BAPTISM OF BLOOD
The stench of the tropics welcomed the young Marines to Port-au-Prince when the ship entered the harbor, a sour-sweet breath from mountain forests which also bore the taint of decay from the waterfront. Beyond the red-roofed city the hills rose incredibly green. It was mid-July, 1919.
Puller and Muth got a brisk greeting from Captain Donald Kelly at the barracks: “Report at 4:30 in the morning, equipped for battalion drill. You might like a few beers in the hotel, but beware that rum.”
The two took rooms at the hotel, where they met the town’s chief of police, a Captain Conn, an old Marine sergeant who seemed impressed by Puller’s request for help in learning the Haitian language, Creole.
“You learn just ten words a day, and you’ll soon be squawking like a native. It’s a bastard French-African. They speak it, but never write it. I’ll give you some common words and a few phrases, just as they sound, and you can start tonight.” Puller listed these in a pocket notebook, and in the roar of the bar began his acquaintance with the new language.
Haiti was the strife-torn western tip of the island shared with the Dominican Republic; revolutions had been shaking the government since 1914, after almost a century of freedom from France. Since 1916, at the request of the Haitian government, Marines had policed the country amid violence which had taken nearly 2000 lives, almost all Haitian.
General Smedley Butler had created the Gendarmerie d’Haiti with a shrewd disregard for precedent. The senior officers were U. S. Marine officers, whose brief tours of two years created a supply of field-trained commanders. But he chose Marine enlisted men to act as junior officers of his constabulary and allowed them to stay as long as they wished, on the theory that they became more valuable as they learned the language and customs of the people. In practice it was these Marine enlisted men who operated the force. Under them were many native soldiers, most of them veterans of the old Haitian army—and from this pool were drawn many second lieutenants, sergeants and corporals.
In 1919 the rebels were the Cacos, fierce jungle-wise Negro tribesmen who roamed the hill country, pillaging settlements and sometimes sweeping into the cities; even the capital, Port-au-Prince, was not safe from their raids. Atrocities were common. The war was five years old when Lewis Puller arrived for his first taste of combat, and it still raged furiously.
Puller and Muth were roused by a Haitian maid at 3:30 the next morning with a pot of alarmingly black coffee, a French roll and a jigger of rum. At sunrise they reported for battalion drill. As he fell in Lewis saw a striking soldier: Sergeant Major Napoleon Lyautey, a quadroon who stood well over six feet, a lean, powerful figure of about 190 pounds, a man of remarkable poise. His high, thin nose gave him an aristocratic expression; his pale brown scalp was as bald as an egg. Lyautey had been a general in the old Haitian army. Puller thought he must have the blood of one of Napoleon’s generals in his veins.
Captain Kelly drilled the battalion for four hours in the stifling heat. Orders were in English, perhaps the only English these native soldiers understood. It was the most perfect close order drill Puller had seen; V.M.I.’s young cadets and the Parris Island Marines were amateurs by comparison.
The Haitian noncoms were armed with hardwood sticks two and a half feet long and an inch or less in diameter. At the least sign of inattention the culprit was cracked on the head, and men stepped warily to avoid these sticks, or cocomakaks, for they were like bars of steel. When the battalion marched off the field to its barracks, Puller saw six or seven bodies on the ground and hurried to his company commander, who replied harshly: “Mister, do you think I’m blind? They’ll soon be back. It happens every day. Just a touch of the heat.”
Around the barracks a line of Haitian women squatted against a wall. When the battalion was dismissed every native soldier stripped naked and the women charged into the open, surrounding them. They brought changes of clothing for the troops and bundled up the sodden garments the men dropped to the ground. While the change was made the women laughed, watching their men and merrily pointing out the variety of exposed charms. They soon disappeared with the soiled clothing. Puller thought it the most efficient laundry service ever devised.
His first foray into enemy country came without warning. The following night at dinner Captain Kelly gave him a casual order:
“A noncom will pick you up at 3:00 A.M. tomorrow on horseback. You will take a pack train to Mirebalais and Los Cohobos. You will carry ammunition and shoes, with an escort of twenty-five mounted men and a sergeant.”
Before he went to bed Puller consulted older officers as to the location of the inland towns. When he faced his men in the morning he found that none spoke English, not even the sergeant. He counted the cases of ammunition and bags of shoes, the horses, men and pack saddles, and with gestures and barked orders in English, put them in motion.
The first stop was Mirebalais, a town forty miles away, by roads through bandit-infested country. Puller determined that he would not spend the night in the open, for his head was full of tales of ambush in the Philippine campaigns. While they were hurrying along the trail his sergeant often came to him to complain, gesturing wildly, but Puller could not understand him.
