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Twenty-six
“Odeal”
USS Maryland
Leyte Gulf
29 November, 1944
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Strafing Zekes and Oscars weren’t the problem, terrible though they were, but it was up to the Kamikazes to first terrorize, then kill men on whatever ship they dove towards or took a run at. Their cockpits packed with explosives, their pilots resolved and fanatical, they caused their share of damage and casualties. When one struck the fore of the ship between both of the big 406 mm forward gun batteries, Seaman First Class Albert Schmidt was thrown clear of the ship into the water. He was deafened, burned and disoriented by the concussion of the blast, and above the din of gunfire and fire alarms, his calls for help went unheard.
He was just one of many men who were with “Fighting Mary” since the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor. Most of the battleships that survived the attack and were repaired to fight again were present at this battle, like they were on a mission of private vengeance. And, truly, they were engaging in exactly that, but Seaman Schmidt was not thinking about that as the tide drew him away from his beloved Mary. Already in the Navy before Pearl, he was a seasoned veteran and yet this was the first major fight in the war for both Schmidt and Maryland. Dedicated and loyal, he was a sailor with no greater goal than to serve at sea for his country, which took him in, trained him, fed him and paid him when the Depression had eaten away his father’s pride, driving him to suicide before he could grow old, leaving a devoted wife and three children to fend for themselves. Albert never understood his father’s feelings of being a failure and yet forgave him. He knew all too well that a man could take only so much shame, whether it was his to rightfully claim or not. After Pearl, he’d heard the stories, both onboard from fresh recruits to men in the E-Club of other men who volunteered but were turned down because of the slightest bullshit about having “flat feet,” whatever those were. Too many of those stories ended in suicide. Those men, young and old, believed that if America had been so blatantly and cowardly attacked, and they were not allowed to defend and avenge, then their shame was a death sentence. Why go on living?
He also heard the worst tales of men who were turned away from recruiting centers and did not choose to hang themselves. Ridicule and harassment were on their menu every day while men like Schmidt could sit down to a dinner of greens and pork chops and hot coffee.
Al never stopped thanking God for what he had. He always went to services on Sunday and never planned on getting married or having children. If that responsibility was too much for his father, who was a very kind and good man, then Al wanted nothing to do with family life. So he worked hard for Mary, for his country, and for himself. He cared nothing for promotions and often feared the prospect of one. He had a spine and didn’t need his shipmates suspecting that he was some kind of “brownie,” or “brown-noser.” The term was degrading and the only sailor who ever used that name on Al Schmidt was now out of the Navy with a permanently bent nose. The punch was enough to impair the man’s vision, breathing and make him look like a character in a bad movie.
Famously, the man was reported to be flat on the deck, bleeding and gasping for air while Schmidt stood over him and calmly said, “There’ll be no more talk down here about brown-nosers. You guys buck up, do your jobs and follow orders. Nothing less, and if more is called for, let no one question it. Youse got something to say, think first. Otherwise keep your lousy mouths shut.”
It was a good lesson to be taught, and Schmidt was busted to just plain “Seaman” for it. He did have some pride, and couldn’t take his character being called into question like that.
***
And now, he was really scared. Within the hour, the cove and Leyte were out of sight. The current moved faster and brought him alongside a piece of floating deck 20 feet long and ten feet wide. It appeared to be from a destroyer; he couldn’t tell, but he was so tired from fighting the current that he risked being seen by climbing onto it and resting.
If any Japs saw him, he’d be strafed, taken aboard ship and shot, or worse, taken prisoner. He welcomed the sunset, and he knew that God would either see him through this or welcome him to paradise. He accepted the fact that death was the biggest part of war, so he had expected it to happen anyway since Pearl; he just couldn’t help feeling sad that he might die alone out here, contributing nothing else to his country.
When the moon rose, it appeared full. That was bad, because some islands were still occupied or patrolled by the Nips. Barges usually did patrols closer to shore, but he didn’t know where he was, so he was fully exposed out here, lit up like a neon sign by the damned moon.
Then the fear really set in because dorsal and tail fins told him that sharks were around. He was still bleeding a little from a cut he’d received, probably from shrapnel, on his back. He only knew it burned, not how bad it was. As he suspected, there was some blood getting into the water, and they said that attracted sharks of most species. He didn’t know about species, but he knew that some larger individuals could leap high and long enough to reach him. He was not safe.
The deck hit a reef after a night of rain, torrential and warm, but by day he saw it lifted by the tide. He saw islands nearby but didn’t dare try to swim for one. More days followed with him being burned by the cruel sun until his skin dried and cracked wherever he tried to move. He knew he was a dead man, and if he didn’t find water to drink soon, he knew the stories. That was no way to die.
Fever took him. His dreams were grotesque and so vivid that he thought that they were real.
One dream in particular startled him so badly that he prayed for death.
