The Last Full Measure (49 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
Men might be philosophical about death, but they shared with soldiers down the centuries a particular horror of being killed in a certain way, a way that denied them some kind of saving grace. When Major John André, a British officer and spy captured
during the American War of Independence, was sentenced to be executed, he petitioned George Washington to allow him to be shot, as befitted an officer; Washington insisted on the ignominy of a criminal’s execution by hanging. More than 160 years later, Laurens van der Post, a South African–born officer in the British Army (later to become famous as a conservationist, anthropologist, and writer), captured behind enemy lines in Java in 1942, faced what seemed to be his imminent execution at the hands of the Japanese: “And curiously enough, the only thing that worried me was
how
I was to be killed … I didn’t want to be strangled, I didn’t want to be hanged, I didn’t want to be buried, I didn’t want to be bayoneted—all forms of execution I had seen. I wanted to be shot. And I thought: the great thing is to think of an argument, a way of putting it to them so that they shoot you in the morning. This seemed to me of vital importance.”
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Donald Burgett, a tough young paratrooper intimately acquainted with death in battle, pondered the possibility of his own with a vividness born of experience. Echoing Lord Moran’s observation during World War I, he confesses that it is dismemberment that tightened the sphincter:
The thought of death did not really bother me too much. Death is just the other end of being born. It is natural. We come into the world out of a dark, unknowing void and we return to it. What really bothered me was the thought of having my arms and legs torn from my body. Of lying there with my blood spurting out on a shell-ravaged field. Of seeing the jagged ends of splintered bone protruding from the torn, ragged stumps of flesh where my limbs used to be. Of smelling burnt powder and raw iron mixed with fresh human blood. I had experienced this with others in battle too many times. I didn’t want it to happen to me. I would rather be killed.
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Another way the combat soldier could protect himself from the fear of death was to detach it from the
me
and invest it in the
you
: “We worried more about our buddies,” remembers Marine Frank Chadwick. “You made yourself believe that nothing could happen to you, that you had to worry about your friends.” But it was a peculiarly schizophrenic attitude. On the one hand, “you knew people were killed and wounded all the time, but deep down you thought it would happen to some other guy.”
Responsibility and care, love even, are freighted with the appalling risk of loss. Kenneth Cole, who had his best buddy killed on Iwo Jima, lamented: “I just can’t make myself understand that I won’t see Boone anymore. Even though you may have seen men die in the same outfit with you it is impossible to make yourself believe that anybody can get killed that is as close to you as Boone was to me. He taught me practically everything I know about being a Marine. If it hadn’t been for Boone I would have been a white cross on Bougainville.”
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The contract of comradeship had to be honored, although perhaps many years later. Alex Bowlby’s closest friend, Corporal Jeffreys, was killed in Italy.
One morning I saw a rifleman from “D” Company. Had there been any casualties I asked?
“No,” he said. “It’s been pretty cushy. But Corporal Jeffreys is dead. He stepped on a Teller [a German mine] and it went off. He was on patrol.”
I walked away quickly, automatically heading for a wood outside the camp. There I sobbed my heart out. I felt as if part of myself had died.
By the evening the grief had bottled itself up. It stayed that way until one November evening fourteen years later, when I cried my way across half London.
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Sometimes the dead stranger reached out: “There he is … a fellow Marine. His face is not recognized; perhaps I have never met him. None of this seems to matter now. He is my brother. How many times had my fellow Marine felt the slicing and piercing of the Japanese bayonet? There must be at least 30 bayonet wounds. His penis is cut off and shoved into his mouth in the Japanese way of the ultimate insult. His once handsome features and dark complexion are now obscured by ants.… I shed … tears for his family whom I will not be able to find. To this day I am bothered by this memory.”
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Charles Lindsay of the Fourth Marines on Okinawa stumbled on the body of a fellow Marine: “A perfect specimen of youth … not a scratch on him except a bullet hole thru his helmet. He must have been killed instantly and there was no blood. I opened his pack to get his poncho to cover him from the flies. Out fell a picture of his mother and a picture of a beautiful girl. I placed the pictures inside his jacket and then knelt down and prayed. And then just plain cried. To me he was the whole war.”
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As bizarre as it might sound, death could be a relief from the weighty responsibility of loving someone in peril. C. Russ Martin was a sergeant in the US First Infantry Division. His twin brother was killed in North Africa. “Twins, we feel for one another, and the minute he got killed I knew it, a sensation and a kind of relief, you know, from worrying about him. I didn’t have to worry about him anymore. A boy walked up to me and said, ‘You know your brother got killed?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ ”
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Another response was to balance loss with revenge, the death received with the death meted out. Donald Burgett, the tough-guy airborne warrior, going into a desperate attack in northwest Europe in 1944, recalls:
Passing one foxhole I saw an infantry man holding his dead buddy in his arms and crying. This puzzled me, and I stopped for a minute to ask him what the trouble was.
“They’ve killed my buddy,” he sobbed, with tears streaming down his cheeks. “But he can’t be dead, we went through basic together; the medics have got to save him.”
The man was dead all right, shot through the Adam’s apple, and I told the infantry man so. “The only thing that you can do for him now is to leave him alone and help kill some of these Krauts.”
Looking back I saw that he was still crying and holding the dead man in his arms. “He must be nuts,” I thought. I have had buddies killed even in training and didn’t feel like that. Not an hour ago Baranski, René, Robbie and LaRose had been killed and several others badly wounded. I felt bad, but we couldn’t sit around and cry about it. We had Germans to kill.
