The Old Breed

Chapter 15

Cape Gloucester

April 18th, 1944

4/18/1944

Dear Pop,

I wish I could have gotten back to you earlier, but  our island has been keeping me busy for a long while. You have likely heard where the 1st Marine Division is, but I am still not allowed to say the actual place. "Loose lips sink ships."  I'll be surprised if I am even able to give my unit designation to you through the military censors.

As I know you were a Marine in the Great War, I don't feel it's necessary to hide anything from you.  Sometimes the things I've seen are too graphic to tell Mamma and Ted, but I know that you would understand. I haven't lost anyone in my squad yet, only had one guy wounded, but  a lot of the other squads and platoons are taking worse casualties. A lot of the guys call us "Lucky Squad" because of our casualty rate being at none, but I knock on wood every time someone says it. I used to think jinxes and all that jazz was baloney, but now I take all the precautions 'cause you never know when everything can go wrong. I pray everyday that nothing will happen, but I am afraid but sure that this luck can't last forever.

We're almost off Cape Gloucester and no one could be happier. This place is literally hell, without all the fire. It still has the same amount of heat though. It rains at least an hour every day, and one time I saw an entire jeep get swallowed up to its windshield in mud after a full day of downpour once. Needless to say, the Marine Corps was down one jeep after that. The jungle is so thick you practically live and breathe it. Sometimes the canopy of trees above turn the trails below almost as dark as night. The air feels almost solid it's so thick with humidity. Because of the heat, our uniforms are practically 50% fabric and 50% sweat.

Hygiene is a pretty bad problem here. It seems like half the guys have some form of dysentery, malaria, or other scary jungle diseases. There is no way to take showers other than to try and soap down in the rain, but even with all the showering rain above, the mud seems to cake everything. And it doesn't come off. Like, no matter how hard you try, it does not come off. Our feet are the worst though. Sometimes we don't even bother taking our boots off because it just disheartens us with what we see. With some guys, you can't tell whether they even have feet under the boils, calluses, and blisters. My feet are always pruned, blistered, and boiled. On the worst days, they won't even be the right color of my skin. On the better days they just hurt and look like hell.

I've met a lot of good guys here though, and they're the only reason I haven't gone insane. In my squad, I've got guys like Lanky, Hammer, Rocky, Bear, Professor, Skimp, and others. The guys have started calling me Bishop, after finding my Bible. I don't mind it though. I  think God is rewarding me for my faith with an actually good nickname, because, believe me, there are some nicknames that are pretty bad.

I went through my first real mortar attack about a week ago. Us Americans send out so many mortar and artillery strikes I am surprised anything is left of Jap resistance or anybody out there for that matter. We hadn't even seen a sign of any Japs in a while, so you can probably see how we were surprised when the whistle of mortars starting coming towards us. For a second we all couldn't believe it, and thought it must have been coming from our own troops, but soon enough we were hit by these huge explosions. We had just settled down for the night, so we were in little covered bunkers we had spent half the day building, but these mortars were powerful enough to shake the logs over our heads, even at a distance. The mortar strike went on for almost  half an hour, and they were so loud and bone rattling terrifying you couldn't help but just curl up in a ball, close your ears, scream, and hope not to die. When it was over, we were all shellshocked, and some of us were slightly deaf, and others had lost their voices. We'd all left any remaining humane thing in us about this war down in those bunkers, and I'm pretty sure part of my soul was torn up and buried in that place. Four guys from B Company bought it after a direct hit, four more bodies heading back to the States. I'm not even sure you could call some of them bodies more. It was more like - pieces. Just pieces. The word body seems to represent at least something humane, but there was nothing human about the remains found in that devastated bunker.