With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [21]
“What the hell's the matter with you? Don't you know how to use a bayonet?”
“But, Sarge, if I stick you, they'll put me in Mare Island.”
“There's less chance of you bayoneting me than of me whipping your ass for not following my orders.”
“OK,” I thought to myself, “if that's the way you feel about it, we have witnesses.”
So I headed for him on the double and thrust at his chest. He sidestepped neatly, grabbed my rifle behind the front sight, and jerked it in the direction I was running. I held on to the rifle and tumbled onto the cinders. The squad roared with laughter. Someone yelled, “Did you bayonet him, Sledgehammer?” I got up looking sheepish.
“Knock it off, wise guy,” said the instructor. “You step up here, and let's see what you can do, big mouth.”
My buddy lifted his rifle confidently, charged, and ended up on the cinders, too. The instructor made each man charge him in turn. He threw them all.
He then took up a Japanese Arisaka rifle with fixed bayonet and showed us how the Japanese soldiers used the hooked hand guard to lock on to the U.S. blade. Then, with a slight twist of his wrist, he could wrench the M1 rifle out of the opponent's hands and disarm him. He coached us carefully to hold the M1 on its side with the left side of the blade toward the deck instead of the cutting edge, as we had been taught in the States. This way, as we parried a Japanese's blade, he couldn't lock ours.
We went on long hikes and forced marches through the jungles, swamps, and over endless steep hills. We made countless practice landings from Higgins boats on small islets off the coast. Each morning after chow we marched out of camp equipped with rifles, cartridge belts, two canteens of water, combat pack, helmet, and K rations. Our usual pace was a rapid route step for fifty minutes with a ten-minute rest. But the officers and NCOs always hurried us and frequently deleted the ten-minute rest.
When trucks drove along the road, we moved onto the sides, as columns of infantry have done since early times. The trucks frequently carried army troops, and we barked and yapped like dogs and kidded them about being dogfaces. During one of these encounters, a soldier hanging out of a truck just ahead of me shouted, “Hey, soldier. You look tired and hot, soldier. Why don't you make the army issue you a truck like me?”
I grinned and yelled, “Go to hell.”
His buddy grabbed him by the shoulder and yelled, “Stop calling that guy soldier. He's a Marine. Can't you see his emblem? He's not in the army. Don't insult him.”
“Thanks,” I yelled. That was my first encounter with men who had no esprit. We might grumble to each other about our officers or the chow or the Marine Corps in general, but it was rather like grumbling about one's own family—always with another member. If an outsider tried to get into the discussion, a fight resulted.
One night during exercises in defense against enemy infiltration, some of the boys located the bivouac of Big Red and the other instructors who were supposed to be the infiltrators and stole their boondockers. When the time came for their offense to commence, they threw a few concussion grenades around and yelled like Japanese but didn't slip out and capture any of us. When the officers realized what had happened, they reamed out the instructors for being too sure of themselves. The instructors had a big fire built in a ravine. We sat around it, drank coffee, ate K rations, and sang some songs. It didn't seem like such a bad war so far.
All of our training was in rifle tactics. We spent no time on heavy weapons (mortars and machine guns), because when we went “up north” our unit commander would assign us where needed. That might not be in our specialties. As a result of the field exercises and obstacle course work, we reached a high level of physical fitness and endurance.
During the last week of May we learned that the 46th Replacement Battalion would go north in a few days. We packed our gear and boarded