Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  I stood among the heaps of dead. They lay crumpled, useless, defunct. The vital force was fled. A bullet or a mortar fragment had torn a hole in these frail vessels and the substance had leaked out. The mystery of the universe had once inhabited these lolling lumps, had given each an identity, a way of walking, perhaps a special habit of address or a way with words or a knack of putting color on canvas. They had been so different, then. Now they were nothing, heaps of nothing. Can a bullet or a mortar fragment do this? Does this force, this mystery, I mean this soul—does this spill out on the ground along with the blood? No. It is somewhere, I know it. For this red-and-yellow lump I look down upon this instant was once a man, and the thing that energized him, the Word that gave “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name,” the Word from a higher Word—this cannot have been obliterated by a quarter-inch of heated metal. The mystery of the universe has departed him, and it is no good to say that the riddle is solved, the mystery is over—because it has changed residences. The thing that shaped the flare of that nostril, that broadened that arm now bleeding, that wrought so fine that limply lying hand—that thing exists still, and has still the power to flare that nostril, to bend that arm, to clench that fist exactly as it did before.

  Because it is gone you cannot say it will not return; even though you may say it has never yet returned—you cannot say that it will not. It is blasphemy to say a bit of metal has destroyed life, just as it is presumptuous to say that because life has disappeared it has been destroyed. I stood among the heaps of the dead and I knew—no, I felt that death is only a sound we make to signify the Thing we do not know.

  I went back down the hill.

  En route, I stopped off to see the Digger. He and his natives had a spot to themselves on high ground just behind E Company. He was glad to see me and he was quite plainly shaken. He made tea.

  “Where in ‘ell did yer Yanks learn to shoot like that?” he said. I held my tongue. “Blimey—that was a racket you made last night. I don’t mind saying I was a bit nervy.” He finished his tea in quick gulps, and eyed me half-sheepishly, half-grudgingly. “Yer marines are bleddy good. Bleddy near as good as the A.I.F.”

  It was the accolade.

  The storm had subsided by morning. It had swamped two of our amphibian tanks and an L.C.V. But no one ventured down to the little black beach, for a new peril had arisen. At daybreak, a mysterious enemy gun had tried to range in on us from the hills. It could not be located. But all of its shells fell in the water.

  I led a patrol every day now. Still unable to shoot an azimuth, able to read a map only with difficulty—yet I continued to lead patrols, listening for that good old reliable ocean.

  Most of my patrolling was to the north, toward what was called Dorf Point—where the beaches were lined with the wreckage of those ungainly barges which the enemy had relied on for moving supplies, until that nocturnal traffic had been shot to pieces by our torpedo boats operating out of New Guinea. On one of these patrols, commanded by the tall, good-natured Lieutenant Easy from E Company, we came to a cluster of native huts. The interior had that musky odor of fish, which we had learned to associate with the Japanese. I thrust my hand into a tangle of bedding. It was still warm. The touch thrilled me.

  “It’s still warm,” I said to Lieutenant Easy, looking up at him. “They must have just pulled out.”

  He nodded and gave the command to press on in pursuit.

  But it was getting late, and we could not go much further from our lines, lest we risk night falling between ourselves and a safe arrival home. So we turned our faces to the south.

  I fell back with the lieutenant, and another man took the point.

  Almost at that instant he raised his hand.

  The patrol’s vanishing act was ragged, and before we had cleared the track there appeared at the end of it—materializing from the underbrush, itself, so it seemed—a young and powerful native. He stood in rigid salute, British-style, grinning broadly at us, as though he was both glad to see us and amused at our clumsy attempts to elude detection.

  Easy and I regarded him and each other in amazement. The lieutenant motioned him forward. But the native remained at attention. He seemed to have a reason for not moving. He seemed to be guarding someone or something.

  “Let me go up to him, Lieutenant,” I asked. “Maybe he speaks pidgin.”

  “Okay,” Easy said. “You talk to him.”

  His reluctance to move, his protective attitude—both became understandable when I had come up to him. Stretching away to the rear of him was the most sorry, the most suffering, the most carefree, and the most smiling procession I have ever seen. There were about fifty of them. Some were hobbling on rude crutches made from sugar cane, some—the ancients—were borne aloft on litters, some were supported by the more stalwart among them; all had been reduced by starvation to mere human sticks with every rib visible beneath hides stretched so taut that one feared they would burst through; and all were afflicted by yaws or bore the mark of them—yet every one of these dark faces came alight with beatific grins the moment they saw me come up to their leader.

  He smiled, too, and it was a movement of such beauty and trust that I could have embraced him.

  “You savvy pidgin?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, Massa—me all the same mission boy.” I motioned to the people strung out behind him, silently intent on our conversation.

  “What name belong this fella?”