About 4:00 P.M., without warning, Lewis stumbled into the first fight of his career—and proved his instinct for combat. The pack train was ambling around a wooded bend between hills which were littered with stones and cactus, when it met an oncoming Caco band of about a hundred, equally surprised, and in the same formation. Puller spurred his horse and yelled: “Charge! Attack! Vite! (Hurry!)”
The column charged, horses, pack mules and all, and in the thunder and dust and fierce yells the Cacos broke for the hills, firing a few stray rounds as they went. They were gone so quickly that Puller doubted his senses for a moment, but he had shot one of them, a small black barefoot soldier from whose body he took a sword so fine that he could touch its point to the hilt.
Puller’s only casualties were superficial bullet wounds to five of his horses and mules.
By driving the column to its limit the Lieutenant reached Mirebalais by 9:00 P.M., and turned over to the Gendarmerie officer half of his cargo. Puller asked the officer, a Lieutenant Weedor, to find out the cause of his sergeant’s day-long tirade. Weedor spoke to the Haitian and laughed: “He’s trying to tell you to slow down. That you can’t march the troops at your speed. He says you’ve been at double time almost entirely since 4:00 A.M., and you’re wearing out men and animals.”
“Tell the sergeant that I appreciate his efforts, but before anything else is done, he will see to the animals, have them rubbed down, cooled out, and fed. After an hour, they will be watered. At 4:00 A.M. we clear for Los Cohobos. The column will be in line.”
The sergeant shouted in outrage.
“Tell that black devil to obey orders and create no more trouble. Tell him to leave the poorer animals here under one guard, and load the rest in the morning.”
He went to battalion headquarters with Weedor, where he reported to Major E. A. Ostermann, the commander.
“Congratulations, Puller.”
“For what, sir?”
“You’ve been blooded, man—and come through it.”
“I hadn’t thought of it. We didn’t lose a man, and only a few animals hit. Nothing bad.”
At 4:00 in the morning they were on the trail again and soon covered the sixteen miles to Los Cohobos. The sergeant came near mutiny when Puller told him that they would return at noon, but there was worse to come. They reached Mirebalais in the late afternoon and Lewis ordered departure for Port-au-Prince at 4:00 A.M. He considered arresting the raging sergeant.
During the stop at Mirebalais, Puller saw a Haitian soldier report from a raid deep in Caco country. The soldier, Private Cermontoute, reached into his saddle bags and drew out two heads—black, grinning masks already beginning to shrink, lips drawn back over gleaming teeth. He held them high for the Marines to see, immensely proud.
Late the next afternoon when the patrol reached Port-au-Prince an automobile rolled beside Puller and the Department commander, Colonel Walter N. Hill, leaned out.
“Why didn’t you go to Los Cohobos?”
“I did, sir.”
“I’ve been sending trains there for a year, and you’re the first ever got there and back in three days. You’ve got a permanent job, running trains. How are your animals?”
“All right, sir, so far as I know. A few flesh wounds.”
“They’d better be all right. I’ll be down to inspect them at 8:00 A.M. tomorrow.”
Puller seemed preoccupied when he turned over the mounts to Lieutenant Richards at the corral. “The Old Man’s going to eat me alive about those sore backs. I told him they were okay, and he’s inspecting in the morning.”
“Puller, I’m an old Seventh Cavalry man, and the best damn vet the Army ever had.”
“Biggest liar, too.”
“All right. Wait and see. Before the Colonel gets here in the morning, I’ll cure every one of those sore backs.”
“I’ll give you ten dollars if you do.”
Before 8:00 in the morning Lewis and Richards were awaiting Colonel Hill at the corral.
“You owe me ten bucks, old man. There’s not a sore back in the lot.”
Puller walked down the line. “These aren’t mine, horses or mules, either.”
“The Colonel won’t ever know it.”
“If he’s any kind of horseman he will.”
“Just hand me the ten. You’re safe. He won’t know one end from the other.”
Puller paid and when he saw the expression of wonder on the Colonel’s face as he inspected the animals, he knew that the money was well spent.
Within a few days Puller was back on the trail, driving his mule train to mountain outposts. Lewis tried to join a small striking force, Mobile Company A, newly formed to clean out Caco bands in the Mirebalais-Los Cohobos area. The company was full, but in less than a week its commander went to a hospital and Colonel Hill summoned Puller to take his place.
