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

with. It was an electric coffeepot made out of crockery that Mom had gotten with some coupons she’d saved up, and it must’ve weighed three or four pounds.
    “You leave my mom alone,” I yelled at Peter, “or I’ll bust you with this thing!”
    “Like hell you will, you little shit,” he said and started toward me.
    I swung the coffeepot and smacked him pretty good with it. I wasn’t sure exactly where I hit him, but I knew I hit him hard.
    He let out a groan and fell on the floor with blood spurting all over the place. I couldn’t believe how fast the blood ran down his neck and onto his shirt, and I was afraid for a second that I’d cut his jugular vein.
    Oh my God! I thought. Maybe I’ve killed the son of a bitch, and they’ll send me to the electric chair!
    Then I heard Peter cussing and saw him trying to get up, so I knew he wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t in real great shape, either, and the next thing I thought about was trying to get an ambulance.
    We couldn’t afford a telephone, and the nearest one was two blocks down the street at a neighbor’s house. By the time I ran all the way there as hard as I could go and called for an ambulance, I was shaking all over. When the ambulance showed up a few minutes later, a cop was following along behind it. I shook even worse when my mother told the cop what happened.
    “Is he gonna die?” I asked the cop.
    “Nah, he’ll be okay,” the cop said. “He’s bound to have one helluva headache, though. You sure put a dent in his hard head.”
    “Are you gonna take me to jail?” I asked.
    The cop laughed and shook his head. “No, son. All you were doing was trying to protect your mother. From what she tells me, it was self-defense all the way.”
    Peter ended up with a J-shaped scar right in the middle of his forehead. From then on, he stayed out of my way, and I stayed out of his. And as far as I know, he never threatened Mom or chased her through the house again.
    I thought a lot about that stuff with Mom and Peter and Dad and Peter Jr. on that first night at Guadalcanal. I knew I still had some anger toward my dad bottled up inside me for all the misery he caused Mom, but I felt sad about what happened to him, too.
    I made a pledge to myself that, if I ever had a wife, I’d never treat her the way Mom was treated, and I believe I’ve kept that pledge. If any good came out of me busting Peter with that coffeepot, I guess that was it. Plus it taught me later on to keep strict limits on my own drinking. A beer or two was okay, but I always seemed to have a sixth sense that warned me when to stop.
    The way I figured it, having two drunks in the family was more than enough.
    A FTER I DROPPED OUT of trade school, I wanted to join the Navy. But I was still a few months shy of my seventeenth birthday, and Mom refused to sign for me. I fussed and pleaded, but she wouldn’t change her mind.
    Maybe she really thought I was too young, or maybe she just wanted to keep me around for a while longer to keep Peter in line. Whichever it was, Mom’s refusal turned out to be a lucky break for our whole family. After many months of searching for work, I finallylanded a great job as a shipping clerk for a company that manufactured ink pens.
    I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming when they told me the salary was fifteen dollars a week. It was like a miracle. There were plenty of guys twice my age who weren’t making that much, and it was a godsend for me and Mom and my sister. I was so happy about the job that I almost quit thinking about joining the service for a while. But after the fall of 1939, when the war started in Europe, my friend Charlie Smith and I started talking about enlisting again, this time in the Army.
    A private’s pay in the Army was only twenty-one dollars a month, which was just about a third of what I was making at the pen company. But all my food, clothes, and housing would be paid, and I could send part of my paycheck home to Mom