Islands of the Damned (27 page)

I stood there gawking, as I had back in boot camp when those fighters came roaring off the runway at North Island. I thought, You crazy son of a bitch. You’re going to crash. Those Marine pilots, they were good. They were something else.

I had nothing to do now but wait. The sergeants were all bunking together. I was still in charge of the mortar section, but they were bunking down the street. If I needed anybody to do anything, I just hollered. I was tired, but my wound had healed. Then one day I suddenly felt a chill. Within minutes I was shivering violently. I couldn’t seem to get warm. The feeling passed but a short time later I started sweating. I was burning up with fever. I went down to the camp doctor’s office, my knees so wobbly I could hardly walk.

I knew very well what it was. I’d seen it often enough in others. Like so many Marines, I’d come down with malaria. The doctor started me on quinine and increased the Atabrine tablets I’d been taking, like everyone else. I went back to my tent to lie down, alternately shivering and sweating for the rest of the day. All week I lay in my cot or, when I felt strong enough, got up and wandered around a bit. The fevers and chills gradually lessened. But the truth of it is, you never really get over malaria. The symptoms go away. But months and even years later they can come back. Malaria was to be an off-and-on presence in my life for some time to come.

It was September 14 before I finally learned I was being shipped back to the States. The rest of the First Marine Division were going to China. The next day I went down to the enlisted men’s camp and looked for my old buddies. I spent most of the day going from tent to tent saying my good-byes. Some were already on board ship. Late in the month the First Marine Division left Okinawa for China. Jim Burke, Sledgehammer, Hank Boyes, Snafu Shelton, Sarrett, Santos—the guys I’d fought alongside, all my old buddies—were gone. I was on my own.

In the weeks afterward I moved from the NCO camp to another camp, where I sat through a raging typhoon. When it was safe to go outside the first thing I saw was a cargo ship blown right up onto dry land. It was a foretaste of what the sea can do. After the typhoon I moved closer to the harbor, with the Eleventh Artillery Regiment, where I bunked until it was time to ship out.

The eighty-two-day battle for Okinawa had taken more than twelve thousand American lives, and left more than thirty-eight thousand wounded. Nobody has ever been able to calculate exactly how many Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians died in that campaign. Even after the surrender, small pockets of Japs went on fighting, just as they had on Peleliu.

I came off watch on the pitching deck of the USS
Lavaca
at midnight and felt my way down the ladder to the cramped sleeping quarters. It had been a rough night with the ship bucking heavy seas. The air below was close and foul as I squeezed between the tiers of bunks filled with snoring men. I found my own bunk, shed my dripping poncho and threw myself down. I closed my eyes in relief. One more day closer to home.

It certainly hadn’t turned into any bon voyage.

I had witnessed what a typhoon could do the week before on Okinawa, when a storm parked a ship on dry land, practically at the doorstep of my tent. That morning I went out and walked around. It looked like a good old Texas tornado had passed through. Two-byfours were driven slantwise into the ground, trees uprooted and tipped over, roofs peeled away in ragged strips. The transport that was to take the Fifth Marines to China had sailed out of the harbor to weather the typhoon at sea, rather than risk being driven aground.

Just before I left the island I hooked up with another Texan, Ernest Schelgren, a platoon sergeant in the Eleventh Artillery who was also awaiting shipment home. He was from a farm and I was from a farm, and we hit it off. On October 16 we boarded the USS
Lavaca
together, looking forward to calm seas and an uneventful voyage. A few days out a typhoon caught us.

The
Lavaca
was an attack transport, built just a few years before but already a bucket of rust, a real tub. A couple days out I got assigned to guard duty on deck for four hours. As we watched clouds pile up across our path, the skipper came on the loudspeaker warning the crew to batten down the hatches. Everyone was ordered to wear life jackets and to stay below. Except those of us unlucky enough to be on watch.

Topside, I clipped on to the fore and aft line, a rope three or four inches thick that ran from the bow to the stern. It was the only thing you could hang on to.

The wind strummed the wires and the
Lavaca
creaked and groaned. Spray washed over the deck, and, as we got deeper into the storm, raging rivers of foam five and six feet deep. A crewman said the waves were fifty feet high, and I believed every word. They were taller than the ship. The
Lavaca
would climb up one side of a wave, seeming to take forever. Then it would tip, slide down the other side and start the long climb up again. It was a little like fighting across the ridges and valleys of Okinawa.

When I got below after my watch, the bunks were swinging against the sway of the ship. In bed at last, I adjusted my arms and legs, stretched out and closed my eyes. Maybe I even drifted off to sleep for a minute or two. Suddenly there was a roaring grind like metal being torn from metal, and a
bang!
I bolted up, wide-awake. We were next to the ship’s galley and I could guess what had happened. In all the tossing and heaving, a stove had torn loose from its moorings and come sliding across the floor and slammed into the bulkhead. Now with a complaining screech it started sliding back the other way. Canteens and canteen cups, shaving kits and mess kits were clattering on the deck, tumbling off the overhead beams where owners had left them for safekeeping. In the semidarkness there were groans and shouts of alarm.

I thought, Well, it’d be a helluva time to have your ship go under and drown, on your way home. Then I thought, I’ll just lie here and I’ll find out right quick if we’re still afloat or not. The ship went up, then it came down. Then it went up again, each time about fifty feet, and it came down. I decided, Okay, we’re still afloat.

So I turned over and went to sleep.

