author's note. I've had this story kicking around in my head for ages, and decided that this was the perfect time to sit down and write it, while I am literally in the middle of applying for my teaching license and trying to find a job. Smart!
So, I've always found Lt. Mac to be one of the most interesting characters from the Sledge episodes. I tend to view him as the inverse of Lt. Dike from Band of Brothers: where Dike is likeable but useless on the battlefield, Mac has an abrasive personality but is apparently quite competent. Dike is always well clothed and well rested, and Mac is covered with the same filth as the rest of his men. That tells you a lot. Also, I've been saying for years, if they really wanted us not to like Lt. Mac, they should have cast someone less fresh-faced and adorable to play him (what, I'm old but my eyes still work). Also also? The awkwardly tender way he handles that baby at the end of ep. 9 breaks my heart every time.
I am aware that there were a lot of things about this character in the books that didn't make it into the series, but I'm basing this fic only on what we see in episodes 7/9/10. The only things I took from real life are that Mac's first name was Robert, and he was a combat veteran who got his commission through Officer Candidate School. As always, no disrespect to the real men and women who experienced these things.
They had warned him it would be like this, in Officer Candidate School. They told him he wouldn't ever really fit in anywhere, a man without a country. The other officers would look down on him, because he'd been an enlisted man and he didn't have a college degree and he sure as hell hadn't gone to West Point. The enlisted men would resent him, because he'd been one of them and he hadn't been content, hadn't known his place and traded in his combat experience and whatever grudging respect he'd earned for shiny pair of Lieutenant's bars. Traitor.
Mac doesn't care. He didn't enlist in the Marines to win some sort of popularity contest, and he didn't put himself through twelve weeks of OCS hell to be named Homecoming King. He's not a genius like his cousin Charlie; he's not anything special, and he's pretty sure the instructors expected him to be one of the two-thirds who wash out because he's twenty-one but looks about seventeen. And the more they don't believe in him, the harder he works.
The only thing he really has is toughness, and even that's not so rare, being one of a few million young men who'd starved and scrabbled their way through the Great Depression. Mac had actually gained weight in boot camp, because God knows his Ma tried her best but she had half-a-dozen mouths to feed besides him. And that's why he's doing it, really. Because that shiny officer's commission comes with a hefty bump in pay. More if he dies. Which he's not planning on doing.
Mac doesn't care that his men don't like him. That's not his problem. They'd dislike anyone who showed up on Pavuvu just then, the unwanted replacement for a beloved but very dead CO. He doesn't need them to think well of him. He just needs them to not die.
Sledge is going to be a problem. He can tell that right away.
They've sent Mac to meet up with his new platoon, and the timing really couldn't be more unfortunate - they've just come from the battlefield, not even time to change their clothes, and here's Mac in a uniform so clean and starched it actually physically hurts. A couple of days R&R would have gone a long way in softening the men's attitude towards him, towards anyone not all battered and beat to hell at that point, but the Marines aren't known for putting out the suggestion box at times like these. Or ever.
They're limping off the transports in shredded uniforms and untied boots, with that utterly dead expression to their faces that Mac absolutely remembers because it hasn't been that long. And that's where the United States Marine Corps makes its second mistake - they've stationed a bunch of nurses, in spotless white uniforms and perfect pin-curls, right where the men are streaming back onto the beaches. Paper cups and pitchers of juice like it's a Sunday school picnic, and if anyone had asked Mac - which, again, they're not - maybe get these men used to being around human beings again, period, before you try them on women.
Most of the men accept their allotment of juice silently and shuffle out of the way. Mac can't really get a read on them; he has a secret, desperate stab of fear that he's never going to learn all their names and won't that just make them hate him even more? But the one with the cherry red hair catches his eye, because he's never really seen hair that color before, and because the redheaded private is just staring staring staring at the pretty blond nurse who's got the misfortune to be in his sights.
Not staring at her like he'd like to go to bed with her, because honestly these men are too worn out to be randy at the moment (in twelve hours, Mac expects the situation to be totally different; he's well-prepared to issue reminders that the nurses are very much off limits). More like, staring at her like she's personally responsible for whatever hell he's just been through on the field of battle. Brave as he knows she must be, the poor girl is visibly wilting under his gaze. And Mac finds himself thinking of his sister Janie - she's not a nurse, but she's a volunteer with the Red Cross, and the thought of some man just staring her down like that, like she burned down his house and pissed on the ashes, just doesn't sit right with him.
