With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [71]
Each ammo box had two leather straps, and each ammo carrier had a heavy box on his back with the straps around his shoulders. I lifted one of the ammo chests. It weighed more than our mortar. What the Japanese lacked in height, they certainly compensated for in muscle.
“I'd sure hate to hafta lug that thing around, wouldn't you?” asked the Marine. “When they got hit,” he continued, “they fell to the deck like a brick because of all that weight.”
As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He held a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Each time his pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle. My buddy tossed the coral chunks as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on some muddy road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action. The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief.
I noticed gold teeth glistening brightly between the lips of several of the dead Japanese lying around us. Harvesting gold teeth was one facet of stripping enemy dead that I hadn't practiced so far. But stopping beside a corpse with a particularly tempting number of shining crowns, I took out my kabar and bent over to make the extractions.
A hand grasped me by the shoulder, and I straightened up to see who it was. “What are you gonna do, Sledgehammer?” asked Doc Caswell. His expression was a mix of sadness and reproach as he looked intently at me.
“Just thought I'd collect some gold teeth,” I replied.
“Don't do it.”
“Why not, Doc?”
“You don't want to do that sort of thing. What would your folks think if they knew?”
“Well, my dad's a doctor, and I bet he'd think it was kinda interesting,” I replied, bending down to resume my task.
“No! The germs, Sledgehammer! You might get germs from them.”
I stopped and looked inquiringly at Doc and said, “Germs? Gosh, I never thought of that.”
“Yeah, you got to be careful about germs around all these dead Nips, you know,” he said vehemently.
“Well, then, I guess I'd better just cut off the insignia on his collar and leave his nasty teeth alone. You think that's safe, Doc?”
“I guess so,” he replied with an approving nod.
Reflecting on the episode after the war, I realized that Doc Caswell didn't really have germs in mind. He was a good friend and a fine, genuine person whose sensitivity hadn't been crushed out by the war. He was merely trying to help me retain some of mine and not become completely callous and harsh.
There was little firing going on now because ⅗ was preparing to pull back as it was relieved by an army battalion. Our tanks, two of which had been parked near us, started toward the beach. As they rattled and clanked away, I hoped they weren't leaving prematurely.
Suddenly we were jolted by the terrific blast of a Japanese 75mm artillery piece slightly to our right. We flung ourselves flat on the deck. The shriek and explosion of the shell followed instantly. Fragments tore through the air. The gun fired again rapidly.
“Jesus, what's that?” gasped a man near me.
“It's a Nip 75, and God is he close,” another said.
Each time the gun fired I felt the shock and pressure waves from the muzzle blast. I was terror stricken. We began to hear shouts of “Corpsman” on our right.
“For chrissake, get them tanks back up here,” someone yelled. I looked toward the tanks just in time to see several wheel around and come speeding back to help the pinned-down infantrymen.
“Mortar section, stand by,” someone yelled. We might be called to fire on the enemy gun, but as yet we didn't know its location.
The tanks went into action and almost immediately knocked out the weapon. Calls came from our right for corps-men and stretcher bearers. Several of our ammo carriers went with the corpsmen to act as stretcher bearers. Word filtered along to us that quite a number of casualties had been caused by the terrible point-blank fire of the enemy cannon. Most of those