Joseph Lanciotti was a fifteen year old, setting pins in the local bowling alley of Lodi, New Jersey on Sunday, Dec 7, 1941. The news of the attack at Pearl Harbor turned the world upside down for  most Americans, especially the boys in his neighborhood close to draft age.  In his courageous memoir, A Timid Marine: Surrender to Combat Fatigue, Lanciotti tells us that for him the likelihood of fighting was still years away — but those years came quickly.  By the fall of 1945 he was at Parris Island, Marine Corps boot camp.  By April 1 of 1945 he was landing on the jagged coral shores of Okinawa, one raw recruit in the largest amphibious operation of human history.

The power of the book comes from the simplicity of the telling.  Though Lanciotti is clearly able to express himself, and from his literary allusions is better read than most, this is not a crafted, symmetrical memoir.  It reads, in some ways, like a connected series of accounts told according to the Public Broadcasting Storycorps conventions — plain, spontaneous recollections of people and experiences in a person’s life.  The book is roughly divided into three sections.  The first, at boot camp, is a fairly standard account of the experience.  If Styron’s A Long March is a touchstone for all these, Lanciotti doesn’t embarrass himself.  His is pure personal experience, unfiltered as fiction and set off somewhat by his  admission of early problems with authority.  As a sentry at a military plane crash on the east coast, he falls asleep and gets 8 days in the brig. The shame of being caught by veterans of Guadalcanal fighting was worse for him than actual brig time – which brought a measure of respect and solidarity with others.

The central, and most moving part of the book is of the fighting on Okinawa and his own  “crack up,” walking away from the constant shelling, gripped by the fear of dying and sight of body parts of friend and enemy scattered all around him. 

Even though he says at the beginning,

The truth is that no one, especially one who has not been in a war, can really describe what occurs on a battlefield adequately, to convey its utter waste and horror.  Even those who witnessed it personally can’t use the words to exactly describe it as it was  … but if you shared a foxhole during combat for one night , words would not be necessary to explain anything to you…

he does a good job of describing it.  The landing is on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945.  Kamikaze planes  planes “swarm like malignant mosquitoes … flying through the hail of tracer bullets.  We cheer when one is shot down and curse when one hits an American ship.”  From the ships thousands upon thousands of rockets are fired, swarms of American planes fly over, dropping bombs and shooting rockets.  All this prior to the Marines landing.   The landing itself, contrary to expectations, was unopposed.  The Japanese had moved up into the hills and down into caves and Okinawan burial vaults.  Finally Lanciotti sees his first enemy dead:

 “A group of puppet-like Asian kids, smooth shaven except for wisps of hair on chins and cheeks, their heads  broken open by bullets exposing a gray puddle of brains that leaked down and smeared their faces into their opened eyes.”

A night march in darkness is so complete that friend and enemy are indistinguishable. Men collapse from the strain, from the weight of their loads. They slip on gravel and roll down the slopes.   Hunger and thirst are intense.  Patrols are sent out  to “attract enemy eye balls and fire and see what the reaction was.”

Psychologically being at the point (of a patrol) was nerve wracking.  You felt the eyes of the enemy were on you even if they were not.  You imagined the sights of the rifle were on you and that any moment they would be squeezing off a shot that would tear into your body.  You anticipated the burn of the round in your back or belly, you knew if it hit your head you would not know the next second of life.

He is honest as he looks back at what he was:

There are few things as terrifying as an eighteen year old boy dressed in a fatigue uniform, a steel helmet on his head, two slings of ammunition across his cheat… walking towards you slowly and deliberately.  You fear all the armament and ammunition he carries, but there is something else that should make you extremely anxious as he approaches.  The few sprigs of hair growing on his face is the face of youth, and he has been told by some authority to destroy you and by god, he will, unless he is killed or overcome with fear.

I know, because I was one of them…

And despite his disclaimer that no words can tell us about war, he is going to try.   “I intend to grab you by the scruff of the neck and stick your nose into the reality of it.”  And he does that.

 Most courageously he speaks of his surrender to fear.  It came after his best friend was killed, and many were wounded; it came as he imagined the young Japanese soldiers pinned down as he was, and the Okinawans crushed between the two armies with no safe place to go.

I had reached my breaking point, my time to surrender.

I stood up so the whole world could see me under the surreal light of the flares.  Men were shouting for me to “get down get down, you stupid, fucking bastard, get down.”

We were all afraid and the fear made us angry and profane.  But I was happy now and unafraid.  For the first time in many days. I had surrendered and was ready to end my war.  I was going to leave this madness.  If both sides would join me, it would all be over.  But they were too brave to surrender and did not know how.

