I unpacked the radio set bundle once we got back into the messing space, still jumping every time a fragment from the shore bombardment hit the LCI. There’d been no let-up since it had begun, which ought to tell the Japanese that the Marines’ last big offensive was imminent. Goon had told me the story of the time that the high command had finally realized that the Marines’ practice of shelling the next objective for a few hours essentially gave the enemy early warning of where we were going to strike out for next. To prove his point, they’d ordered a heavy push against an objective on the island that was proving almost impossible to gain ground on—but without any preparatory shelling. The Marines had been able to take that objective in a few hours, because the Japanese hadn’t been ready. My guess was that since this was the last significant pocket of resistance on the island, the generals figured it no longer mattered, so go ahead and pound on ’em for a few hours, if only to make the grunts feel better.
The radio was in the shape of a long brick, with a telescopic antenna at the top, two semicircular meters on the face, one for signal strength, one for battery state, and all painted haze-gray. There was a battery compartment containing four chunky batteries, still wrapped in semi-transparent oilcloth. There was no frequency selector—the frequency was pre-set for five hundred kilocycles, the standard maritime distress frequency. I expected it to work, but then wondered who’d be listening, or guarding, that frequency out here around Iwo Jima. Certainly not the Marines. I’d never been inside Nevada’s expansive radio rooms, but I assumed if I made a call it was going to be a warship that answered.
The next problem was going to be whether they would accept my call or immediately suspect communications deception. While I’d still been aboard Nevada, which seemed like a hundred years ago, we’d been constantly changing freqs every day and night to frustrate Japanese who were getting into our fire-control nets and pretending to be American units. Some of them were pretty obvious, but others had been damned convincing. They were also really good at jamming our circuits, usually with some hideous-sounding music. I had to be prepared to deal with challenges from whatever station eventually answered up. We no longer had our code books or even a copy of the grid. I was going to have to wing it, big time.
Then there was the grid, or lack of one: how in the hell could I call for fire without the grid? I couldn’t even give them my position, much less the position of any worthwhile targets we spotted out here. Goon said I should forget about spotting, and just notify the Navy of where we were holed up and request rescue, but that didn’t help—I needed to tell them where to go to rescue us. Then I remembered that the LCI would have been operating off a chart when they made their approach to this part of the island. Was the chart still here? The conning tower hadn’t been submerged, so maybe, maybe … I told Goon what I was thinking. He pointed out that I’d have to climb an exterior ladder to get up to the pilothouse.
“If some SOB’s been assigned to watch the beach area around these wrecks, they’ll see you. Believe me, they’ll have arty that can reach out here.”
“So go up at night?” Twitch suggested.
“No,” Goon said. “He’ll need a light. The rain’s gone. Weather’s clear. No fucking lights.”
“I think I’ll just have to take my chances,” I said. “There’s no point in calling out to the whole Navy and saying: Help, help: I’m here, only to have them come back and ask: Where’s here, exactly?”
Monster made a rude noise. “Them?” he offered from his perch on the overturned sofa. “They prolly gonna be listenin’ on that freq, don’t ya know. ’Sides, I don’t tink any of this radio talk is so smart, me. Best ting to do? Lie low, wait for the brethren to kill all them mudbugs, and then squeak.”
That comment produced a moment of thoughtful silence in the badly battered messing room. I tried to marshal some arguments against, but the logic was pretty overwhelming.
“Okay,” I announced. “We have a radio. Let’s see what happens over there when the big deal actually gets up here. If we can help, we’ll call. If we can’t, we’ll do what Monster’s suggesting: keep our heads down and wait. Maybe live a lot longer.”
It took about three seconds to gain general approval of our grand strategy. Go, Monster, I thought. We’d brought back rations and water from the lifeboat. We ate and then got some more rest.
As night fell, we decided not to use any lights within the wrecked LCI. One bullet hole could give us away. We figured the general advance would slow up once darkness fell, anyway, in keeping with the pattern of warfare on Iwo since the first rude awakening as to what we were really facing. We had to assume the north end of the island was just as honeycombed with defensive positions as the rest of it. I decided to examine that radio with what little light was left, which is when I discovered why there was no mouthpiece or earpiece.
Oh, shit, I thought with great dismay. It was a CW radio. There was a tiny key embedded in its face, spring loaded, with a small red light showing when you were putting out Morse code on the air. Hardly suitable for complicated spotting dialogue. Just SOS and a lat-lon. I cursed softly. Goon raised an eyebrow and I told him our new problem.