The next morning Lewis took his company of 100 by rail to the hill town of Croix de Bouquet. His officers were the newly commissioned native lieutenants, Lyautey and Brunot, and his first sergeant was one Clairmont, a tiny black man who exercised perfect control over his troops. In the ranks was also Private Cermontoute, the head-hunter, whom Puller had pried from Weedor’s command by promising to make the young native a corporal, though he could neither read nor write.
More than a hundred native women awaited the company at Croix de Bouquet, ready to follow and support it. Sergeant Clairmont detailed his woman to act as cook and laundress for Puller. The column marched over the mountain to Mirebalais.
They had only two days of training before plunging into the wild country and Puller spent much of it on the rifle range, where he saw each man fire twenty-five rounds—the first of his efforts to teach every man who served with him to become a sharpshooter. He also broke up the squads into two four-man firing teams, anticipating Marine Corps policy by twenty years.
With the aid of Lyautey and Brunot he drilled the men for short fights against the enemy in ambush. He used his bugler, who would march with him on the trail, to sound “plays,” in the manner of a football coach. One bugle blast, and the column faced left; two blasts, to the right; three blasts, and the two leading platoons deployed into line.
The soldiers were taught to seek cover, to prepare foxholes when possible and to fire only when they saw the enemy. Each man carried a grenade and there were a rifle grenade launcher and a Lewis machine gun with every fire team. They had a breakfast of rice, beans and coffee; there was no midday meal. They marched fifty minutes of each hour, much of it at double time, and Puller soon found that he had no more need of the ten-minute rest periods than his mountain-trained soldiers.
A few hours out of town on their first patrol, when he saw men slyly removing their leggings, Puller ordered all of them removed, since they were tight and uncomfortable and slowed the troops. He noted that the men now resembled Confederate infantry, with trousers tucked into socks.
The column soon halted and when Puller moved up he saw a camp follower giving birth to a baby. A group of women calmly attended her at the trail-side. Puller was alarmed, but Lyautey assured him: “It happens much with our people. The column may move. The women will see to her, and she will soon be marching with us.”
At reveille the next morning a proud, grinning soldier, Private François, brought his wife and a greasy baby boy to be admired. The child was covered with gun oil in the absence of other lubricants and gave off a martial aroma as he suckled. The woman walked with the column all day.
Lyautey and Brunot made a new proposal: “Captain, we are wasting time with so much daylight marching. We must move by night if we wish to catch the Cacos in camp. We will be ambushed by day, if they are many—or, if they are few, they will hide.”
“Fine. We start tonight.”
The column pushed on. It was the dry season, and the trail led along the heights. On the second night of the march Puller saw fires on a ridge below them. A man whispered: “Cacos.”
Puller reached into his pack and put on a pair of old basketball shoes he had drawn from the athletic officer, and the others took off their shoes. With Lyautey and two sergeants, Lewis moved down the trail toward the enemy camp. Brunot remained in command of the company.
Drums were loud in the camp, which was on a ridge amid open fields, and the small party crept to within a few yards; the Cacos were having a celebration over some victory. The scouts climbed back to the company and Puller prepared to attack at dawn. He placed the men in line on one side of the ridge and sent crews with three of the machine guns to the left, where they covered the enemy rear from one flank. “They will run after the first firing,” he told Lyautey, “and they’ll run right into our field of fire.” The brown man grinned his approval.
The volley cracked in the first moments of daylight and there was complete surprise. The fight ended quickly. Puller found seventeen bodies on the ridge, lying among some old farm buildings and crude lean-tos. Most of the casualties were in the rear where the machine guns had covered the open. At least a hundred machetes were lying on the field.
When the troops occupied the grove the place was alive with gamecocks, staked on short lines, 203 of them in all. The men fell upon them excitedly. They brought out blackened five-gallon tins once used for kerosene and gasoline, and soon had them boiling with water and rice. A cockfight tournament began.
The birds fought in the Haitian fashion, with their natural spurs honed as sharp as razors. Men squatted in a ring about them as fearless cocks were thrown into the ring one pair after another. As one went down a new one took his place. The victim’s neck was wrung without ceremony, quick hands plucked and dressed him, his body was cut up and he went into the pot. A tantalizing aroma filled the grove. Puller found the soup from the tins delicious, though its only ingredients were chicken, rice and salt.
The company spent the day fighting cocks and eating chicken and rice and sleeping. At nightfall they were off again, carrying the dozen surviving roosters. When they went back into Mirebalais, the cocks earned them small fortunes in the cockpits of the town. Lyautey told Puller: “A marvelous system for weeding out the boys from the men. Victory or the cooking pot. It is like this in combat, Captain.”
