Battle Cry

THEY CALL ME MAC.
The name’s unimportant. You can best identify me by the six chevrons, three up and three down, and by that row of hashmarks. Thirty years in the United States Marine Corps.

I’ve sailed the Cape and the Horn aboard a battlewagon with a sea so choppy the bow was awash half the time under thirty-foot waves. I’ve stood Legation guard in Paris and London and Prague. I know every damned port of call and call house in the Mediterranean and the world that shines beneath the Southern Cross like the nomenclature of a rifle.

I’ve sat behind a machine gun poked through the barbed wire that encircled the International Settlement when the world was supposed to have been at peace, and I’ve called Jap bluffs on the Yangtze Patrol a decade before Pearl Harbor.

I know the beauty of the Northern Lights that cast their eerie glow on Iceland and I know the rivers and the jungles of Central America. There are few skylines that would fool me: Sugar Loaf, Diamond Head, the Tinokiri Hills or the palms of a Caribbean hellhole.

Yes, I know the slick brown hills of Korea just as the Marines knew them in 1871. Fighting in Korea is an old story for the Corps.

Nothing sounds worse than an old salt blowing his bugle. Anyhow, that isn’t my story.

As I look back on those thirty years I think of men and of outfits. I guess I’ve been in fifty commands and maybe there were a hundred men I’ve called Skipper. But strangely, there was only one man among them who was really my skipper and only one outfit I think of as mine. Sam Huxley and the battalion he led in World War II, “Huxley’s Whores.” What made Huxley’s Whores different? Hell, I don’t know. They were the damnedest bunch of Marines I’d ever laid eyes on. They weren’t Marines actually—or even men for that matter. A gang of beardless youths of eighteen, nineteen, and twenty who’d get pickled on two bottles of brew.

Before that war we had men among us who never knew that life existed outside the Corps. Leather lunged and ramrod straight, hard drinkers and fighters and spit-and-polish career men.

Then came the war and the boys—thousands of them. They told us to make Marines out of them. They were kids who should have been home doing whatever the hell eighteen-year-old kids do. God knows we never thought we could do the job with them…God knows they fooled us.

What made them different? Well, there was one of these kids in my squad who was quite a writer. I wish he was here to help me explain. He had a way reasoning out things to make them look real simple. He could tell you about fighting spirit and the deeper stuff of movements of peoples and the mistakes of generals and issues and of an American Congress that were sometimes as deadly to the Corps as any enemy in the field. He understood those things far better than I do.

A lot of historians write it off as
esprit de corps
and let it go at that. Others think we are fanatics for glory, but when you come right down to bedrock my kids were no different than anyone else. We had the same human strength and weaknesses that any crew of a ship or battalion of an army had.

We had our cowards and our heroes. And we had guys in love and so homesick they near died of it.

There was the company clown, the farmer, the wanderer, the bigot, the boy with the mission, the Texan. Huxley’s Whores had its gamblers, its tightfisted quartermaster, its horse-ass officers, its lovers, its drunks, its braggarts, its foul-ups.

And there were the women. The ones who waited and the ones who didn’t.

But how many men were there like Sam Huxley and Danny Forrester and Max Shapiro? And what makes these kids who have the normal loves and hates and fears throw their lives away, and what is it they carry within them that makes retreat worse than death? What was it that turned defeat into victory in the dark beginning at Guadalcanal and on the bloodsoaked lagoon at Tarawa and on Red Beach One at Saipan? They went through a wringer of physical and mental hell but still never failed to give each other that wonderful warmth of comradeship.

I do not berate any man who carries a gun in war, no matter what his uniform. But we Marines got the short end of the stick in that war. How many times in World War II were American forces, aside from the Marines, asked to walk into crushing odds with the cold sea behind them and withering fire before them and only raw guts to pull them through? I remember only one other time, at Bastogne.

This is the story of a battalion of invincible boys. And of my kids, the radio squad.

The Corps suffered humiliating defeats following Pearl Harbor and many fine old outfits fell holding outposts whose names were then foreign to the American people—Wake Island was one of them. We had to start from scratch with a couple of proud hardnosed, but ill-equipped regiments that remained in the scattered and wounded force. The new boys came to double and triple the ranks and we began the hard road back.

The Sixth Regiment of the United States Marine Corps, with me included, was sitting on Iceland keeping company with the northern lights when the war broke out, legally, that is. The Regiment was one of those proud outfits that had been settling banana wars for decades.

We got a big reputation in the first World War in a place called Belleau Wood, where we stopped the Hun dead in his tracks. For doing this the French decorated us with a fancy braid, the Fourragère, which all members of the Sixth Marines wear about their left shoulder.

At Château-Thierry, when Allied lines were collapsing, the story goes that one of our officers yelled: “Retreat, Hell! We just got here!” Maybe you’ve seen that expression in the history books along with some of our other battle cries.

The rest of the Corps is jealous of the Sixth because we happen to be the best regiment. In their spare time they dreamed up a nasty name for us: they call us the Pogey Bait Sixth. The story, and entirely unfounded, is that in 1931 on one of the ships taking us to Shanghai, we had ten thousand bars of candy but only two bars of soap in our ship’s store.

It was no sad parting we made from Reykjavik after we entered World War II, because the weather and the women were way below zero and the whisky strictly rotgut. We had sat out at our camp at Baldurshagi like a gang of stir-crazy cons, the monotony driving us insane.

When the Sixth returned from the frigid monotony of Iceland the regiment was split wide open. All personnel were given furloughs and reassignment orders. They spread the men all over the Corps, to form a nucleus for a hundred new outfits being formed. Thousands of boys poured through the boot camps and the old-timers were urgently needed everywhere.

I had a month-long blowout and then got a ticket to the West Coast with my old buddy, Sergeant Burnside. We were happy to be able to remain in the cadre of the Sixth Marines to help it reorganize again to full complement. I was made battalion communications chief with Burnside, a notch under me, heading the radio squad. When we hit Camp Eliot, a few miles outside San Diego, it was little more than one long street with immense barracks lined down it. The place was nearly deserted, but not for long.

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