Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. How about a pint of my blood, too, huh?”

  “How many teeth you got in that sack?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “A hundred?”

  “Guess again, boy. Guess up a storm.”

  Grinning crookedly beneath his handlebar mustache, Souvenirs disappeared into the jungle. But his famous Bull Durham sack full of Japanese gold teeth had left his admirers engaged in excited speculation.

  “I wonder how many gold teeth the sucker really has in his sack?”

  “I dunno—but a fellow from his old squad in F Company says he got fifty of ‘em from Hell’s Point alone. That was three months ago, and he’s been going out on those patrols pretty steady since then. He’s got at least seventy-five of them gold teeth in that sack.”

  “Must be a couple-thousand-dollars’ worth. Hell’s fire! I’d like to have that when we get back to the States. I’d get me a hotel room and a—”

  “What the hell makes you think you’re gonna see the States again?”

  “Where d’ya think we’re going when we get off of here?”

  “Another island, that’s where! Anybody thinks he’s gonna see the States again is as crazy as hell! They’ll have your ass on another landing so fast you won’t know whether to sweat or draw small stores. Ain’t nobody around here gonna see the States, not for a long time, anyway, unless he gets carried back.”

  “Aw, blow it!”

  We were growing irritable. Our strength was being steadily sapped, and a sort of physical depression afflicted many of us. Often a man expended his whole strength going to chow, working his way down the slippery hill to the galley tent set in a ravine, and then climbing back up it. Sometimes, if the rain had been especially heavy, a man might skip chow; just forget about it, even though his belly might be growling. The hill would be too slippery. The rain.

  The rainy season was upon us. On our exposed Ridge it fell upon us in torrents. A man was drenched in seconds, his teeth chattering and his hands darting swiftly to his precious cigarettes, transferring them to the safety of his helmet liner, cursing bitterly if he had waited too long before becoming conscious of their peril.

  After cigarettes, we were concerned about our ammunition. On the downward slope of the hill, the rain water ran into our pits and holes as though they were sewer receivers. We had to dash for the pits and lift the boxes of machine gun belts out of the water’s way, piling them atop one another on the earthen gun platform. Any dry place in the pit was reserved for ammunition. He who sought refuge from the rain had to sit on the water cans.

  There were whole days of downpour when I lay drenched and shivering, gazing blankly out of my hole, watching as the sheeted gray rain whipped and undulated over the Ridge. At such times, a man’s brain seems to cease to function. It seems to retreat into a depth, much as the red corpuscles retreat from the surface of the body in times of excitement. One ceases to be rational; one becomes only sentient, like a barnacle clinging to a ship. One is aware only of life, of wetness, of the cold gray rain. But without this automatic retreat of reasons a man can go only one way: he can only go mad.

  Barnacle-like, I had made a discovery during the downpour. I had found that even in wetness there is warmth.

  I was the only one on the Ridge with a cot. I placed it in my hole. Over this, I had stretched a poncho on which I had sprinkled dirt. We were not permitted so much as a stick above the ground for fear the enemy might find a target. I ditched my hole, and there were times when my homemade drainage and my poncho combined to keep me dry; but when it rained heavily or persistently, I was done.

  The hole filled with water which rose right through my cot and soaked me. At times, I might be lying in an inch or so of water with a foot of water beneath my cot. It was cold. It went right to the bone, because the intense heat had made our blood so thin.

  At last in disgust I hauled my cot out on the hillside. The hell with it! Let the Jap shoot, if that near-sighted creature could see through the rain, if he was so stupid as to want to.

  I placed one dripping blanket under me and pulled the other over me. It was warm! It was sodden, but it was snug; it was wet, but it was warm; it was miserable, but it made me laugh.

  See me now, if you will, and you will see the war in the Pacific. Look at the Ridge rearing like a whale from the wild and dark green jungle sea, sweep that tan hillside with your eye and search for a sign of life. You will see none. You will see only the gray rain falling, the rain and a cot and a solitary man huddling beneath a blanket.

  Ah, but he’s happy! He, and only he in all the world, knows of the warmth within a wet blanket!

