INTERVIEW WITH BILL GANDALL

  Interview with Bill Gandall

NOTE: I interviewed Bill Gandall March 2, 1988, at the Veterans' Memorial Building in Santa Cruz, California. He gave his dates of service in the U.S. Marine Corps as November 9, 1926, to November 9, 1930.
     I tape recorded the interview, then transcribed it myself, editing for brevity only. Here, I have changed the order of some things he said, to spare the reader some of the jumping back and forth that Bill did as he talked. Other than that, this is what he said, the way he said it.

BG: My father was a railroad worker, and I lived in a lot of these towns as a kid, like Savannah, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; Chicago...and I lived among mostly Catholic Polish people, Chechoslovakian people, other mixtures, on the West Side of Chicago. I grew up as a typical midwesterner. I left Chicago after grammar school, and went to junior high in Cleveland, and high school in New York and in Palm Beach. I ran away from home when I was 16.
     And I joined the Marine Corps at 18, not to fight, but I liked those South Sea posters.
     I always thought that all the Marines were bastards. Because the ones I was with, 3,200 of us, were a pretty rough bunch. It was 100% white, and all racist. 70% were from the South, a lot of 'em from Appalachia, with ingrained hatred, built in by the years of attitudes towards considering Indian people inferior, considering Hispanics... calling 'em spics, gooks, and black people were called niggers, and Jews were called sheenies and kikes. And I'm Jewish. But I was so immersed in the Christian culture, by growing up in the West Side of Chicago, that that didn't mean anything to me.

     I had just finished doing duty at the Boston Navy Yard. And I was manning a machine gun at a mass demonstration in front of Charlston Prison, when I was on a roof, with a machine gun, ready to shoot into a 100,000 people that were protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. ...and I was told by my officers that we were gonna 'fry a few wops today,' you know, we were gonna execute 'em, fry 'em.
     And not being educated, I just thought that they were telling the truth, that these were bombthrowers, and foreigners who were trying to overthrow the government. And I went along with it until I read about it in high school, and then in universities, that they were really martyrs for labor.

     [In 19]27, '28 I was in Nicaragua.
DM: First of all, I'd like to hear the circumstances surrounding your being sent there. What were you told by your chain of command?
     BG: I was told that we were going to Nicaragua to protect American women and children, who were being threatened by this bandit named Sandino. 'Course, Sandino was a nationalist hero, but we weren't told that. But he was 'endangering American lives and property,' especially, they'd bring in that violin concerto, 'women and children.' I was shipped out on a minelayer; it was the second contingent to land at Corinto.
     Then I met a hotel owner that was a paraplegic, played chess with him, and one day I said, We're gonna catch that bandit Sandino. He said, Bill, he says, You've been brainwashed - that was before brainwashed was a common term - and he said, You have been so misguided, he said. If Sandino gets in, I'm gonna lose my hotel, because I think there'll be a real revolution, to dispossess some of us. But he's still a patriot, because he wants to be free. And he says, So do I. He said, I'm not supporting the American invasion. If I could help Sandino, I would. I said, I'll turn you in. He says, No you won't; fundamentally, you're a good guy. So of course, I never squealed on him, or anything. So he gave me some ideas.

     But I was an animal, and I did what I was told, and I killed a lot of people - innocent people - I committed rape there, with a group... group rape...that was usually out in the boondocks, where nobody could see us, out in remote areas, like around Matagalpa, Jinotega, and other places on patrol. We'd come across a girl swimming, or cleaning...they'd wash clothes by pounding them on the rocks, because they didn't have soap, in the river. And the honcho guy in our group, usually a Sergeant, a brute, would attack her, and the rest would follow, it became a mass hysteria thing. Sometimes, you know, you'd just kill the girl, just by overusing her. She'd die from it.
     There was no pity, there was no sympathy. We'd take an alcalde, a mayor of some village, and we'd get him up, and his family, in front, and say, Where's Sandino? They didn't know, most of the time they were just ignorant. They didn't know where Sandino was...and we still thought that they did know, or some stooge would report it, 'cause we offered money, and we'd hang him up by his ankles and cut his throat or his private parts, and torture him until he died. And then if there was any objection, we'd kill anybody who would object. We'd shoot 'em with our...and I would too, you did it, there was no feeling that they were people. They were in the way, kill 'em. There was complete brutality. We were committing genocide, as far as I'm concerned now. But at that time, I didn't have the intelligence or the empathy with people to know it. I was completely brutalized.
     You know, like when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, and the second day on the drill field, the Sergeant says, Whaddya think of this problem, and I said, ‘I think...’ being the volunteer type, and he hit me with [the side of] the sword, this heavy saber, right against the cheek, he knocked me to the ground, he hit me so hard. And as I'm lyin' there thinkin', what the hell am I into, he points the saber right at my nose, within an inch, and he says, No sonofabitch thinks in the Marine Corps. You obey. Period. Obey, obey, obey. No thinking. No thinking allowed.
     So I didn't think. I became just an animal responding to stimuli. And the stimuli was all wrong.
     And then we burned villages...everything we did in Vietnam we did there first, but the American people didn't know about it; there was no radio, there were no reporters, and of course there was no television in those days. I'd say that 99 99/100% of the American people didn't know where Nicaragua was, and furthermore, they didn't care.      
DM: Where were you stationed down there?
BG: All over. But mainly Managua. Managua was the center of our operation.

