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CHAPTER FOUR

For God and Country

Donald was a Marine. He was a Marine decades ago in China, and he was still a Marine fifty years later in Pennsylvania. Though he was on active duty for only three years, it was true: “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

I was familiar with that saying, but it took me some time to catch on to what this meant. Thankfully, early in my process of researching Donald and asking how to meet ex-Marines, another Marine tipped me off that I should refer to Donald as a former Marine; there are no ex-Marines. It would seem that you can be discharged from all of the military services for a myriad of reasons, but you never stop being a Marine.

“We stole the eagle from the Air Force, the anchor from the Navy, the rope from the Army, and on the seventh day when God rested, we overran His perimeter and stole the globe. And have been protecting our shores ever since.” This is just one of the many sayings that suggest the special regard Marines hold for themselves. Marines are aggressive, proud, and loyal; Marines are first in and last out; Marines never leave their dead; they have a code of conduct; esprit de corps is Marine culture. In basic training, Marines are taught that “The US Army is chickenshit in combat, the Navy is worse, and the Air Force is barely even on our side.” Marines alone among the military services bestow their name on their enlisted ranks. The Army has officers and soldiers, the Navy has naval officers and sailors, and the Air Force has Air Force officers and airmen—but the Marines have only Marines.

It doesn’t take much to draw a line from Donald’s Marine duty in China and the prewar days in Shanghai through the Rape of Nanking and then home to Western Pennsylvania and a double murder. If Donald’s story happened today, we’d be more sympathetic and maybe say, “Well, that’s a tragedy, yes, but he’s a vet.”

But that’s today, and that’s how we see things through a lens colored by history. For Americans, World War II was heroic and successful. It was a war with fighting on two fronts: Europe and Asia. We loved our boys who served their country and did their duty. True, a number of them were never quite okay again, but we didn’t talk about that much. Our understanding of, and sympathy for, battle fatigue and war neurosis evolved over the course of America’s military history.

The other layer of my understanding why there are no ex-Marines came into full focus as I began to correspond with other men who had been in China with Donald. I started my search by subscribing to the magazines Marine Corps Gazette and Leatherneck. I laugh now when I think about what my mail carrier must have thought as Leatherneck began to arrive along with my subscription to Vogue. But I also worried whether my liberal judgments could flex enough so I could understand what it means to be a Marine.

Marine training is about learning to follow orders. Marine training also means working as a unit. Being able to respond without thinking is a tool that can save lives. Marines are strong and proud, and yet, paradoxically, they submerge themselves in unity.

Basic training in the Marine Corps is tough and is designed to break men down in order to rebuild them as fighting units. The goal of boot camp is to erase individuality so that recruits will function as a unit. The message to recruits who are becoming Marines is “You are not alone—you are no good alone.” And the celebratory message to those who make it is “Now you are a Marine; you can go anywhere, fight anyone, and survive anything.”

Aboard the USS Chaumont Heading to China—1937

His heart was pounding. The men around him were laughing, swearing, and teasing. There was friendliness among the men. He could see it, but it seemed very far away. It made no sense. They were pushed together—barely an inch between him and the man lying above him. He opened his eyes, and above his face was the curve of a man’s buttocks making the canvas curve down toward him. His eyes shifted left, and quickly he closed them again. Another man was next to him, and then more men beyond him.

He’s trapped. Trapped. Trapped. He took a deep breath. I’m all right, he told himself, I’m all right; we’re just on a ship, going to bed, just gonna sleep soon, real soon, I’ll sleep, then it will be okay. The smells roiled in the cabin—sweat, urine, and shit—so he turned his head. The canvas under him smelled of old vomit. His stomach lurched.

I’m on the ocean, at sea, going to sea, this is big, good, big. The words were not helping. He tried to pray. God, Father, oh Father in heaven. He couldn’t remember the words, and his heart beat faster. Tight, he felt tight. He pressed his closed eyes tighter, but he could feel the men all around him. They were close, too close.