It was dark. No stars were out. The moon was dark. He could see nothing. Something splashed out of the water and he thought he had been hearing a voice from under the surface all night. He “awoke” to find a creature beside him, lying close. Then, a kiss; cooling and refreshing, and he remembered being revived and thinking more clearly.
He saw by the predawn light what looked like a mermaid, which sailors from ancient times to the present dwelt upon unhealthily, and thought he was dying from thirst, mad with fever. But she was still beautiful, even if out of the water she had matted hair. She saw that he was awake and kissed him again. “I loved you so much in life that in death, seeing you here, I came far to help you and to be with you.”
Her tail seemed as if it had become two ordinary legs. Her kissing made him have a flash of memory, not much, just that he knew he loved her. When her naked body was no longer cool, she felt inviting and aroused, and that aroused him.
Their lovemaking was slow, passionate and complete. When it was over, she slid back into the water.
But she didn’t leave him.
The deck he floated on veered slightly, impossible in such a strong tide.
She showed herself again, swimming to and stopping at a reef offshore of a volcanic island. There was plentiful cover in the tropical forest, which was dark and must be dense. That would help him avoid enemy eyes, but as she pulled him gently off the wood platform, swimming on the surface with him on her back, holding his hands around her neck to her breasts, which now were adorned with nipples, he thought, this, this was total insanity, and he was never going to be fit for duty again even if he was rescued.
“This island,” she said, “has enough for you to survive. Light fires if you can, but not in daylight. There’s food to be caught in the water, but stay off the reef. There’s coconuts, and fresh water gets trapped in the volcanic rocks when it rains. It will look like a natural spring. Stay off the beach in daylight unless you’re trapping food, and be sure to rinse yourself off after being in saltwater. Since I’m pregnant now and rusalki must stay in whatever water they choose to live in, salt or fresh, I will keep to the area and help if you need me. However, you’re going to be alone for longer times as your child grows in me. Unless you’re rescued soon, you’ll get lonely, and I must warn you that loneliness is its own poison.”
***
He awoke after a long time on the beach, because his back was so sunburned that he itched, and when he reached back to scratch, he came away with sheets of sloughed skin. He was never going to live through this. Especially not being badly burned and having nightmares about mermaids. Good lord did he really dream that? He must be truly mad.
He did, however, find freshwater in a natural sink-sized pool, being fed by a small stream of runoff from the rock cone of the extinct volcano. Just as his dream had said. You did not get fucked by a mermaid, he told himself.
But he drank as much as he could hold, threw it back up on the grassy jungle floor, and he drank again, just less.
From being dehydrated for so long, and from not eating for how long he didn’t know, he grew feverish and then would return to normal and then back again.
Hunger drove him to catch small fish in a net he made out of his shredded shirt. He just finished tearing along the strips the shrapnel had started. The fish species he didn’t know or care about, he would just scale them against the coarse lava rock, and eat them whole.
With that and a growth of beard that shamed him, he began to believe that he knew what cavemen were like. But his nightmares were only beginning.
He thought he might see an MTB, because they had shallow drafts, and could avoid charted reefs while still getting close to shore to look for evidence of Jap occupation or lack of it. Every small island with some exceptions could hide enemy weapons and fuel caches, and MacArthur wanted nothing left in this area…
This area? He had no idea where he was. He knew he was pushed south of Leyte, but how far was impossible to know, and east-west was worse. there was always longitude, wasn’t there?
***
He reckoned, during a lucid spell, that he must have been here on this damned island for months. It had to have already passed into the new year, and his depression was significant. He’d long since stopped praying, not because he was angry or he stopped believing, but he just didn’t think about it.
Mosquitoes ate chunks of him, the sun and salt ripened him for attack within his cracked skin, and raw crabs and fish were swelling his stomach with bugs while his muscles withered to the bone.
His hair and beard grew, retaining heat from sunlight, and one month with scarce rain made him conserve water. He tried making watertight bowls by weaving palm leaves together; he kept trying but it didn’t work. A coconut shell would work but he couldn’t open the fresh ones and by the time the fallen ones broke open, they were rotted, and stank too much for him to even touch.
He wondered less each day how the war was going. He found it hard to care. Part of him remembered the circumstances of his separation from Mary, and understood that he was now counted as killed in action. They probably thought he was blown up from such a blast, and he didn’t care. Because part of him was too bitter at having to suffer things no man should suffer. They probably never even looked for him.
Sometimes at night he tried to start a fire. He had never been able to do it. But in maybe his third month, he ventured closer around the base of the volcano, and he found something in a long tube. Lava tubes they called them. He looked at exactly the perfect time of day and saw something resembling marine grade canvas. It smelled moldy and he sneezed. He reached in and found dry supplies, matches, cigarettes, and even some rations. There were candy bars that were melted and had leaked from their Hershey’s wrappers, and a few magazines for the M-1 carbine. And, wonderful to see, a can opener. He wanted the rations so much that even with his cut and cracked hands, he deftly used the tiny can opener and got one can open. His eyes were burned from the sun and salt like everything else, but even if he could not see what the can held, he found a way to eat it. And as much as anything else, his first cigarette in about six months made him determined to fight on. There were two packs of camels, and when he’d take one out of the pack, the stale tobacco would always tip out of either end, but he noticed that the humid climate softened them up, so he’d let one sit on the rocks for a bit before lighting it.