"Okay, Marine." Mac tries to play it off like it's a joke, keep it light-hearted like they're at a cocktail party and not some Godforsaken tropical hole. "You've had your look-see, now move along."
Sledge (of course he doesn't find out his name until later) fixes him with an absolutely withering glare, and Mac lets his smile bleed off. But at least Sledge isn't glaring at the nurse anymore. She throws Mac a look of gratitude, and he nods in acknowledgement, and that's the end of that but he knows that won't be the end of his troubles with his men.
It seems like whenever there's a tough call to be made, Sledge is there to second-guess him, eyes silently accusing as if Mac is doing this all for sport. The time with the Japanese prisoner, for one - he knows it's a touchy situation, touchy like trying to share a hammock with a porcupine, because most of them would blow themselves sky-high rather than be taken captive.
"Do you speak Japanese?" Mac wants to know, more out of curiosity than anything else. Because he seriously doubts they're going to get anything in the way of useful information.
"I'm an intelligence officer," the other man retorts, and in a way he doesn't answer Mac's question and in another way he does. After the war, Mac will get a lot of mileage out of this little exchange. Do you speak Japanese? I'm an intelligence officer. Hilarious.
He's sure not laughing now. This whole time, they've largely been fighting an enemy that's invisible, dug in and faceless. Mac very much understands the desire to do violence to this one representative of the whole damn country of Japan. To exact revenge for every single one of the friends he's lost, what the whole country has lost, all the way back to Pearl Harbor.
But somebody's got to be the grown-up in this situation, and damned if Mac hasn't drawn the short straw. He tells off Mister Clean Uniform, Army Intelligence loud enough for his entire platoon to hear. Let them know he's on their side in this little government-sponsored pissing match. Army intelligence. What a joke.
But he's got to tell off Sledge too, because he's had it drilled into his head that this stuff is important. Maybe the Germans don't respect the Geneva Convention, and the Japanese sure made their feelings clear in the Philippines, but they're Americans and they're not going to be roughing up the few prisoners they can get their hands on. At any rate, Mac doubts the situation is going to come up again, and it never does.
A few nights later, though, rain pouring into the neck of his poncho and down his back and into his skivvies, and isn't that comfortable, Mac calmly informs Sledge that a dead body in his hole is no reason to screw up their defensive perimeter. He's rewarded with another one of Sledge's you-kicked-my-puppy looks. Sure, Mac thinks, because I came in here three months ago and littered this island with corpses. Just plopped them into the ground like seed corn, specifically to ruin your day, Sledge.
Mac allows himself to be irritated about it for maybe thirty seconds, then returns to the task at hand.
There's really only one day, one day in the whole damn war, that Mac is truly afraid.
They're throwing themselves at the sheer rock walls after staring at them for more than a week, and things are going about as well as can be expected, which is to say not very well at all. There's not really any way to avoid shooting at the civilians, and Mac is pretty sure he will hate the Japanese forever for putting them in that position, but that's nothing compared to when the real fun begins.
The fighting has gone quiet for a minute, and Mac hears the familiar thud of artillery, but the thing that absolutely sends ice-cold fear skittering down his spine is that the shells are coming from the wrong direction. There's a moment of complete, utter disbelief and then -
"SHORT ROUND," he screams, louder than he's ever screamed anything in his life, and he knows it's not going to make a damn bit of difference. Artillery is well out of shouting range, and that's by design.
"PULL BACK," Mac screams, because it's his job to keep these men alive even if he can't trust the United States Government or the Marine Corps or the Artillery Division to share that goal. "MOVE MOVE MOVE!" Mac screams his throat hoarse and keeps on screaming, physically hauling men to their feet by the neck of their uniforms. The barrage is kicking up little pieces of rock from the cliff face, peppering his arms and face with tiny cuts that he doesn't even notice until the next day, when he shaves and all those little wounds open up again.
