Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  The rain had stopped but the rain forest dripped on. Just before the perimeter, we turned a bend, and there, over the head of the man before me, I saw a monster spider, crouching in its web—one of those red and black horrors, with horrid furry legs stretching out crookedly from a body as large as your fist. At that moment it fell from its web upon the helmet of the forward men—encompassing it—and he, with a gesture of extreme loathing, swept his helmet from his head to send it clanking into the bush. I waited for him to retrieve it, turning to cover the trail behind us, and then we caught up with the rest.

  Lieutenant Commando and I continued on to the command post after we had gained the perimeter. What looked like another patrol—a combat patrol, judging from the automatic weapons they carried—was drawn up outside the C.P. tent. The Commander was inside, talking earnestly to a young F Company officer, when we entered. His face relaxed when he saw us, and he grinned at the four fingers Commando brandished aloft. Even in the poor light of the tent, the Commander’s blue eyes seemed to glint.

  “Never mind,” he told the young officer. Then he turned to us. “Glad to see you back, Lieutenant. We heard the gunfire. What was it all about?”

  “We ran into an enemy point down near Tauali, sir,” Commando answered. He took a map from the pocket of his dungaree coat, unfolded it, marked it at the point where we had shot up the countryside and handed it to him. “There were four of them, sir. We destroyed them with small arms fire and rifle grenades.”

  The Commander glanced up hopefully.

  “Find anything on their bodies?”

  “No sir,” said Commando without hesitation. “We had no time to search them. It looked like they were the point for a main body of considerably larger size.”

  I looked at Commando from the corner of the tent to which I had retreated. I looked at him closely. If ever a man spoke with confidence or certainty, it was Lieutenant Commando.

  The Commander shrugged.

  “Too bad. We could use a little information right now. But then,” he said, laughing, “business is picking up. We’re killing the little bastards, and that’s the general idea. Unless I miss my guess,” he went on, obviously relishing the phrase and the notion, “unless I miss, my guess, they’re getting ready to come calling any day now.” He smiled again, showing his even white teeth. “That’ll be all, Lieutenant. Good work.”

  Commando thanked the Commander and left. I watched him go, thinking: He is not a liar, he believes that he actually saw all that. Nor is he a coward, for I have seen him react to danger. Souvenirs is right: Commando sits on his brains.

  Fortunately, Commando’s report had no effect on the precautions of the Commander. We remained on a twenty-four-hour alert in the expectation that the Japanese might “come calling.”

  But they did not come that night.

  In the morning, I was assigned to a fresh patrol ordered to explore the Tauali track. This one was led by Lieutenant Spearmint and it was one in which I was given my due and restored to the Point—but this may have been merely because I was the only one who had been over the ground before. Lieutenant Spearmint was sensible enough to take advantage of that.

  Spearmint was a very capable, a very calm and a very sensible officer. He had been promoted from the ranks as had many of our leaders, but he had not been dazzled by the heights of his new eminence. As the surest sign of this aplomb in the face of such good fortune—for no sunnier smile of the gods seemed possible to us—Spearmint still chewed gum.

  The clean-linen league, as we called the officer corps, had not conned him into a change of manners, and even now his jaws were working in slow, ruminative movement as he told us off into our positions and gave the command to move out.

  “And remember, Lucky, let me know when we reach the spot where you hit them yesterday.”

  It was raining and the track was more slippery than ever—and so, our progress was even slower than it had been the day before. To the right, now faintly heard through the rustling of the rain, now inaudible, lay the ocean. These were the only sounds.

  Word was whispered up to me that the lieutenant wanted to parley. I crept back to where he crouched by the side of the track. He had a map balanced on his knees and was holding his poncho over his head to shield the map from the rain. He motioned to me and I knelt in the mud beside him.

  “Where are we?” he asked in a low voice.

  A normal question, but it shook me. I had been concentrating so hard on the negotiation of those curves that I had forgotten to take bearings. My worries had been for the foe, not for direction.

