Americans at War

GIVE US THIS DAY (254 pp.)--Sidney Stewart --Norton ($3.50).

THE LAST PARALLEL (333 pp.)--Martin Russ --Rinehart ($3.95).

A soldier's courage has become a stranger and subtler virtue since the days when Spartan mothers clapped their sons off to the wars with the stark injunction: "Return with your shield or on it." In the jungle retreat of Bataan, it became necessary to resist in a seemingly lost cause. On the frostbitten ridges of Korea, it became necessary to carry a stalemate to its logical inconclusion. In these tragic endurance contests, new kinds of American courage were bred, and that courage is celebrated in these two remarkable, non-fiction accounts by first-time authors. Give Us This Day, by Army Private Stewart, is the more powerful and moving. The Last Parallel, by Marine Sergeant Russ, is more cocky and exuberant; neither is for the reader who is queasy of mind or stomach.

Death March. Draftee Sidney Stewart was fresh from the States and stationed in Manila when the Japs started bombing the Philippines. So civilian-minded were his fellow soldiers that they mustered for departure to the front lines in oxfords rather than combat boots. So garrison-minded were their commanders that they issued orders while the bombs were falling that ties would not be worn and officers no longer saluted. Author Stewart catches the quickening tempo of panic. As he and a buddy ordered a drink at the posh Manila Hotel bar, they heard a girl with a brittle laugh telling her escort: "I wired Mom that it would be just a fabulous adventure. Fabulous."

Four months later, on Bataan, the day came when ammunition was spent, rations were gone, the last officer killed. It was time to burn the flag and surrender. "The flames licked up through the red and white stripes toward the blue. I noticed that all the men were crying, and I could feel the tears as they fell on my cheeks. I gritted my teeth, almost hating America. Hating America who had left us here." They expected the worst, and it soon came. The Bataan Death March has never been more graphically described in print. In a berserk frenzy, the Japanese bayoneted and shot the fallen, walked alongside the marchers with impaled American heads on their bayonets. On the second afternoon, as the bone-weary, mouth-parched prisoners waited alongside a cold, bubbling stream hoping for their first drink of water, one of the men broke ranks and buried his face in the stream. "A Japanese noncom ran up, unsheathing his sword . . . I heard a quick, ugly swish. Before I could realize what had happened, I saw the head roll away in the stream."

In the twelve days and nights of the Death March, 17,000 American and Filipino soldiers died. In the next 20 days, at Camp O'Donnell, 23,000 more died. Stewart's chronicle becomes a saga of almost miraculous survival in the face of starvation, brutality and the terrors of the mind. The high point of horror: the fetid hold of a Japanese transport where thirst-crazed prisoners, so tightly packed that they had to stand on their own dead, claw each other to death for a drink of blood.

What enabled Stewart to survive and keep his sanity? The loyalty of his closest buddies and a mute faith in God, best exemplified for Stewart in the selfless devotion of a priest, Father Bill Cummings, who first said, "There are no atheists in the foxholes," and who died while saying the Lord's Prayer over the dying, his very last words those of Stewart's title--"Give us this day."

If Sidney Stewart endured war like a plague, Martin Russ resolved to pass it like a test. Russ, too, was 21 and fresh from St. Lawrence University when he joined the Marines, began keeping a day-to-day journal. What The Last Parallel lacks in art, it makes up in a jagged sense of immediacy. As the first Chinese rifle fire slapped against the sandbags of his bunker outpost, Russ and a fellow marine "hugged the ground and laughed like a couple of idiots. We laughed, I suppose, because there was ACTUALLY A MAN OUT THERE WHO WAS TRYING TO kill US."

New War Generation. For all his newfangled, semi-bullet-proof vest of spun glass and nylon, Author Russ was in a war that was part French-and-Indian ambush tactics and part World War I trench fighting. Long before Russ joined the outfit on New Year's Day 1953, the Korean war had become a stalemate of dug-in positions. Massive mortar and artillery barrages confined both sides to night patrols, reconnaissance, ambush or recovery of the dead. With a certain Byronesque recklessness, Russ volunteered for them all. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection for January, The Last Parallel is peculiarly fascinating for its creation of a new war generation in print, a kind of fighting man who could go into combat spouting bop talk, read the plays of Sophocles between barrages, and sniff heroin for kicks when away from the MLR (Main Line of Resistance).

The book's portrait of a marine in the making suggests that Author Russ subscribes to the cultish concept of the Corps as a breed of supersoldiers. Once in a while, the swagger of transparent egoism royally fouls up Author Russ's prose: "I'm also not going to think too hard about why I volunteer for everything. And I'm not going to think too. I'm not going to think. I'm not going to. I'm not going. I'm not. I'm. I."

Fortunately, self-conscious passages such as these are as rare as caviar on the MLR. The humbler truth contained in both The Last Parallel and Give Us This Day is that America is blessed in her fighting men. Of them, as of the fallen Athenians whom Pericles mourned more than 2,000 years before, it might well be said that "esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, [they did] not weigh too nicely the perils of war."

Gabrielle died quietly on a spring day, slipping away so imperceptibly that she seemed to have made her "sign of love upon the air up to the very last minutes." Her mother and father looked only once at the frail, empty corpse and then left, "wheeling a baby carriage piled high with books, dolls, toys, two suitcases, and no baby . . ." Author Gabrielson has written this cry from the heart with courage and competence. It may well bring a measure of consolation to other grieving parents. And, to all readers, it will be a signal affirmation of the human spirit that succeeds, against great odds, in finding the solace of life in death.

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