     Calvin Coolidge promised the Nicaraguan people, in 1928, that they would get a fair and open election. And a fair and open election was as follows:
     I was put in charge of the biggest district in all of Nicaragua, 'cause I spoke about 20 words of Spanish, most of which were connected with sex or food. And the Colonel in charge said to me, Bill, I want you to run a fair and open election. But just make sure that General [Jose Maria] Moncada wins. Moncada was our candidate. He was a stand-in for the guy who was most cooperative with us, a guy named Somoza. He was a boyhood friend of Sandino, by the way, and he was completely corrupt.
     So I had six Marines, a detachment, to help me. They had rifles, and I had a .45. And I walk in, my Marines are outside, sitting on a bench, I walk in, I throw my campaign hat down, you know what it's like, a Boy Scout hat...
DM: Smokey the Bear.
BG: ... and I'm in khaki, and I've got a lanyard attached to my pistol, and I detach it, and I pull it outta my holster, and slam it on the table, as I look at the [election] Board - there's five of 'em there; two were absent. I says, "Es la ley." It's the law. And they look amazed, you know, at my absolute stupidity for sayin' that, when I'm runnin' a 'free and open election.' They'd believed the President [Coolidge]. Unbelievable that they should believe him, after all the rapes and....
     And I says, Furthermore - I picked up the gun and I pointed it at each one individually, and said, in broken Spanish and English, - “if any of you bastards cross me, you're dead.” As I pointed the gun at 'em.
     And they shook their heads in amazement. And one guy, a big peasant with immense shoulders and a great big walrus mustache, he leaned back and said to the little guy next to him - they were from different [political] parties - and he says to him,  "¿Es loco, no...?" and the guy shook his head dolefully and he says, "No es loco. Es muy loco."
     And they went about their business, and they ran a fair and open election. Every voter had his hand dipped in mercurochrome, so he wouldn't be able to vote twice, as if it made any difference....
DM: So was it a free and open election?
BG: Are you kidding? You must be kidding, I mean, we ran nothing fair. When the election results were in, we counted 'em, and I verified it, but I didn't sign the statement. What I did was I took the 72% that the Conservative candidate [got; he] really won the election. Moncada only got a few votes; all the other candidates got more votes than he did.
   So I just took those [conservative] votes, and transferred them to the [Moncada] column, and then verified it, for General Moncada. And I told my group to take the majority of the ballots, that were for the Conservative candidate, who was a fairly decent guy...he owned a lotta coffee fincas, and he wanted some benefits for his people, he didn't want all the profits to go into the banks of the United States.

     So I told 'em to take those boxes fulla ballots that were against us, and dump 'em into Lake Managua, which was nearby. And Lake Managua is a freshwater lake, and it's got freshwater sharks, which is unusual. And the [laughs] ballot boxes didn't sink, even though they were loaded with paper, and I said, Well, I'm in charge here, so you guys go in and get those boxes.
     So they timidly went in with poles, got the boxes, and burned 'em, so there was no evidence to show.
     So that's one of the great things we did. The other terrible thing we did was ruin their cemetery, desecrated it. One night - all of us were pretty drunk. Liquor was very cheap there, wonderful Scotch liquor by the bottle for a few pennies.
     ...we hadda march down, after busting open the graves and distributing the bones as if it were a bowling alley, knocking off the heads of statues - a lot of those statues were done by the civilization ...Quintana Roo, in Guatemala, what is the race...
DM: Maya?
BG: ...Mayan. There were Mayan statues in there, in a Catholic cemetery; they had mixed their own myths with Catholic saints. These were irreplaceable. There is no record now of these Mayan statues; they were just knocked about by us. We destroyed every statue in the whole cemetery, and opened the crypts, and insulted the whole people. To the Nicaraguan people, who had this theology, and this history, of worship of ancestors, and revering the dead, and the afterlife, and all that...  this was the most horrible thing we could do.