  Runner came down with malaria. They kept him at the Battalion Aid Station for a few days, then sent him back to the lines. He was still feverish, but there was nothing they could do for him. He lay in his hole, unable to eat. When the chills came, we piled our blankets on top of him. When the fever broke and the sweat began pouring off him, he lay back and grinned. He could barely talk, but he whispered, “It feels so good. It feels so good. So nice and cool.”

  In mid-November we knew that the crisis had come. Our division had thrown back the Japs time after time, even gone on occasional offensive; we had hung on against stiff odds, until the battle seemed to be even. But crisis was unmistakable in mid-November.

  It was in the air, a part of the atmosphere; just as a man might sense a hostile presence in the dark, we felt the thing coming against us: the great Japanese task force moving down from the north.

  If it succeeded we would all go down.

  But crisis never comes without being preceded by false optimism. So, too, was our crisis heralded by the appearance in the bay of a flotilla which sailed so gaily in, it seemed certainly to be the long-awaited reinforcements.

  “Keeripes!” Scar-Chin shouted, even his aplomb shattered. “The navy’s come! The navy’s back! Look in the Channel. Look, look! A cruiser and three destroyers!”

  We pelted up the hillside to the Ridge crest, whence unfolded the vast panorama of northern Guadalcanal, the sea and the surrounding islands. From this distance the Channel seemed but a blue lagoon.

  But there were the warships. We hugged each other and danced—Chuckler, Runner, Hoosier, Oakstump—all of us. We strained our eyes for a glimpse of the transports. They were not in sight yet.

  Then came the question.

  “Who says they’re ours?”

  Silence.

  The ships’ guns gave answer. They were firing on our island! Here in broad daylight, arrogant, armed with a contempt more formidable even than their guns, they hurled salvo after salvo into the airport, sank the few small craft we had in sight, executed a sweeping about-face in the Channel and departed the way they had come. Their stems dug into the boiling water as derisively as a woman flouncing her skirts.

  Chagrin.

  Not even our malodorous vocabulary could command a word base enough to express our vexation, our bitter exasperation, our cursing, foaming disappointment.

  Back we went down the hill and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to make light of it, desperately trying to release the pressure being generated by this new dread which no one dared to name.

  No one seemed to want to go to bed that night; even though it was dark, all stayed hunched around Chuckler’s pit groping for the cheerfulness of the bright nights when we would stage impromptu vaudeville, trying to force a gaiety that was not there.

  At last all crept to their holes. The naval battle awoke us. The voice of the imperturbable Scar-Chin came roaring out of the black, “Kee-ripes! It’s a naval battle! You can see it! C’mon, ya jerks, c’mon up here.”

  I think of Judgment Day. I think of Götterdämmerung; I think of the stars exploding, of the planets going off like fireworks; I think of a volcano; I think of a roaring and an energy unbelievable; I think, of holocaust; and again I think of night reeling from a thousand scarlet slashes and I see the red eye of hell winking in her wounds—I th
ink of all these, and I cannot tell you what I have seen, the terrible spectacle I witnessed from that hillside.

  The star shells rose, terrible and red. Giant tracers flashed across the night in orange arches. Sometimes we would duck, thinking they were coming at us, though they were miles away.

  The sea seemed a sheet of polished obsidian on which the warships seemed to have been dropped and been immobilized, centered amid concentric circles like shock waves that form around a stone dropped in mud.

  Our island trembled to the sound of their mighty voices. A pinpoint of light appears in the middle of the blackness; it grows and grows until it illuminates the entire world and we are bathed in pale and yellow light, and there comes a terrible, terrible rocking roar and there is a momentary clutching fear to feel Guadalcanal shift beneath us, to feel our Ridge quiver as though the great whale had been harpooned, as though the iron had smacked into the wet flesh.

  Some great ship had exploded.

  We could not even guess what or whose. We had only to lie on our hillside, breathless, watching until the battle was done, and then to retire to the pits to await dawn with murmuring voices and beating hearts. Were the result not so vital, we would have seemed like baseball fans anxious for the World Series scores.

