Free Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu by Bill Sloan, Jim McEnery

family by doing it. In fact, thousands of them committed suicide when they were surrounded and trapped just to keep from surrendering.
    But we didn’t know anything about that in those first days of combat. We didn’t know how sneaky and bloodthirsty the bastards were, either.
    The whole thing with the Goettge patrol was a ruse—a carefully laid trap.
    Goettge and his men walked straight into an ambush. Only three of the twenty-five Marines escaped alive. The rest were slaughtered before they could get off the beach where they landed. Then the Japs entertained themselves by chopping up the bodies into little pieces.
    One of the guys who survived said the last thing he saw early the next morning, when he glanced back at the beach where the massacre took place and swam for his life, was “swords flashing in the sunlight.”
    T WO MORNINGS LATER, after the three survivors dragged themselves back to our lines and the story of what happened got around, Third Battalion headquarters sent a bunch of patrols into the area where the ambush had taken place. As soon as it was good daylight, Lieutenant Adams called me over and assigned my eight-man rifle squad to one of the sectors to be checked out by these patrols.
    We were also supposed to look for an F4F Wildcat fighter that had gone down and bring out the pilot if he was still alive. We never found a trace of the plane or pilot, and after what we did find, we forgot all about them.
    “Be damn careful out there, Mac,” the lieutenant said. “Don’t take any unnecessary chances.” Then he paused, looked me straight in the eye, and added, “Don’t take any prisoners, either.”
    “No chance of that,” I said. “We don’t need no extra mouths to feed.”
    Every guy in my squad was mad as hell about what hadhappened, and so was I. We were itching for some kind of payback. By now, it was the sixth day since we’d landed, and so far we hadn’t even seen a Jap on the ground, much less had a chance to take a shot at one. I think most of us hoped this would be the day we did.
    We knew one thing for sure. If we found the murdering bastards, they wouldn’t have any luck pretending to surrender this time.
    Moving in single file, we waded across a knee-deep stream and climbed the three-foot-high mud bank on the other side. Then we made our way through dense undergrowth and a thick grove of coconut palms. Our feet squished in our boots. Before long, we’d get used to that feeling.
    Over the next twenty minutes or so, we covered several hundred yards, gradually circling back toward the beach. That’s when we spotted the bodies—or what was left of them—scattered in pieces near the water’s edge.
    We’d stumbled across the exact spot where the Goettge patrol had been ambushed by the Japs and where they’d been butchered afterward like a bunch of pigs.
    The first thing I saw was the severed head of a Marine. I almost let out a yell because the head was moving back and forth in the water and looked like it was alive. Then I realized it was just bobbing in the small waves lapping at the shore. They would wash it up onto the sand a few inches, then it would float back out again when the waves receded.
    The next thing I noticed was a leg that had been hacked off at the knee. It was still wearing its dead owner’s boondocker shoe with its laces neatly tied. A few feet away was part of a bloody sleeve from a Marine first sergeant’s shirt with the chevrons still attached. Other chunks of rotting flesh that had once been human body parts werefloating in the water and lying on the sand. The smell was overpowering.
    “Holy shit!” I heard a guy behind me groan. “I think I’m gonna puke!”
    He stumbled over to a clump of brush and I heard him gag. I almost gagged myself. None of us had ever seen anything like this before. If I’d had something besides black coffee in my stomach, I probably would’ve been as sick as a dog.
    It still kind of surprises me that none of the guys in