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.
