The Iwo Jima Narrative

Introductory Text

The Island
The Iwo Jima Narrative Part 01 20th Post Posted 26 April 2016 at 03:40:58 EDT Link to original

Lying in the hold, listening to the bombardment, there is no sleep. The booming of the guns travels through the shivering metal of the ship. Hour after hour, without end, the arsenal of democracy rains down on the tiny island.

What could it be like for the Japs huddled in their bunkers? Surrounded. Doomed. Do they know they have no hope? Do they expect death? Do they wish for it?

Death. The island is death. Waiting for them. Ancient. Waiting since before they were born. Thousands of young men have crossed vast oceans to come to her, following paths they could have never foreseen. Thousands of young lives will converge on her shores. Converge and end.

After three days of round-the-clock bombardment, a clear and bright morning. Whispers through the hold about problems with the shells. Many of them never exploded, disappeared in the air. There have been stories of bombers being cut in half. Of bomb crews emerging limbless from their planes. What is on the island? Some new kind of weapon? Something the Japanese have been saving until now? Just talk. The men feel the death out there, waiting on the island.

The landing vehicles ride through the waves, and the Marines climb out onto beaches of ash, an alien surface, crumbling under their boots. There is no fire. No sound but the motors and the clinking of gear and the sergeants shouting, urging them on. No movement from the interior. Then screams. Bloody stumps. Men cut in half. But still no fire. How is there no fire? More men screaming. Groups of men on the ground, howling, bright red lumps where limbs had been. How? No sign of the Japs. No fire. No shells.

More vehicles land. The beaches become a crowded, screaming nightmare. There is something here, something beyond their understanding. Invisible. Killing at will. Is it the island itself?

A few men manage to advance up the steep beaches and across the rocks, but soon they are cut apart as well. Other men follow and advance farther. They have been trained to advance. Take the beach. Forward. Always forward. Slowly, the men find their way farther and farther into the island interior. Through horrible trial and error, they begin to understand. They don't speak of their discovery. They don't believe it. But their overwhelming will to go forward and their overwhelming fear of death teach them what their minds cannot accept, teach them a lesson about the island.

They notice tracks through the ash and rock where there is no grass. These tracks are not foot trails, but deep tracks carved at strange angles, striated like dry streams, places where it seems the ground is simply missing. They realize they must avoid these tracks. If they step onto them, or let any part of themselves pass over the them, that part will disappear, whether it is their fingers or feet or limbs or even their heads. Sometimes parts of their bodies disappear even when they don't cross the tracks, and they realize that there are unseen tracks through the air, invisible boundaries they must not cross.

If they lose a part of their bodies, the blood does not flow, but there is pain, pain beyond flames or knives or bullets. Pain unbearable. Unholy. Inhuman. There are screams all around them, of men who have accidentally run afoul of the invisible power.

There is no time to understand this, to reason it out. They simply adapt. Moving carefully, holding out blades of wild grass or shirts or gear, probing, waiting for part of the object to disappear, then stopping, testing for a way forward. Sometimes they find it. Sometimes they are forced to turn back.

In less than an hour, they have forgotten entirely about the artillery and snipers and bayonets. There are no soldiers. Only entrances to empty bunkers, abandoned pieces of artillery, some cut in half, but no enemy. They are playing a new game now, taught to them by some unseen teacher, playing it with total concentration.

Playing and winning.

The Marine wounded, with their strange unbleeding wounds, are taken away. Their screams fade. Orders from command are unchanged. Take the island. So they move forward. Up. Towards Mt. Suribachi. The mountain is shaped like a bowl. A dead volcano. They approach by various paths, each man following another, taking a narrow path of safety. Makeshift markers are set up to show their boundaries.

A Marine turns and sees, floating like a butterfly, a severed human arm. It turns and floats away and disappears altogether. Minutes later, a disembodied pair of legs scrambles past. The Marines curse and speculate and even giggle, but keep moving forward. There is no time to understand. They expected to spend weeks taking the island. Now it seems that could have it in a couple hours.

A shot rings out, the first shot since the confusion of the landing. A Marine is firing at the mountain. Others peer through their binoculars and spy a man sitting on the rim of the mountain. Simply sitting. Alone. Just a vague shape. Snipers are called in and they fire on him, but the island's air seems to swallow the bullets. The man is untouched.

They press forward. The deadly tracks wind around them, growing more numerous. Some of the men find themselves at dead ends. One Marine slips and disappears entirely without so much as a shout. They come to the foot of the mountain. It is small but rugged and steep, and the lone man sits over them, looking down on them.

