Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  I was glad when night closed in. Then my company was on its feet in turn, plodding up the silent beach in darkness.

  We took up defensive positions. We scooped out shallow emplacements and turned the mouths of our machine guns toward the sea. We told off a guard and went to sleep, the last sound in our ears the pound of the surf against that long low coastline.

  They bombed us the next day. But it was nothing to fear. It was not even the foretaste of how it would be.

  “Condition Red!” someone shouted, and we heard the drone of their engines. They were high above, perhaps a dozen or so bombers, silvery and slender. They swept above us in a splendid V and loosed their loads over Henderson Field. We shouted and danced about in derision. We were fools. The bombs were not for us, but for our poor comrades on the airfield. We could hear the explosions and feel the earth shake, but it was not enough to make a child blink.

  In that stupidity born of false security we laughed and shook our fists at the now departing bombers, as though we had taken their worst and put them to flight.

  Ah, well. We had much to learn.

  Not even the excitement of the bombing could match the delirium following discovery of the Japanese sake cache.

  Case upon case of it was found in a log-and-thatch warehouse not far west of our beach positions. There were cases of wonderful Japanese beer, too—quart bottles clothed in little skirts of straw. Soon the dirt road paralleling the shoreline became an Oriental thoroughfare, thronged with dusty, grinning marines pushing rickshaws piled high with balloon-like half-gallon bottles of sake and cases of beer.

  There was food at the warehouse, too; huge tins of flour and rice and smaller cans of fish heads, those ghastly delicacies of Nippon. But no one took the food.

  Besides, each squad had set up its own mess. We had our own flour and Spam and cans of peaches and sugar and coffee—all stolen in raids on the piles of food which had been hastily unloaded by the transports, fleeing the armada that sank the cruisers. Our ship had been set aflame the day we landed when a Zero crashed amidships. So we had no battalion mess. Marvelously, these little squad messes sprang up all along the beach. The provender was of the best that could be stolen.

  With these, and the sake and beer, we lived a rollicking, boisterous life for about a week, until the liquor ran out and the Major came around to commandeer the food.

  What a wonderful week it was! What a delicious way to fight a war!

  Chuckler, Hoosier, Runner and I had buried our sake and beer in the sands, deep down where the sea had seeped and where it was cool. It was our cache, and no one else could touch it. So it was the four of us who drank the most of it, except when the drink within us enkindled the warmth of generosity. Then we invited others into the circle.

  We sat squatting. Because the huge sake bottles were difficult to pour, we had to push them to one another, and we drank by turns, as the Indians smoke the peace pipe. But our method needed the skills of a contortionist. One would grasp the huge bottle between one’s thighs, and then, with one’s head bent forward so that one’s mouth embraced the bottleneck, one would roll backward, allowing the cool white wine to pour down the throat.

  Oh, it was good!

  My palate was not at all sophisticated, yet no mere refinement of taste could ever match the sheer exuberance flowing from every mouthful of that sake. It is glorious to drink the wine of the enemy.

  And we were getting gloriously drunk.

  After one of these nocturnal drinking bouts I retired tipsily to my sleeping quarters; that is, I rolled back a few feet from the circle and fell into the shallow depression I had scooped out of the ground. High above me sighed the palm fronds, like lovely asterisks through which filtered the soft and starlit tropic night. I fell asleep. I awoke to the tiny twanging of hordes of invisible insects winging over my chest. I realized they were bullets when I heard the sound of firing to my rear. I went back to sleep, sadly convinced that the Japanese had got behind us.

  Such was the power of sake.

  In the morning someone explained that the firing had been two companies of the Fifth Regiment, each mistaking the other for the enemy. “Trigger-happy,” he said. I believed him. He needed no authority. He had a theory, which was the only authority required on Guadalcanal.

  Morning was the best time for the beer; it was cool with the cool of night and the dark sea beneath the sands.

