“That’s real footage,” Uncle Doug points out.
It’s a grainy, faraway shot of a Marine hosing down a hillside with a flame-thrower.
I say to him, “Huh.”
Then it’s back to John Wayne and his men, who seem far more real than the real footage. John Wayne is Sergeant Stryker, his men the men of Company Able, on an island with palm trees, white beaches, and “a whole lot of little lemon-colored fellas,” as Stryker puts it.
Japs, he means.
I’m in my pajamas sitting cross-legged on a throw rug, my younger brother Mike upstairs in bed, Uncle Doug behind me in his sofa chair, in my parents’ basement where he lives.
Uncle Doug resembles Sergeant Stryker. He’s my mom’s brother so he’s not Italian and he looks like a combination of John Wayne, President Kennedy and the Marlboro Man.
“That’s called a B.A.R., what that guy is using right there,” he says.
I know he’s waiting for me to ask him, so I do: “What’s that stand for?”
“Browning automatic rifle.”
“Huh.”
Uncle Doug knows a lot about the war, having been in it. So was my dad, but Uncle Doug was a machine gunner on Okinawa. My dad was a cook on an island off Alaska— we have pictures of him, smiling, wearing the same white apron he wears at the butcher shop, not wearing a helmet, not needing one.
“Uncle Doug?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Did you kill any Japs over there?”
He tells me that isn’t something you should talk about. “But I’ll tell you this,” he says. “I know for sure I got at least eighteen of those sons-a-bitches—possibly more, but eighteen for certain. But like I said, it’s not something you should talk about.”
“Eighteen, Uncle Doug?”
“At least.”
My dad killed pigs and chickens.
“Those boats are called A.L.C.’s,” Uncle Doug informs me.
“A.L.C.?”
“Amphibious landing craft.”
“Huh.”
Stryker and his men hit the beach but get pinned down. This wisecracking Brooklyn Dodger fan they call Rigs gets shot. He tells Stryker, “Looks like … I’ll get a good … night’s sleep … tonight, Sarge,” and dies.
Then a commercial for Bill Moran, your friendly Dodge dealer. “C’mon down!” he shouts, spreading his arms.
Rigs is dead and this clown is selling cars.
I sit there wishing to God I was on Iwo Jima with a B.A.R., racing in a zigzag, blazing away, screaming, Die, you lemon-colored sons-a-bitches, die, die!
“Absolutely worst cars ever built,” Uncle Doug is telling me.
He drives a Plymouth Fury. It’s parked out front, a work helmet in the back window. When he’s not between jobs he’s an ironworker, in a helmet and tool belt, strolling sky-high girders, a Pall Mall in the corner of his mouth.
My dad wears an apron and waits on customers. He doesn’t even smoke.
“That’s a good old standard M-1 rifle he’s got right there,” Uncle Doug points out when the movie is back, Stryker shooting a Jap who shot the happy-go-lucky guy from Tennessee they called Farmer.
“Huh.”
I’m not that sorry about Farmer. He was kind of an idiot.
Stryker and his men fight their way to Mount Suribachi, where they rest for a minute, Stryker pulling out his cigarettes, saying he feels pretty good. And just then, just as he’s saying how good he feels, he gets a bullet in the back from a sniper.
Someone machine-guns a nearby palm tree and a Jap falls out of it. Then they turn to Stryker. “Is he … ?” one of the men says. And the one bending over the body says, “Yeah.”
“Those bastards,” Uncle Doug says quietly.
I can’t speak.
Then that famous shot of those five Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.
“That’s real footage.”
I manage to say, “Huh,” tears running freely down my face now.
Then one of the men growls out, “All right, let’s get back in the war.” And they trudge off.
The End, music up:
From the halls of Montezu-uma
To the shores of Tripoli …
Uncle Doug tells me to turn it off and I do, but I don’t want to leave. I want to talk. I want to tell him how I feel about the United States Marine Corps, whose motto is Semper Fidelis, meaning Always Faithful, and how faithful I will be to the Marines, always, and how I hope to God when I’m old enough to enlist there’s a war going on, hopefully with those little lemon-colored bastards again.
But he tells me, “Lights out, soldier.”
I go upstairs. I walk quietly past my parents’ bedroom, my dad snoring away in there.
He has to get up at 5:30 in the morning, while it’s still dark out. And he doesn’t get home again until dark. And he does that six days a week, for us—my mom and me and my brother and three sisters—and I know he’s the best father in the world. I know that. I do.
But still: while all those guys were dying on Iwo Jima— guys like Rigs, like Stryker—he was up in Alaska, in an apron, making spaghetti and meatballs.