     And we marched, 300 of us, from Campo de Marte, in the dust, up to our knees, got down there, we had to kneel down, and present arms. That's very difficult to do, when you're kneeling...and our general spoke, and asked...we were apologizing for our terrible insult to the Nicaraguan people.
     And you know what the 300 of us were doin'? Muttering under our breaths: What are we apologizing to these gooks for? Let's shoot 'em. And including that general. We were ready to shoot the bastard, is the way we put it, because he's makin' us apologize to these inferior....     
DM: Your own general?
BG: Yeah. We were ready to shoot him. And I think if we'd had a leader that was stupid enough, we woulda shot him. Because we were animals. Here he's makin' us apologize to these inferior gooks, these nothings, and...we really resented it, so we went out and did another pillage of some kind. We burned a village just for the hell of it, because of that. We were rankled. Our manhood, or machoism, was being insulted. We were being made to feel shame, and we didn't feel shame. We felt anger, at these stupid college guys tellin' us what to do.
     So it was a horrible thing, and I didn't understand it, and didn't care. I didn't have any conscience or any feeling about it; I just was getting drunk most of the time, carousing around, tryin' to get laid, counting the days when I would go back home in rotation.

     We trained [the Guardia Nacional] in brutality, just like the Marine Corps, it was like a Parris Island, or a Camp Pendleton down there. We brutalized them; they mistreated the Indians....
DM: Were you hearing, in the early '30's, Smedley Butler going around and talking about...he also had a change of heart about the Marine Corps.
BG: Yeah. Oh, yeah, that helped me...after [Butler] got out, he issued some terrific statements, about bein' a collection agency and a gangster for American banks, how we coulda taught Al Capone a thing or two, he only operated outta three districts outta Chicago; we operated outta three continents. I thought he [Butler] was one of the great heroes of our time. Little man, real little, but a lotta guts.
     [Much later] I picketed a lotta Marine Corps recruiting offices, calling for the courtmartial of Colonel [Oliver] North, and they came out, all of 'em, and said, Good for you, boy, we wish he would go to jail.

Shoveling Ice on the Norrona

Shoveling Ice on the Norrona

         
     Sam and Jon were Norwegian bachelor brothers who lived in Seattle and fished Alaskan waters for halibut. In 1971 the mercury scare ruined their market, so most of the halibut boats came south for albacore. I was hanging around the dock at the Bumblebee cannery looking for unloading jobs both times when the Norrona pulled in to the mouth of the Columbia and ran upstream the few miles to Astoria to tie up and sell her fish. They hired me both times.
     Jon was maybe 55. Sam, the skipper, was older. Jon and I worked in the hold; Sam stood on deck and signaled the crane operator on the dock when to raise and lower the big rectangular steel bucket through the Norrona's open hatch.
     The second trip had been a short one, and the fishing had been poor so we had only about four tons of fish to get out but a lot of unused ice that had to be shoveled into the unloading bucket, lifted out of the hold by the dock hoist, and dumped over the side. A man who worked for the cannery operated the hoist; Sam tilted the bucket to dump the fish into a larger cannery container extended over the Norrona's deck on the
flat steel arms of a waiting forklift.
     Now, the inside of a fish hold is its own kind of place. It would not, for example, be a good place for a department store (too small), a library (too dark), or a geriatric ward (too hard to climb in and out of). But a fish hold is an ideal place for preserving fish from the time they are caught until the boat  leaves the fishing grounds, runs to the nearest cannery port or  receiving station, and ties up at the dock. And it is accessible to the people who need to get into it.

     That large, squat wooden box you see on the deck of a fishing boat is not a box; it has no bottom. It's the hatch coaming. Its cover is the hatch cover, which is the only way in and out of the hold (unless the ocean, or a piece of its bottom, or another boat, makes a new opening in the hull). A post, grooved on all four sides, extends down from each corner of the hatch to the bottom of the hold. The area of the hold bounded by those four posts is called the slaughterhouse. The rest of the hold is subdivided into bins by inserting the ends of the "bin boards" into the grooves in the vertical posts, and stacking the boards up on edge until they almost reach the underside of the deck. This partitioning of the hold provides smaller, more manageable spaces for iceing down the fish as they are caught, but the more important reason for it is to prevent the load from shifting in heavy weather. A few tons of fish and ice, thrown suddenly from one side of the boat to the other, can easily capsize her.
           
