Peace Kills (23 page)

To the young—very young—Marines who were looking at that mountain when I was there, the flag-raising must seem to have happened a full Secretary Forrestal five-hundred-years ago. For someone born in 1984, the war between Japan and the United States is almost as long past as the war between Japan and Czarist Russia is for me. During that protracted meander of chronology, Iwo Jima acquired a slight, untoward comic tinge. There were numerous parodic representations of the monument, the photo, the pose. There were Johnny Carson's “Mount Suribachi” tag lines. There was a period of years when every drunk of a certain age who'd ever been a Marine claimed to have fought at Iwo, my uncle Mike included. (Uncle Mike's World War II Marine Corps stint was spent in a stateside hospital with an infected toe.) John Wayne didn't fight there, either, but he gave a clumsy imitation of doing so in
Sands of Iwo Jima
. When televisions became common, that movie appeared on them constantly. The photograph itself did not show the first American flag atop Suribachi but, rather, its replacement with a second, larger Stars and Stripes. It is an image of combat in which no combat is involved. One or two too many men are trying to shove an iron pipe into a pile of rocks. And the flag-raising was not a signal of victory. It happened on the fifth day of the invasion, when most of the fighting and dying were yet to come.

The Marines of 2003 woke up on their first morning on Iwo Jima and hiked four miles from their campground to the top of Suribachi. They did it so quickly that they were there for sunrise, at 5:45. They hung their dog tags at Suribachi's peak, on a bas-relief of the flag-raising mounted on a granite plinth. The monument is decorated with hundreds of dog
tags, many bearing dates of birth more recent than my last dentist appointment. But if there was anything that struck the young Marines as antique or absurd about this battlefield, they didn't show it. Some of them will be sent to deal with the antique absurdities of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The director, the cameraman, and I—antiques in our forties and fifties—proceeded on our own absurd errand. Bearing camera, tripod, battery packs, tapes, and so forth, we trudged through a satire of tropical paradise. The beaches were black, not white. The sea looked like agitated dishwater. The sky was cloudless, but dull with heat haze. Palm trees did not sway, nor did bougainvillea flower in the botanically anonymous uninterrupted scrub. The weather didn't warm the blood, it broiled the bald spot and baked the feet. In place of grass shacks and tiki huts were the ruins of Japanese pillboxes and gun emplacements.

The three of us carried our stuff across the island and up Suribachi and down. We didn't faint in the heat or get too dizzy and sick. Iwo Jima is not a place, we complained to one another, where you feel you're allowed to complain. We went out into the deep, steep-pitched sucking sand of the D-day landing beaches. Thirty thousand men were put ashore that morning in a space hardly adequate for a UCLA panhellenic luau. Tanks, amphibious vehicles, and Marines themselves sank to immobility. On D-day, 2,420 Americans were killed or wounded.

Combat now is a less crowded affair and more dependent on sophisticated electronic equipment. We were lugging some. It didn't compare in heft to what a Marine carried on a World War II amphibious landing. In 1945 one man's weapons, ammunition, and gear might have weighed as much as 122 pounds. Killing is not as physical as it once was. It's time for
young, hopeful people to be relieved of fighting duties. War should be fought by the middle-aged men who, anyway, decide that war should be fought. We don't have our whole lives in front of us. We're already staring down the barrel of heart disease and SEC investigations. Being wrenched from home, family, and job wouldn't be that wrenching for many of us. We wouldn't need these morale-boosting trips.

The irony of unarmed old guys didn't appear to register on the young Marines. They had brought pocketsful of small Ziploc bags and were filling these with sands of Iwo Jima.