“Okay, then,” he said, in a resigned voice. “We’re done. Ain’t like we didn’t do a righteous job of work during our little vacation on Iwo fucking Jima. And I sure as hell don’t wanna be the last guy killed on Iwo. We do what Monster suggested. We lay low. When we’re pretty damn sure we know it’s safe, we make contact.”
There was no arguing with that, although I felt bad that I couldn’t deliver some timely shore bomb if the guys on the beach got their asses in a crack on the final push. I tried to think of some other way to do it.
Some carrier air came over about then and started to work over the beaches where we’d been hiding out the day before. Over and above that racket I could hear the deep booming of one or more of the beasts, back from Guam and freshly rearmed. I stashed the radio up high, out of the way of any intruding water, and found a place to crash. Out of habit, I kept my typewriter handy, not that I expected bad guys to be jumping onboard. The surf outside had settled quite a bit, and it was starting to get really cold inside. The wrecked LCI still moved in tune with the surf, but gently. Sleep, I thought.
“Hey, Goon,” I said.
“What? Sir?”
“What could go wrong?”
“It’s Iwo, Loot,” he said. “Absolutely every-fucking-thing. You armed and dangerous?”
I snorted. “Armed, for damned sure.”
Then I had a thought. I needed that chart. Even with a CW radio, I could warn the Marines if I saw something bad cranking up on the nearby beach area.
“Goon,” I said. “I need a chart, a nav chart. If there is one, it’ll be in the pilothouse. I’m gonna climb out there and get it.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll do it. What’s it look like?”
“Like any chart,” I said. “It’ll be taped down onto a desktop or a table. Unstick it, roll it up into a tight roll to keep it as dry as possible. I can do it.”
“You get some sleep, Loot,” he said. “If it’s there, I’ll get it. I don’t need you fallin’ offa some damn ladder.”
I tried. There was more air activity over the next four hours, up and down the near middle coasts of Iwo. The other two Marines slept like logs, but I only dozed; I think I was just more attuned to carrier air than they were. After one of our light carriers had been sunk by kamikazes right at the beginning of the Iwo operation, the Navy had moved a big-deck up from Guam to augment the escort flattops. It hadn’t hurt that other big-decks were preparing for the Okinawa invasion, which meant that the Japanese air forces were getting ready to deal with that now that most of Iwo had been lost to them. There hadn’t been any doubts lately about our taking Iwo, only how big a butcher’s bill we were going to pay and how many Marine divisions were going to be wrecked in the process; from what I’d heard at the CP, it was beginning to look like all three.
It was still bothering me that we were going to sit out the rest of the bloodshed ashore while meekly awaiting rescue. Surely they had plenty of spotter assets teamed up with the advancing Marine forces by now, but none so well positioned as I was. I think my brain had been working on a way to get back into the battle even as I pretended to sleep. It came to me around midnight. I’d been concentrating on the radio gear these landing craft had been equipped with. I’d forgotten the troops they’d been carrying when the three craft had walked into the artillery ambush. Wasn’t it possible that some of them had been Marine radiomen?
We had swum out to the largest of the landing craft, the LCI. But there were also two LCMs out here—Landing Craft Medium. Both of them were barely awash at high tide, having been hit hard and often. Plus they were open amphibious boats, unlike the LCI, which had both an open well-deck and an enclosed hull. The Mike 8, as it was known, was some seventy-six feet long; the Mike 6 was fifty-six feet. I hadn’t paid too much attention to the Mike boats because they’d been so seriously hammered, but it looked like there was both a 6 and an 8 within fifty feet or so. The larger, the 8, had been torn open from stem to stern. The 6 had been blown in half, with the forward piece upside down and mostly underwater. The back half was upright but fully awash. I couldn’t be sure because we’d been fixated on getting aboard the remains of the LCI with its distinctive conning tower and round portholes.
But all three would have been carrying Marine infantry—mortar crews, riflemen, hospital corpsmen … and radiomen. Field radios were heavy, especially with spare batteries, and required a single man-mule per radio. If I could swim over there and poke around in the well-deck, I might find one; if undamaged it ought to be still waterproof, and those were voice radios, not Continuous Wave. It was pretty dark out now—no moon and just enough wind to produce haze and mist. The big swells had subsided as night fell. As a practical matter, any bodies on the Mike boats had probably been swept away by now.
Goon reappeared, with what looked like a tight roll in his hand. I didn’t open it, but felt the paper in the dark. One side was waxed. Yup. I told Goon my idea about the other boats and the possibility there’d be a radio out there.