Out . . . out . . . out. The word started to drum in his head. I can’t, he thought to himself, I can’t. Gotta do this, can’t see me run, can’t run, be okay, but the other word was louder and faster in his head now. Out, out, out.

He was afraid to move, afraid to turn; if he shifted he’d be sick or maybe he’d run. Can’t run, no legs to run. The thought scared him. Even if he got up, he didn’t know how to get out. So many men there, canvas beds and duffle bags hung everywhere. Where is the door? What is it called, the door thing you come through to get in this room? It wasn’t a room, too many men.

Hot, smell of sweat. Vomit smell again.

A man farted loudly, others laughed, then a man belched, more laughter. It’s okay, he said to himself, nice guys, good guys. The man under him turned, and an arm, elbow, or leg thrust into his back. We are lying on each other like we’re dead, he thought, and the panic rose again. His throat was closing. Breathing was hard, hardly any air. He was so hot; sweat dripped from his face, and he felt the sweat roll down his neck.

A man made a crude joke about a woman. Bastard, he thought. Did he say that out loud? He couldn’t tell. “Damn,” another man said. “My fucking back.”

The word was in his head again. Out. This time he couldn’t stop; he turned. He sat up and hit his head on the bottom of the man above him. “What the fuck, Watkins,” the man above said. His leg was over the side. “Don’t fucking have to piss now, man, come on,” the underneath man said angrily. He had one leg almost to the floor. He stepped on the edge of the canvas bed of the man below him. His foot slid loose, and he fell left into the two men across. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, piss in your bed,” one man said. He couldn’t hear now; he couldn’t breathe; he squeezed sideways between the rows of canvas swings with bodies crowded into them. Out, out, out, repeated in his head. Is the door this way? He stopped. He didn’t know, didn’t remember, how the ship worked and how they got there.

“The other way, fuckhead,” a man lying next to his face snarled into him. He swiveled his head. “The other way. Way out. Out.” Then sliding, squeezing, and sliding sideways, he saw the opening. Head down, duck head. He missed and scraped the top of his head on the metal frame of the opening. Out to a corridor. Now where? Head toward the lights. Breath came now in gulps, and vomit was in his throat. A ladder. Squeeze. Up the ladder. Now where? Another ladder ahead. Up the ladder, cooler air now, air ahead. Then he was out, up and out onto the deck.

Cool air hit his face. He was still moving fast, too fast. He tripped and went down on one knee. Cool night air fell on him. He breathed. Tears came to his eyes.

“Hey, Marine. New to sea?” A voice from his left. He kept his head down and bit hard to stop his tears. “Too fucking hot for ya? Then sleep on the deck, man; it’s the only way to do it.”

He looked around now. He could hear again. He heard the man’s voice and a bigger sound. Something was roaring outside of him. Huge, louder, fast, shuddering. It was the water, the water and the ship; the ship was cutting through water. He was at sea.

I placed small ads in the Marine Corps Gazette and Leatherneck. The ad said that I was trying to locate Marines who served in China between 1937 and 1940. I gave my home address, phone number, and email address in hopes there might be someone who could help me learn more about the United States Marines in China. I expected to hear from family members who had a father’s scrapbook or maybe had an uncle’s letters. I was unprepared for what happened.

The first ad appeared in September of 2000, and I began to be drawn into the China Marine world immediately. I came home from work that day, and my message machine flashed, showing I had seven messages. That was a lot for our house, so I grabbed a pen to jot down numbers, but when I heard the first message I couldn’t write at all.

A firm male voice said, “Ms. Cameron, this is Staff Sergeant Clifford Wells. I am responding to your notice in the Marine Corps Gazette. I believe I can assist you. I served in China 1938 and departed Shanghai on 23 March 1940. Please call me.”

