Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  Our boat putt-putted to a wallowing halt beneath a huge ship that listed so markedly to port that it seemed drunk. It was one of the old Dollar Line ships; the President Wilson, I believe.

  “Climb up them cargo nets!”

  As we had come, so did we leave.

  We were so weak that many of us could not make the climb. Some fell into the water—pack, rifle and all—and had to be fished out. Others clung desperately to the nets, panting, fearful to move lest the last ounce of strength depart them, too, and the sea receive them.

  These also had to be rescued by nimble sailors swarming down the nets. I was able to reach the top of the net, but could go no farther. I could not muster the strength to swing over the gunwale, and I hung there, breathing heavily, the ship’s hot side swaying away from me in the swells, very perdition lapping beneath me—until two sailors grabbed me under the armpits, and pulled me over. I fell with a clatter among the others who had been so brought aboard, and I lay with my cheek pressed against the warm, grimy deck, my heart beating rapidly, not from this exertion, but from happiness.

  Once belowdecks, Chuckler and I set out for the galley and a cup of hot coffee and conversation. We walked in and sat down, just as the last soldier who had been aboard this transport was rising to leave. He looked down at us as we sipped the coffee from thick white mugs.

  “How was it?” he said, jerking his head shoreward.

  “Rough,” we answered, mechanically. Then Chuckler spoke up, “You mean Guadalcanal?”

  The soldier seemed surprised. “Of course I do.”

  Chuckler hastened to explain. “I wasn’t being wise … I meant, had you ever heard of the place before you got here?”

  His astonishment startled us. An idea was dawning, gladly.

  “Y’mean …”

  “Hell, yes! Guadalcanal. The First Marines—Everybody’s heard of it. You guys are famous. You guys are heroes back home …”

  We did not see him leave, for we had both looked away quickly—each embarrassed by the quick tears.

  They had not forgotten.

  1

  The glory was gone out of it now. Gone was Guadalcanal. Gone was the valor, the doggedness, the willingness to let the jungle pick our whitened bones. We were spent, fit only for the Great Debauch stretching gaudily ahead in Melbourne.

  Say a requiem for camaraderie, mourn the departed fellowship that had bound us—officers and men—from the Carolina coastal marsh to the last panting lunge over the side of the President Wilson. It was dead.

  They took us first to Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides, where we arrived on Christmas Eve, each to receive a lollipop from the chaplain, while Lieutenant Ivy-League gladdened the hearts of his superior officers with our cigars—and there, for three weeks, they gave us the manual of arms and practiced that portion of their code which admonishes the officers to remember that as he would not mistreat his dog, so he should not abuse his enlisted men.

  Then they took us to Australia.

  A happily blaring band played us onto the docks at Melbourne. It was our first sight of the Land Down Under, for we had been belowdecks since leaving Espíritu, driven there by a filthy storm in the Tasman Sea. We grinned at the band, and suddenly every one of us knew it was going to be all right.

  I passed a red-haired WAAF and exchanged smiles with her, detecting in her gladsome eye a second hint of the good times to come.

  They bundled us onto a train and got us rolling. We crowded to the windows. Then everyone began to shout and whoop, for the most astonishing thing was happening. The route was lined with women—cheering, hugging themselves and each other, dancing up and down, blowing kisses, extending to the United States First Marine Division the fairest welcome.

  The train halted at Richmond, a suburb of the city, and we were herded into a fenced compound reminiscent of a cattle pen. On the other side of the fence were more girls, squealing, giggling, waving handkerchiefs, thrusting hands through the fence to touch us. Suddenly we were beside ourselves. We had not seen a woman since New Zealand, seven months before.

  Then they opened the gate.

  “Commm-panee! Tenn-shun! Forrr-rd harch!”

  We stepped out grinning, slouching, our rifles slung—right past the girls. In all that moving column of faded light green there was nothing to suggest the military. So were born the Lotus-Eaters.