  Oakstump did not last long with the beer. It was not that he drank so much, but that he drank it so fast—which is the same thing, perhaps. He arose unsteadily from our circle, stepped from the shade and keeled over almost the instant the sun touched his head. We adorned his body with palm fronds and stood an empty sake bottle on his chest so that he resembled a Shinto shrine.

  Then Hoosier became solemnly aware that he was not properly dressed. He had no trousers on. Such a breach of decorum, even in the company of men not customarily correct in these matters, seemed to pain the Hoosier. He lurched to his feet, groped for his missing trousers and staggered down to the water.

  “Hey, Hoosier—where you going with those pants? You going to wash your pants, Hoosier?”

  “Ah’m gonna put mah pants on.”

  “In the water?”

  He showed his big strong teeth in a silly grin: “Ah always put mah pants on in the ocean.”

  His dignity was matchless. Each time the surf receded, he would place his left foot in the trouser leg. With the exaggerated care of the inebriate, he would draw that leg up, and then, while balanced precariously on the right foot, a wave would pound up behind him and smack him on his pink behind.

  He arose each time in dignity. Gravely, he would go through it once more. Merrily, the wave would roll up again and let him have it. Once or twice, he would teeter for a moment on that disloyal right foot, looking quickly behind him with a half grin, as though to see if his old friend the wave were still there. It always was.

  Such was the power of Japanese beer.

  Since that first day we had been bombed regularly; at least once, often several times daily. Enemy naval units began to appear in the channel. Contemptuous of our power to retaliate, they sailed in and bombarded us in broad daylight. The Japanese were returning to the battle.

  To protect vital Henderson Field against an enemy who seemed determined now to fight for Guadalcanal, special nocturnal patrols were required. The first time that my company was commanded to furnish the patrol marked the end of our drinking, and our careers as beachcombers came crashing to a close in tragicomic style.

  It was the day our liquor ran out I was among those who joined the other men from our company and marched away from the beach, through the coconut grove, into the kunai, and so to the point we would defend outside Henderson Field.

  In front of me marched No-Behind. He was a tall, slender, noisy fellow from Michigan who was oddly capable of exasperating anyone in H Company merely by marching in front of him. It was an odd affliction in that it was no affliction: No-Behind actually seemed not to have a behind. So long and flat were his hips that his cartridge belt seemed always in danger of slipping to his ankles. No curve of bone or flare of flesh was there to arrest it. He seemed to walk without bending the knees of his long thin legs, and most maddening, where his trousers should have bulged with the familiar bulk of a behind, they seemed to sag inward! When to this was added a girlish voice that seemed forever raised in high-pitched profanity, there emerged an epicene quality which enraged those unlucky enough to march behind No-Behind. Often I quivered to draw my bayonet and skewer No-Behind where his behind was not.

  This day, as we passed with fixed bayonets through the kunai toward the line of wood beyond which a round red sun had fallen, Corporal Smoothface marched behind No-Behind. Smoothface was drunk on the last of the sake. He seemed to be babbling happily enough, when, suddenly, with a crazy yell, he lowered his rifle and drove the bayonet at No-Behind.

  We thought Smoothface had killed him, for No-Behind’s scream had been that of a dying m
an. But, fortunately for No-Behind, his very insufficiency in the target area had saved him; the bayonet passed through his trousers without even breaking the flesh, and it had not been the cutting edge of the bayonet but the hard round feel of the rifle muzzle that had provoked his expiring shout.

  Smoothface found it so funny he had to sit down to contain his laughter. Then, as he arose, a battery of artillery concealed in the wood gave nerve-jangling voice. They were our seventy-five-millimeter howitzers, shooting at what, we did not know, for they shot frequently and we never knew if they were merely registering terrain or actually blasting the enemy. But the sudden crash of field pieces is always a disturbing thing, even if the guns turn out to be friendly.

  Smoothface bared his small, even teeth in an animal snarl. He unlimbered his rifle again, and returned the fire. That was the end of the Guadalcanal Campaign for Corporal Smoothface. He was led away under guard.