He relayed his phone number—I was sure this person was saluting as he spoke—and then he said, “Now I usually bowl on Monday and Wednesday, so it’s best to call me on Friday.”

I knew no matter how young he had been in 1938, this was a really old guy who sounded like he was still Staff Sergeant Wells.

That week I had more messages like that, delivered in the clipped tones of radio bulletins. And I received letters, which echoed the phone calls: “Dear Ms. Cameron, I am writing in response to your recent notice in the Marine Corps Gazette. I believe that I may be able to help you. I am . . .” Then they gave rank, name, duty assignment, and location in China, which always included the full date of arrival and departure.

The letters described each Marine’s assignments, duties, and special services rendered: chauffeur to the commander, chef for enlisted men, engineer, or corpsman. Somewhere near the end of each letter the writer would tell me his current age—eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine—and how best to contact him. The closings were poignant: “I am happy to help you learn more, but please don’t call. I am extremely deaf.” Or “I will write back to you again but only when my son comes on Thursday to help me with the mail.”

But there was another face of former Marines: emails. The ghosts of China came to me through the Internet. The emails were slightly less formal: “Hi Diane. Rcvd yur email msg. My tour of duty in Shanghai was 3 Nov. 1938 thru 18 May 1940. Fourth Marines regimental Hdqtrs. I was C.W. radio operator. I have some phone books of Shanghai . . .”

And with each new contact, I received a writer’s gift: Each man had documents. Some had scrapbooks or copies of the Walla Walla, a weekly newspaper first published by the Marines in Shanghai in 1928. Some men had saved the 1938 Thanksgiving dinner programs that included the menu, and others had box scores of Chinese baseball games with the rosters of players. And they wanted to send it all to me.

Cliff Wells, Frenchy Dupont, and George Howe, along with other former Marines, became my friends and teachers. Despite their age and ailments, they were generous with their time. George, who served with Donald and was now eighty-seven years old, was completely deaf but still wrote to me every week.

These men told me what it was like to be young and far from home, see death all around them, and then have to kill. These men, older than the Greatest Generation, shared that group’s reluctance to talk to family about what they’d experienced, but they were willing, almost waiting, to tell me. It was Cliff who asked me one day, “Diane, do you understand what ‘hand-to-hand combat’ really means?”

I hesitated, knowing in that moment my notion of combat—based on movies—was about to change. And then Cliff told me in gruesome detail.

Frenchy explained what starvation felt like and described his panic and fear when, as a prisoner of the Japanese, he realized he was going blind. And a man nicknamed Bones—because he weighed sixty-three pounds as a prisoner of war (POW)—told me about the strain of being surrounded by violence every day. And it was George who described seeing a guy “go off his rocker” when I asked what it was like to handle dead bodies every day.

It did make me wonder, as it has since my journey began, Why has no one uncovered this group of men who could write the real “We Were There” story of events leading up to World War II? From the urgency I felt from these strangers, pushing to get these materials into my hands, there weren’t many people in their lives—not at their own Thanksgiving dinners or at the bowling alley—who were willing to listen. Here were the men who saw the Rape of Nanking and the bombing of the USS Panay, who lived the high life of Shanghai—“Paris of the Orient”—and the lowest of lows as prisoners in Bataan and Palawan, and survived. These men, who had been through all of that and still identified themselves first and always as United States Marines, wanted to tell their stories.

I am aware of the ease with which the phrase “China Marine” rolls from my tongue now. The stories led to facts, and the giant puzzle started to fill in. I know Donald and the Marines were transported on the USS Chaumont, “up north” means Tientsin, and “guard duty” means confronting the Japanese. I know “bombing detail” means picking up body parts all day and that we were at war with Japan long before Pearl Harbor.