  We were mildly surprised to find ourselves marching into a stadium. It was the Melbourne Cricket Grounds. Here were our quarters, double-decked bunks stretching up the cement steps in tiers. They had removed the benches, replacing them with our bunks, so that the effect was one of a huge horseshoe, from which sprang row on row of thin spidery structures—and this enclosing a large circular green field. We were to live out of our packs. We slept in the open, unprotected save by a sort of quarter roof above us. Rain whipped by winds to our exposed front would not fail to wet us.

  But who was to complain? Still less, who was to care about such trivial inconvenience on this first day of our return to civilization; who would upbraid the unadulterated good fortune which had quartered us in the Cricket Grounds—almost in the heart of the city—while the other regiments, the Fifth, Seventh and the Eleventh Artillery, sulked in the suburbs? The city was ours, to be tasted almost nightly. We had not earned it; we had rather won it: our Regimental Commander had flipped the lucky coin with the chiefs of the Fifth and Seventh. Of all the regiments, ours—the First—was in the most advantageous position for the Great Debauch.

  Discipline, already dissolved in the delicious squeals of the girls, all but disappeared that night.

  We had received part of our six-months’ arrears of pay in Australian pounds, but we had been issued no clothing; we still wore our disheveled dungarees.

  Yet, perhaps a third of the Regiment prowled the streets of Melbourne. I was out alone—Runner, Chuckler, Hoosier and the rest were either on guard or unwilling to risk it.

  The exhilaration of that night! At first I thought that it was my strange uniform and deep sunburn that marked me out for curiosity. But soon I came to realize that there was something more: I was the deliverer in the land he has saved. The smiles and winks of the Melbourne crowds assured me of it; the street-hawkers, too, with their pennants—“Good on You, Yank. You Saved Australia”—told me it was so. It was adulation and it was like a strong drink. I took it for a triumph and soon regarded every smile as a salute and every Melbourne girl as the fair reward of the sunburned deliverer.

  The first was Gwen.

  We met in a milk bar. Strange place for a marine with every appetite athirst after seven months of abstinence, but the pubs of Melbourne closed at six o’clock, and I did not know then that the hotels continued to serve drinks for a few hours thereafter.

  I had marked her the moment I entered the place, and had seen the interest in her eyes. But now, as I sat alongside of her and drank a milk shake, she feigned indifference. I did not know what to say. So I asked her the time. She glanced pointedly at the watch so plain on my wrist, at the clock above my head, and said, “You’re a Yank, aren’t you?” Her words could not have been more exciting if she had said, “Let’s go up to my room,” for it mattered only that she should speak to me.

  “Yes,” I said, “we’ve just come from Guadalcanal.” Her eyes went round as she answered, “Have you, now? That must have been terrible.” So it went, polite words, formal words, words without meaning, but words alive with the call of sex—words converging on the result, so that in the end, after stops at hotels here and there, it was as though her first remark actually had been, “Let’s go up to my room,” for that was where we went.

  There was the flickering light of a gas heater and there was the bed. But no more.

  Gwen instructed her brash visitor in the inscrutable ways of women: there would be no bell-bottom trousers in her young life, there would be no Yankee’s bastard to insult her declining years, there would be nothing—without there first being a ring on her finger.


  Pretending a gravity most difficult under the circumstances, I arose from that unrewarding couch and reinvested myself in my uniform and my dignity. And I left.

  I closed the front door softly behind me and stepped into the silent night, ruefully reflecting on the American motion picture that has persuaded the world that all Yankee males are millionaires, cursing the conceit of womankind that is convinced there is no man living who cannot be bamboozled.

  Back in the center of Melbourne, outside the Flinders Street Station, the streets were moving with marines. If a third of our Regiment had been illicitly ashore earlier, now it must have been half. Some were still bearded. It was a motley, reminiscent of that horde that had swarmed from the Guadalcanal jungle to fall upon the packs of the dog-faces.

  This time, they brandished bottles, hot dogs of the thick sausage-like Australian kind, meat pies, dishes of “icy cream”—whatever could be obtained from the all-night kiosks. There was singing, too. It seemed that overnight everyone had learned at least two verses of “Waltzing Matilda.”

  Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong

  Under the shade of a coolibah tree;

  And he sang, as he watched and waited till his billy boiled:

  “You’ll come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me!”

  I had enough money left to hire a horse and carriage that stood by the railroad station, and half a dozen of us piled aboard. I slipped forward and rode the horse.

  So we came home—munching the delicious kiosk provender, pulling at the bottles and roaring with song, while the huge tame beast beneath me clop-clopped amiably along the pavement.

  Next day we drank to the death of discipline. We drank to it literally—for every pack had blossomed with a bottle—and with our feet on the corpse, for only one formation disturbed the orgy of the ensuing week. My memory of that reveille was that it was a delectable farce.

  “Everybody up! Everybody out!” a drink-thick voice of authority bellowed that morning. Silence.

  Then, like the dead stepping from open graves, perhaps a dozen of our two hundred sleeping figures rose mechanically from their cots and enshrouded themselves in their blankets. One or two bent to tug bottles from their packs before stumbling downstairs and out the gate to gather in front of the stadium wall.

  Old Gunny—the one who had embarrassed the Major when Secretary Knox visited us in New River—came staggering out to call the roll. But he could not speak. He gazed stupidly at this handful of huddling mummies.

  Lieutenant Ivy-League rolled out to receive the report.

  Gunny about-faced with grave deliberation. He saluted with fingers awry, as though sticky with glue. “All preshen’ ‘n accounted for,” he said, and sank gently on his face. Ivy-League examined him with mournful solemnity, half bent, as though to place a tender pat on Gunny’s face. Then he looked owlishly at us, and said, “Com’ny dishmished …”

  We returned to our sepulchers.

  After that, they let us run.

  Perhaps they let us run because the officers—from top to bottom—were just as eager to gambol. They paid us, outfitted us with new uniforms—including those green battle jackets which we wore eighteen months before they gained the Eisenhower name—they instructed us as to where and when we could get our meals, and they reminded us that prophylaxis kits could be picked up at sick bay. Except for those detailed to guard duty, everyone was free from noon on.

  Even the guards found playmates. These—who often descended upon the Officer of the Day, requesting “a marine to go walking with”—were derisively called “weed monkeys,” after their habit of lying in the tall grass of Victoria Park surrounding the Cricket Grounds.

  The guards at the side gates and those outside on roving patrol were most favored by the “weed monkeys”—and soon it got to be a standing joke that for the first time in Marine Corps history there were men volunteering for guard duty. But the weed monkeys made things easier for those of us who had stayed out too late. One had merely to circle the Cricket Grounds until one came upon a rifle leaning against the wall—mutely testifying to the guard’s delinquent occupation elsewhere and one had only to open his gate and slip in.

  Each day brought a new pleasure, a fresh discovery. We discovered Australian beer, which compares favorably with that delicious Japanese beer; we found the bars plentifully supplied with Scotch whiskey; we learned that a “sheila” is a girl, a “cobber” a friend, that what was “bonzer” was excellent, that “fair dinkum” was the equivalent of honest-to-goodness and that the term “Yank” could fall from the Australian lips like a kiss or a curse.

  In the first week we came upon an upstairs restaurant on Swanston Street, and here we discovered sparkling hock. We had asked for champagne, but the waitress said there was none to be had.

  “We’ve got sparkling hock, though,” she said in that Australian accent that is cockney. “It’s nearly the syme.”

  “Does it bubble?” asked Chuckler, motioning with his hands. “You know—like ginger ale?” Chuckler would explain spaghetti to an Italian mamma.

  The waitress grinned indulgently. “You Yanks,” she said, and departed, returning with an ice bucket and bottle. The cork popped like champagne, the fluid sparkled like it—it tasted like it! For as long as our money lasted, we had found our beverage!

  Chuckler and I clinked glasses with the exaggerated gravity of Hollywood.

  “T’hell with war,” he said.

  “Me for peace,” said I.