  It was the beating of many motors on the airport that told us we had won.

  From the moment of dawn the airplanes rose from the airport in pursuit of the enemy fleet. The sound of their motors was as triumphant as the March from Aïda, and we cheered and jigged and waved our arms at them passing overhead, urging them on, shouting encouragement, beseeching them for direct hits, to blast the Nipponese armada from the surface of the sea.

  It was electrifying. The noise of the airplanes was never absent from the air above our heads. They came and went all day, even the most decrepit among them; and we never tired of saluting them. All Guadalcanal was alive with hope and vibrant with the scent of victory. We were as doomed men from whose ankles the iron bands have been struck. A great weight was lifted from our shoulders. The enemy was running! The siege was broken! And all through the day, like a mighty Te Deum rising to Heaven, came the beat of the airplane motors. Oh, how sweet the air I breathed that day! How fresh and clean and sprightly the life that leapt in my veins! To be delivered is to be born anew. It was as though we were putting aside our old selves, leaving those melancholy beings behind like a pile of soiled and crumpled clothing, exchanging them for newer persons, for the garb of gaiety and hope.

  So the tide turned on Guadalcanal.

  Chuckler found a scorpion in his clothes box, a canned-soup crate which he kept in his hole. “Hey, Luck!” he shouted, “I got a scorpion in my box! C’mere.” I gazed at the crabbed creature with its fearsome tail. “Let’s see if they really commit suicide.” Chuckler found a stone. He struck the bottom of the box sharply with it, driving the scorpion into a corner. His last blow struck perhaps a quarter inch from the cowering scorpion’s body. We waited. We watched in fascination as the tail quivered, came slowly aloft, arched over and plunged into the scorpion’s back. It seemed to be convulsed, then to lie still: dead. “I’m a son of a bitch!” Chuckler ejaculated, releasing his pent-up breath. “How d’ya like that!” He was for overturning the box and emptying out the dead scorpion, but I suggested we wait a few minutes to be sure. We withdrew to squat on the hillside. In five minutes we returned. The scorpion was gone. “I’m a son of a bitch!” Chuckler said again, this time in exasperation. “You can’t trust nobody. Even the scorpion’s a phony!”

  6

  Chuckler and I began to forage for the platoon. Lieutenant Ivy-League set us free, like bird dogs, and each day we buckled our pistols over the sun-bleached trousers which we had cut off above the knee, slipped empty packs over our shoulders, secured our helmets and departed from the Ridge.

  We had to make the descent on foot, but once we had gained the fields and the coastal coconut groves, we were able to hitchhike. Our destination was the food dump set up not far from our first defensive positions on the beach. Food had begun to enter Guadalcanal in abundance after the defeat of the Japanese naval force. But in the manner of distribution characteristic of every army since Agamemnon’s, it had not even begun to reach the frontline troops. It was being funneled into the galleys and the bellies of the headquarters units and all the other rear echelons quartered safely behind the lines, those effetes who are at once the envy and the contempt of every frontline trooper who ever had recourse to sanitary stick and slit trench.

  We considered all this food ours. We considered it ours whether it resided within the barbed-wire enclosure of the food dump or in the store tents of the rear echelons. We would get it by stealth, by guile, or by force: we would steal it, we would beg for it, we would lie for it.

  At first, when Chuckler and I would drop off the tailgate of the truck on which we had hitched a ride, we would approach the heavily guarded food dump by crawling on our bellies. Once close to the fence—out of sight by the army guards who sat atop the piles of cases, rifles over their knees—we would scoop out the dirt under the fence and squirm under.

  Stacks of crates and cartons gave us cover while we crept quietly along, searching for canned fruit, baked beans, spaghetti, Vienna sausage—even, prize of all prizes, Spam! Yes, Spam! Perhaps the processed pork that everyone called Spam was the bane of the Stateside mess halls, but on Guadalcanal, Spam was a distinct delicacy. Often we would risk a bullet in the back for Spam, softly looting a case of it at the foot of the very stack upon which the sentry sat, like mice filching cheese from between the paws of a sleeping cat.

