Now, beyond a few broken concrete slabs in the under-brush, there was nothing to indicate this was a wartime camp. Nothing to indicate it was a park, for that matter, except the sign.

This is not to say that New Zealanders have forgotten. Wellington of course was large enough to absorb a division of men, particularly when most of its own were far away. It would be hard to find a Marine who did not have a family he visited regularly on liberty and with whom the closest relationships developed. In 1968 the New Zealanders who had known Marines told me again and again that they seemed to be looking for a home. “The thing that struck me most,” said one woman, “was that when you met them and you liked each other, then you sort of belonged to them and they belonged to you. They weren’t interested in meeting other people and going around and that sort of thing.”

Time has, to say the least, been kind to the Marines who have passed through the filtering process of New Zealand memory: everyone apparently was an Eagle Scout. Neat, clean, polite, generous, gentle with children. In 1968 when I asked a friend what her impression of me had been in those days, she said I was courteous, intelligent, lovable: “You recited poetry for my mother.” My own image from those days was very different: gauche, confused, anxious, lost. Did I talk about the war? Never, she said. Yet it seems to me that it was always on my mind. How could I not have talked about it? But this, too, was a common observation. “No, they never talked about the war, where they had been, where they were going. They talked about New Zealand, what a lovely country it was, how they liked the people. Things like that. We were old-fashioned compared with America, I suppose. I think they liked that for some reason.”

We did indeed. The homes in which we settled down and spent so much time on liberty were crowded with heavy, overstuffed, old-fashioned furniture with lots of pillows and cushions, innumerable knickknacks, figurines, landscape paintings, and photographs. It was a little like visiting grandmother when a small boy in the Midwest.

There were of course

In Wellington that someone was twenty-one-year-old Joan, a nursing student. She lived in a house perched on the side of a hill in Island Bay. You went out on the No. 1 tram, and you had to walk up 137 steps to get there. Below were tennis courts where you could see young boys play in the late afternoon, and the garden was full of flowers.

We went walking, sat in the parlor and talked, dined out, or went to the movies. She and her parents and sister were extraordinarily kind to me, and I often had dinner with them Once her mother asked me what my favorite dessert was, and I told her lemon pie. Since she was not familiar with thir delight of my childhood, I described it as best I could, and the next time I came by, there was s fresh lemon pie. The family of course knew that I was married, and on one occasion her mother privately and with considerable delicacy asked me if my relationship with Joan was something she should be concerned about. I replied no, and she never mentioned it again. The pie, as I recall, came after that.

When I first met Joan, she was recovering from the news of the death in North Africa of a young New Zealander she had known well. In a sense, I suppose, she was having some difficulty facing the necessity of life and I the necessity of death, and without quite realizing what we were doing, each helped the other. The innocence of our relationship is likely to be received with skepticism by those whose image of the traditional Marine on his way from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli included activities with women that wenf beyond conversation pnd dinner In fact, today many would probably find it quaint that I struggled with the morality of the matter: Was I being unfaithful to the girl I had married and loved so much because I walked hand in hand with Joan, kissed her occasionally, and on the day of my departure stood out in the clear, open sunshine of their front steps and held her and wiped away the tears she was shedding—for whom? For me? For her friend lost in North Africa? Or simply for all of

I would have survived Tarawa without knowing Joan, but I think my capacity to deal with Tarawa might well have been different had I not known her.

In the fall of 1943 we sailed for Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. None of us had ever heard of the place before.

Twenty-five years later I made the journey by air. The eight-hour plane flight from Fiji allows plenty of time to drift into the past, and as the plane circled high over the atoll for landing and I saw that dark streak across the water, I found my throat suddenly dry, chest tightening, that rising sensation of alertness in the stomach.

The view from the air was new to me. Twenty-five years earlier I had joined others on the deck of our naval transport long before dawn to watch the pre-invasion bombardment of the island. Naval shells arched in red streaks across the dark sky. At one point, before the big guns on the island had been silenced, a shell whistled overhead, and those of us who were new to this game ducked, to the amusement of the veterans.

This, however, was the lightest moment in a dark three days. Embarrassment was a feather compared with what hit me afterward. For Tarawa jarred my psyche with a blow so painful and long-lasting that in some ways that battle may have been the most dominant experience of my life. I was barely twenty-two years old, totally inexperienced, temperamentally unprepared for combat, by nature vaguely unsympathetic to things military, naive, and generally ignorant in the ways of command. A green second lieutenant responsible for thirty-nine men. It is with a sickening feeling at my own idiot innocence that I recall the little speech I gave the platoon just before we went down the nets into the landing craft. I told them there was no need to worry, no necessity for anyone to get killed, although possibly someone might get slightly wounded. No heroics, then, just do their jobs and what they were told. All would be well.

The platoon was to sustain twenty-six casualties—thirteen dead and thirteen wounded.

We had been told that, given the heavy naval and air bombardment, we would probably have little to do except walk across the island. We would be lucky, went the phrase, to fire a shot. On that score the high command was right: a great many Marines never had the chance to fire a shot.

The impact of the losses rendered me almost completely ineffective in any military sense. When the battle was over and we were taken off the island, my state of personal shock at what had happened is suggested by the fact that I sat in the wardroom on our naval transport and over and over again wrote

All of this drifted uneasily through my mind as the plane circled and landed in the late afternoon on the airstrip about halfway up the atoll—just a cleared stretch of packed coral. The original airstrip built by the Japanese on Betio, and after the battle renamed Hawkins Field in honor of the young lieutenant posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his deeds, had long since disappeared.