Back in the relative safety of their position, some of the men are puking, some cursing, some sobbing at the sheer stupidity of it all. Mac wants to do all three, but can't let the men know that he's just absolutely flat-out terrified. He can't stop shaking, though, and pulls his poncho on to give himself some kind of cover. Most of the men around him are lighting up cigarettes to calm their nerves, but Mac doesn't smoke, never really got the taste for it. Instead, he is an avid and dedicated gum chewer. While he waits for his hands to stop trembling, he chomps his way through an entire pack of Wrigley's like most people would chain smoke, until his jaw aches but the rest of his body is mostly okay.
The worst part is knowing that no one will ever be held responsible. There will be no formal apology, no reprimand in anyone's service record. Just the equivalent of a shrug, oh well, what are you gonna do. His platoon lost seven men that day because someone couldn't tell the difference between a 3 and an 8 on a map. And Mac's the lucky one who gets to write their families.
Sledge has a chip on his shoulder, but Shelton is just straight crazy. Strange, though, that the two of them balance each other out. Most of the time.
Mac is well aware that Shelton is running some kind of poncho-related scam. He lets it go, because he figures it's the normal hazing that you always give to the new guys. He's been on both the giving and the receiving end of that relationship, and it's pretty unlikely to do any actual harm. Mac knows that if he tries to shut it down, they'll resent him for interfering - and keep right on doing it. He figures Snafu will ease up eventually, anyway.
Mac put Hamm with Sledge and Shelton on purpose, because he figures Hamm will mellow the two of them out a little bit. Peck he can't really get a read on, but Hamm has the makings of a good Marine - he's smart and tough and seems to be more or less normal.
Well. Look how great that turned out.
They're crossing the valley again, and Mac is straining his ears for the sound of traitorous artillery, but none comes. It's surreal, like watching a movie where the picture and sound aren't quite joined up. They have tanks and flamethrowers and all sorts of equipment that would have really come in handy a month ago, if anyone in Washington could have thrown them a bone. Still, this is the first time since Mac went to OCS that anything has gone more or less according to plan.
Mac sees Sledge and Snafu duck into that little ruined hut, and he wants to tell them to wait because Mac needs to clear it first. Could be booby-trapped; that wouldn't surprise him one bit. It's too late to warn the two of them, but the hut doesn't blow up either, at least not right away.
His ears are ringing so loud that Mac doesn't even hear it right away. He's trained himself to pick out the sound of a sniper, or to triangulate the thump of a far-off artillery gun, and what he's hearing now doesn't fit. Is it… Is it a baby? That can't be.
But it is. Snafu and Sledge are just standing there like statues, maybe trying to decide if they're going to smash the baby's head into the wall but certainly not doing anything useful.
"What the hell's the matter with you two," Mac says. A statement, not a question.
He's never held a baby before in his life. When Charlie and Abby had their kid, he was on furlough and took a train out to St. Louis to see them. Abby never could get him to pick the baby up, which she thought was hilarious - you're not going to break him, you know. All Mac knows is that the thought of leaving this baby here is suddenly and absolutely intolerable. So he squats down in the hay and turns the baby over, and it doesn't appear to be injured - just very, very pissed off - and he gingerly takes it into his arms.
The baby is so light, no more than a bundle of sticks, and it's flailing its little arms and legs and rooting desperately for a nipple. Mac thinks the baby is probably dehydrated - how many days has it been since they bombed that hut? Too many. He wonders if he should give it a drink of water, but his canteen is filthy and he figures the baby probably doesn't need dysentery on top of everything else.
Outside the hut, a lieutenant in a suspiciously clean uniform holds out his arms to relieve Mac of his burden, and Mac shakes his head. Not on your life, buddy. Mac is no saint, but he knows damn well what these rear echelon guys are doing with civilians, like they're afraid the war will be over before they've had their fun.
Mac holds the squalling bundle a little more closely to his chest, and he doesn't realize it but the murderous look on his face warns off anyone else who would try to take it. He picks his way back down the valley, through the rubble and the piles of corpses, which isn't terribly easy without using his hands for balance. Funny that they spent all this time trying to gain that tiny bit of ground, and Mac is ceding that territory already. And that's when it hits him: he's the one who put the shells on that hut. Sure, HQ ordered it and Sledge calculated the azimuth, but it was ultimately Mac's call. You made this baby an orphan, he tells himself. You feel good about that?