They hear the sounds now, coming from the other side of the ridge, coming from within the giant bowl of the mountain. Human voices. Many of them. Thousands. The sounds of laughter, giggling and cackling and howling laughter. Like a wonderful party where somebody is telling a hilarious story. The Marines listen to it dumbfounded. Slowly the laughter fades, and there is a new sound, a strange rushing roar that quickly breaks apart into discrete sounds: screams, shouts, gasps, weeping, terror. The sound rises and rises, and the Marines shudder. This too fades and the laughter returns. And so these two sounds trade places over and over, fading in and out above the sound of the waves.

A Marine trains his binoculars on the mountain again. The man is still sitting there. Japanese. Wearing a uniform. His head is floating several feet above his body. The body is in several pieces with lines of sunshine between them. His face, sweat dripping over the smooth eyelids, shows no emotion. Slowly, he raises his hand, as if wave to them, and his fingers float away from his palm.

They crawl up the mountain
The Iwo Jima Narrative Part 02 21st Post Posted 26 April 2016 at 23:43:33 EDT Link to original

They crawl up the mountain, bare hands on the sharp volcanic rocks. The sun beats down on them. It is a grueling test. The island has a secret that it doesn't want to reveal.

They draw close to the man at the top of the mountain, keeping their guns trained on him. He has no weapon. His body is fragmented like an image in a broken mirror, various pieces floating without connection, the brightness of the sky shining between them, the blood of his insides bright red. His head is like a balloon floating several feet over the rest of him.

"Hello, America," the head calls, breaking into a sickly smile. The whites of the eyes are clustered with red hemorrhages. Sweat rolls down the face.

The Marines don't know how to respond. They ask if he's armed. The question strikes one of them as funny and he giggles. A tide of giggling comes from the other side of the ridge, behind the fragmented man. The giggling turns to screaming.

"What's going on here? You alone?" A Marine asks.

The man doesn't seem to understand. One of the Marines tries his basic Japanese. The man makes a sour face. "No Nippon... Korea... Korea person," the man says, and a disembodied hand points to a nearby fragment of his chest. "나는...I... Christian... 예수," the man says. He pulls a necklace out of his shirt. On the end of it is a small metal cross. A tiny suffering Jesus gleams in the sun.

The Marine tries English again. "What's happening here?"

"마귀가 여기 왔어."


 * Translation of Korean to English: "The devil came here."

"What?"

"군인들이 대문을 건축했어. 그 아이의 명령으로."


 * Translation of Korean to English: "The soldiers had built a gate. The child with the command."

"I don't understand."

A wide smile splits the Korean man's face, and he lets out a loud laugh, and the smile flees, and suddenly he is weeping. His emotions seem to follow the giggles and screams that come from inside the mountain. The Marines feel it too: the strange urge to laugh followed by a harrowing fear.

The sound beyond the ridge rises, the screams becoming higher and louder. A wave of maniac giggling joins the screaming so that both sounds fill the air at once. A electric feeling touches the skin on the Marines' arms. They find their minds filling with strange, dark thoughts.

Somewhere in a castle in Japan lies a mad God Emperor who has sent his men across the ocean to defend his glorious empire with their blood. On the other side of the world lies the great humming factory called America, the heart of an empire of commerce, which once forced Japan to join the world in trade. Machines and flesh now flow along tendril-like courses, delivering goods and death, ensnaring the globe.

The sun goes dark, like a light switch turning off. The Marines instinctively duck, then look up and gasp. Above them, extending miles into the sky, is an enormous metallic cylinder, filling the sky, blocking out the sun. It spins slowly above them, pieces of it flickering and disappearing like the image in a broken movie projector. In a day filled with madness, they find themselves confronted with something wholly beyond their capacity for surprise. They simply mutter soft curses and get closer to the ground. The earth seems to tremble with the sound of the screaming and laughing, which swirls like a storm all around them.

Somewhere near the beach, a Marine pats another Marine on the back, interrupting his stunned gawking, and shouts something into his ear. The second Marines pats the man in front of him, and the message goes up the line like this until it reaches the Marines talking to the fractured man.

Pull back.

They are to withdraw from the island.

The men do not question the order for a moment. They turn and crawl away from the Korean.

Below them, the ashen island flashes with pieces of sunlight that manage to slip through the flickering cylinder. When they are almost at the foot of the mountain again, the man stands up and shouts something over the hideous screaming. The Marines cannot hear it and would not understand it anyways.

"마귀가 예수를 데리고 산으로 가서 천하 만국과 그 영광을 보여. 가로되 만일 내게 엎드려 경배하면 이 모든 것을 네게 주리라."


 * Translation of Korean to English (Matthew 4:8-9): "The devil took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, 'All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.' "