Perhaps that movie deserves another, unironic look.
Sands of Iwo Jima
, released in 1949, doesn't have much to do with the battle, although the final scenes are set on Iwo and incorporate harrowing footage shot by Marine combat cameramen. The movie's real subject is a change in America, a nationwide 150-million-person shift in values. John Wayne, a Marine sergeant, is tough as nails. John Agar, a private in Wayne's platoon, is sensitive and has been to college. They clash. “I want my son to be intelligent, not tough,” Agar tells Wayne, who is shown to be pretty damn sensitive himself and more intelligent than you'd think. Then Wayne gets shot, and Agar realizes that sometimes the sensitive, intelligent thing to do is to be tough as nails.
Sands of Iwo Jima
thus traces U.S. foreign policy from Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick through Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points to George Bush's Whatever-It-Turns-Out-to-Be.

It's tempting to believe that the Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima weren't as sensitive as Americans. The Japanese fought for the island mostly from underground, hiding in sixteen miles of tunnels and caves. They died in there from flamethrower attacks, satchel charge explosions, and suffocation. Many Japanese dead remain in these catacombs. Narrow,
scary orifices of the tunnel system open all over the island. Visiting relatives have placed small altars by the holes. Offerings of cigarettes and sake sit beside incense burners. Broken and rusted weapons are arranged gracefully. It's just not possible for a sensitive American peering into the dreadful apertures to think that every person inside was as miserable and frightened as I would have been.

In fact, the Japanese military men on Iwo Jima, or at least the officers, were arguably more sensitive—and more intelligent—than their American counterparts. The island's commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, was an accomplished artist. He was fluent in English. He spent several years as a military attaché in the United States and Canada, writing letters home to his wife and child, the pages filled with humorous cartoons. And he openly opposed going to war with America. The head of naval forces, Rear Admiral Toshinosuke Ichimaru, wrote poetry in Japanese and classical Chinese and was famous for his calligraphy. Lieutenant Colonel Takeichi Nishi was sensitive to opportunities for fun. He was a baron, of the gossip-column-boldface variety, who won a gold medal in horse-jumping in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. He partied in Hollywood, had affairs with actresses, and knew Spencer Tracy. All three officers fought to the death.

Across the northern fan of Iwo Jima a volcanic plateau is half eroded into disorderly hills. Mostly their names are nothing but their heights in feet: Hill 382, Hill 362A, and so on. Every hill caused hundreds of people to die; so did every ravine between them. Any clump of rocks providing cover was a source of death, as were all open spaces providing none. Almost five men to an acre were killed for this island, a corpse
in each subdivision house lot. On D-day Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. Shepard, Jr., the commander of the Third Battalion, Twenty-eighth Marine Regiment, told his men that their objective was “to secure this lousy piece of real estate so we can get the hell off it.” William Manchester, in his memoir of the Pacific war,
Goodbye, Darkness
, described Iwo Jima as “an ugly, smelly glob of cold lava squatting in a surly ocean.”

By coincidence, just a month earlier, I'd been looking at other smelly globs on the far side of the same surly ocean, in the equally isolated Galapagos Islands. My fellow tourists and I
ooohed
at the black sands,
aaahed
at the sulfurous volcano vents, and told one another how beautiful the sunset was behind mounts of exactly Suribachi's shape. Iwo Jima does not have the strange life-forms found in the Galapagos. But what form of life could be stranger than that which was lived on Iwo Jima from February 19 to March 26, 1945? The Galapagos Islands are internationally protected, to preserve the history of biological evolution. On Iwo Jima the history of moral evolution is preserved. The litter of battle is lying where it was dropped. A seven-story Japanese fortification inside Mount Suribachi has never been reentered.

After Iwo Jima a few more big World War II battles took place, notably in Berlin and on Okinawa. But it wasn't long before sensitive, intelligent nations evolved beyond such things—even if Hiroshima, one of those cataclysmic events common to evolutionary history, was required to spark the progress. Since then military hordes swarming in all-out attack and military masses falling in desperate defense have been rare. When they do happen, evolutionary throwbacks are involved—Kim II Sung, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein.