America tried to avoid war with Japan in those years, but war pressed closer. There had been American business interests in China for thirty years; Standard Oil had a large operation there, as did a dozen other American companies. The International Settlement was a kind of neutral zone, and there was an American embassy in Peiping (later called Peking, then Beijing). The American businesses had thousands of employees in Shanghai, Nanking, and the surrounding area. In the 1930s Japan began to push against the Chinese, and the Americans and other foreign nationals were in the middle but trying, ever so delicately, to stay neutral.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration was basically pro-Chinese and anti-Japanese but struggled to restrain the Japanese without actually fighting. But the Japanese pushed hard against the Americans, which led to the delicate duty of the United States China Marines who had no orders to intervene; they were only to protect Americans and American business interests. However, in 1937 their diplomatic position became more tenuous. In December of that year, Japanese aircraft bombed the USS Panay, an American gunboat sitting in harbor. It was a hostile gauntlet thrown down by the Japanese, but President Roosevelt, unprepared for war, accepted Japan’s explanation that the daytime bombing was an accident. Instead of military retribution the United States asked Japan for monetary compensation, but the China Marines knew that war had moved closer and their lives were going to get worse.

“I remember when the Panay was bombed,” Cliff told me. “We were alerted that morning, and we locked and loaded; we’d always drilled and had emergency drills; you couldn’t see all those bodies everywhere and not know this was a war. We were on alert; we heard the Panay went down and were ready to march into the Japs. We were on our way to confront them with arms but then got word to step down. Washington said, ‘It was an accident.’ But nobody in China thought it was an accident. It was the middle of the day, and the Panay was flying her colors. They shot at our ship, and we just sat there.”

Donald’s discharge papers say that he “participated in the defense of the International Settlement, Shanghai, China.” It sounds romantic. And it certainly was international. The International Settlement was a rich, extravagant, highly scented, and scenic place. People from at least twenty different countries lived there, including British, French, Dutch, and American civilians, and there were concessions—business districts—operated by the French and the Japanese.

“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” the wartime song asks. Shanghai was Paris on steroids, and the Marines were young and green. I can picture the nightclubs, shows, and rustling silks; the jewelry, necklaces, beads, and women all for sale. I can hear the ice tinkling in glasses and the music: Chinese musicians on the streets and jazz and classical music coming from the clubs at all hours. When I try to look through Donald’s twenty-two-year-old eyes, I wonder at all he saw.

China duty had the reputation of being the envy of the military services in those few years before World War II. It was considered light duty—Monday through Friday 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.—and the excellent exchange rate meant young men with low salaries could gamble and party, buying all the booze, silk, Chinese goods, and women they wanted. Back at the barracks a houseboy was spit-shining their shoes and tidying the bunks to dime-spinning Marine standards.

But there was a dark side to this life. For those who know what happened there in 1937 and 1938, “International Settlement” was also code for horrors beyond belief.

Over the years, photos of the torture and killing have been published and exhibited. In 1994 The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang described what the Japanese did to Chinese civilians. The atrocities were concentrated in Nanking but spread through all of occupied China and into the domain of the Marines. More than 300,000 Chinese civilians were murdered. But it was worse than murder; first they were tortured and mutilated, then killed.

In the 1930s there were bubblegum cards sold in the United States that showed pictures of the more discreet scenes of dead and decapitated bodies in China. This was, of course, our own anti-Japanese propaganda, but the pictures were a small sample of the atrocities Iris Chang would later uncover from photos and eyewitness accounts—men, women, and children brutally raped, tortured, and coldly used for bayonet practice. Chinese civilians were chopped, slashed, cut, and pulled to pieces.

One of the most sadistic games of Japanese soldiers was capturing pregnant Chinese women, placing bets on the gender of the fetus, and then cutting open the woman’s abdomen to determine a winner. The fetus would be pulled from the woman’s belly, tossed in the air, and caught on a Japanese soldier’s bayonet. The mother would be left to bleed to death. Sometimes the Japanese soldiers might cut off a woman’s hands or feet and insert them in her genitals. And our China Marines stood as witnesses.