  Soon we had no need of stealth. The food dump had become the most popular place on the island. The roads became clogged with plunderers like ourselves, pistols swinging at their hips or rifles slung over shoulders, converging outside the fence like a holiday crowd outside of Yankee Stadium. There were now so many holes dug beneath the fence that one might gain entry at any point. Inside, bearded, gaunt, raggedy-assed marines roved boldly over the premises, attacking the cases with gusto, tearing them open to seize what they wanted, leaving the rejected articles exposed to wind and sun with the indifference of pack rats. When a man’s bag was full, he sauntered off—contemptuous of challenge from the guards.

  Inevitably, such a swarm of thieves depleted the dump and thus brought on more stringent security. We shifted to the ships. Friendly vessels riding at anchor had become a common sight in our channel since the naval battle.

  We hoped to exchange that marine commodity—taletelling—for cups of delicious navy coffee, and perhaps even for candy bars!

  We would wait until a boat had been emptied, before approaching its coxswain.

  “Hey, sailor, how about a ride out to your ship?”

  No insolence, here. We played the childlike warrior begging a simple pleasure, the poor little match girl outside the candy shop on Christmas Eve. We played on the sailors’ sympathy, inducing them to overlook the very plain law forbidding marines to visit the ships. We cared for no law ourselves (what could the punishment be?) but the sailors had to be persuaded, as did the Officers of the Deck once the landing craft swung under the ship’s beam and we called up our request to come aboard. Often he shouted down in anger.

  “No! Coxswain, take those marines back to the beach. You know it’s against regulations to bring troops aboard. Shove off, y’hear me?”

  “But, sir, I just wanted to come aboard to see a friend of mine. From my home town. Wouldn’t it be okay if my buddy and me came aboard to see my friend? We lived next door to each other. He’s my best friend and I haven’t seen him since the war started. He was with my grandmother when she died.”

  All depended now on the officer’s acumen, or his willingness to be taken in. Should he ask for the friend’s name, all was lost. Should he be stupid and believe us, or should he fall into the spirit of the thing and grin at our obvious fabrication, we would grasp the rope ladder and climb aboard.

  Once gaining the run of the shi
p, we would trade our tales for coffee, our souvenirs for food and candy. A coterie forms quickly about us in the galley. We are the cynosure.

  “Y’mean them Japs really was hopped up when they charged you?” a sailor asks, refilling outstretched coffee mugs.

  “Sure,” comes the answer. “We found dope on them. They all had needles and packages of dope. They’d hop themselves up before the charge and then they’d come at you banzai-ing.” (No drugs were found on the Japanese.)

  “Did the marines really cut off their ears?”

  “Oh, hell, yes! I knew one fellow had a collection of them. Got most of them at the Battle of Hell’s Point—the Tenaru, y’know. He hung them out on a line to dry out, the dope, and the rain rotted them all away. It rained like hell one night and ruined the whole bunch.”

  “You wouldn’t believe it, but half of them Japs can speak English. We was hollering into the jungle one night things like ‘Tojo eat garbage’ and ‘Hirohito’s a son-of-a-bitch’—when all of a sudden this Jap voice comes floating up to us, an’ whaddya think the bastard said?—‘T’hell with Babe Ruth!’”

  We bask in their laughter and extend our cups for more coffee.

  A particularly receptive ship might even unlock the ship’s store in our honor, and we would return to the Ridge, packs filled with candy bars, razor blades, bars of soap, toothbrushes and sundry trophies of the hunt. Let it be admitted that we were not unselfish in division of the candy bars; for these we considered rightful tribute of the forager. We kept them to ourselves.

  One day, hearing that the Eighth Marine Regiment—the “Hollywood Marines”—had reached our shores, and that they had brought with them a PX, Chuckler and I girded for our greatest foray.

  There were two tents and there were two sentries—each standing with rifle and fixed bayonet in front of a tent. Behind was thickest jungle. Oh, unguarded rear! Oh, defenseless rump! Did they think the jungle impenetrable! Did they count themselves safe, with this paper posterior of theirs?