     The slaughterhouse is usually the only subspace in the hold shaped like a rectangular prism; the other spaces are truncated by those planks which form the shape of the hull as it comes in from the side and down to the keel. The obtuse angle formed by the juncture of the two sides of the hull with the keel is filled with concrete for ballast; then a shaft alley is laid on top of the concrete. The shaft alley houses the long steel shaft which transmits power from the engine, which is forward of the fishhold, to the propeller  which we call the screw  at the stern.                                      
The removable planking over the shaft alley furnishes a level working space a couple of feet wide which runs the length of the hold; it lifts out for cleaning and for shaft repairs.
     The slaughterhouse is also the only place in the boat where a man can stand up straight, unless the boat has an exceptionally deep draft. From the slaughterhouse you bend over to walk either forward or aft; one or two steps to either side puts you up against the bulkhead as it angles down toward the keel.

     The heavy wooden deck beams are bare overhead; on the sides the ribs are covered with interior planking. The outboard ends of the bin boards are all_
angle cut-  each one at a slightly different angle than those above and below it  so that their ends roughly follow the curvature of the hull.
     All this wood is dark: dark from years of being continually wet, of being stained with fish blood, and from being struck by no light but that furnished by the two bare bulbs which burn when someone is working in the hold, and the occasional shaft of sunlight which tumbles through the hatch when the cover is off for unloading.
     All this dark wood is punctuated at frequent but not perfectly regular intervals by perfect circles a half inch in diameter. They look like dowels. But boats are not put together with dowels. Boats are put together with speciallycoated nails or screws, like this: a halfinch diameter hole is bored partway into each plank at two points within the area of its intersection with a rib. A nail or screw is driven into each hole through the plank and into the rib, then the hole is plugged. A plug is different from a dowel  though the circles with which they punctuate the planking of a boat look just like the circles formed by dowelends in some handcrafted furniture  in that dowels are cut so that the grain in them runs longitudinally and they furnish strength in fastening; the plugs used in boatbuilding are cut so that tahe grain runs crosswise. This gives no strength, but that is not the purpose of a plug. The strength is furnished by the nail or screw; the purpose of the plug is to prevent water from seeping into the hole and being trapped there to corrode the fastener and rot the wood, which it would do if a dowel were used, since water travels much faster with the grain than across it.
     All this wood is scarred; the ribs, struts, planks, and bin boards show the blows of gaffs, ice shovels, and the four-
foot-long, steel pipe-handled devil'stail forks used for breaking hard ice. Finally, every edge of every piece of wood (even the edges of the scars, except for the newest ones) has been rounded by the patient abrasive action of forty-odd years of slightly shifting tons of crushed ice.
     Now wood all beveled, plugged, dark, scarred, rounded, glistening wet and dripping in the light of two bare bulbs.

     There's the place; now the work:
     The four tons of fish were only about a quarter of what the boat could carry: they were all iced in the after bins and the bins on either side of the slaughterhouse.
     Jon got the fish out of the ice and threw them toward me; I grabbed them by the tails, two at a time, and threw them into the bucket. Jon never stopped moving, and he never wasted a move: a sweep of his oilskinarmored left arm would clear the ice off a layer of fish, then his right hand would be swinging the gaff  thock! he'd bury it each time in the firm flesh just behind the top of the head, then flick his wrist, and the twelvepound, twofootlong, shiny silverbullet albacore would come leaping out of the bins at me, faster than I could grab them by the tails and flip them into the bucket. But I was keeping ahead of the crane operator, so after awhile we had a pile of fish already free of the ice and waiting in the slaughterhouse for the bucket to come back down, and we would kneel down on the ice for a minute or move over and stand up in the slaughterhouse to straighten our backs  that is, after we saw the bucket disappear from above the hatch opening. If one of those buckets, loaded or not, slipped loose from its rigging (as occasionally happened), it would crush whatever part of whatever careless fisherman it landed on.
     The four tons of fish were out of the boat in about an hour; then we started on the ice. The ice which had been used for the fish was colored a mottled red by the tuna blood: a ton and a half of raspberry snocone. It was already out of the bins and shoveled easily; a few bucketfuls took care of it.
     "What about the ice you didn't use, Jon? We take it out, or not?"
     "Ja, vee take it out. It's old, an' hard, an' vee ain't going out for a few days. Vee take it all out, an' clean up the hold good."
     The Norrona had holding coils, a partial refrigeration system the purpose of which is to reduce the hold temperature so that the ice melts less quickly. When the ice first comes aboard, it is flaky and easy to shovel, but when it stays in the bins for a week or more without being moved, it tends to melt and partially refreeze. We had several tons of this hard ice to move out of the hold.
     Shoveling ice is the hardest work on one of these boats, except for pulling big, fast-biting fish aboard on the hand lines in heavy weather. It all has to be done bending over because there is no headroom; you swing the scoop shovel once to get it full and once to empty it into the bucket, and both swings are done from a crouch.
     Jon moved ice like he moved fish. He expended a tremendous amount of energy without wasting or even slightly misdirecting so much as a footpound of it. His combination of strength, speed, and skill kept chunks and shovelfulls of ice cascading into the bucket as if propelled from a chute by a large volume of compressed air. But despite the speed with which he worked, there was nothing frantic or even hurried about his movements. You pull in at a port after two weeks at sea, you got work to do before you go ashore and rest, so you might as well get it done. Jon was getting it done as he had been getting it done for nearly fifty years.
     The first time I had worked with Jon, the eighteenyearold high school football jock who was working in the hold with us, and who had been unloading fish for a few summers, got tired and slowed considerably towards the end of the job. By the time we'd finished he was pretty nearly exhausted; Jon hadn't slowed a bit.
     That time, and this time as well, I had reached inside and disconnected my fatigue switch, and gathered all the strength I had to stay with Jon, because of my respect for him and because I wanted to be a fisherman.

