With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [160]
After we moved out of our battalion area and onto the road, we saw almost no one. As we walked along the silent road, the only sounds in our immediate surroundings were our own voices, the crunching of our boondockers on the road, the muffled sloshing of the water in our canteens, and the occasional thump of our weapons’ stocks against our canteens or kabar scabbards. We moved in that silent world that characterized the backwash of battle.
The area was replete with the flotsam of war. The storm front had passed, but its wreckage was left behind. Our experienced eyes read the silent signs and reconstructed the drama and pathos of various life-and-death struggles that had occurred. We encountered numerous enemy corpses, which we always passed on the windward side. We saw no Marine dead. But a bloody dungaree jacket here, a torn boondocker there, a helmet with the camouflage cloth cover and steel beneath ripped by bullets, discarded plasma bottles, and bloody battle dressings gave mute testimony of the fate of their former owners.
We passed through an embankment for a railroad track and entered the outskirts of a town. All buildings were badly damaged, but some were still standing. We stopped briefly to explore a quaint little store. Displayed in its window were various cosmetics. In the street in front of the store lay a corpse clad in a blue kimono. Someone had placed a broken door over the pathetic body. We speculated he had been the proprietor of the little shop. We passed a burned-out bus station with the ticket booth still standing in front. To our right and distant the battle rumbled and rattled as the 6th Marine Division fought the enemy on the Oroku Peninsula.
Without incident we continued through the ruins toward the beach when an amtrac came rattling toward us. The driver was the first living soul we had seen. We hailed him, and it turned out he was expecting us at the beach but had started along the road hoping to locate us. After receiving the information about our unit, he spun his amtrac around and headed back toward the beach. With our mission completed, my buddy and I started back along the road through the ruins.
We passed the little cosmetic shop and the dead Okinawan covered by the door and approached the bus station on our left. A gentle breeze was blowing. Only the clanking of a piece of loose tin on the ruined bus station roof broke the silence. If I blotted out the distant rumble of battle, our surroundings reminded me of walking past some deserted farm building on a peaceful spring afternoon back home. It seemed like an interesting place to take ten, explore the bus station, and eat our ration bars. We had saved time by meeting the amtrac, so we could stop for a while.
The harsh snapping and cracking of a long burst of Japanese machine-gun bullets zipping chest high in front of us sent my buddy and me scrambling for cover. We dove behind the concrete ticket booth and lay on the rubble-strewn concrete, breathing hard.
“God, that was close, Sledgehammer!”
“Too damned close!”
The enemy gunner had been zeroed in perfectly on his elevation, but he had led us too much. The bullets ricocheted and whined around inside the burned-out bus station. We heard the tinkle of glass as the slugs broke windows among the burned-out buses.
“Where the hell is that bastard?” asked my buddy.
“I don't know, but he's probably a couple of hundred yards away from the sound of the gun.”
We lay motionless for a moment, the silence interrupted only by the peaceful, lazy clanking of the tin in the breeze. Cautiously I peered out from behind the base of the ticket booth. Another burst