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By Root 1394 0

been gutted in battle after battle. Most of the assaults had been amphibious landings, the newsreels in American theaters displaying with patriotic pride the grand show of landing craft swarming ashore in so many obscure places, places where the Japanese waited, places that someone at the top had labeled important. Adams heard the talk from the hospital beds, some of it loud and stupid, the men who begged to go back out there, to join the party, killing Japs as though it were a bird shoot. There had always been that kind of talk, through boot camp, through training in San Diego, more training on Guadalcanal. There, in September 1944, the Twenty-second Regiment had been assigned as part of a brand-new Marine division, the Sixth, created from what some in the other divisions thought to be dregs, leftovers, the crippled and shot-up remains of other units. But the brass knew differently and made sure the men who formed this new combat unit knew it as well. The Sixth was commanded by a fire-breathing dragon, General Lemuel Shepherd, who had organized the various ground troops and engineers, the corpsmen and tankers, into a solid fighting force, and had done it on Guadalcanal by re-creating what could only be called another boot camp. The training had been fierce and brutal, especially for veterans of the combat regiments who thought they had already faced their worst challenge from the enemy. Shepherd had been a hero at Belleau Wood in the First World War, earning medals before most of his command had been born, but having a hero at the top didn’t stop their griping. Even the officers who carried out Shepherd’s orders had begun to wonder if the general’s pride was going to brutalize these men far beyond what they could expect from the Japanese.

By the time the rigorous retraining had concluded, the officers knew what Shepherd had already known, that this new division would put up the best fight the Marines could offer. There were rivalries, of course, the other Marine divisions always certain that they were the best, the toughest, the most feared by the Japanese. The brass ignored most of that, focused instead on where all of this angry spirit could best be used. By late 1944 the planning had been complete, the bases established primarily on Guadalcanal and Guam. As the War Department’s two-prong strategy ripped away the island bases from the grip of the enemy, what men in Washington knew only as pins on a map, the Marine and army divisions had suffered in horrific and costly battles. Every month brought some new plan, another invasion, another beach, another jungle. Individually, the regiments that now formed the Sixth had been engaged in fights that began with the disastrous defeat at Corregidor in 1942, right up through the conquest of Guam two years later. But since the summer of 1944, the Sixth had been the focus of General Shepherd’s intense training, all units brought up to full fighting strength, rested and refitted for yet another campaign. While they did their work at the base on Guadalcanal, other Marine divisions had continued the fight across the islands, the most recent the bloodletting on Iwo Jima, the fight that the newsreels were already trumpeting as America’s most heroic success. But the Sixth was continuing to strengthen and prepare, receiving an influx of veterans from some of the earlier campaigns, men who had crossed the beaches at Peleliu and Saipan. Throughout the entire Corps, new recruits were being sprinkled into the veteran regiments so that no commander would have to lead completely green troops into battle. On paper the Sixth might be a brand-new division, but they carried too many veterans to ever be labeled untested. Only the commanders knew what that test would be.

Adams had joined the Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor, had spent what seemed to him to be an eternity in the training bases stateside before his opportunity had come to sail westward. The indignity of the filariasis had been more than a health scare. Adams carried a kind of pride that only a few of the men around him would understand.