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

Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street in South Brooklyn, New York.
    When I think back over all the years since then, I honestly believe I was always a Marine at heart. Even before I had any idea what a Marine really was—or ever even heard the word “Marine”—I think it was what I wanted to be. I just didn’t know what to call it back then.
    I’m Irish to the core on both sides of my family. My Grandpa and Grandma McEnery were both born in Ireland, but by the time they got married in 1888, they’d crossed the Atlantic and settled in Brooklyn. Grandma McEnery died in childbirth before I was born, and I didn’t see Grandpa McEnery very often when I was a kidbecause he lived clear over on the other side of Brooklyn from me.
    On the other hand, my grandparents on my mother’s side were always around. The first place I clearly remember as home was the neighborhood of Gerritsen Beach that began developing on the east side of Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay right after World War I. When I was real small, Mom’s parents, Grandpa and Grandma Daniels, lived just a few blocks away from us. But when I was about eleven, my mother and father separated, and she and my sister and I had to move in with Mom’s parents in a house at 109 Gain Court in Gerritsen Beach.
    If I went back looking for it today, I’d probably have a hard time finding it, but it wouldn’t surprise me much if it’s still there. Most of the streets have the same names, and many of the old houses are still standing.
    The neighborhood—I don’t think anybody calls it Gerritsen Beach anymore—was a remote place at that time. It wasn’t really like part of the city at all, and it was a long bus and train ride to the older, more established sections of Brooklyn. The neighborhood faced a beach along Jamaica Bay with a swamp on the east side that was eventually filled in by dredging silt from the bay. Then the swamp became a big park with baseball and football fields, playgrounds, and basketball courts.
    I spent hundreds of hours playing in that park, and the name they gave it was kind of prophetic where I was concerned. They called it Marine Park.
    There was a creek nearby where saltwater from the ocean mingled with freshwater before it emptied into the bay. In the winter, the freshwater would freeze into big chunks of ice that floated in the saltwater. At low tide, there’d be five or six rows of those big icechunks left grounded at the mouth of the creek, each of them about a foot thick. Then, when the tide started to come back in, the neighborhood kids would make a game out of jumping from one chunk to another as they started to float out into the bay.
    We’d walk down the rows of chunks that were on land, but as they started to float, you had to be careful. You had to be fast enough to jump from piece to piece as they moved out toward the main floe where the creek and the bay met. If you stayed on a piece of ice too long, it would sink underneath you. Then you’d find yourself dunked in the ice-cold water. We thought it was fun. We were a little crazy, I guess.
    To give you an idea of how far off the beaten path the neighborhood was back in the 1920s, rumrunners would sometimes slip into the creek off Jamaica Bay at night to unload their illegal booze. They’d hire some of the guys from the neighborhood to help them put the stuff in hospital ambulances, which was how they delivered it to their customers’ warehouses. Those were Prohibition times, and rum-running was big business.
    It was a violent business, too. One time when I was about eight or nine, the cops tried to intercept a boatload of bootleg hooch down at the creek, and a big gun battle broke out. I don’t know how many cops and rumrunners got shot, but I remember it scared the pants off one of my girl classmates and her family who lived close by. The girl’s mother made the kid lie down on the floor and put a mattress over her to protect her from stray bullets.
    On the west side of Gerritsen Beach