On the trail soon afterward, the Captain had a lesson in the stern discipline of the Haitian troops. A soldier near the end of the column began to straggle, a shining black man whose body shook with rolls of fat. He sat at the side of the trail moaning that he was exhausted. Lyautey barked orders and the yelping culprit was trussed with a lariat tied to the saddle of a pack mule, and was dragged at a lively pace along the trail.
The body thumped and tumbled for several hundred yards, until the screams had subsided to groans of desperation. Lyautey then relented and the bleeding man staggered to his feet. To Puller’s astonishment he straggled no more and made his way with the column until the next halt, when he fell as if he had been poleaxed.
“It seems cruel, Captain?” Lyautey asked. “Without it, the patrol must fail, for if one man falls, others will fall out. They will indulge their weakness, and we cannot allow this. Do not forget that we are fifty miles from base, Captain—and that if we had left this man alone on the trail for one hour, our tender friends the Cacos would have cut him into ribbons.”
Puller was convinced, but when he looked at the blood-crusted skin of the sleeping soldier, Lyautey smiled. “Within a week, Captain, he will be a new man. We are not so savage as we seem.”
Lyautey also taught Puller the value of living off the country. In the twilight Lewis saw the preparation of a feast that seemed a miracle. They had bought a steer from a native farm as the column passed; Lyautey had urged generosity, so that the farmer would remain friendly.
“How much?”
“For that big steer?”
“It is enough. More than enough. He will not soon again see so much money.”
The troops were expert butchers: one man hit the steer on the head with an axe and as the animal sank to its knees another opened its throat with the slash of a knife; as the blood gushed still another tossed a lariat over a tree limb, hitched it to a back leg of the steer and a pack mule dragged the carcass until it dangled in the air.
A soldier slit the hide from tail to hoof, wrapped another lariat around folds of the skin, and as the body rose higher in the air, the hide was peeled from the body by a second mule. In half an hour or less the animal had been cleaned, cut into pieces and dressed, and beef was browning on skewers over dozens of fires. Men shaved off strips with their knives while the meat ran red. They ate for two hours or more.
The hide went onto a pack saddle, and the steer’s head, bones and scraps were tossed into a Dutch oven dug into the ground. These were cooked until daylight, when the soldiers ate once more, devouring the last morsels of meat, and gnawing at large bones. When they took up the day’s march their bellies thrust out as if they were pregnant.
“They will march three days on such food with nothing more to eat, Captain,” Lyautey said—but there was an emergency ration for the future. Each man carried in loops over his belt two-foot strips of beef, each about an inch square. These strips were salted down each night—though Puller thought the sweat of their bodies sufficient to cure it properly. The meat lasted for weeks in this way. But few steers were to be found; day after day the fighting ration of the patrol was beans, rice and coffee.
At mid-morning, a few days later, the head of the patrol reached the banks of La Chival River, in the remote country near the San Domingan border. The men halted, under orders, until Puller came up. The river was about seventy-five yards wide.
From the opposite shore a native in Domingan dress rode out on a magnificent horse, a big buckskin with white mane and tail who splashed through the shallows under perfect control, though without bridle or saddle.
“A wonderful horse,” Puller said. “I’d surely like to have him.”
Brunot muttered in Creole and a rifle cracked. Puller saw one of his men pull his rifle bolt and eject a cartridge. The beautiful horse stood in the river, looking nervously about. His rider floated downstream in a stain of blood.
The stunned Puller turned to Brunot: “Did you order that man shot?”
“Hell, sir. You said you wanted the horse. Anything the Captain says is our command. We have discipline here, sir.” The men seemed unmoved by the cold-blooded killing.
“My God! Catch the horse, get the men over the river—and see if you can find that man’s family.”
Lewis never again expressed himself idly before these soldiers. His search for the family of this victim was futile, but the horse was his mount for years in Haiti, a strong young stallion which never failed him.
Company A had waded the stream without opposition, but as they mounted a ridge beyond, a rifle fired, and there was a terrifying shriek of a bullet overhead. Puller ducked.
Lieutenant Lyautey was at his side: “Captain Puller, officers do not flinch under fire. They stand. The men take note of this thing. It is of first importance.”
“I’m all right. What makes those damned things sing like that?”
“I will show you, sir, when we have driven the enemy.”
When the company gained the crest and the ambush had been cleared, Lyautey brought Puller a Caco rifle, a single-shot French .45, a Grau. He exhibited some remarkable ammunition.
“They have little to fight with, sir, and so they make it of what they can. There is little enough lead, and so they cut telephone wire, and stick these bits of copper into the shell, using a little lead to hold them. It is this that makes such devil’s screams. At first, it frightens the men.”