The storm went on for seventeen hours, during which nobody moved around much. A lot of the guys got seasick, which made the smell in the hold even worse. I didn’t get seasick but a few days after we passed through the storm, my chills and fevers returned. I was sent to sick bay with malaria.

After three weeks at sea we sailed past the Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland Bay Bridge one morning and docked in San Francisco. None of us went ashore. Before the end of the day we were on our way again, down the coast to San Diego.

I was feeling reasonably like a human being again. The Red Cross met us at the dock with paper cups of orange juice and half pints of milk. Trucks were waiting, engines running. The Navy had taken over Camp Elliott, where I had departed for the war thirty-two months before, so we were driven to Camp Pendleton. I’ll never forget the first night in the barracks. The weather wasn’t freezing, it wasn’t even particularly cold. But I was the coldest I’d ever been in my life. After so many months in the southwest Pacific I guess my blood was thin.

I had an upper bunk. There was a mattress, a pillow, a sheet and one thin blanket. Between the mattress and the springs was a cloth pad, a mattress protector. After a few hours, I climbed out of bed and put my clothes on. I crawled back under that blanket but I was still freezing to death. Literally shaking. I thought, To hell with this, and I pulled the mattress over me, and that’s where I spent the night, sleeping on that mattress pad. I never did get warm until I got up next morning.

While we waited to be mustered out, Ernest Schelgren and I hung out together. His wife, Barbara, flew in from Dallas to meet him and we became good friends, and remained so for many years after. My sister Ila was sending me money so I was able to go out on the town whenever I got liberty.

It took the Marines almost a month to return me to civilian life. I turned in my equipment, filled out lots of papers and sat through a final interview. I was surprised that the interviewer didn’t ask whether I had been wounded or whether I had any medical problems. When it was over the Marines paid for a train ticket back to Texas. I was in a hurry and I flew home instead.

I moved in with my sister Ila in Dallas, then took the train down to spend Christmas with my parents at Jewett. My father had set aside a calf for me, as he did for each of the Burgin children. But I didn’t want to farm. I had seen him work too long and too hard for too little. In a month I returned to Dallas and started looking for a job. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with my life.

I had already started the paperwork on Okinawa to bring over Florence. Although I had never officially proposed to her, it was always understood between us that we were going to marry after the war. I had written to her father asking for her hand. She told me once in Melbourne that he threatened to shoot “that Yank” if I came around trying to date his daughter. We had a good laugh over that. He didn’t even own a gun. Fortunately, he sent his permission.

I listed her as my fiancée, which meant she had to wait in line behind all the wives and the wives with children before she could come to the United States. Once the paperwork was approved I had to post $500 with the government. This was a technicality, in case a fiancée arrived in the United States and the couple ended up not getting married, or they got divorced quickly. Then the money would go to the young woman to pay for her passage home. If the couple married, the government would return the $500.

Neither one of us had any doubts. We longed for the day we would finally be together. I put us on the waiting list for a new refrigerator and started looking for an apartment—not an easy thing to find in the months after the war, when GIs were returning home by the tens of thousands.

I bought a ’39 Plymouth to help me in my job search. Growing up in rural Texas I had admired the mail carriers. I knew both of the rural route carriers who worked out of Jewett. I had been in their homes. They were friendly men and they had decent jobs during the Depression. I always figured that someday I would work for the federal government, because that meant job security and a good retirement plan.

I went to the Veterans Administration to see the contact officer. He was a man named Frank Mallory and he took an interest in my case. I think he took an interest in all the returning vets, because he was that kind of person.

We were sitting in his office talking and I told him I wanted to work for the Post Office. I’d had another bout of malaria and red, itchy fever blisters had spread over my chin and nose. I couldn’t have weighed more than 140 pounds.

“Are you drawing disability?” Mallory asked.

I wasn’t.

“And they didn’t ask you about it when you were discharged?”

I said they hadn’t mentioned anything about malaria or any medical problems.

“Well, somebody wasn’t doing his job,” he said. “What we’re going to do is put in for a pension and let you start drawing compensation for this.”

He showed me how to fill out the papers and gave me an addressed and stamped envelope. He also arranged for me to get on the list for the Civil Service exam for the Post Office.

A month or so afterward I got a check for 60 percent disability pay retroactive to my discharge.

In February, T. L. Hudson showed up. He’d gotten over the wounds he’d received on Okinawa. We found a boardinghouse where we could bunk together and the rent included breakfast. We became very close friends.

That month, I was notified that I had been recommended for a Bronze Star for my role in wiping out the machine-gun nest on Okinawa. This was the first I’d heard, but welcome news. I went out and bought my first and only set of Marine dress blues for the presentation ceremony, which was held in Dallas’s Oak Cliff YMCA. My dad and mother drove up from Jewett to stand beside their proud son, the only time they ever saw me in a Marine uniform.

When my health got to the point that I was able to go to work I decided to try the railroad company. They put me in telegraphy school for two months, but just before graduation I found out they planned to stick me in a little station way out just this side of El Paso. No town, no settlement of any kind, not even a gas station. Just a lonely railroad agency beside the track. I could imagine how Florence would take to that, and it wasn’t what I’d had in mind either, so I said, No, thanks. With Mallory’s help, I landed a job on the assembly line at the Ford plant in East Dallas. I worked there three months making $1.28 an hour—which was pretty good—when a letter came from the Post Office telling me to come in for the Civil Service exam.

I went to work for the Post Office on May 15, 1946, carrying the U.S. mail for eighty-four cents an hour, enduring the heat and fighting off mean dogs in East Dallas.