People have not gotten better, of course—-just more sensitive and, maybe, intelligent. One of the things they are intelligent about is strategy. Iwo Jima is 660 miles from Tokyo. At the beginning of 1945 Americans had Pacific air bases that were within range of the Japanese mainland for bombers but not for fighter escorts. If the Americans could take Iwo Jima, B-29s would fly over Tokyo fully protected. If the Japanese could keep Iwo Jima, B-29s would not. Today ninety-six thousand soldiers aren't thrown into one such small space on a map. There are so many other kinds of space to fight over—outer space, cyberspace, the space between most people's ears.

We gave Iwo Jima back to Japan in 1968. It is now, as it was in February 1945, a Japanese military base. At sunset when I was there, the Japanese national anthem was played over loudspeakers near the Marine campground. Every U.S. Marine turned toward the Japanese flag, stood at attention, and saluted. A Marine sergeant said under his breath, “My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave if he saw this.”

Neither his grandfather nor any other American is rolling over in his grave on Iwo Jima. The American dead were disinterred in the 1960s and returned to American soil. Their ghosts don't haunt the Iwo Jima battlefield. Nor do the ghosts of the Japanese. I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm Irish enough to be able to tell when none are around. The island is grim. Thoughts of its history are frightening. But Iwo Jima isn't spooky. I found the same notion in James Michener's
Tales of the South Pacific
. At the end of the book the narrator visits a military cemetery. He encounters a black sailor who has volunteered for caretaker duty.

“Isn't it strange,” I asked, “for colored men to like work in a cemetery?”

My guide laughed gently and easily. “Yes! Yes! I know jes' what yo'-all means,” he said. “All dem jokes about ghos's and cullud men. But what yo'-all doan' see,” he added quietly, “is dat dey ain' no ghos's up here! … dey is only heros.”

Pardon, for the sake of the thought, Michener's insensitive language. He was a pre-postmodern man. And so was General Kuribayashi. In his last message to Imperial General Headquarters he said, “Even as a ghost, I wish to be a vanguard of future Japanese operations.” If so, he's haunting a Toyota factory.

General Kuribayashi sent his message from a cave in a ravine at the northwest corner of Iwo Jima, an area that the Americans called Bloody Gorge. The Marines of 1945 were plagued by the manifold bolt-holes, peek holes, and gun ports concealed in the narrow jumble of rock and brush.

I went to Kuribayashi's final redoubt with a Marine sergeant major and his Japanese counterpart. The sergeants major are friends. They are authorities on the history of Iwo Jima. Together they gave lectures to the young Marines and guided the hikes around the island.

I couldn't see the entrance to Kuribayashi's cave—even though his descendants had marked it with a statue of a Shinto goddess. The sergeants, on their bellies, led me inside. Kuribayashi was a wide man, five feet nine and two hundred pounds. Getting him into his headquarters must have been like opening wine when the corkscrew is lost. Thirty feet down, the roof, walls, and floor of the cave flared like a panic attack. We stood in a large, hot, stinking chamber with dead men's belongings all over the ground.

By early March Kuribayashi had only fifteen hundred men. They were all in one square mile around Bloody Gorge. Tens of thousands of Marines were on the island. The American Pacific command declared Iwo Jima “secure” on March 14. Yet the fighting continued for twelve more days. In the “mopping up” on Iwo Jima, 1,071 Marines were killed. As of my visit to Iwo that was fewer Americans than had died in the conquest and occupation of Iraq, with its 167,000 square miles of territory and its army of half a million men.

We're coming to the end of the long, dark modern age. Slaughters of unnumbered human beings continue, but not among people who knew Spencer Tracy. Warfare persists, but the scale of battle is returning to something that the author of the
Iliad
would recognize. Maybe someday each combat casualty will rate the kind of mourning that Achilles did for Patroclus, except on television, and the saga of every Jessica Lynch will be an
Odyssey
or, anyway, a cover of
People
. There never will be peace, but we can have wars where, when we talk about our soldiers, we say, “Dey is only heros.”