  I held my breath and listened for the ocean.

  If I could hear it, and if it was on my right, it meant we were still traveling in the right direction. If I did not hear it or if I heard it on my left—it meant that we were lost.

  I heard it—on our right—and I looked at the lieutenant’s map to see the scale of miles, and then calculating the distance we had come, the bends we had passed, the distance to the ocean, I pointed to what seemed a corresponding point on his map, and said, “There.”

  Spearmint nodded. I peered up into his face. It was a controlled face, and looking into it now, I saw the lines of concern disappear from about his eyes and saw the gum-chewing begin again, and I obeyed without a word when he nodded and told me to move out once more.

  It had stopped raining. The green of the jungle gleamed wetly while we worked up to the plateau where the fiasco under Lieutenant Commando had taken place. We came to an open place, a short expanse of low grass beneath a hole in the jungle roof, leading to a short sloping hill that disappeared around a curve before reappearing as Commando’s bluff.

  Halfway up this hill, imprinted as clearly as though cast in plaster of Paris, was the mark of a foot. It was a bare foot, a broad foot, a foot with a prehensile toe. It was a native’s foot. It pointed at us, down-trail. It thrilled and mystified us. I had beckoned to Spearmint and was prepared to discuss it with him, but he looked nervously about him, and said, “C’mon, let’s get up that hill. This is bad ground.”

  We trod carefully up the rise, for it was still slippery.

  In the excitement of the footprint, I almost forgot to remind Spearmint of where we were, but then, I remembered, and said, “Lieutenant, this is where we hit them yesterday.”

  Spearmint looked concerned.

  “What about the footprint?” I asked.

  He looked at me thoughtfully and pushed his helmet back. He chewed his gum methodically, with his lips drawn back and the big teeth showing. It was as though he drew strength and spirit from that rubbery wad.

  “What about it?” he repeated softly, more to himself than to me. “It’s there, that’s all. Nothing we can do about it. Worst thing is—it’s just one print.” He shrugged and returned to contemplating me. “We’d better stop here awhile. You take rear guard, back by that hill.”

  “But, Lieutenant,” I expostulated, trying to conceal my chagrin, “I’m supposed to be in the Point.”

  “Go ahead,” he replied, unruffled. “Do as I say. Rear guard.”

  I obeyed, feeling as though I had been degraded.

  Just a trifle below the crest of the hill, and to the left, I concealed myself in the underbrush. I broke off a few twigs which obscured my line of vision, gaining, thereby, a clear view across this open expanse. I crouched there on my haunches, stewing, angry that I had been demoted to the rear. Though the rain had stopped, there was still not a single sound, not even the ocean.

  A twig snapped.

  I glanced up to see four men approaching me. They were close together.

  For a moment, I thought they were our own, and I wondered why another patrol had been sent out, and why that big fellow in the lead, Major Major-Share himself, had chosen to lead it.

  They kept coming and I saw their mushroom helmets and knew that they were Japs.

  I reached down and unlatched my safety and said to myself: “Wait, and then shoot up and through them and maybe you will ge
t them all with one burst.”

  They were coming up the hill now. The big fellow had his head bent into it and his arms pumping, and he looked even more like Major Major-Share, as I swung my right foot wide to block the trail, and there, looking up at them, pressed the trigger and fired.

  They fell screaming.

  The big man threw his arms over his head and screamed and spun and fell with the clatter of his rifle, and those behind fell in other ways, screaming, too, with one rolling over and over, down the hill, to disappear from sight forever.

  I had emptied my thirty-round clip and had but my twenty-round clip left. I had no idea if there were more of them, so I abandoned my position across the trail, falling back around the curve to the next man, who received me with parted mouth and starting eyes.

  “Stay here,” I said, and hastened back to Lieutenant Spearmint. He was not unnerved, but the sound of firing to his rear had not left him undisturbed. His face asked the question.

  “A Jap patrol,” I panted. “Four of ‘em. I think I got them all. But there may be more.”