“It rattled me. I never heard such a sound.”
“Captain, you never hear the bullet that hits you. It is one of the few blessings of battle.”
During the rest on the ridge a man handed Puller half a pineapple. Lewis began to eat it, but tossed it aside when he saw that it was bloodstained. On closer inspection he found the hillside was sprinkled with the blood of the Caco bandits, though no bodies remained.
“They carry off every body, and every wounded man,” Lyautey said. “And when they catch our wounded … well, Captain, if you see one, you will never forget. The Cacos believe that every man who dies must go before the gods—and they use their knives to see that when our men go, they are beyond recognition. They slash the face to ribbons, and tear the body apart. You will see.”
Puller was learning valuable lessons from the Haitian, and made it a point to be near him when the patrol halted for a rest. Every day or two, a soldier was detailed to shave Lyautey’s head, scraping the hair to the gleaming skull, and even at these times the big man tutored Puller:
“Captain, it is a matter of life or death for officers and noncommissioned officers to have respect from the men—and something more. Adulation. They must obey orders to the letter, without question, though they die for it. It is the only way to handle men in combat. If you lose control, you lose lives. It is so simple as that.”
About three weeks later, when he was off patrol, Puller attended the christening of the child born on the trail, and stood as his godfather. He was surprised to hear the priest call the name: “Leftenant Puller François.” It was the first of scores of namesakes in his long career. Lewis gave the priest five dollars and asked that a candle be burned for the child. “It will be done, Captain, and candles will be burned for you, and prayers said. Bless you, sir.”
Lieutenant Lyautey was soon taken from Puller, to duty at the palace of President Dartiguenave in the capital. There was an able replacement, a Lieutenant Calixe, who helped to further the education of the Captain in the patrols which followed in rapid succession.
The teaching of Lyautey saved the Captain’s life more than once, notably on a patrol near the village of Saut d’Eau, where he had a brush with death.
A priest in this place told Puller of one Dominique Georges, a bloodthirsty Caco leader who had wrought much damage in the region and was now in camp about fifteen miles away. Puller told Brunot to pass the word that they would leave for Mirebalais the next morning, and to see that it got public attention. At ten o’clock the following morning the patrol took the dusty trail, followed by pack mules dragging a number of bushes Puller had cut. He took with him every native they met on the trail, and when they had gone several miles, turned his troops off the main road, the civilians still under guard, and sent the pack mules into Mirebalais.
The patrol went no more than a mile from the trail, put out sentries, and slept until dark. At dusk, Puller had the men leave heavy gear with a guard, and in light marching order headed for the Caco camp. They marched for hours until, about 2:00 A.M., a rainstorm burst upon them. Brunot said that the enemy must be near, and the march slowed, the column in single file, without lights or sound, in the darkness and rain.
Cermontoute led the way, followed by Brunot, Puller and two firing teams, then the massed machine guns and the rest of the company, under Lieutenant Calixe. After an hour the rain stopped and the moon appeared. As they rounded a bend the vanguard saw half a dozen glowing logs at the trail-side, now smoking and steaming.
“This was to light the trail for sentries, Captain,” Brunot said.
Puller walked past the logs, and saw a native with a rifle at ready on a high bank above the road. There was a challenge: “Qui vous?”
Cermontoute gave a quick reply: “Caco,” and the three leaders moved ahead into a clearing. Puller saw a few huts and many lean-tos, with several fires still burning before them. A burly man rose from a hammock in the largest of the huts, where there was a light, and shouted: “Who passes?” The sentry by the trail called reassurance: “Cacos.” Puller, Cermontoute and Brunot lay flat in the grass, and Puller held the big man in his rifle sights until he turned back to his hammock—he later regretted that he did not fire, for this was the bandit leader, Georges.
Puller sent Brunot back for the rest of the company, with orders to flank the camp: “And don’t mind us. When the shooting starts, we’ll be flat. Hurry!” Brunot was only a few yards away when a bandit came from a hut with a rifle, walking straight toward the invaders. Puller put a restraining hand on Cermontoute, hoping that the man would pass by them, but he came on. When he was but a step away he halted: “Who are you?” His rifle was at the ready. Puller shot him, and as the man fell the company charged up and Cacos poured from the shanties. There was a fury of firing, during which Puller took two quick, vain shots at Georges.
