To quote Charles
Dickens, “It was the best of times and the worst of times”. I have to go
back in my memory about sixty years and that is not easy when you keep
having periodic ‘senior moments’.
At seventeen years
of age, I joined the Navy. World War II was going strong and the year was
1944. After boot camp and a couple of service schools, I landed in the
Amphibious Forces, dressed as a Marine not a Navy guy. I guess that was
why they issued us M-1 Carbines instead of a full blown rifle like a
regular Marine would get. We had a week's training under a Drill Sergeant
at a camp in San Bruno, California and eventually shipped out. I was a
signalman and found myself, a sailor dressed in marine greens with a small
rifle, sitting on a rock in the Pacific Ocean called Okinawa.
Our small group
landed on the beach and set up markers for the Marine landing forces.
Eventually all the fighting men landed and went inland to secure the
island leaving us on the beach to set up a signal tower for communication
with the incoming fleet.
We lived in tents,
and kept watch at night in a trench we dug surrounding the perimeter of
our small encampment. Our small M-1 carbines were not good for accurate
marksmanship much over 100 yards. One night while on watch in the early
morning before dawn, it was dark and very still when I heard the
bushes outside our perimeter about fifty yards start to make a noise.
Someone was there. Now you must understand that I joined the Navy so I
wouldn’t have to engage the enemy from close range. I fully expected to be
on some large ship shooting large shells to hit a target, hopefully over
the horizon. My worst fears were realized, I wasn't in the Navy, I was in
the Infantry and I was thoroughly terrified. I whispered to my watch buddy
on the other side of the perimeter, but he couldn’t hear me. After another
few minutes of the rattling noise, I fired my trusty M-1 at the bush,
emptying a fifteen round magazine, put in a second one and emptied it and
after using my third magazine, I threw my bayonet at the bush.
By that time, our
whole group was awake and in the trench with me asking questions. I sat
there and just shook a little. In another hour, dawn broke and we could
see the landscape fairly well. Nobody was there. Slowly approaching the
threatening bush, we encountered a dead goat. I must have hit him with at
least twenty of the forty-five shells I shot and there was nothing left
but a really beat up animal, fur everywhere and the dead goat seeming to
smile at me.
Well, you can
imagine the ribbing I took. I was known as the “Heroic Goat Killer” until
someone else did something just as stupid and the group’s attention was
directed toward him. That someone was Frank Maggard, Petty Officer 1st
Class, on guard in the same perimeter trench about two weeks later. He
actually started a firefight with the enemy several hundred yards down the
slope toward the beach.
We all were back
in the trench, shooting our carbines and getting a lot of return fire.
There I was, terrified again. This went on for an hour or so, until the
dawn broke again. The enemy turned out to be the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers that had landed on the beach in the night and set up their camp.
Fortunately, nobody on either side were great marksmen so there were no
casualties. We did, however waste a lot of ammunition.
It was moments
like these that kept us sane and able to survive at a time when things
looked pretty dark. We stayed on Okinawa on White Beach through all the
Kamikaze raids on the fleet in the harbor until the end of the war.
There are other stories to be remembered and told, some funny, some sad,
but all part of my life then. I would hate to repeat those times, but I do
look on them with a certain warm nostalgic feeling for the friendships we
developed with our fellow sailors.
Stu Walder |