I began to walk away from the insanity, exposing myself to death by standing while under heavy fire and going for a casual walk to the rear.  I shuffled towards what I believed to be the safe, rear area dragging my rifle by its muzzle.  I was headed where there was less noise, less pain and less fear.

Safe in the tents of the triage area and somewhat settled by being away from the shelling and in the presence of women nurses still, when he tries to eat, he gags:

When I put a forkful into my mouth I could not swallow.  I had the vision of eating human flesh, bits of human parts, a finger, a piece of brain swarming with maggots…

Others were with him in the tents

We were all like little animals afraid of being abused.  We did not talk. We did not trust each other, and we were ashamed of being there without wounds that bled.

After several days of hospitalization close to the front he is returned to his unit and finally, the battle over, is shipped to China and out of any more fighting.  He spends his last 18 months or so in Tsingtao, China, part of a Marine force  to show a presence and thereby somewhat slow the advance of communist forces.  His sensitivity to others and a nonconformist curiosity put him in touch with local Chinese and the remnants of a White Russian colony — refugees 30 years earlier from the Russian revolution.  Though he shows no inclination to do so, interesting stories could have been written of these acquaintances. His first experience of love – but not love making- with a shy Chinese girl is particularly promising.

He ends the book, published in 2005 when he was approaching 80, with a summary of his life after military service, education under the GI Bill, marriage, two children and his happiness, disturbed every morning by news from the war in Vietnam.  “Every morning the list of the dead was increased … and I told my wife I was ashamed for being so happy.”

I knew what those numbers meant.  They were not just numbers. They were shattered dreams and lives, not only of the men killed, but also the lives of thousands of people who loved them.  We were existing during a time of insane human sacrifice of young men by a government that did not have an acceptable reason, or valid explanation.

 Despite his own fear, that of the civilians on Okinawa, caught between Japanese and Americans, is heavy in his mind.

“The terror and suffering of civilians goes mostly unrecorded.  One can only imagine what it was like for them.  The killing and wounding of children, the young nurses, old men and women were cruel tragedies that have been mostly forgotten. “

In a ruminative, somewhat wandering ending, Lanciotti traces his White Russian friends from Tsingtao to Washington state, he tells how a comrade from the Okinawa fighting, and his wife, coped with his missing leg. He worries about the invisible injuries of those coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, recalling that according to Army figures 1,393,000 American soldiers in WW II had been treated for combat fatigue.  37 percent were discharged for psychiatric reasons.

We don’t know why Lanciotti wrote A Timid Marine: Surrender to Combat Fatigue, or how long it took him. He doesn’t tell us if it was a  long term nagging need or was impelled by the immediate present — the news from Iraq echoing into his months on Okinawa or simply the weight of age, urging his witness before his time had passed.  He is not defensive or aggrieved by his psychic injuries.  He makes no claim to having suffered long term, nightmarish PTSD, as we have heard so much about lately.  His ‘combat fatigue’  seems to have passed and left him in relatively good health, which is all the more reason to wonder why he wrote the book — to “come out of the closet” so to speak.  All the more reason to think his confession courageous.

Clearly, the question of why he walked away that day stayed with him.   He does not tell us of besetting nightmares, night sweats or family searing rages.  In fact, he speaks of happiness.  There is however, ‘”an enduring sense of shame. I had saved my life by cracking up. …Still I hear the voice of the young psychiatrist asking me, “Are you a coward?””

He doesn’t analyze this deeply, perhaps by disposition, perhaps by inability.  Perhaps he writes simply to say, ‘this happened to me.  It happened to tens of thousands, hundreds, over a million.  This happened to us, it is happening now, and it will happen as long as wars are brought upon us.  This is a cost that can be estimated, and must be, before nations engage in fighting for position and power continents away.’  He is no polemicist, in fact sort of the opposite. He writes quietly, his descriptive ability is woven in with reflective despair — at all that went unlearned from the war he had witnessed. He is a kind and thoughtful man saying to those who will listen that this much is known:

There is no such thing as getting used to combat … Each man up there knows that at any moment he may be killed, a fact kept constantly before his mind by the sight of the dead and mutilated men around him.  Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure … psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds.

“Those of us who surrender to the horror,” he says “would question ourselves morally for the rest of our lives.”

For readers who read to understand the human experience, stories like Lanciotti’s — confessing an injury most try to hide in deep shame– come few and far between.  Stories of manly courage, movies of derring-do, shape the consciousness of men around the world; he refers to their influence on him and his friends several times.  It is good to have this small testimony among them. Perhaps more will follow and help make less slippery the slope to armed combat for falsified and obscure reasons.