“Lemme rest a bit. Then we’ll go check.”
I agreed, but I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted that radio. The next question was: go it alone or wake Goon? That was a tough one. Those boys were truly exhausted. They were relatively safe in here, however bad the smell. I was a good swimmer and there were life jackets hanging on bulkheads in the passageway. I could wear one to help me get there and back. I couldn’t dare show a light, but if I could get aboard one of those Mike-boat hulks and poke around, there should be at least some equipment in the bottom of the wreckage or, if necessary, scattered around the shallow sea floor. And if I could recover an intact field radio and get it back to the LCI, I might be in business again and able to help with what was coming tomorrow.
I thought some more: if I woke Goon, he’d tell me to wait a while. Goon had brought me the chart. Now it was my turn. Any number of things could happen to reveal our presence on the wrecks, in which case I might get us all killed. But, damn—if I could resurrect a working radio, I could hurt the enemy bad and maybe at least attenuate the wholesale killing of my Marines.
My Marines; boy, that was presumptuous, and yet, that was my duty, wasn’t it? Keep as many Marines alive on this cursed island as possible? Screw it, I decided—I’m just gonna tie on a kapok life jacket, slip out of here, hold my nose through the body mash, get down into the water, dog-paddle over there as quietly as I can, and go look.
Five minutes later I found myself sliding into the water back by the stern, on the seaward side, and looking for the Mike boats. Had they been inboard or outboard of us? The small swell was trying to push me back inshore in the darkness; I should have paid closer attention. Three rusting wrecks. All those Godforsaken broken bodies inside. Trapped in a steel shoebox at point blank artillery range. All cut to ribbons. Somewhere right out there. My eyes teared up as I looked into the darkness.
“That way,” Goon said quietly, from behind me.
I about shit. He planted a big ham hand on my shoulder. I suddenly realized he was probably feeling what I was thinking. “Sir,” he amended.
I should have damn known, I thought, exhaling. “I’m trying to find a radio, Goon,” I said. “Just one goddamned radio. There has to be a radio over there. I—”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured you’d do, Loot,” he said as we bobbed neck deep in the sea at the edge of the wrecked LCI. The sea was strangely benign that night, almost as if it were inviting us to go look. There had to be at least one radio, please God, I thought. I just need one. Goon, too, had strapped on a kapok. Without further discussion, we set off for the smaller of the two Mike boats.
I chose the smaller boat because it wasn’t in as many pieces. Two main pieces, to be precise, with both of them moving up and down independently, like someone was trying to bend a bar of metal to break it in half, up and down, up and down. The hull coaming was above water; the rest submerged. There was nothing for it but for us both to submerge into the well-deck and feel around for gear. We had to take the kapoks off to do that; we tied them to an already rusting cleat.
We felt around and found gear. Lots of gear. Rifles. Packs. Utility belts. Entrenching tools. Mortar stands. Mortar rounds. Water cans. Ammo boxes. A few bodies trapped in jagged shell holes, festooned with belligerent crabs. Three times we burst back onto the surface, our eyes stinging with the salt, moving over a little bit each time. We clung to the jagged metal, breathing hard, and listened for intruders. Two more times down. Utility belts. C ration packs. Empty boondocks. A radio.
A radio. No mistaking it. Steel, pimply knobs and buttons, heavy, leaden. A stubby whip antenna, barely sticking out of the case. A dangling, bloodied and tangled, carry harness. A complete collarbone assembly and three ribs.
God.
And then, a second one, this one with a big dent. Two radiomen, I thought, sitting together on the benches in the well-deck, as they would. I grabbed one, Goon the other, and we shot back to the surface, our fists embedded in the straps. Just as a flare popped overhead the wreckage. We instinctively ducked, staring at that magnesium light from just below the surface, which was sea green now, and praying there wasn’t a scout sitting right there with a Nambu, staring us in the face.
We hung that way for a few seconds, surfaced, and then said fuck it in unison. No-one was out there, and somehow we knew it. We put the kapok jackets back on and paddled together to get back to the LCI, where we were greeted by Monster and Twitch, who helped us hump the precious radios onboard. We tumbled back into the messroom, where it was still totally dark. We hung the dripping radios by their straps in their tangled harnesses. Goon and I flopped down on the tilting mess-table benches and nodded at each other.
Victory. We hoped. It was probably around midnight. So, now we had radios. Two radios. One might even work. And then the really hard part would begin. Convincing Regiment or one of the beasts we weren’t enemy.
Worry about that tomorrow, I muttered, and fell asleep.