  I had no need to wait, for Spearmint was on his feet motioning for another man to join us and for everyone else to stay where they were, on the alert. “C’mon,” he said. The three of us returned to the brink of the hill. “Any more of them?” I asked the man I had left behind, and he shook his head in the negative. I could hear groaning. I turned to the lieutenant. “Want me to give a look?” He nodded.

  I lay on my belly and began to inch out on the slope. The big man lay where he had fallen. He was dead. There were two others lying further down the hill and just at that moment, just as I appeared, the furthest of them began to crawl away.

  Explosions roared behind my ear. Lieutenant Spearmint’s man had cut loose with a Tommy gun and had done so almost inside my ear. It jarred me. Thinking perhaps more enemy were coming, I scrambled back to the high ground.

  “He almost got you,” said the man who had fired.

  “Who almost got me?”

  “That Jap—the one I just let have it. He was sighting in on you.”

  The man was excited. He had a handlebar mustache and it seemed to quiver as he spoke. I looked at the lieutenant. His face reflected concern, but it was an anxiety for the safety of a patrol seemingly cut off by the enemy. I thought: this guy’s crazy, the only live Jap out there is the wounded one. But I thanked him anyway.

  Groaning rose from the hillside again, and the sound of movement.

  The other man and I leaned out and finished off the wounded Jap. I fired short bursts, afraid of using up my last clip.

  “Listen,” said Lieutenant Spearmint, when the deed had been done. “You two stay here. I’m going to strike off to the right, toward the ocean. No sense going back the way we came—there may be Japs behind us. As soon as you see the tail man, pull out.”

  An intense silence had fallen, broken by what seemed to us the sound of movement down at the foot of the hill, where it ended in thick growth.

  But our patrol made sound enough as it broke through the underbrush toward the sea, racketing like mastodons, so eager were they to be away from this mystifying plateau. When we saw the last man, we followed suit, but not before my comrade had swept the hillside with a long burst from his submachine gun.

  Once we had passed the underbrush, we understood the reason for the noise. A field of smooth, wet, slippery rocks lay underfoot, covering a steep descent to the sea.

  We slipped and slithered and bumped and rolled and clattered all that distance of a few hundred yards to the water, expecting that any moment would bring the enemy fire down upon us. It was a most awkward flanking movement, but it got us out of the box we imagined ourselves to be in.

  We returned along the pebbly beach, sometimes walking through the ocean, sometimes cautiously climbing over steep rocks that thrust darkly into that flat gray sea. When Spearmint thought we had gone far enough, and when the ground to the right no longer rose so high above us, we left the beach and regained the trail.

  After staking out a point and a rear guard, Lieutenant Spearmint called a rest. He approached me, taking off his helmet to mop the sweat from his brow.

  “You’d better go back to the perimeter and let ‘em know what the firing was about.”

  I turned. Spearmint suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you.” He jerked his head in a backward motion and grinned and said, “Good work.”

  I felt better about that rear guard.

  It was not far, now, to the lines—and I ran through the jungle at a dogtrot, eager to report my news and to bask in the admiration of my comrades. Suddenly the sentinel of one of our cossack posts confronted me over his rifle, and I grinned at him, flourishing four fingers aloft.

  “Nice going,” he said, “who got ‘em, Lucky?”

  “Me, I did,” I flung back at him, still running—and relished the surprised “Hey!” that broke from his lips.

  Ardor had given way to truth by the time I reached the remaining men of the outpost, and I held up only three fingers this time, exchanging grins with them, and continuing on to the C.P.

  The Commander immediately sent out a fresh patrol, with instructions to pass through Lieutenant Spearmint’s men and to investigate the track as far to the south as seemed wise.

  But they found nothing. There were only the bodies of three Japanese soldiers, the signs of the escape of a wounded fourth, possibly a fifth—and that was all. Even the native’s footprint had been obliterated. Nor did there ever come to us any explanation of how that enemy patrol came to be behind us. The swirling mists of the rain forest had enshrouded the incident in mystery.