  But he had one last glorious round remaining. Placed in the rear of a captain’s jeep, he rose to his feet, abusing him.

  “Ah’ll never ride with Captain Headlines,” he swore, and as he swore it, the jeep leapt forward. Smoothface was ejected in a slow somersault into the air, came down on his ankle, broke it and was taken to the hospital, where, that very night, a rare transport landed on our airfield. He was evacuated to New Zealand, was cured, given a light brig sentence, and finally turned loose to browse among the fleshpots of Auckland. His broken ankle, although perhaps not honorably suffered, was the very first of the “beer wounds,” which all veterans covet so mightily—those merely superficial holes or cuts or breaks which take a man out of battle and into the admiring glances and free drinks of civilization.

  It was still light over the airfield when we left it and stepped into the gloom of the jungle. It was as though one had walked from a lighted, busy street into the murk and silence of a church, except that here was no reverence or smell of candle-grease, but the beginning of dread and the odor of corruption.

  We were told off at staggered intervals of about ten yards. I have no idea how many men were on the patrol, perhaps slightly more than a hundred of us, of which some thirty would have been from H Company. We never knew these things. All that we knew was that in front of us lay the dark and moving jungle and quite probably the enemy, behind us the airfield in which reposed absolutely all of Guadalcanal’s military value.

  Our entrenching tools made muffled noises while we scooped foxholes out of the jungle floor. It was like digging into a compost heap ten thousand years old. Beneath this perfection of corruption lay a dark rich loam. We had barely finished when night fell, abruptly, blackly, like a shade drawn swiftly down from jungle roof to jungle floor. We slipped into the foxholes. We lay down and waited.

  It was a darkness without time. It was an impenetrable darkness. To the right and the left of me rose up those terrible formless things of my imagination, which I could not see because there was no light. I could not see, but I dared not close my eyes lest the darkness crawl beneath my eyelids and suffocate me. I could only hear. My ears became my being and I could hear the specks of life that crawled beneath my clothing, the rotting of the great tree which rose from its three-cornered trunk above me. I could hear the darkness gathering against me and the silences that lay between the moving things.

  I could hear the enemy everywhere about me, whispering to each other and calling my name. I lay open-mouthed and half-mad beneath that giant tree. I had not looked into its foliage before the darkness and now I fancied it infested with Japanese. Everything and all the world became my enemy, and soon my very body betrayed me and became my foe. My leg became a creeping Japanese, and then the other leg. My arms, too, and then my head.

  My heart was alone. It was me. I was my heart.

  It lay quivering, I lay quivering, in that rotten hole while the darkness gathered and all creation conspired for my heart.

  How long? I lay for an eternity. There was no time. Time had disintegrated in that black void. There was only emptiness, and that is Something; there was only being; there was only consciousness.

  Like the light that comes up suddenly in a darkened theatre, daylight came quickly. Dawn came, and so myself came back to myself. I could see the pale outlines of my comrades to right and left, and I marveled to see how tame my tree could be, how unforbidding could be its branches.

  I know now why men light fires.

  Urgency and a certain air of inquiry and reproach characterized the manner of the Major as he drove his jeep through the coconuts, stopping at each squad mess along the line to commandeer the provender. Except for the urgency, he might have been a scoutmaster scolding his charges for having eaten their lunch by midmorning.

  The Major’s tour marked the death of the squad messes. Our brief escape from battalion authority was ended, and a battalion galley was being set up. But the Major found precious little food to cart off to a pyramidal tent which was set up about two hundred yards in from the beach. This was where we ate, and this was where we were introduced to our new diet of rice. The food had belonged to the enemy, and so had the wooden bowls from which we ate it. We preferred these to our own mess gear with its maddening capacity for making all food taste like metal. We ate a bowl of rice for breakfast and had the same for supper. Once a marine complained of worms in the rice to one of our two doctors.

  “They’re dead,” he laughed. “They can’t hurt you. Eat them, and be glad you have fresh meat.”

