seemed identically filthy, bearded, and tired. They said little. All the loud talk the new arrivals had done in their clean uniforms suddenly seemed like boys playing cowboys and Indians. Those men were warriors. When they took Michael on his first patrol, he blasted away at every rustling leaf. They just smirked and kept humping through the jungle. When they hit the dirt, Michael hit it, too. He could be sure a split second later there’d be tracers, bullets, shells, bombs-something coming to kill him.

Michael’s second day on Guadalcanal, he was on sentry at the perimeter of the airstrip. He heard a plane coming. A Navy Hellcat, scraping the treetops and spewing smoke. The pilot crash-landed a hundred yards away. The plane burst into flame. Michael broke into a sprint to try to help the pilot out of there. By then two jeeps full of people had pulled up, and Michael’s platoon leader, Sergeant Hal Mitchell, yelled at him to get back. The flames were too hot. Their fire truck had been bombed. The equipment they used instead could have barely put out a campfire. Michael could see into the cockpit. The pilot, trapped and screaming, looked right at Michael and begged to be shot. Michael gripped his rifle, but his sergeant gave no orders. The screams stopped soon after that. Michael needed to get burn treatment just from standing nearby.

Victory was declared at Guadalcanal a week or so later. The Marines who’d done most of the fighting were rotated out, sent home or at least for some R and R in New Zealand. The replacement troops were left behind to secure the island. On the map Guadalcanal’s just a dot, but it’s a hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, heavily forested with rough terrain and the destruction left behind by a battle that went on for months. Not to mention all the caves.

The caves were a nightmare. Dead bodies of course, deep crevices full of sewage, biting ants an inch long, rats the size of raccoons. The Marines went into the caves in groups of four plus a Doberman. Michael loved the first dog, but after a couple of them got blown up by booby-trapped corpses, he stopped getting attached.

Michael himself captured a grand total of one Jap, emaciated and near death. He propped the man up. The Jap pointed at Michael’s Ka-Bar. “Knife,” he said. He pantomimed shoving it in his guts. Michael wouldn’t give it to him. The man looked relieved.

At first, like nearly all the men on that caves detail, Michael saw it as a salvage operation. He learned to field-strip booty from a dead Jap faster than you could pull out your watch and check the time. Back at camp, the market for these things was flooded, and the best items left the island with the Marines who’d done most of the fighting. But an enterprising man can find a way. For Michael Corleone, it was the native people. Any gear that was useful in the home was easy to sell locally. Michael traded a lot of what he found for fresh fish. All Marines love a brother in arms who can improve on the lousy food, especially in a war zone.

One morning, though, Michael woke up and saw a pet cockatoo he’d gotten from a native for a carton of smokes get swallowed whole by one of those rats. He shooed the rat out of the tent, and when he did he looked up and saw the biggest spiderweb he’d ever seen, stretched between two coconut trees. The spider had caught a seagull in it. The gull was wrapped up, and the spider was eating it. Also, another dog died. Some days go that way. They were about to blow one last cave and go back to the base camp when Michael noticed a crayon drawing on the ground. It struck him as odd that some Jap was in here passing the time coloring a picture. Michael bent over. There was a whole stack of drawings. The one on top had an airplane in the sky with a meatball on the side and smiling people on the ground waving up at it. There was one of a family at a dinner table with an empty place setting, one of a princess, and several more of ponies. Just a regular little girl drawing pictures of ponies to send to her daddy, who probably died fighting a war whose course he couldn’t have changed one way or the other. Michael smoothed them out and set them down. He gave the signal to blow the cave.

He got back to camp and heard that Sicily had been liberated. Michael Corleone never again took anything off the enemy that he didn’t need for his own survival.

Compared to a lot of others, Michael’s battalion had it easy on Guadalcanal. They fared well during skirmishes on some of the surrounding islands, too.

Peleliu was another story. They were going in first. Cannon fodder.

The convoy that loaded onto the ship for the invasion looked like the Okies heading west. Every inch of the deck was crammed with men and machines, stacked high and covered with a patchwork of tarps. The heat was unbearable, a hundred and ten in the day and ninety at night. There wasn’t enough room below for everyone to sleep. They bunked on the deck, in or underneath trucks, anywhere they could find shade. Michael only pretended to sleep. Even the saltiest veterans on the ship looked pale and shaky.

By the time Peleliu came into view all there was to see was a wall of smoke and flame. Dozens of battleships pounded the island with sixteen-inch shells that sounded like airborne freight trains. Cruisers peppered it with smaller mortars. Soon the sound of all the guns bombarding Peleliu became one deafening thunder. The noise felt like it was pressing down on him. The whole ship throbbed with it. The air smelled like diesel fuel. The invasion force piled into amphibious tractors and Higgins boats and squatted down below the gunwales.

They went right into the middle of it. The air was full of the snapping of bullets. The smoke was so thick Michael couldn’t imagine how the driver knew where to go. Michael felt the amtrac scrape coral. Sergeant Mitchell shouted the order to hit the beach. Michael jumped out and ran. Everything was smoke and chaos. He was aware of men falling all around him and screams of pain, but he kept his head down and hit the deck alongside two other Marines behind a fallen tree. Up and down the beach, amtracs exploded and burned and sometimes men staggered out of them and were cut to pieces by machine-gun fire. Michael saw the deaths of at least a hundred of his brothers in arms. Men he loved and trusted, and he was not, even then, a man much given to trust. But all he felt was nothing. A blur. He’d been shot himself, on the side of his neck. Just a nick, but it bled like mad. Michael had no idea until the man beside him, a corporal from Connecticut named Hank Vogelsong, asked if he was all right.

In combat, no one ever really knows what’s going on. Somewhere far behind them was a colonel in charge of all this who didn’t know which way their guns were pointing. Someone Michael didn’t know and who’d probably never lay eyes on him had decided he was expendable. Not Michael personally. It’s not personal, just war. And Michael was a pawn. All he tried to do at Peleliu was not die. Nothing smart or brave. He was just luckier than the thousand other guys from his division who died that day.

Once enough of them made it across the beach, they were able to advance inland and start stacking rocks and debris so they could return fire. Enemy fire slowed, but still Michael was pinned down that whole first night. They’d apparently given up on those banzai attacks Michael had trained for, and there was never any chance to mow them down.

At first light, Sergeant Mitchell organized an assault on the ridge where most of the shooting was coming from. Michael and ten others made a run for it, about fifty yards to a clump of trees and scrub. Two were killed and two more were wounded before they got there. An American tank advanced to the other side of the ridge, and it drew fire the way tanks always do. Then the shooting stopped. They were twenty feet from the crest of the ridge. Hal Mitchell sent three men with automatic rifles and two with flamethrowers up to the crest. As they were about to scorch it, the Japs opened fire. Sergeant Mitchell ordered Vogelsong and Michael to help him get the wounded out of there and retreat. As Michael covered them, Vogelsong and Sergeant Mitchell carried one of the wounded men back to where Michael stood. As they were going back for the other one, an 80mm mortar killed him and wounded Vogelsong and Mitchell.