  In the dark of that night the Japanese “came calling.”

  Out of the jungle dark they rushed, out of the blackness of a night made wilder still by the wailing of a wind that might have been a hurricane.

  I was not in it; in fact, no more than twenty or thirty marines were in it. It came against G Company, which occupied the center and highest ground of our perimeter. This eminence rose from around our C.P., except at the western or sea anchor, of course, so that the headquarters lay in the center of a horseshoe rising around us.

  The attack came at two in the morning, just as the wind rose to a pitch of fury—when the night was full of its shrieking, and the tearing, crashing sounds of the jungle reeling beneath the lash of its eternal tormentor—when the surf, too, roared in pain behind us.

  And all the while it rained.

  On such a night it was impossible to know more than what the sounds might tell us. Because the noise was predominantly our own because not even a spent bullet fell in our declivity, we knew that we were not losing. But we knew no more.

  I sat in our C.P. tent, fully armed, awaiting instructions from either the Commander or Major Major-Share. I had with me a thermal grenade, with which I was to destroy all of our papers, should the Japanese break through. Some others from the section had been impressed as ammunition carriers, but I remained in the tent, crouching wonderingly in the dark, spared the ordeal of carrying mortar shells to the “stovepipe” crews.

  I could hear the carriers cursing as they plodded past the C.P. tent, the shamrock-shaped triple shell casings on their shoulders, and sometimes I could see them in the momentary, flickering light cast by exploding shells or lightning flashes—I cannot now remember which. Some sobbed with bitter, molar-grinding exasperation when they would have slid down the muddy slope for the second or third time, to be struck cruel blows by their heavy burdens or else forced to grope blindly for them in the dark and mud before resuming the ascent.

  But the stovepipes needed ammunition. From their sounds it was plain that they were widening and making denser their rain of shells. They had raised a fearful racket and had almost obliterated the wild wail of the storm. Our machine gun fire had ceased, except for a sporadic burst. Once in a while there was the pop of a single rifle or the spreading crackle of many rifles firing simultaneously. There were no enemy sounds. The batt
le was dying. The mortars were its death rattle. We had won.

  By the first light of day we learned what had happened.

  Four Japanese soldiers and one officer had been taken alive, and had been brought down to the C.P., their arms bound behind them, knives at their throats, and from them we learned that the Third Company, 53rd Regiment of the Japanese 17th Division had been dispatched from the main body at Cape Gloucester to Tauali, to defend against our landing.

  Their passage had been through near impenetrable jungle and they had not arrived on the scene until two days after our own coming. Nevertheless, they attacked us. They attacked us, some one hundred of them against our force of some twelve hundred, and, but for the prisoners, we had annihilated them.

  Were they brave or fanatical? What had they hoped to gain? Had their commander really believed that a company of Japanese soldiers could conquer a battalion of American marines, experienced, confident, better armed, emplaced on higher ground? Why had he not turned around and marched his men home again? Was it because no Japanese soldier can report failure, cannot “lose face”?

  I cannot answer. I can only wonder about this fierce mysterious enemy—so cruel and yet so courageous—a foe who could make me, in his utmost futility, fanaticism, if you will, call upon the best of myself to defend against him.

  Our dead were six men, among them the stubby, intrepid Obie, whom I had last seen in Melbourne so drunk he could barely stand, whose gun pit had been overrun when the Japs overwhelmed a section of the lines in their first silent rush up the hillside—Obie, who had helped to drive them out in the counterattack, and who had been alternately firing and hurling imprecations at them until one of their bullets took him squarely in the forehead. May he rest in peace.

  The Japanese dead lay in heaps on the hillside, and they filled the trench where Obie’s gun had been located. The souvenir-hunters were prowling among them, carefully ripping insignia off tunics, slipping rings off fingers or pistols off belts. There was Souvenirs himself, stepping gingerly from corpse to corpse, armed with his pliers and a dentist’s flashlight that he had had the forethought to purchase in Melbourne.