Young Kids: Tell Them

[The following was written by combat correspondent Captain Earl J. Wilson, after experiencing Tarawa with the 2nd Marine Division.]

You take a lot of young kids, see, get them from the farms and the cities while they're young and strong and fearless and do not weigh the scales of chance. Bring them in and dress them in uniforms and give them guns and tell them of the glories of the past. Tell them vaguely of the promise of the future. But thinking's no good because when you think you don't act with the emotions, so teach 'em to shoot, to hike and run and hate the enemy.

Teach at a time when they would be going to dances in junk heap cars with writing on the sides or thinking about going to college because wouldn't it be fine to be a doctor. Take 'em when their eyes are bright, their muscles strong and rippling. Grind 'em, grind 'em into the pattern, make the walk and talk alike and fit the pattern. Ship over the water to some foreign land where they can go to town and hang around the dance halls and meet the girls and get drunk on bootleg whiskey. Take 'em out in the country and make 'em toe the mark, make them land on foreign beaches and train and train and train until they know their weapons and the way to hide in a hole amidst the mud and cold.

Then you are ready, take them now for they are ready. Take them on a ship where they are crowded like animals in a swelling hold for night after night and make them eat out of pans. Let them grasp at the few pleasures left, let them read the old torn magazines, let them hear the few old records, let them play cards, let them talk of home sometime. But be tough because now is the time to take them over the side on a swaying net into a plunging boat, now is the time for the sky is clearing and on that thin line over there are other young men with other guns in their hands waiting to kill or be killed.

Now the wait, now the huddling together in the bottom of the steamy, fume ridden boat, now some are sick from the crowded boat and puke on the floor, but no matter, now. Take 'em on the beach, scratch your maps and order the pins to move in on that sector and they move in because they can't move any other way, and with the shells and bullets tearing the young strong rippling muscles to quivering chunks of flesh, and now while the flash is forever dimming those bright flashing eyes, and now, by God when the shrapnel is blowing the guts out of men all around 'em and while they are sinking and breathing their last gasping breath on a stinking piece of ground that nobody wants in the middle of the Pacific not even big enough for a good crop of corn, but good enough for a thousand of these men to be blown apart on its beaches or to drown in its waters and for three thousand more to be marked for life by empty sleeves and dangling flapping trouser legs, now tell those left what it's all about, tell them why it's going on and why it will go on, tell them what you're gonna do about it, tell their mothers and their sweethearts, tell the wives who have waited for so long, and for what, any empty space in the bed beside them. Tell them... tell them.