I'm Staying with My Boys by Jim Proser

Author:Jim Proser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

After all we’d fought through to get here, the landing was like sailing up to Miami Beach. Chesty was in the first boat. By the time we got in, he was shaking hands and tugging on “Red Mike” Edson like they were two college boys at a football game. You could hear them bellowing hellos all over the beach.

“So where are they?” Chesty wanted to know. One of Mike’s guys gave Chesty a map that he glanced at for a second trying to square it with the terrain he saw in front of him. “Hell, I can’t make head nor tails of this—why don’t we have something better than a National Geographic map anyway? Just show me where they are!” Chesty was impatient as hell when it came to business. Mike waved over toward the hills beyond the airfield.

“All right, let’s go get ’em,” Chesty said.

That had Mike laughing. Chesty was the same hell-for-leather character Mike had soldiered with in Haiti and in Nicaraugua. He directed Chesty toward a coconut grove just off the beach where we would bivouac.

A supply convoy somehow had gotten through the submarine killing fields right behind us and had already started off-loading to the beach. Our first detail was going to be hauling supplies. Once we got to the coconut grove we could see why we were picked.

Our new home was a tent city in a swamp, like the other tent cities in swamps we had lived in for most of our training. This was sticky with tropical heat and ankle deep in water except for where the tents stood up on humps of dry ground. We tramped into the place and encountered some of the sorriest-looking Marines I’d ever seen walking upright. They looked like they hadn’t eaten, slept or shaved in weeks, and they smelled, bad. Diarrhea had taken the weight off of most of them and a few had stopped trying to stay clean. They hadn’t had toilet paper in weeks and had run out of every kind of paper to wipe with so they just lived with wet asses—real baggety-ass Marines.

The field hospital shuttled a steady line of wounded toward the emptying supply boats. The stories started coming in about the ridge, the Tokyo Express and Washing Machine Charlie. We got a lot of ribbing about us being the first team, Chesty’s hand-picked unit, who ended up coming late to the fight. They were sure glad to see us but most of them were too weak and tired to make much of a fuss. A few of them just stared and didn’t say a word, almost like they didn’t see us, like their minds were on something else. These were some of the men that came off the Ridge.

In some of their tents it looked like a rummage sale. When they first took the island, the Japs left in such a hurry that they left behind all kinds of booty that was now stashed in every corner of the tents: pots and pans, canned fish, Japanese field hats, uniforms, serving bowls, tools.

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