I am not a US soldier, I never have been, and hopefully never will be. To those of you who read this and are enlisted, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the sacrifices that you, your brothers, and your sisters have made for my freedom and those who too sit in their homes in relative safety each night.
Thank you, and enjoy!
Chapter One:
“Get your fuckin’ ass movin’ Jones! Do you wanna look like my mom’s fuckin’ spaghetti?! Get your ass down, NOW!”
Sergeant Angelico roars at me in his thick Italian/New York accent. The Japanese begin to open fire on the beach as we are advancing up the beach. We are on Iwo Jima, two thirds of the men around me will be dead by the time we take just the first few hundred feet or so. Or at least thats what Ive been told by others who have survived. The amount of damage that the human body can withstand and survive is sheerly incredible. There’s a soldier lying on the beach with both of his legs lying about ten yards away, and he is still calling for a medic, as though nothing were amiss. I cannot say whether or not he is still alive as of now for we have moved about thirty yards ahead. The cacophony of war is horrendous. Plain and simple, it is hell in every imaginable way, it is utterly infernal.
Our mission is to advance up the beach, and eventually seize the island of Iwo Jima. I can’t say that that is going to happen any time soon, no matter how much I wish we could end this war in minutes, or better yet, seconds. The Japanese are like cockroaches: you kill one, five more come out of the ground. Which happens to be littered with what seems like millions of tunnels that they’ve dug in preparation for our arrival.
As I reach a crater in the black sand, I hear the tell tale whistle like sound of an incoming artillery shell, and I know I will not make it this time. I will be one of those “two thirds”.
“GET DOWN, GOD DAMN IT!”
Sergeant Angelico bellows as he dives over me to save me from the majority of the blast damage. To this day, I will never forget the bravery of the man who made my life living hell throughout my training, and even beyond. As the mortar shell explodes but feet away from me I silently send a prayer to God thanking him for my life, and asking Him to look after Sergeant Angelico for me.
Trying to stand up is difficult, as the sergeant is about six and a half feet tall and almost three hundred pounds, but I manage it. Once on my feet I look about me, and immediately drop back in the crater as I’m in the middle of a huge battle that has no clear victor.
Pain. Red waves of scalding red hot agony. Getting shot sucks I think to myself, just before letting out a bark of maniacal laughter and blacking out...
My name is Will Jones, William Oswald Jones. Both of my parents are British, but I grew up a farm kid in rural Georgia. They came over on a ship, and bought a large piece of land that we take care of every spring so that we can make a living. At a very young age I fell in love with science, but never got the opportunity to begin to act on the matter much before high school.
I was fifteen and in the ninth grade. I stayed back in seventh due to my father getting injured, so I missed so much school staying home working on the farm for most of the year that they told me just to come back next year. I took biology for the first time that year and I immediately fell in love with the study of life. I knew immediately that I wanted to become a doctor when I grew up. It was then that I decided to do something foreign to me: actually try hard in school. When the third week of school went by, I was hooked. I wanted to know everything about biology I could. When we were given our text book, that became the only thing in life that mattered to me until I finished reading it in just three days.
Needless to say, in tenth grade I took chemistry, and though it wasn’t my favorite subject it certainly was fun. I was beginning to work on my dream of becoming a doctor. I would turn seventeen this spring, and World War Two was beginning in earnest now. I was worried about the draft that I knew was coming, but my folks told me not to worry about it since I was only seventeen. By the time that I got to twelfth grade, I had taken biology, chemistry, anatomy, and physcology classes. I used my drive to become a doctor to push myself through my other classes as well and get scholarships for college. I wanted to go to Georgia Regents University Medical College of Georgia. This had been my dream since the summer before my last year of high school.
When I got my acceptance letter from my dream college, I thought that life would be great from here on out. Go to school, get my degree, work in a hospital in Atlanta. I would send money back home to help my folks through hard times like the winter, or whenever they needed it. I would save up and buy my dad a brand new tractor out right, since ours is falling apart.