MY UNEASINESS dropped away after the landing. A large crowd of Gilbertese always gathers at the little airfield—Tarawa National—when a plane comes in or departs, and there are various government people on hand to greet new personnel or returning families. The terminal building was a small open shed with a low fence over which passengers passed luggage and goods—a process to which customs officials paid no attention at all. Informal, but still it was like coming into any airport: you end up being concerned about passports, baggage, transportation. The confusion was mild, however, and soon I caught a ride up the one narrow road that runs down the southern half of the atoll to the little six-room hotel on Bikenibeu.

In 1968 Tarawa was the administrative and commercial center for the Gilbert and Ellice Island Colony, one of the last fragments of the British Empire. It lies somewhat above the equator and across the international date line. With the exception of Betio, which has to be reached by motor launch, the small islands making up the atoll are linked by causeway. The highest point is about twelve feet above sea level. Betio is little more than two miles long, and eight hundred yards wide at its western end, tapering down to about three feet at its eastern end.

Tarawa is isolated by most modern standards. The then-fortnightly flight from Fiji existed primarily to handle government personnel and families on their way in or out for various reasons. I turned out to be the only Marine who had ever returned and one of the few genuine visitors in living memory. This made me something of a curiosity.

Since the war the British, in a concerted effort to bring the Gilbertese more or less into the twentieth century, had brought in various experts in education, agriculture, health, family life, and the like. The hospitality of these people was typical not only of the countries from which they came—England, New Zealand, and Australia—but also of what we associate in tale and myth with the Pacific Islands. I started to get invitations before I even reached the hotel, the first coming

Few of these expatriates, or the Gilbertese for that matter, knew much about the battle, although they were reminded of it all the time. For Betio, which is the most heavily populated island in the atoll, still carries on its narrow back the monuments of war. The Japanese had had about a year in which to turn the island into a defense bastion, and many of the fortifications that they built still stand, too massive to destroy. The naval guns still tilt in rusted anguish toward the sea or lie broken on the beach. Ammunition washes up with the tide. Shattered amtracs lie half-buried in the sand. Small children still dig up American grenades and bring them into the homes, and broken weapons are propped up here and there in front of houses, casual reminders of the past.

The morning after my arrival I hitched a ride down to Bonriki, where the government offices are located and from which I took the battered launch across to Betio, about a thirty-minute trip. As the launch eased alongside the pier, the sound of an explosion ripped the air—a startling but familiar greeting from the past. My stomach flipped. Ammunition and explosives uncovered during some construction were being destroyed—a common occurrence.

Twenty-five years earlier Betio had been shrouded in smoke and dust, most of its coconut palms blown to shreds, and the whole impression had been one of desolation, barrenness, and sand. Now it was green, quiet, and populous. I knew the island was small, but I had forgotten how small, less than half the size of Central Park in New York City. You can stand on one side with the lagoon at your back and view the ocean on the other. I went three times to Betio, motorbiked around it, bicycled, and walked. Once I tried to retrace my wartime course about the island and came across the small building housing one of the Japanese naval searchlights, where I had spent the fourth night lying in the midst of broken glass, rubble, and blasted equipment, while a single Japanese plane made a casual bombing run down the island. The twisted, rusted rim of the searchlight still lay on the sand. One wall of the building had disappeared, and the equipment and rubble inside had been cleared out; otherwise it was just as it had been. Later, when I paused in front of a bunker, its narrow rifle slits still surveying a long-forgotten field of fire in which I now stood uneasily, I found myself frozen for an instant, swept by the absurd sensation of being terribly exposed.

THESE BLUNT REMINDERS of the past seemed unreal in their peaceful setting of village huts, expatriate homes, and low-slung government buildings. But then I remembered that battle, too, has its incongruous reminders of peace. On the morning of the second day of the fighting, with

One of the things I tried to do in wandering about on my own was to find the place where Joe Sexton had been killed. He had been on my mind from the time I had undertaken this journey. In war few can make it psychologically without the buddy system. This is the basic unit of survival—one, two, or three comrades drawn together by factors quite beyond explanation and wholly unrelated to the common interests, ideas, and backgrounds that bring people together in peacetime. This comradeship does not often last when the war is over, but the memory of its deep, mysterious sense of identification is never lost or diminished.

Joe, Bill, Brownie, and I had been thrown together on the voyage out as replacements. On arrival in New Zealand the replacement officers were all crowded together in a hot, stuffy room for assignment to the various units of the division. In the confusion I became separated from the other three. When the captain in charge finished making the assignments, he discovered he had left me out. What am I going to do with you? his expression asked. I simply pointed across the room and, trembling inside with anxiety, told him, I want to go with them. He understood, and with them I went.

JOE WAS THE ONLY one of us to die at Tarawa. I hadn’t seen it happen myself and only had Bill Howell’s account vaguely in the back of my mind. I finally settled for what I thought ought to be the place and stood there for a long time, feeling curiously empty of emotion. Our reaction to his death had set in after we were sent to rest camp in Hawaii a few weeks later. Up to that time none of us had talked about it. Then, late one afternoon, our baggage from New Zealand caught up with us. Someone had two or three bottles of whiskey in his trunk, and in the midst of unpacking we began to drink. The binge, a collective rage really, lasted several hours and ended with our smashing what little furniture we had managed to scrounge or build, hurling books, clothing, and equipment all over the tent, and fighting one another with staves drawn from the ends of our cots, as though we were medieval ascetics scouring the devil from our bodies.