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

my squad started screaming or cussing or otherwise going hysterical. Mostly, they just stood there frozen in their tracks, like their brains couldn’t process what they were seeing. When I think back on it, I figure they were all thinking something similar to what I was thinking.
    I won’t ever forget this—not ever! I told myself. I’ll never see a Jap in my life without thinking about it.
    Over the next two-plus years, I saw a lot of gruesome sights in the Pacific, but I can’t remember anything worse than what we saw that morning.
    As best we could tell, there were pieces of at least four bodies scattered along the beach, and there may have been several others in some bushes a few yards in from the water. We didn’t bother making a detailed search. It was totally obvious what had happened to Goettge and his men.
    When I got hold of myself and looked around, the first member of my squad I saw was PFC Kenneth Blakesley, a skinny blond kid not quite eighteen years old. He was standing a couple of feet from me and staring wide-eyed at the bodies and shaking his head. When he tried to talk, it sounded like he was choking on his own words.
    “For God’s sake, Mac,” he said, “why would anybody do this?Wasn’t killing ’em enough? Did they have to make mincemeat out of ’em, too?”
    I put my hand on Blakesley’s shoulder. The kid was a good Marine who was always willing to go out on a work detail when I needed somebody. But right now, he looked like he was about ten years old.
    “They just want to scare us, Kenny,” I said. “They want to show us how tough and mean they are so we’ll think they’re a bunch of damn supermen. But we’re gonna show them a few things, too, before this shit’s all said and done.”
    A minute or two later, Lieutenant Adams showed up with the rest of the platoon. They’d been moving parallel to my squad on our left, and they’d come across some dead Marines, too.
    “What should we do with these bodies, Scoop?” I asked him. “You want us to try and bury them?”
    He shook his head, and there was a look of pure misery on his face. “Just leave ’em where they are, Mac,” he said. “There’s no time for it right now. Maybe we can send back a burial detail later, but frankly I’d hate to risk it.”
    I got my squad together and the whole platoon moved out. Later on, First Marine Division headquarters refused to confirm that the slaughter of the Goettge patrol had ever actually happened. But I never really understood why. Any man who’d seen what we saw that morning knew better.
    Patrols from two other companies—L/3/5 and I/3/5—also reported finding mutilated body parts. But the bodies of Goettge himself and other members of his party were never recovered or officially identified. As a result, as far as I know, all of the dead Marines are still listed as “missing in action.”
    The fact that all three of the survivors, Platoon Sergeant FrankL. Few, Sergeant Charles C. “Monk” Arndt, and Corporal Joseph A. Spaulding, described the slaughter in detail in interviews, magazine articles, and official reports didn’t seem to make any difference.
    Sometimes I think the brass were just too embarrassed by the whole thing to admit the truth because Goettge and his men were naive and gullible enough to walk right into a trap. I guess United States Marines were supposed to be too smart and tough to make mistakes like that.
    Maybe the brass just wished everybody would forget it, but I knew I wouldn’t. And I don’t think any of the other guys who were there that morning ever forgot it, either. We still had an awful lot to learn about the Japs—but we were learning.
    As we marched away that morning, I could hear a voice inside my head repeating the same words over and over: I won’t forget! I won’t forget! I won’t forget!
    That afternoon, mostly just to take my mind off the things I’d seen that day, I took a few sheets of Jap paper I’d found out of my pack and wrote