That wasn’t the case. Life is never that easy, ever. Three days after I got my letter from Georgia Regents, I learned that my scholarships would not be able to cover the full cost of that college. I had no considerable amount of money saved up, only twenty dollars, and that wasn’t going to get me through medical school. It looked like I would be working on my family farm forever.
By the following March after my dreams got crushed I was further dragged down. Who knew how much a single sheet of paper could weigh when it tells you that you will be fighting in your country’s army in a far away land? Well, that one sheet of telegram paper must’ve weighed at least four hundred pounds.When I read it, it fell to the ground with what I swear was a groundbreaking thump. My heart followed that little piece of paper down, down, down to the ground and beyond.
I stayed home until two days before I was scheduled to leave helping as much as I could on the farm. I packed some of my belongings, and dad drove me out to the nearest recruitment center. I wasn’t going to let Uncle Sam ruin my dreams, and do it his own way too. I was joining the Marines. I was going to be the first in and the last out. But little did I know how hard the Marine Corps would be on me. Let alone how dangerous the ensuing battles would be.
Chapter Two:
Arriving at basic training was quite an experience to me. Growing up on a farm and in a rural southern community, I never really did get used to seeing a lot of people in one place. There were hundreds of men running in lines, doing jumping jacks, and plenty of slightly older men screaming at the tops of their lungs. The drill sergeants seemed to take no preference of screaming in the recruits faces, or just screaming at them in general. I gotta deal with this for twelve weeks? I asked my self.
Week six arrived after a flurry of running, puking, pushups, puking, running, puking, shooting, pushups, puking, etc., etc., etc.. No matter how well we did, the Marine Corps never let us feel that we doing good enough. The drill sergeants were intent on breaking us in every possible way. Be that breakage physical, mental, or emotional, they didn’t care.
During a shooting drill, I was trying to reload my M1 Garand and the clip slipped. Whilst slipping, the bolt action snapped shut catching my middle finger in it’s painful grip. Extracting my finger from the gun, I noticed that it was pointing to the left where there wasn’t a joint. Now normally I might have hollered, or bitched about it, but I just calmly placed my rifle on the ground and got up. I walked over to the temporary medic’s tent.
“Hi, what happened to you?” the cute nurse asked me as I walked in.
“Uh, I broke my finger, see?” I reply in a bored tone.
“Let me see it then, I’ll get a splint on it inna minute, just sit on the cot over in the corner.
I got something a little more important to take care of first”
When I sat on the cot, the first thing I noticed was that this tent was pretty small, but there must have been at least thirty young men in here, and they all seemed to have an injury of some kind. The weird thing about the place though, was the fact that the only noise was coming from the shooting range essentially just outside this temporary pavillion.
This woman must not be able to tell time, since a minute was three and a half hours ago, and my back was killing me from sitting in one spot so long. I got up and began to look over the rows of cots with the injured men occupying them. It was on the far side of the tent that I noticed a more permanent structure with a bronze sign hung on the door. Wending my way through the cots, I started to head towards the door.
As I got closer to the door, I could read the sign that said: “medical staff only”. Not bothering to heed this sign, I pushed open the door and found myself in what looked exactly like my barracks where I sleep every night.
“Excuse me, but your not supposed to be here. The sign clearly states “medical staff only”. It was the nurse again. About damn time she fuckin’ shows up I mentally noted.
“Yes, but since you disappeared so long ago and haven’t bothered to fix my finger yet ma’am, I thought I would go looking for you.” I say back to her and can’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“Oops, silly me. I forgot about the helpless man with the broken finger. I’m so sorry. I didn’t remember that a broken finger is much more life threatening than a man with a missing leg, or a man that has enough lead in him to cast the bullets of this army twice.” Once again, more sarcasm. I was quickly disliking this woman more and more each time I met her.
Well, this is not the end of the story, but this is where I will leave off for now I guess. If yall like this story, then I will post more. Hell, I might post more either way, I’m doing this because I like to write, and who knows, one day I might be a writer. I want to thank Jashley13 for reading the beginning of the story and helping me to make some corrections to it so that I could continue in a better direction.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story,
bubba556223
