Buzz Bissinger - The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II

Drawing by John McLaughry of jungle at Bougainville, 1944. Courtesy of the Estate of John J. McLaughry.

To Neal McCallum

Veteran of the 6th Marine Division and Okinawa. Sailor. Scholar. Student of history. First responder to my endless questions. Best of all my great friend.

M y father was a marine at Okinawa.

He was drafted in 1944 during his freshman year at Dartmouth College. He told me he had actually been taken by the navy but had enlisted in the United States Marine Corps because he did not want to die on board a ship. Knowing even as a kid a smidgen of the history of the marines in the Pacific, that struck me as the strangest logic I had ever heard. But he was suited to the corps. He was tough, an excellent football player at guard in high school despite being only five foot nine and 165 pounds, once separating his shoulder and having his coach pop it right back on the sidelines.

He never talked about Okinawa except for little odds and ends: being in a foxhole at the end of the campaign with a little guy from Brooklyn who prayed a lot, dying for a bottle of booze, coming down with something, and getting shot with a needle bigger than his body. My sister, Annie, and I sometimes marched around the apartment with my dad, the cadence sounding like hup-a-left hup-a-left hup-a-left left right left. He made it fun, as other marines who had been at Okinawa did to avoid the irreversible scars that lay underneath. I did ask him once if he had used his rifle there. He said he had. I asked him if hed hit anything. He said hed had no idea and hadnt been about to find out.

That was all he said, going outside to smoke a cigarette when the subject of Okinawa came up. It was his private space; to ask further would have been to violate it. I know he had seen things he could not bear, so at odds with his humanity and pacifism. He hated guns. But he did what he did because there was no other choice. Duty back then was not up for discussion. I will not embellish. He was not wounded. I cant say for sure how much action he saw. But I know he was there, and thats enough for me and should be for the rest of us. He was a hero because he was in the war. He was not a war hero.

When I embarked on The Mosquito Bowl in 2017 with the eighty-two-day Battle of Okinawa in World War II integral to the book, it was not because of my father. It was not some search-and-discovery story. I had no idea what regiment or battalion and company he had been in and had never searched for information.

As I was doing a book proposal, I looked up the military records of the men I might be writing about. Because many of them had died at Okinawa, I wasnt sure I could do the kind of reporting that was necessary. My other nonfiction books had been based on being there, so-called immersion journalism. This was the opposite. I wanted the men to come alive as flesh and bone before their deaths. I went back and forth on whether I could really get to their core and do them the justice they deserved. As I conducted my inner debate, the irony of researching the careers of others but not my fathers seemed crazy. I wanted to respect his privacy, but I realized I had to know.

I hate the use of the word destiny as a force that leads you to something. The only destiny I can guarantee is that I will eat the last cookie in the jar late at night and then lie to my wife, Lisa, about it.

A significant part of The Mosquito Bowl deals with the 4th Regiment of the 6th Marine Division, which fought at Okinawa. Because online records can be spotty, I assumed I would never find his name. But Ancestry.com makes it effortless, and records are remarkably accurate. It took me minutes.

There was my father, Harry G. Bissinger, on a muster roll attached to the 1st Battalion of the 4th Regiment of the 6th Marine Division as a private. It was a rifle company.

In other words, he was in the very same regiment and battalion that are so central to The Mosquito Bowl. Because many of those I wrote about were great college football players and my dad was a great sports fan, I have no doubt that he knew of them and maybe met some of them.

It was that discovery that made me realize I had to do it; it was destiny, after all. I would be writing exclusively about other marines, but I knew that I would be writing about my dad.

He left us far too soon, dying at the age of seventy-five roughly six weeks after 9/11, invaded by leukemia that devoured him four months after diagnosis. I so terribly wish he was here for so many reasons, a man of incredible charisma, charm, and humor who wasnt above taking a drink or two or three because thats the way his generation rolled. He was one of those rare people you always wanted to be around. For all his ebullience with others, he was so very hard on himself. He rarely took pride in anything he did despite all of his accomplishments, one of which was being a marine.

I so terribly want to tell him how proud I am of his duty on those killing fields. The book is my way of doing it.

A s October bled into November and then December in the iron lung of heat and humidity, the greatest enemy of the 6th Marine Division on the island of Guadalcanal in the fall of 1944 was boredom. Boredom led to anxiety; anxiety led to sights and sounds and smells you could not shed of shit and blood and once-human carcasses turning black with bloat or green with flies or white with a million squirming maggots, which led to fear, and fear never relented no matter how much you had already witnessed and how numb you already felt. The military was encumbered by a thousand rules, but for the veteran marine there was one that stood out, the rule of three: if you had already survived two campaigns in the war, you would not survive a third. Your luck, which any soldier would tell you was the only difference between life and death, would run out.

The marines of the 6th Division were from every state and region: the Brooklyn boys who spoke their own patois and should have been in prison but could hot-wire any army vehicle and therefore were heroes; the southerners, who liked to kill; the stoic midwesterners; the self-collected westerners; the Ivy League easterners, who could fight like hell with a little more smarts. They came together in the great pot of World War II and learned that their differences were far less than their commonalities. They trusted one another. They learned respect for one another. Most of the time they liked one anotherexcept when they didnt and fought it out. It was the only sustained period in American history when socioeconomic difference was no difference (as long as you were white).

Most of the roughly twenty thousand marines of the newly formed division were veterans of at least one battle. The longer they were in combat, the more they knew when to hold em or fold em or go all in. They used judgment, as much as they could in war. The ones who were impulsively brave were too often the ones who did not come home. But the untested ones were different, just out of basic and field training, some naturally terrified but others eager and excited. Once they had arrived at Guadalcanal in the southwestern Pacific for training, there was a certain amount of swagger, as though they had been in the war since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The military liked the young ones, seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen, too confident against death to know any better and therefore willing to do anything. They had the excess that comes with youth, all of it just a grand adventure, a way off the dimly lit lamppost corner where the shadows never varied. They wanted to be in the marines because of the great tales of the South Pacific they had read as kids, only to end up here on this jungle-rotted shithole of Guadalcanal, where the million-crab march to the ocean took place with regularity, infesting tents, boots, and fart sacks.