  “This fella name belong ‘em Waremo. This fella stop along Waremo.” He pointed behind me toward the village by that name, which lay a mile or more to the north. “All the same good fella. No likem Jap.”

  “You talk true along me?”

  “Oh, yes, Massa. Me talk true. Me mission boy.” He looked at me solemnly. “Papa Mare he talk along us. He say we must talk true along God, talk true always.”

  He seemed bursting to tell me a story and I nodded to him to go on.

  “Two fella Christmas ago, Jap he come. This fella Kanaka no likem Jap. Jap he kill. This fella Kanaka hidem long bush,” he jerked his head in the direction of the inward-lying mountains. “Papa Mare he die finish. Jap he come. He catchem Papa Mare. He chopem head belong him. This fella Kanaka he hidem. You fella he come long water. Jap he run. This fella Kanaka he leavem bush, he stop long water. He likem stop along village Waremo belong him. Savvy?”

  I nodded and motioned to him to accompany me back to the lieutenant. I explained what was happening. The natives wanted to return to their village. Was it safe to permit them? The lieutenant shrugged.

  “Maybe we ought to bring them in with us.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but we’ve hardly got enough food for ourselves.”

  Easy took off his helmet and scratched his head. Then he said: “They can go up to the village and we’ll keep this fellow here for a hostage. He can talk to Digger. After all, that’s what the Digger’s supposed to do—see to reorganizing the natives.”

  So that’s the Digger’s mission, I said to myself. Aloud, I said, “What about those Japs we were chasing? They might cut these people to hell and gone.”

  I turned to the native and asked about the Japs. He smiled. “Jap he run.” I looked at the lieutenant. He laughed.

  “Listen,” I said to the native. “Number One Fella”—I pointed to the lieutenant—“he say this fella Kanaka stop along village Waremo, okay. You stop along us. Okay?”

  He smiled easily. “Yes, Massa.”

  The native—his name was Kolo—returned to his people. Our men stood aside as they passed through us, and then, seeing them in their hardship, began to give them cigarettes and candy and rations, whatever their pockets contained. The natives accepted them gladly, and with dignity.

  As they passed through, I saw the children among them—their tiny bellies distended with hunger. One of the ancients on a litter sucked on a bamboo shoot which he waved weakly.

  Then they were gone, having vanished around a bend, and Kolo stood proudly beside me. At
a mute command from the lieutenant, the patrol moved out again.

  Once we came to a stream intersecting the trail as it swept to the sea. It was about ten feet wide and a foot or so deep. I rolled up my trouser cuffs preparatory to wading it, but as I did, strong arms clasped me from behind and lifted me, depositing me, dry, on the other side, where I turned to confront the smiling countenance of Kolo.

  When we had regained our perimeter, Kolo was taken to the Digger’s. Next day, a heavily armed patrol led the Digger and his police boys to Waremo, an event which marked the commencement of the Australian’s real purpose with the marines, for the British, or their Australian cousins, must have had no intention of permitting this cheap labor resource to remain unexploited or unorganized, or, worse still, long exposed to the corrupting influence of American generosity.

  But Kolo remained with us, or rather, with me. He became my batman.

  He slept beneath my jungle hammock. He even washed my clothes.

  Two days after I had met him, standing so snappily at attention in the rain forest, I sat on the beach while he washed my dungarees. It was one of those rare times of sunlight.

  The jungle steamed steadily and little clouds of vapor arose from our soaked clothing. At such times we would wash our clothes in the ocean by beating them against the waves, rubbing them against the abrasive sand and, at last, wringing them out. Then, half-dry, we would re-enter them, hoping that the heat of our bodies would complete the job before the rain returned.

  The beach was crowded with naked marines flailing their clothes against the ocean, their bodies incredibly white, for the rains and that sunless, dehydrating jungle had long since drained all color off. Among them stood Kolo, his body brightly black against that background. They eyed him curiously. When he brought the clothes to me, I heard a whoop of derision and then the rough and unmistakable shout of the Chuckler.

  “If that don’t beat the hell outta me! Lookit him, will you? Lookit him—the lousy rear-echelon bastard. If he ain’t gone and got himself a batman! I’m gonna write his old man and tell him it’s okay to send that blue uniform now.”

  Kolo withdrew as they came up the beach and gathered around me, laughing.

  I started to retort, but, at that moment, the sky darkened and the rains fell again. A general cry of rage and despair rose from the beach. We sat there in disgust. Finally the Hoosier got to his feet.

  “Shoot me,” he pleaded. “Why’nt somebody be a good guy and shoot me?” He looked despairingly at the ocean, turned steely gray again and dimpled by the raindrops, and then glanced down at his own half-dry clothing. “Hell’s fire!” he swore, “what’s the use of waitin’”—and ran like a madman straight into the ocean.