It was over within a few minutes, and the estimated 150 to 200 Cacos fled, leaving a few casualties behind. Puller found Georges’ rifle, a new Grau with his initials burnt in the stock, and twenty-seven other rifles in the lean-tos. The company had no casualties, and left with the several dozen fighting cocks they had come to expect as loot in raiding a camp. Puller made a brief, matter-of-fact report of the affair to headquarters, but tales of his bravery under fire were told for months in the barracks.
One day when Lewis led his patrol to a supply dump in the field, he met Louis Cukela, one of the legendary characters of the Corps, a dark, barrel-shaped man who spoke rapidly in broken English, a Serbian cook who had won the Medal of Honor in the World War.
In his tent that night, Puller got the benefit of a Cukela explosion: “We fight this war like damn fools, Puller. They scatter us like peas. All over Haiti. Cukela patrol one pea. You one pea. They put us in a few posts, and damned if we can leave the tents to find the enemy. This is not war. This outpost waiting drives me mad. If they want to fight, they must bring all together, and send us out to find Cacos and end this thing.”
Puller listened to Cukela for hours, and remembered that night: “I learned one of the great lessons of warfare from him—concentration of force. It was familiar to me from having read Caesar and Napoleon, but no one put it like Cukela, and he was one of the first critics of American warfare I had met. We still have not learned the lesson of military concentration in America and I can’t see why. It’s plain in every worthwhile textbook.”
In the months afterward Cukela went with Puller on many patrols, adding his machine gun company to Company A. One night the combined force set out just after dark, marched all night without incident, and was halted at dawn by the commander, who ordered all hands to sleep until late afternoon. Cukela raged: “No real man can sleep in the day. I will hunt the enemy.”
He asked Puller to go scouting with him, but Puller declined, saying that he would obey orders. Cukela borrowed a BAR—Browning Automatic Rifle—got permission to stalk Cacos until dark, and disappeared. He was back at twilight and marched with the patrol all night without a sign of fatigue. Puller and his friends were amazed to see Cukela keep up this pace for a week—and though some scoffed that he merely left camp to sleep away the days, there were few doubters.
Puller got an indelible memory of Cukela on the trail one day when the Serb broke the silence of the march with a roar, halted, and hammered on his huge chest, shouting: “Me! The Great Cukela! Greatest chef in Milwaukee—a goddam second lootenant in the Marine Corps! Helling about in these goddam bushes!”
He ceased as abruptly as he had begun and walked on without another word.
Puller’s military reading bore fruit in the jungle fighting; he conducted experiments with the aid of Brunot and Calixe. He told the lieutenants: “In the Boer War, the English found that they killed few enemies when they lay on high ground, and the Boers were low. They always shot overhead. Men usually fire too high on such ground.”
The natives saw the point, and Puller went to work on the problem. He had special rifle sights made in a railroad machine shop, with a tip twice as high as regulation. The men used these sights on patrol. When the company went to the rifle range, Puller acted as armorer, inserting the normal sights before the men went to the targets, a simple change which increased confidence and accuracy.
He was also troubled over the inability of men to shoot well in the dark, for they often fired into the ground or high in the air. His remedy was a wooden stake, varying with the height of each man, tied to the stacking swivel of his rifle with rawhide. When the marksmen lay prone they rested the barrels on the stakes, quickly ready to fire parallel to the ground, rather than high or low.
The Captain was less successful in other attempts. When he asked the chief of constabulary for shepherd dogs to use on the trail, for example, he got no reply—but he was told unofficially that dogs were taboo, since the French had used them to hunt runaway slaves in Haiti.
During his months at Mirebalais, Puller was once called into conference between brigade officers and Major Roy Geiger, chief of Marine aviation, who had come on an inspection tour. Lewis was asked for his opinion of the progress of the fighting.
“We could do more with the planes.”
“They should be out in the country where the trouble is, and not on the field at Port-au-Prince. You could scatter little fields all over Haiti, and keep planes there.”
“But we have no strips,” Geiger said.
“We have about a thousand prisoners here,” Puller said. “In most places you need only to cut the grass. Except in the rainy season, you’d have no trouble.”
“We’ll try it,” Geiger said.
Within a few weeks the little planes, most of them World War Jennies, were using isolated landing fields in the Caco country, and one operated from Puller’s strip near Mirebalais within three days. He made some of the first flights.
Buck Weaver, a Marine pilot, flew him for a couple of weeks but they were limited to study of the terrain, for though there was a store of 22-pound bombs there were no bomb racks. A succeeding pilot, a Lieutenant Sanderson, declined Puller’s offer to toss bombs overboard from the rear cockpit, and devised a release mechanism by fastening a canvas mail sack under the fuselage with a sash cord sewn to either end. When Puller spotted a Caco camp below, Sanderson loosed the end of the rope tied in his cockpit, and the bomb fell. Puller flew dozens of such missions, but the damage to the enemy was unknown, though Lewis claimed that the crude bombsight had uncanny accuracy. These, so far as Puller knew, were the pioneer flights of close air support in the Marine Corps.