  He was joking, but he was serious. No one resented it. Everyone thought the doctor had a good sense of humor.

  The day after our diet of rice began, the Major’s unwonted urgency became clear to us. We were ordered up from the beach to new positions on the west bank of the Tenaru River. Our orders commanded us to urgency.

  The enemy was expected.

  2

  The Tenaru River lay green and evil, like a serpent, across the palmy coastal plain. It was called a river, but it was not a river; like most of the streams of Oceania, it was a creek—not thirty yards wide.

  Perhaps it was not even a creek, for it did not always flow and it seldom reached its destination, the sea. Where it might have emptied into Iron Bottom Bay, a spit of sand, some forty feet wide, penned it up. The width of the sandspit varied with the tides, and sometimes the tide or the wind might cause the Tenaru to rise, when, slipping over the spit, it would fall into the bosom of the sea, its mother.

  Normally, the Tenaru stood stagnant, its surface crested with scum and fungus; evil, I said, and green. If there are river gods, the Tenaru was inhabited by a baleful spirit.

  Our section—two squads, one with the Gentleman as gunner, the other with Chuckler as gunner and me as assistant—took up position approximately three hundred yards upstream from the sandspit. As we dug, we had it partially in view; that is, what would be called the enemy side of the sandspit. For the Tenaru marked our lines. On our side, the west bank, was the extremity of the marine position; on the other, a no-man’s-land of coconuts through which an attack against us would have to pass.

  The Japanese would have to force the river to our front; or come over the narrow sandspit to our left, which was well defended by riflemen and a number of machine gun posts and barbed wire; or else try our right flank, which extended only about a hundred yards south of us, before curving back north to the Tenaru’s narrowest point, spanned by a wooden bridge.

  The emplacement for the Gentleman’s gun was excellently located to rake the coconut grove opposite. We dug it first, leaving Chuckler’s and my gun standing some twenty yards downstream, above the ground, protected by a single strand of barbed wire strung midway down the steeply sloping river bank. We would emplace it next day.

  We dug the Gentleman’s gun pit wide and deep—some ten feet square and five feet down—for we wanted the gunner to be able to stand while firing, and we wanted the pit to serve as a bomb shelter as well, for the bombs were falling fiercer.

  But furiously as we worked, naked to the waist, sweat str
eaming so steadily our belts were turned sodden, we were unable to finish the pit on the first day. When night fell, only the excavation was done, plus a dirt shelf where the gun was placed. We would have to wait for the next day to roof it over with coconut logs.

  We felt exposed in our half-finished fortifications, unsure. The dark made sinister humpbacks of the piles of soft red earth we had excavated, and on which we sat.

  But, because we did not know real battle—its squallish trick of suddenness—we could not feel foreboding as we sat atop the soft mounds, concealing the telltale coals of our bitter Japanese cigarettes in cupped hands, softly smoking, softly talking. We were uneasy only in that shiftiness that came each night and disappeared each dawn.

  No one went to bed. The stars were out, and this was enough to keep everyone up, unwilling to waste a bright night.

  Suddenly in the river, upstream to our right, there appeared a widening, rippling V. It seemed to be moving steadily downstream. At the point of the V were two greenish lights, small, round, close together.

  Jawgia whooped and fired his rifle at it.

  To our right came a fusillade of shots. It was from G Company riflemen, shooting also at the V. More bullets hit the water. The V disappeared.

  The stars vanished. The night darkened. Like our voices, the men began to trail off to bed, wrapping themselves in their ponchos and lying on the ground a few yards behind the pit. Only the Chuckler and myself were left, to stand watch.

  Lights—swinging, bumping lights, like lanterns or headlights—glittered across the river in the grove. It was fantastic, a truck there, as though we might awake next morning and find a railroad station confronting us across that stagnant stream. The coconut grove was no-man’s-land. The enemy had a right to be there, but, by all the experience of jungle warfare, it was inviting death to mark himself with lights, to let his truck wheels shout “Here we are!”