War really is hell, he thinks. They weren't kidding about that.
A mile or two behind the front lines, Mac finds what he's been looking for, a Jeep with a Red Cross logo on it and a couple of competent-looking medics. They probably won't kill this baby for sport, at least not while he's watching. They aren't exactly equipped for baby care, but there's a mostly empty supply crate that will do for a makeshift crib. One of the medics takes the baby, looking like he's actually ever held one before, and the poor creature didn't weigh that much but suddenly Mac's arms feel very empty.
That night, Mac sits down for mess with a whole table of lieutenants, something that hasn't ever actually happened since he got his commission. He used to think that this was something he wanted, to be accepted by the other officers, to fit in. But it's hard to overlook his exhaustion and filth, sitting next to men in uniforms so new that they still have the factory creases. The new guys are all talking about their 'kills,' laughing and joking about picking men off like it's one of those duck shooting games at the county fair.
"What about you?" some rear echelon officer asks, like Mac should be grateful that they're condescending to include him in the conversation. "How many kills you got?"
Mac pictures the mother in that ruined hut, eyes frozen open and throat torn out, and the food turns to sawdust in his mouth. "I didn't really count," he mumbles, and hunches over his dinner. The conversation moves on without him.
Mac wishes he were eating with his men. They don't talk about Okinawa like it was a big damn joke, because they lived through it; they didn't just show up at the end, shoot a few emaciated civilians, and congratulate themselves on their heroics. He wants to be with the enlisted men but he knows they won't welcome him either, so he focuses on the chow. It's not K rations, at least. Isn't that nice.
The war in Europe has been over for more than a month. Hitler's dead and the camps are being liberated. They're just now finding out the full extent of what was going on in places like Auschwitz, and the Stars and Stripes newspaper has a lot of editorials using phrases like "man's inhumanity towards man." They're shocked by the level of depravity to which the Nazi leadership was willing to sink, and Mac wonders what the war in Europe was like, if people over there still have any sensibilities left to be offended.
Okinawa is over and done with, and they've apparently hopped all the islands MacArthur wanted them to hop. There's only one objective left to take: mainland Japan. Mac and his fellow officers know damn well that the invasion of Japan is going to make everything they've suffered so far look like a fart in a hurricane. He sits through briefings and watches men way above his pay grade fiddle around with maps and compasses and grease pencils, and realizes that if ten percent of his men come out of this unscathed then that will be a God damned miracle.
It's a waste. Such a waste. Why did he put himself through seventeen different kinds of hell, trying to keep his men alive and they don't even appreciate the effort, if they're just going to be mown down like so much cannon fodder? All those men who survived D-Day and Bastogne, just hurled onto the Japanese coast with no purpose other than to die?
There's a lot of time to prepare, weapons to clean and new boots to break in, and the men are bored to the point of stupidity. A lot of scuttlebutt going around about the Japan invasion, and Mac doesn't bother to shut it down. Sometimes, stuck in an interminable meeting or waiting in line for chow, Mac wonders about that baby. He never found out if it was a boy or a girl. Is it still alive? Is it clean and warm and taken care of? Mac figures he could probably write to the Red Cross, and they could ask someone who knows someone who knows, but… But. Somehow, it never feels like the right thing to do.
July comes and goes, and Mac studies his sand tables, commits to memory the exact segment of coastline on which he and his battalion are expected to commit mass suicide. He thinks the waiting is going to kill him, because he's already made his peace with the fact that he's not coming out of this one alive. Wishes the top brass would just hurry up already.
Mac can't imagine what they're waiting for, until early August, when they all find out in a big way. An entire Japanese city vaporized, just gone, and another one a few days later. When he hears about the second bomb, Mac's knees start shaking so bad he has to sit down, not with fear but relief. It's a last second stay of execution, and maybe his platoon will live to see 1946, after all.
There's all sorts of speculation, like how many more of these things do we have? Does Hirohito have any, or Stalin? And how does that even work, a whole city taken out with a single bomb? Mac figures he could ask his cousin Charlie, certified genius Charlie, to explain the whole thing. But he knows he never will.