General John A. Lejeune, Commandant of the Corps, had come to Haiti on inspection, and Lewis was anxious to see the hero of the fighting in France, the only Marine who had commanded a division in the AEF. He met him on the porch of the mess hall in Mirebalais, where Lejeune was talking with the district commander, Colonel Thomas Clinton, and other officers. Lejeune won Puller’s heart.
A Marine patrol filed past, just in from the hills, and the officers turned to watch: a sturdy band of men moving with the easy gait of jungle fighters, returning from a march that had obviously been long and hard. They were unshaven and ill-kempt.
“I’m afraid the men are a little ragged and out of uniform, sir,” Clinton said. “I’m trying to improve them.”
“Colonel, I’m a field soldier,” Lejeune said. “I don’t give a damn what men look like in the field. Only one thing interests me—and that’s ending this war. Don’t waste your time shining them up for jungle work. Our only objective is success, and I demand that.”
Early in 1920 after only eight months of combat experience, Lewis Puller was promoted to command the subdistrict of Port-à-Piment in a remote corner of southern Haiti. He was almost constantly on patrol. In April he was felled by malaria.
He was so weak one morning, with a throbbing head and aching body, that he could not leave his bed. He took large doses of quinine, and on the advice of his first sergeant tried rum as often as he could stomach it. In the fifth day of his fever he lost consciousness.
Lewis opened his eyes to see a stranger leaning over him, a Negro doctor. He turned and saw the round, benign face of the French priest who was the only other white man in the subdistrict.
“You have a bad fever,” the priest said, “but you will be better now.”
“I have given you quinine intravenously,” the doctor said, “and now I must give you more.” He held a huge hypodermic.
“My God! You must be a veterinarian.”
“The malaria does not easily surrender. You need have no fear. I am trained in France for many years. You will be better now.”
Puller walked the following day, and within a week was back at his duties. His first sergeant brought him a bill for two gallons of rum used in the cure.
“You black devil. You poured it between my teeth when I passed out—or you had big parties in the barracks.”
The grinning sergeant folded the money away. “The Captain is not the best of patients. Many doctors, many treatments.”
A few days afterward Puller rode over the mountain trail to Aux Cayes, for his monthly report to his district commander, who greeted him with a smile and a handshake and chanted, as if from an official document:
“For valor in action, in the outpost region of Trou d’Eau, with fine disregard for his own life …
“Captain Puller, I have the honor to inform you that you are to report to Port-au-Prince for the purpose of being awarded the Medaille Militaire of the Republic of Haiti.”
There was a brief round of drinks in celebration, and Puller soon left for headquarters. He was decorated in a ceremony at Port-au-Prince on April 17, the first of his awards for gallantry in action, and after two days’ leave was back in his subdistrict, hard at work.
He wrote Tom Pullen, back in the States:
You may rest assured I was relieved when I found that I had been ordered in to Port-au-Prince to be decorated for killing Cacos, and not to be court-martialed for the same. It’s funny as hell to me; every once in a while some misguided fool up in the States, who knows nothing of the trouble here, sets up a howl over a few black bandits being knocked off.
Well, someone has to be the goat, and it is generally a Gendarmerie officer.…
You don’t want to come down here, Pullen. Stay in the States and make something of yourself. It’s a dog’s life here.… Unless I get into the Marine Corps, I have a pretty rotten-looking future ahead of me.
The next month, May, 1920, the Caco campaign came to an end with the slaying of the two chieftains, Charlemagne Peralta and Benoit Baterville, by patrols led by Captains Herman Hanneken and Cy Perkins. An armistice was declared and the tribesmen poured into the cities by the hundreds to give up their arms and make peace. Every soldier who brought in his weapon was given new clothing and ten dollars.
Puller was in Mirebalais in these days, intent upon studying the enemy. He talked with literally hundreds of the bandits, hearing their versions of combats in which he had fought—and searching always for word of the killing of his friend, Lawrence Muth, who had been the victim of a Caco ambush in the last week of the fighting. He had written Tom Pullen of the reports of Muth’s death:
In the fight with the Cacos a few weeks back Muth got his. The Marines and Gendarmes left him when they retreated (damn them). I surely hope he was dead when the black men got to him.
