Battle Cry - Leon Uris [1]
I’ve sailed the Cape and the Horn aboard a battlewagon with a sea so choppy the bow was awash half the time under thirty-foot waves. I’ve stood Legation guard in Paris and London and Prague. I know every damned port of call and call house in the Mediterranean and the world that shines beneath the Southern Cross like the nomenclature of a rifle.
I’ve sat behind a machine gun poked through the barbed wire that encircled the International Settlement when the world was supposed to have been at peace, and I’ve called Jap bluffs on the Yangtze Patrol a decade before Pearl Harbor.
I know the beauty of the Northern Lights that cast their eerie glow on Iceland and I know the rivers and the jungles of Central America. There are few skylines that would fool me: Sugar Loaf, Diamond Head, the Tinokiri Hills or the palms of a Caribbean hellhole.
Yes, I know the slick brown hills of Korea just as the Marines knew them in 1871. Fighting in Korea is an old story for the Corps.
Nothing sounds worse than an old salt blowing his bugle. Anyhow, that isn’t my story.
As I look back on those thirty years I think of men and of outfits. I guess I’ve been in fifty commands and maybe there were a hundred men I’ve called Skipper. But strangely, there was only one man among them who was really my skipper and only one outfit I think of as mine. Sam Huxley and the battalion he led in World War II, “Huxley’s Whores.” What made Huxley’s Whores different? Hell, I don’t know. They were the damnedest bunch of Marines I’d ever laid eyes on. They weren’t Marines actually—or even men for that matter. A gang of beardless youths of eighteen, nineteen, and twenty who’d get pickled on two bottles of brew.
Before that war we had men among us who never knew that life existed outside the Corps. Leather lunged and ramrod straight, hard drinkers and fighters and spit-and-polish career men.
Then came the war and the boys—thousands of them. They told us to make Marines out of them. They were kids who should have been home doing whatever the hell eighteen-year-old kids do. God knows we never thought we could do the job with them…God knows they fooled us.
What made them different? Well, there was one of these kids in my squad who was quite a writer. I wish he was here to help me explain. He had a way reasoning out things to make them look real simple. He could tell you about fighting spirit and the deeper stuff of movements of peoples and the mistakes of generals and issues and of an American Congress that were sometimes as deadly to the Corps as any enemy in the field. He understood those things far better than I do.
A lot of historians write it off as esprit de corps and let it go at that. Others think we are fanatics for glory, but when you come right down to bedrock my kids were no different than anyone else. We had the same human strength and weaknesses that any crew of a ship or battalion of an army had.
We had our cowards and our heroes. And we had guys in love and so homesick they near died of it.
There was the company clown, the farmer, the wanderer, the bigot, the boy with the mission, the Texan. Huxley’s Whores had its gamblers, its tightfisted quartermaster, its horse-ass officers, its lovers, its drunks, its braggarts, its foul-ups.
And there were the women. The ones who waited and the ones who didn’t.
But how many men were there like Sam Huxley and Danny Forrester and Max Shapiro? And what makes these kids who have the normal loves and hates and fears throw their lives away, and what is it they carry within them that makes retreat worse than death? What was it that turned defeat into victory in the dark beginning at Guadalcanal and on the bloodsoaked lagoon at Tarawa and on Red Beach One at Saipan? They went through a wringer of physical and mental hell but still never failed to give each other that wonderful warmth of comradeship.
I do not berate any man who carries a gun in war, no matter what his uniform. But we Marines got