The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 18

In which the Author recounts the Battle of Tarawa, which is now forgotten in America, because America is a Today kind of country, sometimes a Tomorrow kind of country, but rarely a Yesterday kind of country, and it does not linger on the deaths of soldiers past, which is not possible on Tarawa.

It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press. Actually, I would be impressed with that answer. The more likely response is Who the fuck cares?

Elsewhere in the world, people are a little more knowledgeable about American history. They know, for instance, exactly what year it was when the CIA overthrew their government. In the United States, however, history is largely paved over, abandoned, and relegated to textbooks so shockingly dull that they could only have been written by politically correct creationists whose sole objective was to offend no one. And it’s not just the textbooks, of course, where history has been washed out. The land has been settled for more than ten thousand years; Europeans have been traipsing about since the fifteenth century, which by any measure, is a very long time ago. Yet, outside of Boston and—I can’t think of anyplace else—one is hard-pressed to find a building that predates the twentieth century. In Europe, every town has a memorial commemorating the townsmen who lost their lives in the two world wars. In America, every town has a Wal-Mart. Only on the Great Plains does one find the telling remnants of lives lived and lost, the abandoned homesteads that creak with forgotten stories, and the only reason those boards still stand is that the landscape is so bleak and foreboding that no one else wants to build there ever again. Frankly—and I mean no offense to the good people of North Dakota—I can’t believe you haven’t all left yet.

Even on the acres where momentous events have occurred, such as a Civil War battlefield where the outcome changed the course of history, the site has typically been gussied up, dusted off and varnished, with the result that the visitor sees nothing. At Manassas, for instance, I saw a freshly mowed field, a quaint farmhouse, a lovely stone wall, but mostly I saw a great place for a picnic. I did not see a battle that cost the lives of thousands. It was too clean.

Contrast this with Tarawa, where nothing is clean. Generally, this bothered me. There are few sights more dispiriting than a long seawall built with discarded junk—cars, tires, cans, oil barrels, et cetera—slicing through an emerald lagoon. This was the best that could be done with the detritus of the I-Matang world. On the continents, a broke-down car soon becomes a forgotten broken-down car once it is towed to someplace unseen. On Tarawa, though, nothing disappears. If nature can’t consume it, it remains on the island, most often right where its working life came to an end. This includes the relics from the Battle of Tarawa, one of the bloodiest engagements fought during World War II.

The Japanese admiral charged with defending Tarawa had predicted that a million men and a thousand years of battle would be required before his soldiers could be dislodged from the atoll. The Second Marine Division needed three days. The Battle of Tarawa was fought on the islet of Betio, which is less than one square mile in size. On November 21, 1943, the U.S. Marines approached Betio under the morning sun. They misjudged the tides and their landing vehicles could not traverse the reef and so they waded five hundred yards in the open and suffered a 70 percent casualty rate in the first wave of attack. There were 4,300 Japanese soldiers on Betio, as well as several hundred Korean laborers, and over three days all of them were killed except seventeen soldiers who surrendered because they were too injured to fight on and could not find within themselves the strength to commit suicide. The Marines lost 1,113 soldiers. Corpses are still found when new wells are dug. There is also unexploded ordnance. Now and then a bomb is discovered. Shipping containers are moved from the port and stacked high around the bomb to direct the explosion up. And then—boom.

The remains of this battle exist today as untended features of the land- and seascapes, devoid of the solemn pomp that usually attends war ruins. On land, laundry hangs from antiaircraft guns. The turret of a small tank lies discarded like junk in a clearing where pigs and chickens feed. Bunkers are used as trash receptacles and toilets. The Japanese big guns remain encased by sandbags, now petrified, and in their shadows volleyball is played. On the reef, the detritus of battle endures as nautical hazards. Oceanside, the reef is littered with tank traps, ammunition, the remains of a Japanese Zero, and a B- 29. Each relic marks where someone died and someone killed, and the lack of sanctity granted these vestiges of war does not allow you the distance to pretend otherwise.

If there is one indelible image from the Battle of Tarawa, it is a photo of dozens of dead Marines bobbing in the shallows just off what was called Red Beach II. I often launched my windsurfer from Red Beach II. Just twenty yards from the beach lies a rusting amtrac. At reef’s edge are the brown ribs of a ship long ago grounded, where Japanese snipers once picked off Marines wading and swimming and floating toward a beach that offered nothing better. A little farther I directed my board over the wings and fuselage of a B- 29 Liberator. Clearing the harbor entrance, I confronted the rusting carcasses of several landing vehicles. Near the beach was a Sherman tank, with children playing on the turret.

The Battle of Tarawa is an inescapable part of daily life on the island. I frequently found myself on Betio, pursuing a rumor that fresh fruit could be found at a particular store, when I would stumble across an antiaircraft gun or a cement bunker or a tank turret and I would think, Oh that’s right, 5,500 men were killed here. After a while, it just sort of seeps into you that Tarawa was the site of unimaginable violence and that it ought to be remembered. It bothered me that among my American friends and acquaintances only one had any knowledge of the Battle of Tarawa, and he happened to be a Marine. Perhaps it’s because I had to been to Bosnia. Once one sees a park transformed into a cemetery, one understands that battles ought to be remembered.

There are a few memorials commemorating the battle on Tarawa. In the 1960s, Navy Seabees began work on a causeway linking Betio to the rest of Tarawa. It was to commemorate the Battle of Tarawa. They never finished it. Another war arrived and they were sent to Vietnam. Instead, the Japanese finished the project and today it is called the Nippon Causeway. There are two other memorials on Betio. One is a Shinto shrine honoring the Japanese and Korean dead. Every month a Japanese worker from the port project cleans the memorial, wiping it down and clearing trash and brush. It is always meticulously clean. The other memorial sits in front of the Betio Town Council building. It is a time capsule shaped like an obelisk. No one prunes the weeds here. There is a flagpole, but there is no flag. The memorial reads:

“Follow Me”

2 nd Marine Division

USMC

Battle of Tarawa

November 20, 1943

To our fellow Marines

who gave their all!

The world is free because of you!

God rest your souls

1,113 killed 2,290 wounded

The Central Pacific Spearhead

To World Victory in World War II

“Semper Fideli”

On the other side, it reads:

Memorial to sailors, airmen,

chaplains, doctors, and especially to

Navy Corpsmen

30 killed 59 wounded

Sealed November 20, 1987

Camp Lejeune, N.C., U.S.A.

To be opened November 20, 2143

From our world to yours

Freedom above all

Sylvia had grown up next door to a survivor of the Battle of Tarawa. She didn’t know this at the time; he had died shortly after she left for college. It was only after Sylvia’s parents had mentioned to his widow that their daughter was now living on Tarawa that she learned that for all those years she had lived beside a veteran of the battle. No one knew. The former Marine never talked about it. His widow mentioned that in the years after they were married, he often woke in the middle of the night, screaming, terrified, haunted by the experience. But he never talked about it. Not even the survivors care to remember the Battle of Tarawa. And so all that remains of the battle are the ruins, slowly dissipating on a reef in the equatorial Pacific, just a short distance from the Nippon Causeway.