CHAPTER 19. TOYS OF WAR.

February 19, 1945.

Today, the 5th Marine Division of the 5th Marine Corps of the United States made a landing on Iwo Jima near the long-extinct volcano Mount Suribachi—I was one of those who on this day was supposed to storm that Japanese fortified area: the height of the mountain was 169 meters—I do not know what our human ancestors called Mount Suribachi, but I know for sure what our descendants will call this place… a place of death! Mount Suribachi was an extremely fortified position of our opponents, and therefore the truly glorious US aviation worked constantly, almost continuously, over its spaces: carrying out airstrikes—in this case, an excellent idea, but not all excellent ideas are implemented so perfectly in practice. A good idea is not always the key to victory in military affairs. Our command, which had overcome more than one massive and deadly obstacle during that truly horrifying war, was very well aware of this—from the very morning we felt a certain paternal affection in their address: we were given warm steaks and scrambled eggs for breakfast instead of cold canned food—all this silently, but extremely eloquently, spoke of the fact that many of us would never see the next breakfast again. We prayed.

Human courage—what we are taught from our school desks; what is instilled in us throughout our youth; what we must follow all the way prepared for us—which the military command wrapped our souls with special care a few hours before the landing, in a single moment flew from our hearts, like a thin husk from a round-faced onion at the first gust of a relatively heavy wind, when we just entered the shore of Iwo Jima: as soon as we entered this very inhospitable and extremely unfriendly island, the short words of our officers about strength, victory, and faith immediately reached our consciousness—it was then that I realized for the first time in my life that true strength is in peace, true victory is in peace, and true victory is also in the world! War is not a matter of politics and by no means a matter of law! War is a matter of upbringing! From childhood, our toys were tanks, rockets, and soldiers—from childhood, we are instilled with the idea that we must die… For what? That's a secondary question… Believe! We must believe in our victory, in our strength, but first of all, we must believe in our politicians who started this war! Believe! But what is faith in its essence?! No more and no less than an inner conviction that everything will happen or happen exactly the way a person wants it to! Faith! Aren't our enemies scattering the same words? Is Tadashi Kuribayashi not encouraging his warriors with the same words?!

And so, I am already on the shore of Iwo Jima. There is a weapon in my hands—one of the countless toys of war. I am faced with a choice—I must kill or be killed. A glorious choice, to be sure. I was not presented with such a choice before, when I lived a peaceful life—to buy a Ford or a Chevrolet. Blind fire is being fired from all sides, including naval fire—both one and the other representatives of human nations are dying. The beach is gradually, more and more, filled with bodies. Iwo Jima was no longer washed by the Pacific Ocean—it was washed by human blood: American blood and Japanese blood. They mixed, thereby representing a single liquid connective tissue—the blood of humanity, the blood of the Earth's population, the blood of a rational person… The Japanese have grown into this island, grown with their roots, and therefore we were fighting not with them at all—we were fighting with Iwo Jima, with its terrain, and with the features of its geography. I saw their eyes—they shone like the blade of a Toledo dagger… and their deadly effect was no less! They looked with the greatest contempt at what was the greatest tragedy for us. Human flesh, torn to pieces, human flesh, completely devoid of life, was more like the flesh of children's toys, which, it would seem, were quite willfully broken into pieces by the extremely fidgety hand of a little prankster—war has its own toys. And they are, most often, given away by the smell—the smell of gunpowder and rot. The seriously wounded coughed loudly—the worm of death had not yet gnawed them to the end. They are next to those who no longer have any desires. It is impossible to build a strong building on such a foundation, which consists of that very shaky matter.

Looking around and feeling a frantic horror, I saw that one man had no eyes in his sockets—it was the gaze of death: it was in this abyss that I saw all the gloom, all the darkness, and the hopelessness of hell. Suddenly, in a single moment, the smell of burnt human meat reached my sense of smell—the Japanese began to use flamethrowers. A real slaughter began on the island. No, it wasn't a slaughter—it was a slaughter, where every warrior from one or the other warring side went to the slaughter: a slaughter, in the name of a bright life for future generations. The deceased warriors of America and Japan, with fierce, forever frozen, gazes, were next to each other—the dead fought with the dead, and the living with the living. Many of those who have already learned what is beyond the visible and real world, of course, where it was safe, if the word safety is even appropriate here, were secretly robbed, sometimes by the Japanese, and sometimes by our own comrades-in-arms—greed, like money, has no religion, race, nation, or gender: they are cosmopolitan. They, money, are the atmosphere of the globe, without which all, without the slightest exception, now living people cannot breathe, and therefore cannot exist. And indeed! Everything, truly everything, that is happening now on this small patch of the globe, in this cemetery of everything human, at this feast of Beelzebub… all this is because of money, because of someone's money! No one is born into this world with a desire to kill—it is a disease that is instilled in a person! This is how immunity is developed. For some, it is more pliable to this disease, for some, less so—and for some, it is not there at all… Flamethrowers! Here, a Japanese man, spraying death, is moving forward, towards us, accompanied by his Deimos and Phobos—another moment, and he is dead! Charred bodies, heat… All this is partly reminiscent of Pompeii—there, too, countless people died for no reason. Now I realized what people felt when the all-consuming lava overtook their fragile, in relation to its power, homes!… Tirelessly contemplating death, I myself wanted to die—if somewhere someone looked at me with surprise after these words, then here I did not differ from others in the least! Everything that was happening in this place was nothing more than a pill of reality, which for some reason I was destined to take—a bitter pill that should not be chewed, it had to be swallowed, and then, after a certain time, feel the effect of its very peculiar action.