The next day, a large force hiked over to the scene. There wasn’t a piece of flesh or bone as large as my hand. His head is stuck up on the end of a pole somewhere now, out in the hills.…
Puller picked up Muth’s trail from a minor Caco chief, one Charlieuse, who was in the crowded town. Puller talked with him in his improved Creole, and the arrogant native warrior told of Muth’s end without reservation:
“They walked into our trap, and it was beautiful. Your Leftenant Muth, he was the first. He fell, but he was not dead, and when we drove the enemy away, we made talk with our gods.
“We were four chiefs, to make the sacrifice. As always, we took off the head from the Leftenant, and cut up his body.”
Puller sickened as Charlieuse told of the obscene atrocities committed on Muth’s corpse.
“Then we opened the chest,” Charlieuse said, “and took out the heart. It was very large. And we ate of it, each of the four chiefs, to partake of the courage of your Leftenant Muth. It was a glorious day.”
Puller controlled himself, and on orders from the commander took Charlieuse to the prison. Lewis taunted the Negro the two blocks to the guardhouse in an effort to sting him into a dash for freedom, but Charlieuse was too shrewd for that. Shortly afterward, however, the chief was killed in an attempt to escape his guards.
Lewis soon got a new post, as commander of the district of St. Marc, where he was military governor of a territory of hundreds of square miles of rugged country, with authority over courts, police and civil affairs for 105,000 people. He had never been so busy, for he was endlessly besieged by the problems of those who came to the little town.
He was ordered to build barracks for his outposts, though he had no experience and almost no money for the purpose. Headquarters sent just enough cement for the floors and sheet iron for roofs—the rest was up to the commander. Puller responded with vigor, and for months he drove trains of prisoners through the jungle in a style that reminded him of the building of the pyramids.
“I may go to hell for this,” he told a visiting officer, “but I’ve got to finish, like it or not.”
There were no pack animals, so the half-naked swarms of Haitian prisoners carried logs from distant forests to hew into beams. They stumbled under baskets of limestone they had dug from quarries, then pounded into powder. On the barracks sites they burned this to produce a rich yellow whitewash. For months the men quarried stone, cut it into rough blocks, and bore it under Puller’s watchful eye. Dozens of them broke down under the burdens, and were useless for the work. A few of them died.
But in the hills the twenty barracks rose under the hands of masons and carpenters found by Puller in the prison pens. The small shelters were fourteen by thirty feet, with stone walls two feet thick, pierced with loopholes. Each had an office for a three-man outpost, a jail and sleeping quarters. Puller was forced to fashion bars for the cell windows from the barrels of captured rifles.
The Captain directed each outpost to raise vegetables and supplement the daily ration of ten cents per man, and somehow, despite handicaps, his little military empire prospered.
Lewis did not go unnoticed by his superiors, and early in 1921 he was recommended for a permanent commission in the Marine Corps—where his rank was now that of sergeant. He took examinations, but failed the section on trigonometry, as did ninety per cent of his class; someone had reversed the traditional order that the trig books could be used on the examinations, and Lewis found himself at a loss.
A few months later, Puller had malaria once more. This time he was in no doubt as to his plight, and when he felt the fever, went to the brigade hospital and asked a doctor for intravenous injections of quinine.
“We’d never do that, Captain. It might well be fatal.”
“I had ’em before, and they cured me.”
“Some foreign doctors practice it, but it’s strictly against our orders.”
Puller went to a civilian doctor in Port-au-Prince, took the injections, and recovered within a week.
Lewis was again recommended for commission, the papers endorsed by virtually every officer in the command, and in February, 1924, after months of review of Creole, French and mathematics while he served as adjutant to Colonel A. A. Vandegrift in Port-au-Prince, he again became a Second Lieutenant, U. S. Marine Corps; but this time he was a regular.
“I may not have much else to go on,” he told a friend, “but I have some perseverance.”
He was soon ordered to Marine Barracks, Portsmouth, Virginia, Navy Yard, and embarked with eleven other new second lieutenants.
It was not until years later that Puller realized the full richness of his Haitian experience, and the value of its lessons in soldiering and hand-to-hand combat—he had fought forty actions. He had not only been blooded; the guerrilla combat had been almost continuous, most of it introduced by ambush on the trail. Puller had stood up well under this strain, and had come to trust his own physical prowess and ability to lead men under fire. He had discovered that native troops could become superb soldiers. He had developed his instinctive talent for using terrain in battle, and learned the lessons of jungle fighting. He had become strongly prejudiced against barracks and headquarters soldiers. Despite his youth, he was one of the most seasoned combat officers in the Corps.