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By Root 423 0

” This sounds about right. The Cutter and Proser book continues in Manila John’s voice: “I was back onto the trail in the darkness with my heavy coat of bullets banging against my knees, my hands full with the ammo box. I shuffled along as fast as I could. If I ran into Tojo in the dark, I’d have to drop the ammo box to reach my .45 on my hip. I ran behind the ridge crest but that didn’t stop sniper fire from whining past my head. They were behind our lines and by the amount of fire, there must have been quite a few of them. I thought, if they can’t hit a slow-moving target like me, that must mean my number isn’t up, at least not tonight. I soon couldn’t think about anything but about somehow making it a few more feet. The whole trip was about six hundred yards and I didn’t stop once for a breather. Every thought and scrap of strength I had, was focused on just making a few more feet down the trail. I slipped under the weight several times, covering the belts with mud.

“I made it to the hole and made the call sign, ‘Yankee Clipper,’ as I came up from the rear so they wouldn’t shoot me thinking I was a Jap infiltrator. I dropped what I had, 1500 rounds, and jumped in behind it. Powell was out of ammo on his gun. He grabbed a belt and I took over his trigger just in time. The next wave was on its way up the ridge. With Garland and Evans covering our flanks with their rifles, Powell and I leap-frogged from one gun to the other. The water wasn’t nearly enough to fill the water jacket of even one of the guns, so I had to fire one of the guns while the other one cooled, and while Powell cleaned the next ammo belt and reloaded. We were able to keep a fairly constant rate of fire doing this and also make the Japs shift their targeting from our right gun to our left. It was hours after the first attack and they were still coming, wave after wave screaming ‘Banzai!’ and ‘Marine, you die!’ and we kept killing them. Evans and Garland threw grenades down the hill until they were barely able to lift their arms [it is unlikely there would have been that many grenades in a single machine-gun position]. The boys drank all the water in the canteens and when they could, pissed into the water jackets. Another wave of men ran up the ridge, broke and died in front of us. Some had gotten through. We could hear the firing to our rear. I wasn’t sure our guns would hold up under another attack.”

As the night fight continued, Basilone is said to have made yet another run to the rear, a water run, this time to A Company on C Company’s flank. “Who the fuck are you?” someone demanded when he called out the password. Typical Marine response. But when Basilone returned to his own position and the guns, “Garland was dead. He was a big boy, a quiet type and brave.” Page 212 of Cutter and Proser’s account reports Garland’s death as a fact, but Doorly’s book lists Garland, with “Powell, Evans and La Pointe,” as having been ordered by Basilone the morning after the fight to return to Henderson Field while he remained behind “at his post in order to help the new men,” who must have been replacements, during the less severe fighting and mopping up that continued on October 25.

At my request Bob Aquilina at Quantico looked up Garland’s “death.” He found seven or eight Marines named Garland who died during various Pacific campaigns, but none on Guadalcanal in October 1942. The “death” of Garland remains an enigma.

Young Marine officers and NCOs are taught, “Don’t over-identify with your men. Know their military strengths and weaknesses, but not which guy has a kid, or an old gray-haired mother at home. When you send a man out on the point, the riskiest position, you send the best point man, the sharpest-eyed, canniest scout you have. Otherwise, you weren’t going to lose just him to enemy action, but maybe your own life.”

There was also the inarguable truth that every death of one of your men, a “Garland,” tears a piece out of your own psychological hide, diminishes you as surely as one of John Donne’s clods: “If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the