With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [23]
Today the 5th Marines still forms a part of the 1st Marine Division. Stationed on the west coast, the division can deploy units for duty in the western Pacific.
The trucks drove along winding coral roads by the bay and through coconut groves. We stopped and unloaded our gear near a sign that said “3rd Bn., 5th Marines.” An NCO assigned me to Company K. Soon a lieutenant came along and took aside the fifteen or so men who had received crew-served weapons training (mortars and machine guns) in the States. He asked each of us which weapon he wanted to be assigned to in the company. I asked for 60mm mortars and tried to look too small to carry a seventy-pound flamethrower. He assigned me to mortars, and I moved my gear into a tent that housed the second squad of the 60mm mortar section.
For the next several weeks I spent most of my time during the day on work parties building up the camp. The top sergeant of Company K, 1st Sergeant Malone, would come down the company street shouting, “All new men outside for a work party, on the double.” Most of the time the company's veterans weren't included. Pavuvu was supposed to be a rest camp for them after the long, wet, debilitating jungle campaign on Cape Gloucester. When Malone needed a large work party he would call out, “I need every available man.” So we referred to him as “Available” Malone.
None of us, old hands or replacements, could fathom why the division command chose Pavuvu. Only after the war did I find out that the leaders were trying to avoid the kind of situation the 3d Marine Division endured when it went into camp on Guadalcanal after its campaign on Bougainville. Facilities on Guadalcanal, by then a large rear-area base, were reasonably good, but the high command ordered the 3d Division to furnish about a thousand men each day for working parties all over the island. Not only did the Bougainville veterans get little or no rest, but when replacements came, the division had difficulty carrying out its training schedule in preparation for the next campaign, Guam.
If Pavuvu seemed something less than a tropical paradise to us replacements fresh from the States and New Caledonia, it was a bitter shock to the Gloucester veterans.* When ships entered Macquitti Bay, as the General Howze had, Pavuvu looked picturesque. But once ashore, one found the extensive coconut groves choked with rotting coconuts. The apparently solid ground was soft and turned quickly to mud when subjected to foot or vehicular traffic.
Pavuvu was the classical embodiment of the Marine term “boondocks.” It was impossible to explain after the war what life on Pavuvu was like. Most of the griping about being “rock happy” and bored in the Pacific came from men stationed at the big rear-echelon bases like Hawaii or New Caledonia. Among their main complaints were that the ice cream wasn't good, the beer not cold enough, or the USO shows too infrequent. But on Pavuvu, simply living was difficult.
For example, most of the work parties I went on in June and July were pick-and-shovel details to improve drainage or pave walkways with crushed coral, just to get us out of the water. Regulations called for wooden decks in all tents, but I never saw one on Pavuvu.
Of all the work parties, the one we hated most was collecting rotten coconuts. We loaded them onto trucks to be dumped into a swamp. If we were lucky, the coconut sprout served as a handle. But more often, the thing fell apart, spilling stinking coconut milk over us.
We made sardonic, absurd jokes about the vital, essential, classified work we were doing for the war effort and about the profundity and wisdom of the orders we received. In short, we were becoming “Asiatic,” a Marine Corps term denoting a singular type of eccentric behavior characteristic of men who had served too long in the Far East. I had