V-J day, and the three or four days after it, are pretty much a blur. Mac doesn't wake up naked in an unfamiliar place, or with any tattoos he doesn't remember getting, and that's more than a lot of Marines can say.
He's pretty sure that he ends things on good terms with Sledge. Not sure why that's important, but it is.
Mac gets married in '46, and they spend all his saved-up pay on a down payment for a nice little two-bedroom house. He's got a good job, and he sleeps in a bed and puts on clean socks every day, and doesn't have to dodge artillery fire, friendly or otherwise. There are men who just can't get comfortable with civilian life, men who wake up screaming every night or drinking themselves stupid every day, but Mac isn't one of them and for that he's grateful.
At the company Christmas party in '47, Mac somehow finds himself at a table with a bunch of guys he doesn't know from Accounts Receivable. He's got a pretty good buzz on already, but the guy on his left is sloshed and wanting to talk about The War. And Mac has a theory that the ones who want to talk about it the most are the ones that didn't see combat. Or worse, like those idiots who showed up the last day in Okinawa, clean and well-fed and picking off whatever was left after the real Marines hurled themselves at that damn cliff for a month. Mac is trying to ignore the guy but his wife is giving him The Look, the one that says you'd better play nice and don't go sulking into your beer again and making me do all the talking.
And Mac loves his wife, and generally wants to keep her happy, so he forces himself not to tune out of the conversation. "Bob here was on Okinawa," his wife is saying. "Weren't you, Bob?"
"Yeah." Mac forces himself to look at the guy from Accounts Receivable. Probably he was a desk jockey during the war; he has that look. "Infantry."
"Hey, me too!" the guy from Accounts Receivable says like they've just found out they were in the same Thursday night bowling league. "'Cept I was artillery."
It's the craziest thing, how Mac's jaw suddenly aches, how he remembers rage-chewing stick after stick of gum so he wouldn't start crying in front of his men, because those were their own damn shells. Mac is a little drunk, but he isn't so drunk that he doesn't know what he's doing. He carefully sets down his beer and sucker-punches the guy from Accounts Receivable, right in the face.
Mac's wife is PISSED.
Mac sobered up real quick, after the punch, but she won't let him drive. He leans his head against the cold window glass, watching the snow come down, listens to his wife tear a strip off of him and doesn't even argue.
"What in the HELL were you thinking, Bob," she begins, angrily throwing the car into gear, and she only becomes more eloquent from there. "Do you have any idea how lucky you are they didn't fire you on the spot? You think we can afford that now, with this baby coming in less than a month? The only reason you still have a job is because I'm so bloated and pathetic-looking, but you're on probation for a year, and you'd better toe the line, mister!"
She keeps it up all the way home, up the driveway and into the house. Mac makes for the fridge, and she must think he's going for the six-pack of beer on the middle shelf, because she physically blocks him, parking herself in front of the appliance. She's honestly kind of adorable, her face flushed with anger, arms crossed and resting on her enormous belly. "Oh no you don't," she warns him. "You've had plenty to drink for one night, buddy."
Mac shakes his head, holds up his throbbing hand. "I just wanted some ice."
His wife is not impressed. "You think you deserve ice, Bob? You've got another think coming."
Somebody else's kid might end up in Juvenile Detention, he thinks, but not theirs. Not with a mother like her to keep it on the straight and narrow. "I'm sorry, babe," Mac says, contrite but also still a little amused. "It won't happen again."
"Damn straight. You mind telling me why you did it? Or don't I get to know?"
He hasn't really talked about his war experiences, but it's not because he's afraid or ashamed. Just that he doesn't see the point of dredging up all that ugliness, smearing mud and filth across their tidy house and their nice marriage. Somehow, Mac had never thought she'd be interested. "Can I have some ice?"
She snorts, and rolls her eyes, but at least she moves away from the fridge, and even goes so far as to give him a dish towel so the ice won't drip all over the linoleum. "Tell me," she says. She taps the side of her head. "I want to know what's going on in there."
His wife is starting a pot of coffee, and Mac thinks, I can do this. He sits down, takes a breath, and starts to talk.
the end.