     The second time, I was more fit and had more experience.
     The ice flew. We were two men in oilskins attacking a pile of ice, and this is how we looked and felt:
     Our oilskins were wet inside and out: inside from sweat, and outside from the moisture dripping on us and from ice melting against us. Our oilskins shone darkly through the water running down them somewhat like the dark wood of the fishhold shone through the water covering it. And our faces and hands, piecherry red from the combination of sunburn, exertion, and the temperature contrast between our bodies and the ice, shone redly through their own mixed covering of sweat and melted ice.
     The fishhold of the Norrona was a place where dark carved wood and human flesh glistened through flowing sheets of water.
      Concerning the motion there, two things: first, every swing of shovel, ice fork, or mattock by either of us had all the weight of that man's body and most of the strength of his back and shoulders behind it. This is because, not knowing whether a particular swing of the tool will bite deep or not, we swing it hard enough to make sure. If we don't, many of the strokes will simply be thrown back at us, and a few of those is more enervating than maintaining an unmitigated attack on the pile. Here, as in many kinds of effort, the best way to save strength is to spend it well.
     The second thing to say about the motion is to describe the rhythm, and its effects on the workers and the work. With, say, each of us in separate bins on opposite sides of the bucket and both using scoop shovels, our periodicities will be about the same, and a time will pass when shovelfulls of ice will fly into the bucket in a regular cadence from alternating sides. If one man changes tools, the other will keep the beat until the one who is changing tools picks it up again. After awhile, the rhythm of the work becomes primary, and it is like a vehicle that carries you along with it, such that men who are actually very tired can keep a pace of work which otherwise they would not be able to maintain. The rhythm will become so strong that when one of us goes to change tools, he will swing through the change, dropping a shovel and picking up an ice fork in one motion which takes just the space of one beat, then catch the second beat with the new tool.
     When we work like this, the rhythm becomes an ecstatic dance. The level of ice in the big rectangular steel bucket rises as if seen in timelapse photography. We fret about the time it takes to be raised and dumped; the interruption breaks our rhythm. So while the bucket is out of the hold we jump into the bins with mattocks and ice forks and hack out the frozen corners so we'll be ready with a load when the bucket gets back.
     We got the ice out, got all the bin boards up on deck, scrubbed the hold until it was empty, clean, and still glistening darkly, ready for the next trip. Then we scrubbed the bin boards and stacked them neatly on the after part of the deck, and pumped the bilge. It was evening and the tide was going out when we took off our oilskins and sat down on the rail. The Columbia, hurrying with the tide toward its mouth and the Pacific and the orange-streaked sky beyond, tried to pull the Norrona with her. The bow line groaned in protest where it was clovehitched around one of the dock's pilings. Gulls flew low over us and settled on the river at our stern to quarrel over the last bits of fin and gill tissue we'd washed overboard as we hosed down the deck.
     Sam brought us over two cans of cold beer and we popped them and drank long. "Well, young fella," Jon said as he lowered his beer and belched, "you done all right."