With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [110]
Mac didn't help matters either by his loud pronouncements of how he would take his kabar in his teeth and his .45 in hand and charge the Japanese as soon as one of our guys got hit. The April stay of execution tended to lull even the veterans into a state of wishful thinking and false security, although we knew better.
Soon, however, our idyllic stroll on that perfect April morning was broken by an element of the horrid reality of the war that I knew lurked in wait for us somewhere on that beautiful island. Beside a little stream below the road, like a hideous trademark of battle, lay a Japanese corpse in full combat gear.
From our view above, the corpse looked like a gingerbread man in a helmet with his legs still in the flexed position of running. He didn't appear to have been dead many days then, but we passed that same stream many times throughout April and watched the putrid remains decompose gradually into the soil of Okinawa. I was thankful the windswept road with the sweet, fresh smell of pine needles filling our nostrils was too high for us to sense his presence in any way but visually.
As we patrolled in the vicinity of Hizaonna, we moved through some of the area where Company K, 7th Marines had been ambushed a few nights before. The grim evidence of a hard fight lay everywhere. We found numerous dead Japanese where they had fallen. Bloody battle dressings, discarded articles of bloody clothing, and bloodstains on the ground indicated where Marines had been hit. Empty cartridge cases were piled where various Marine weapons had been.
I remember vividly an Okinawan footpath across a low hillock where the Marine column apparently had been attacked from both sides. On the path were empty machine-gun ammo boxes, ammo clips for M1 rifles, and carbine shell cases; discarded dungaree jackets, leggings, and battle dressings; and several large bloodstains, by then dark spots on the soil. Scattered a short distance on both sides of the path were about a score of enemy dead.
The scene was like reading a paragraph from a page of a history book. The Marines had suffered losses, but they had inflicted worse on the attacking Japanese. We saw no Marine dead; all had been removed when the relief troops had come in and aided K/3/7 to withdraw from the ambush.
As I looked at the flotsam of battle scattered along that little path, I was struck with the utter incongruity of it all. There the Okinawans had tilled their soil with ancient and crude farming methods; but the war had come, bringing with it the latest and most refined technology for killing. It seemed so insane, and I realized that the war was like some sort of disease afflicting man. From my experience at Peleliu I had unconsciously come to associate combat with stifling hot, fire-swept beaches, steaming mangrove-choked swamps, and harsh, jagged coral ridges. But there on Okinawa the disease was disrupting a place as pretty as a pastoral painting. I understood then what my grandmother had really meant when she told me as a boy that a blight descended on the land when the South was invaded during the Civil War.
While a buddy and I were looking over the area, Burgin told us to check out a section of sunken roadway nearby. The sunken portion was about thirty yards long and about ten feet deep; the banks were steep and sloping. Heavy bushes grew along their edges at ground level so all we could see was the sky overhead and the sloping road in front and behind