Battle Cry - Leon Uris [2]
This is the story of a battalion of invincible boys. And of my kids, the radio squad.
The Corps suffered humiliating defeats following Pearl Harbor and many fine old outfits fell holding outposts whose names were then foreign to the American people—Wake Island was one of them. We had to start from scratch with a couple of proud hardnosed, but ill-equipped regiments that remained in the scattered and wounded force. The new boys came to double and triple the ranks and we began the hard road back.
The Sixth Regiment of the United States Marine Corps, with me included, was sitting on Iceland keeping company with the northern lights when the war broke out, legally, that is. The Regiment was one of those proud outfits that had been settling banana wars for decades.
We got a big reputation in the first World War in a place called Belleau Wood, where we stopped the Hun dead in his tracks. For doing this the French decorated us with a fancy braid, the Fourragère, which all members of the Sixth Marines wear about their left shoulder.
At Château-Thierry, when Allied lines were collapsing, the story goes that one of our officers yelled: “Retreat, Hell! We just got here!” Maybe you’ve seen that expression in the history books along with some of our other battle cries.
The rest of the Corps is jealous of the Sixth because we happen to be the best regiment. In their spare time they dreamed up a nasty name for us: they call us the Pogey Bait Sixth. The story, and entirely unfounded, is that in 1931 on one of the ships taking us to Shanghai, we had ten thousand bars of candy but only two bars of soap in our ship’s store.
It was no sad parting we made from Reykjavik after we entered World War II, because the weather and the women were way below zero and the whisky strictly rotgut. We had sat out at our camp at Baldurshagi like a gang of stir-crazy cons, the monotony driving us insane.
When the Sixth returned from the frigid monotony of Iceland the regiment was split wide open. All personnel were given furloughs and reassignment orders. They spread the men all over the Corps, to form a nucleus for a hundred new outfits being formed. Thousands of boys poured through the boot camps and the old-timers were urgently needed everywhere.
I had a month-long blowout and then got a ticket to the West Coast with my old buddy, Sergeant Burnside. We were happy to be able to remain in the cadre of the Sixth Marines to help it reorganize again to full complement. I was made battalion communications chief with Burnside, a notch under me, heading the radio squad. When we hit Camp Eliot, a few miles outside San Diego, it was little more than one long street with immense barracks lined down it. The place was nearly deserted, but not for long.
Burny and I were glad to hear that Captain Huxley had made Major and was to command our battalion. Huxley was a hell of a good man. An Annapolis graduate and former All-American end at Ohio State, he was tougher than a cob. He hung a lean raw-boned hundred and ninety-five pounds on a towering six-foot-three frame. He sort of kept an arrogant distance from the enlisted men; nevertheless we couldn’t help but respect him. No matter how he drove his men, you would always find old Highpockets at the head of the column.
Burnside and I ran anxiously to meet the truck as it pulled up in front of our barrack. At last we were to get a look at our squad. There was only one other radio man, aside from us; a waylaid character by the name of Joe Gomez who had drifted in a week before.
The driver handed me a list. They unloaded their seabags. I scanned them with interest. My face must have dropped ten inches, Burnside’s was down eleven.
“Fall in and sound off when I call your name.” It was the most ill-aligned, saddest-looking