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Rejecting tough-guy rhetoric (although himself a battle-hardened warrior), William Manchester expresses the need to move past grief: “It was bad form to weep long for a fallen buddy. We moved on, each of us inching along the brink of his own extinction.”
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A FEW REVELED
in it; most were disgusted by it, and yet more were reconciled to the necessary truth that killing is what combat soldiers are meant to do: “We were in the business of killing … it was what we were trained for; it was our livelihood, in a very real sense. I am not justifying, but explaining, when I say those were the days when, if a selection board chairman asked (and he did): ‘Wouldn’t you like to stick a bayonet in a German’s guts, eh?,’
he was not expecting an answer drawn from the Sermon on the Mount.”
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As with most soldiers throughout history, combat troops in World War II tended to resolve any moral qualms with an uncomplicated directness: In the words of an armored infantryman, “You learn one basic axiom and that is kill or be killed. You learn to think of ‘me.’ With someone getting killed you say, ‘Better him than me.’ ” And of a medic: “In the heat of all this bitterness, anger, and fear of being done in, it’s either you or them.”
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Survival had a way of trumping most other considerations: “You don’t fight a kraut by Marquis of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself. He does the same to you. He tricks you and cheats you, and if you don’t beat him at his own game you don’t live to appreciate your own nobleness.
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An American infantryman in the Pacific theater would have heartily applauded the sentiment: “Hollywood movies do not actually portray the realities of war, as in many cases the enemy is shot from behind or stabbed from behind or blown up from behind easier than front on. This is not a step-by-step hip-swinging, gun-throwing, honor-bound situation. Actually, you were out to save your own neck in the safest, easiest possible way.”
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Men under great stress cannot help but feel satisfaction—joy even—in killing an enemy who would kill them given half a chance. Is it evidence of innate and primal evil? Of a bloodlust like a lousy inheritance? Or simply that huge sigh of relief—“He. Not me.” George MacDonald Fraser recalls being in an attack against a strong Japanese position at Pyawbwe in Burma that had been long anticipated and much feared by the attackers. Finally, they were in the thick of it, and the killing, surprisingly, brought an almost luxurious sense of satisfaction, deliciously unburdened of guilt:
Nick jumped into the wagon [railroad car], and I was on his heels. It was open on the far side, like a picture window; it might have been designed as a firing point for kneeling marksmen. All around the wagon men were yelling with excitement, throwing themselves down on the rubble and blazing away at those running figures, some of whom must have turned to fire at us, for two or three shots clanged against the wagon. But most of them were running, and all we had to do was pick our targets.
This was something new. In my previous contacts with the enemy, everything had been split-second in crisis, with nothing to do but react at speed, snap-shooting.… There had been no time to think; it had been scramble and shoot and hope … in a way like a goal-mouth scramble.…
But in that railway wagon it was more like the moment when you’re clear with the ball.… There wasn’t much time, but enough: to pick a target, hang for an instant on the aim to make sure, take the first pressure according to the manual—and then the second.
It was exciting; no other word for it, and no explanation needed, for honest folk. We all have kindly impulses, fostered by two thousand years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have the killer instinct, too, the murderous impulse of the hunter … but one must not say so.
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Killing, in Fraser’s world, was sanitized by distance and sanctified by an ancient tribal dispensation. However, when it was up close and personal, the killer was no longer protected from the consequences, as Raymond Gantter found:
It is hard to write this part, because this is where I killed a man. The first one. The first one I was sure of. It ought to be
told simply, because it’s important that you should understand what it’s like—how you feel when you have trapped a small, running creature between the cold sights of a deliberate gun and pulled the trigger, and suddenly the creature has stopped running and is lying there, and now it’s a man and his body is naked, and soft and crumpled. It ought to be told without hint of boast, and yet so that you would see there’s something of the bragging boy in the sense of achievement; it ought to be told without sentiment, and yet so you would see what a big thing it is.
I saw a German soldier rise from behind the protective shoulder of the ridge and start to run to the rear, sprinting across the open field toward the hills. Perhaps he was a runner, a messenger—I cannot remember that he carried a weapon. It occurred to me later that he must have been young and very green, because he ran in a straight line, an easy course to follow with the sights of a rifle. He had unbuttoned his overcoat for greater freedom in running, and the skirts flapped like huge blue wings around his legs. He was a moving dot of blue, a clumsy blue object to be stalked deliberately.… Now, impaled within the sights, the blue coat was enormous, presented itself to my squinted eye like a cloud, like a house, like a target painted solid blue on the firing range.… I squeezed the trigger and he fell. He did not move again, the skirts of the blue overcoat made a patch of unnatural color in the field where he lay.
For a moment I was triumphant and my eyes lingered on my prize, confirming it. There he was! … He was there, still lying there, and it wasn’t a game any longer. He hadn’t risen to his feet, dusted himself off, and thumbed his nose at me gaily before started to run again. He lay there, quiet now, and he hadn’t moved, and I laid my rifle on the floor of the attic—carefully, because of the plaster dust—and put my
head in my hands. I wanted to be sick, but there wasn’t time to be sick. And I thought, Poor bastard … he was hungry and cold, too … scared and homesick and missing his people and tired of war. And I was sick and ashamed because I never hated him, never him specifically, and I never wanted to kill him. And it was an ugly and an evil thing.… Then I picked up my rifle and went back to my job.
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