  We finished the bottle, and innumerable others thereafter, along with innumerable meals of Australian steak and eggs—for the place became our headquarters. Here we dined most of our girls—and here we met Hope and Molly. Hope was possessed of that large beauty that has won many a Hollywood fortune: large oval face with fine silken brown hair falling round it, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, a straight nose—a fine-featured face but a face empty, in repose, grasping. She was buxom too. Hope was a classic—the classic barmaid, the sort whose broad behind has left a lasting imprint on the pages of history. She took to the dynamic Chuckler immediately, and was his girl until we left Australia. Hope never liked me. She thought me conceited and haughty—“Posh,” she called me.

  Molly was different. In the days afterward, she was fond of slipping away from Chuckler and Hope—and then we would walk in the park, singing and teasing one another. She knew from the beginning where our friendship would end. She had not, like Hope, any thought of a life of ease in the bountiful United States. Her interest in me and the other marines she dated was warm and human, for ourselves as persons, not for ourselves as futures. Poor Molly, she loved much—too much.

  “Tell me of America,” she would plead, while we walked the park paths, our feet crunching softly in the cinders, the night air a caress on the cheek, our arms interlocked—for that place, for that moment, in love.

  I would tell her. Sitting on a bench, I would tell her, or perhaps lying beside a lake while the breathtaking southern sky curved vastly away in a velvety star-dusted night. The fragrance of the flowering gum trees suffused that delicate evening.

  “Oh, Luck—I hope they never make you go back.”

  “Me, too.”

  “But they will, won’t they?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Molly. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the war.”

  “Yes, but without it, we would never have met. You can thank the war for that, anyway.”

  Soon the mood would pass, and she would be jesting.

  “Ah, you Yanks. You’re full of the blarney. All of that sweet talk and the fine manners—and there’s only one thing you’re all after.”

  We would rise and swing, arm in arm, along the path, racing each other sometimes, at other times singing. Molly liked my voice, God bless her. The only woman—the only person—who ever has. She thought I could sing, or maybe she only said she did to get me to sing the American swing songs she loved. But Molly could sing—with a fine clear pitch she could. There was one that was my favori
te, a lilting little thing she’d sing in a soft low voice as we walked home.

  Patrick—Michael—Fran-cis O’Brien

  Would never stop cryin’

  For sweet Molly-o.

  Each morn-ing

  Up with the sparrow,

  As swift as an arrow

  Just leaving the bow,

  Into her garden he’d wing.

  Under her window he’d sing—

  “Sweet Molly O’Donahue

  It’s yourself that I’m asking

  To go for a bit of a walk …”

  But Molly and I quarreled over another girl, and we drifted apart, even though Chuckler stayed close to his Hope.

  Sheila had caused the breakup between Molly and me. I met her on a tram, as Chuckler and I rode to St. Kilda, an Australian beach resort outside of Melbourne similar to Coney Island—but not so blaring, not so much a honky-tonk.

  At the end of the line the bus lurched and Sheila fell backward into my lap.

  I imprisoned her with my knees, and said, “Get up please.”

  “I can’t get up,” she said, laughing.

  “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I whispered into her ear. “Australian girls are so forward.”

  “Please,” she said, giggling, turning her dark head to look at me, “please let me go.”

  I looked at Chuckler. “What’s she talking about, Chuck? Let her go? She can get up, can’t she?”

  He nodded gravely. “She likes it there.”

  Sheila cast him an indignant look and said in a strained voice, “Let me go, please.”

  “All right,” I said, “if you go into Luna Park with me.”

  She pursed her lips, then said, “Right-o.”

  “Good,” I said, and relaxed my knees. Sheila got to her feet. She introduced herself and another girl, and the four of us went into Luna Park together.

  We went home together, too, taking the long train ride to one of the far-lying suburbs—and Sheila put both Chuckler and me up for the night in her mother’s home. Chuckler stayed in a room in the house, but I was given an outlying cottage to sleep in. Actually, it may have been a stable at one time, for Sheila called the backyard “the paddock.” A walk connected it with the house about fifty feet away. The mattress was soft and lumpy, but the sheets were cool and clean-smelling—I dropped off to sleep.