“I remember that name,” Henry said. “I used to have a map—” But before he could say another word, Marcus rushed ahead as if he couldn’t stop.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” said Marcus. “And our officers were as green as us. We outnumbered the Japs there ten to one and they didn’t have any heavy guns, but we didn’t know that — we got pinned down by a handful of snipers screaming curses at us and tossing lit firecrackers and yelling from the trees. We couldn’t move. We couldn’t sleep. We thought there were thousands of them. Some of us got so scared we fired into the dark, just to be shooting at something, and then the Japs would see where we were and start firing back at us. So we’d try to stay calm, but then a couple more guys would get hysterical and give away our positions again, and then the Japs would sneak up and pounce on our foxholes.” Marcus paused for a deep, shaky breath.
“Is that what made my father so crazy?” Henry said. “Was he one of the ones who fired?” He couldn’t really picture the scene, but he could imagine the shame: he’d been living with the shame of failure for months.
“No,” Marcus said. “He did all right. But it took us four days to clear Makin, and by the time we were done, a Jap sub had reached the atoll and it sunk one of the escort carriers our last day there. A torpedo exploded the bombs in the hold and the carrier blew up. Men, planes, clothing, everything everywhere — hundreds of men were killed and almost all the rest had horrible burns. Then all the naval officers started saying how there hadn’t been that many Japs on the atoll, and how we’d taken four days to do a two-day job, and that if we’d finished when we should have, the carrier never would have been hit. It was our fault, they said. Those men died because we didn’t know what we were doing.”
He paused again. “Pricks,” he said bitterly, and then he went on to tell Henry how their unit had gone back to Oahu under a cloud. The plans for the invasion of Saipan had been under way by then, and the men were thrown back into training with no rest at all. No one believed they’d see action again so soon.
“What a mess,” Marcus said. The Marine landings went badly; the tide was too low, the channel too crowded, the amphibious tractors and tanks got stuck on the beaches. Marcus’s unit was landed two days later, to back up the Marines. They lost most of their equipment during the landing, and then one disaster had followed another.
“The Marines were moving north,” Marcus said. “Through the center of the island. The commander threw us into the middle of the line, between the two Marine divisions, and he ordered us to sweep through this place called Death Valley.” Marcus moved his hands in the air as he talked, sketching a map along the dashboard and windows as he tried to explain how the valley floor was bare of cover and how the cliffs along the sides were riddled with enemy gun positions.
“They made mincemeat out of us,” he said, chopping at the air. “We couldn’t keep up with the Marines on our sides, who were in much better positions. The line got bent like this,” he said, making an arc with his hands. “Us in the middle, almost a mile behind the Marines on our flanks. The Marines had to wait for us and the brass had a fit. The commander — a Marine, of course — was telling everyone we couldn’t fight, or wouldn’t fight, that we were inferior. Useless, he said. Too old, poorly trained. Our officers didn’t know what they were doing and turned tail when things got tough.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, and our officers couldn’t lead horses to water, but we fought. We fought hard. And all we got for it was shit.”
His voice rose, cracked, quivered, and Henry realized how old Marcus was, and how long ago all this had happened.
“We were stuck in some places for days. Men dying all around us, all of us worn-out and hungry and thirsty and running out of supplies and ammunition, no one helping us and everyone saying what a bunch of no-good failures we were. We couldn’t link up with the Marines on our flanks for a week. You can’t begin to understand the kind of tired we were. In the end we lost as many men as the Marines, but the Marines got all the glory and we took all the blame.
“The story got into the newspapers and there was a big investigation. The Marines said the Army guys were bums, and the Army said the Marine commanders had given the Army troops the worst jobs and sacrificed them. Everyone was arguing about who should have commanded who and how, and they all lost sight of us. All the men we’d lost, all the men who went home missing arms and legs and eyes — that counted for nothing. The men who’d acted like heroes weren’t heroes. They were the guys who’d been too slow at Makin and been responsible for the sinking of a ship, and then too slow again at Saipan.”
Marcus smacked his hand against the dashboard. His hand was wrinkled and spotted and gnarled and had no more strength, Henry guessed, than a child’s, but the vinyl shell was brittle and it split in a sudden star of cracks. “Damn,” Marcus said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not mine. No wonder my father was bitter.” That was the point, Henry thought, of this bloody story. That his father had been falsely blamed for something he couldn’t help. He thought he knew how his father had felt.
“Of course he was bitter. We were all bitter. But bitter wasn’t what did your father in.”
“No? Bitter is hard on a man ….”
“It was the last day,” Marcus said. “When they announced that we’d taken the island. I was with a mopping-up operation further south — but your father was with the troops at Marpi Point.”
He paused, as if Henry would know what he meant. Henry had to admit that he’d never heard of the place.
“How could you not have heard of it? Don’t you read?”
“I was a little boy,” Henry said. “I was a baby.”
Marcus shook his head. “It was horrible. It was famous. The Japanese civilians who’d been hiding in caves during the invasion gathered on the cliffs at Marpi Point when they heard the island was lost — the Japanese soldiers had told them that the Americans were going to torture them if they surrendered. Our troops set up a PA system, and they got interpreters to tell the crowd that the fighting was over, that we had food and water waiting for them and that they were safe. It didn’t do any good. Your father told me they lined up on the cliff and jumped off, a hundred feet onto the rocks and the surf below. Men pushed their children in front of them. Women jumped with their babies on their backs. People stood and bowed to the American soldiers and then held grenades to their stomachs and pulled the pins. The water below the cliff was so full of bodies that the Navy boats couldn’t move without running over them. Your father stood there, screaming at these people not to jump, and they jumped and jumped and jumped. He saw …”
Marcus cleared his throat and stopped. When he continued, his voice was quiet.
“He said he saw a boy just your age jump into the water holding his father’s hand. He was never the same after that. He had malaria, and terrible dysentery, and he’d lost a lot of weight — they sent him to the New Hebrides with the first wave of troops to be rehabilitated. But he never got better. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. When they finally shipped him home, he was in worse shape than when he’d left Saipan. And then he got here and saw the reservoir, and somehow the water here reminded him of the water there, below the cliffs … I don’t know. No one can really understand who wasn’t there. I was there, and I can’t understand.”
Henry heard everything Marcus said, but much of it passed over his head. He saw the scenes Marcus had described, but he saw them distantly, as if in a movie, drained of pain and blood and sound, and he could no more imagine what his father had felt than he could imagine himself in those places. He said to Marcus, “My father would never tell us what had happened there. My mother told us he was hurt in a place we couldn’t see.”