Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu Read Online Free

Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu
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remember, my mother always had to struggle financially. She worked long hours and cut every corner she could, but it seemed like there was never enough money to go around. That was one of the things that started me thinking about joining the service.
    I’d thought about it for several years, and when I was sixteen, I asked Mom to let me join the Navy. At the time, she said “nothing doing” and refused to sign the papers. But four years later, she agreed to sign for me if I was still determined to enlist. By then, I guess she knew it was only a few weeks till my twenty-first birthday, anyway. Then I’d be old enough to enlist without her permission. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, but I probably would have joined anyway.
    That first night on Guadalcanal was one of those times when you start mulling over stuff like that and piecing parts of your past together. Then the next thing you know, you’re asking yourself how you ended up in such a dangerous, uncomfortable, foodless hellhole in the first place.
    After a while, my thoughts drifted to Charlie Smith, my best friend as a kid back in Brooklyn. Charlie and I had joined the Marines together on the same day, and I started wondering where he might be right now. We wanted to stay together in the same outfit, but we’d gotten separated after boot camp, and Charlie had moved around a lot since then.
    The last I’d heard, he was somewhere in the South Pacific with the Second Marines. By now, I thought he might’ve been on American Samoa. A bunch of Marines had been sent there because the brass thought it might be the Japs’ next target.
    The actual truth, though, was that Charlie was on one of those islands just across Sealark Channel from where I was sitting on Guadalcanal at that very moment. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.
    When we were in our teens, Charlie and I talked for months about joining the Army. Finally, after Mom gave in and agreed tosign for me, we got up enough nerve to take a bus and then a train to the recruiting station on Broadway in downtown Manhattan. I never knew why, but the Army recruiting office was closed that day. So we went up to the Navy Building at 90 Church Street, where a middle-aged Marine sergeant in dress blues talked us into joining the Corps.
    Looking back on it, it must’ve been fate.
    The recruiting posters never showed any Marines in sweaty green dungarees with mud up to their ears. They were always dressed to the nines in those snazzy dress blues. Charlie and I could picture ourselves strutting down Broadway in those knocked-out uniforms. That convinced us on the spot that we wanted to be Marines.
    When we walked out of the recruiting depot, a bunch of young guys started yelling at us from across the street. I guess they could tell what we’d just done by the looks on our faces.
    “You’ll be sorr-eee!” they said. “You’ll be sorr-eee!”
    I had plenty of reasons to remember that on my first night at Guadalcanal.
    I didn’t have the foggiest idea what was going to happen next. None of us did. By this time tomorrow, we might all be dead. Or we might still be in this same exact spot, wishing for more water and ammo and something to eat.
    All I knew for sure was that I was squatting in a foxhole listening to Bill Landrum snore. I’d never had enough money to buy myself a set of dress blues, and I doubted if I ever would. Unless they were bayonet-proof and bulletproof, they wouldn’t have done me much good where I was right now. I’d have traded them in a minute for some C rations and another unit of fire.
    I squeezed my ’03 Springfield with both hands and went onstaring into the darkness. And like a lot of other guys around me were probably doing at that exact moment, I kept hearing the same stupid question repeating itself in my head like a stuck record:
    Okay, so how the hell DID I end up in this godforsaken place, anyway?

ALWAYS A MARINE AT HEART
    I WAS BORN ON September 30, 1919, in a hospital at
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