He also thought clearly enough to find a lava tube that he could fit inside of and he piled dead and dried palm leaves and other dried vegetation nearby, stuffed a small amount of it inside as kindling, then went and gathered what wood he could find. The canvas bag tipped over at one point. He didn’t realize that he neglected to empty it, but out tumbled a Ka-Bar knife and a diver’s mask. Commandos had been here, evidently scouting and relaying coded messages. He wondered where they went and why they’d never come back.
He divided his dried fuel and the actual fire in two substantial lava tubes, having learned the hard way that smoke made him sick, and that storing firewood and kindling too close to a fire didn’t work out well. But by looking up, he saw natural chimneys for his new “fireplace,” and holes vented smoke upward in small columns that wouldn’t give him away.
Finally he began to clean and cook his fish and shellfish.
He just hoped it wasn’t too late. Violent bouts of vomiting and diarrhea grew worse. Fever spikes got higher. His nightmares grew from lurid to morbid to grotesque and terrifying; there was no peace or rest in sleep.
The time came when he knew he would never be found. His fight began to leave him again. He didn’t even care anymore if his fires were in the open and were spotted by the Japs. He stopped caring about everything.
He was losing his shirt trap to the saltwater. It was eating it up. But he still caught fish and still ate whatever he caught. One one occasion he managed to trap a large spider and he cooked it. Digging the meat out of the shell was tedious but it was tasty. He ate what he could catch.
He rationed his Camels and was down to smoking one a day, but they helped.
His voice dried up. He talked to himself a lot but then even that was taken away from him. He knew he would be a section 8 before he ever died. Dying was something he just couldn’t seem to do no matter how sick he got.
He noted action on the sea, up a straight in his sixth or seventh month on the island. They moved toward the west. At first only a few American PT boats did it, then destroyers and cruisers.
A few days after seeing the first cruiser, a typhoon hit. He watched the dark clouds looking on the horizon all day, but by nightfall it had not seemed very close. He had the presence of mind to tuck himself into a long lava tube for shelter and when the storm hit the island with its fury, he heard the wind whistle, groan then roar past the opening and spent a day and a night in his tight shelter, not daring to leave it. That decided it for him. When it was over, he began burning his fires on open beach in both night and day. If he was to make it off the island, he had to get their attention, but it wasn’t working. He set a pile of twigs and dried leaves beside it, but fell asleep. Unattended, the fire spread to his fuel and the smoke it sent up was thick and heavy.
On board PT 134, a lookout saw it. She was running radar and mufflers and was very careful; these waters were not secured. Japanese resistance would continue in small pockets even after the war was over, but Schmidt knew as he watched the naval progression continue that a major battle was brewing. While they scouted ahead of a task force, the PT boat’s lookouts saw that the smoke was conspicuous and that forced the skipper to pull up to the reef to send an armed party ashore in a rubber raft. What they saw was unforgettable:
“Hey, Mack, you American? They didn’t know because he looked like one but had no dog tags. He looked up at them with madness in his eyes, but also with a pathetic sadness. “Jesus, how how long you been here, Mister?”
He looked down at a fish on a spit and didn’t answer. “Look at ‘im, he’s cooked. Let’s get him aboard and up to the medical ship. We don’t have the fuel for anything else unless we can make base somewhere close like Mindoro.”
His life became a picture show, like a photographer was controlling what he saw: the sky, a white interior of a wooden vessel that bucked in the waves, the wall when he turned his head to vomit, then the sky again as he was taken from the boat to a stretcher carried by four men and then inside where hanging light bulbs with steel shades above reflected into his burned eyes.
Still later, a nurse looking down at him and then several doctors. He could hear them saying “…intestinal parasites, probably dengue, who knows what else.”
“…emetine hydrochloride, penicillin, sulfaguanidine. Never seen anyone this bad.”
“He’s too weak. That’s too much, it will kill him.”
And finally, “He’s definitely going to die without them.”
More pictures. Loaded onto a medical ship, taken below, placed in isolation. A partition was all that meant. The lights in the overhead were out in his corner, as if they thought rest would help. Al Schmidt, mad with trauma and a high fever, knew it was too late.
More voices: “… said something about being at the Leyte battle but his voice is damaged. Well that puts him on that island for seven months. I don’t know if we can save him, but he will never spend another day in uniform. We failed this man. We’ve failed lots of our men. Women too.”
He saw through a screen of tears that the doctor had just uttered his epitaph. It was too much to bear. His eyes closed.