Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu Read Online Free PDF Page A

that.
    I enjoyed the bumps and bruises of competitive sports, too. I got a kick out of testing my strength and skill against other guys my age, maybe even older. I liked soccer and baseball just fine, but football was always my biggest favorite.
    When I was about ten, I got invited to join a kid football team called the Dragons. After that, I played every season, either with the Dragons or another team called the Huskies, until the year before I joined the Marine Corps. They weren’t school teams, just groups of neighborhood guys who got together and challenged anybody we could find to play us. We had some fierce rivalries, and sometimes over a hundred people would come out to watch our games.
    We didn’t have much in the way of equipment, just a few well-worn leather helmets and shoulder pads, but I truly believe the caliber of football we played was comparable to what small colleges played at the time. I played until I was twenty years old, and I figured anything was better than having to sit on the sidelines for part of a game. My goal was to play every down—the whole sixty minutes. I never hesitated to try to tackle a guy twice my size, and sometimesI succeeded. I guess I was lucky I never got hurt. Banged up a little, but never really hurt.
    At first, I switched positions quite a bit. Sometimes I played in the backfield, sometimes on the line, and always on both offense and defense. There was no such thing as two-platoon football in Gerritsen Beach.
    Later on, I settled in at right end and played that same position for several years. By then, I was almost six feet tall, but I was still kind of skinny—only 155 pounds dripping wet. I got to where I liked defense best because I got a real kick out of rushing the quarterback. I’d just lower my head and run straight at him as hard as I could go. I usually didn’t get there, but sometimes I did, and it gave me a good feeling.
    O N SOME DAYS in the hot part of the summer, I stayed on the beach from sunup till dark. Lots of the other kids did, too. The beach ran for a mile or more from north to south. It was a great place to swim, or dig for clams, or just lie in the sun. And sometimes we’d find really interesting stuff that drifted up on the shore. Even during the cooler part of the year, I spent lots of time fishing—not just for sport but to help put food on the family table—and I hardly ever came home without a pretty good catch.
    In July and August, bluefish came into the bay by the thousands, and even at other times there were plenty of fish called flukes. They were flat like flounder, but some of them got huge—up to three feet long. When they got that big, we called them doormats. A whole family could eat off one of them for two or three days.
    Much as I loved that beach on Jamaica Bay, I didn’t feel the sameabout any of the beaches I landed on in the Pacific. On the contrary, I wanted to get the hell away from them as fast as I could.
    I WOULDN’T SAY I was the “churchy” type as a kid, but I did go to church almost every Sunday. My mom had to work on Sundays if she wanted to keep her job, so she hardly ever got to go to mass herself. But she was a devout Irish Catholic mother who wouldn’t take excuses for my sister and me not going. She always made sure we had clean clothes to wear and a dime or two for the collection plate, and we knew better than to skip. If we did, Mom was bound to find out.
    As somebody who maybe got into more than my share of scrapes, I got acquainted with the confessional booth at an early age. But the priest at Resurrection Catholic Church usually let me off fairly easy when it came to doing penance.
    “Just do one ‘Our Father,’” he’d say, “and that should take care of it.”
    That meant repeating the Lord’s Prayer all the way through one time. It was the lowest penance there was for committing a minor sin like punching some other guy on the football field.
    That was something else I thought a lot about at