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

Guadalcanal. I must’ve said the Lord’s Prayer a couple thousand times while I was there. I started that very first night.
    W HEN I WAS about twelve years old, my father, Thomas McEnery, died of pneumonia. He was only thirty-four, but he’d led a hard life. A hard-drinking life, I’m sad to say. It was probably the booze as much as the pneumonia that killed him.
    By the time Dad died, my mom had left him because of his heavy drinking. It was during Prohibition, but he never had a problem keeping himself supplied with alcohol. He made his own whiskey in a still in the back room of our house. He was a mechanic by trade, and he made fairly good money when he was sober enough to work, but that was less and less often as time went by.
    My mom was commuting up to an hour and a half a day by bus and train to a job as a clerk in a candy store at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. But the paychecks she brought home weren’t nearly enough to cover the bills. Before she left Dad, we were forced to move several times because we couldn’t pay the rent. We lived on Knapp Street for a while, then on Gerritsen Avenue. Honest to God, I lost count of the places we lived before Mom finally took my sister and me and moved in with her parents.
    By that time, we were so broke we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. I had really mixed-up feelings about Dad when we moved off and left him. I was mad at him for being such a drunk and making life so hard for Mom, but I worried about him, too. Of course, there was nothing I could do to help him. By then, nobody could help him.
    A little over a year after Dad died, I graduated from the eighth grade at P.S. 194. By then, times were about as bad as they could get. It was the spring of 1932—rock bottom of the Depression—and the only thing that kept us afloat was Mom’s piddling little salary and my grandparents’ generosity.
    Instead of going on to a regular high school, I decided to enroll in a trade school that promised the students good-paying jobs in the aviation industry after graduation. I stuck it out there for six terms, picking up a few dollars here and there at little part-time jobs likedelivering messages for Western Union in what spare time I had. But I still lacked two terms to graduate when we couldn’t come up with the rest of the tuition money. Then I had to drop out and look for a full-time job.
    By this time, my mother had gotten married again to a Polish guy named Peter Paul Muroski, who lived just a few blocks away, and we’d moved in with him. Mom was a fine woman, but she sure didn’t have much luck when it came to picking a husband. My step-father was an even worse drunk than Dad had been—and a mean one at that. Dad was never abusive. He’d just pass out peacefully after he got a snootful, whereas Peter would get really ugly.
    But Peter did have a nice little son named Peter Jr. Bad as his father acted, I always loved the kid. I called my brother “Junior” and tried to treat him the way a brother should. If he’d been my full brother, I couldn’t have loved him more.
    Dad was the kind of guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but Peter Sr. could lose his temper over anything. On Tuesday nights after he got his weekly paycheck, he’d mix up some kind of drink with alcohol he bought from under the counter at a drugstore. Within an hour, he’d be skunk-drunk, and he’d think up some reason to get mad at Mom. He’d start threatening to knock her around, and more than once he actually did.
    One evening when I was fifteen, I came home from trade school to find Peter chasing Mom through the house and threatening to kill her. He sounded like he really meant it, and it scared the hell out of me. My sister was jumping around in the background and screaming bloody murder, and Peter Jr. was hiding someplace.
    As I ran through the kitchen after Peter Sr. and Mom, I threwdown a cup of milk I was carrying and grabbed up the first thing I could get my hands on to conk him