  In the morning, I lost my batman. The officers came and took Kolo away from me. They needed him to serve in the officers’ mess that they had had contrived for themselves, erecting it almost the very day after the securing of our position. An officers’ mess is one of the surest barometers of military success. So long as the officers continue to pig it with the men, there is danger of defeat. But once the officers’ mess appears—raised almost on the bodies of the foe, contrived of sticks and pieces of canvas or perhaps only an imaginary line like a taboo—once this appears, and caste is restored, we know that victory is ours.

  That same morning, our eighty-one-millimeter mortars ranged in on an eastward lying spot believed to be the position of the mysterious enemy artillery. Their guns never spoke again.

  Our patrols were probing further and further in every direction.

  To the east, in thickest jungle, Lieutenant Racehorse—the same who had placed Chuckler, Chicken and me in that tiny brig aboard the Manoora—killed one Jap while leading a patrol.

  To the south, Lieutenant Commando ran into an enemy twenty-millimeter gun outpost and killed two of them.

  Further south, to Laut, Lieutenant Liberal—a new officer—killed a Jap on patrol.

  In the same direction, a fifty-man patrol of ours destroyed a three-man enemy ambush, blasting them with shotguns after the poor silly Japs had shouted out in their precise English, “Come here, please—Come here, please.”

  Again to the south, to Sag Sag, a patrol passed the plateau where I had had my own encounter, and we had to hold our noses passing the white moving mass of corruption which these bodies had become within a few days.

  To the north a few days later, Lieutenant Racehorse contacted a friendly patrol from our main body at Cape Gloucester and conducted them to our perimeter.

  Finally, far to the south, Lieutenant Commando was wounded by a Jap sniper in a jungle flare-up between his patrol and an enemy force composed of Nipponese soldiers, scout dogs and natives armed with bows and arrows. Because he was so big, he could not be carried the six or seven miles of rugged terrain lying between Laut and our position. A runner was sent back, and I was in the C.P. at the time of his arrival.

  We went to rescue Commando in an amphibian tractor, sailing along the coast under a mackerel sky, a flight of scavenger birds accompanying us like ghoulish outriders over the bleak cliffs to our left. Commando lay in the forward part of the tractor on the return journey, his face ashen and his lips tightened against the pain. Commando might sit on his brains, but he fought with his heart.

  Four days later, on the eleventh of January, we struck our lines and marched up the coastal track to Cape Gloucester, along the shore, past the wrecked barges, through the empty villages, through the ocean with rifles at high port, and up a beach of smooth white stones—and so to the airfield, back to the warmth and comfort of our division comrades.

  4

  I had spent the night beneath a native hut, protected from the pelting rain—damp, if not dry, but at least not drenched.

  When I awoke I could hardly see. Something was wrong with my eyes. It was as though the lids were stuck together. I blundered out into the light and strained to see my comrades, in soiled ponchos arising from the wet earth like genies swirling into shape from the mists, and saw that they were laughing at me and pointing at me.

  I felt my face and found that my lips had swelled like a Ubangi woman’s and that my eyelids, too, had ballooned, as well as my nose. Someone took a mirror from his pack and handed it to me, and I saw myself a puffy gargoyle.

  But my face subsided to normal proportions within a half hour. I ascribed the swelling to some obscure bug that dwelt beneath that unsavory hut—and forgot about it.

  But now I remember, now I remember that here marked the midway point of the battle with the jungle. For the Japanese had been defeated during our solo mission down the coast, and even though the stiffest fight—the Seventh Regiment’s conquest of Hill 660—would require another week for its consummation, it was the jungle and not the Jap that was now the adversary.

  The puffing of my lips and eyes symbolized the mystery and poison of this terrible island. Mysterious—perhaps I mean to say New Britain was evil, darkly and secretly evil, a malefactor and enemy of humankind, an adversary, really, dissolving corroding, poisoning, chilling, sucking, drenching—coming at a man with its rolling mists and green mold and ceaseless downpour, tripping him with its numberless roots and vines, poisoning him with green insects and malodorous bugs and treacherous tree bark, turning the sun from his bones and cheer from his heart, dissolving him—the rain, the mold, the damp steadily plucking each cell apart like tiny hands tearing at the petals of a flower—dissolving him, I say, into a mindless, formless fluid like the sop of mud into which his feet forever fall in a monotonous slop-suck, slop-suck that is the sound of nothingness, the song of the jungle wherein everything falls apart in hollow harmony with the rain.

  Nothing could stand against it: a letter from home had to be read and reread and memorized, for it fell apart in your pocket in less than a week; a pair of socks lasted no longer; a pack of cigarettes became sodden and worthless unless smoked that day; pocketknife blades rusted together; watches recorded the period of their own decay; rain made garbage of the food; penci
ls swelled and burst apart; fountain pens clogged and their points separated; rifle barrels turned blue with mold and had to be slung upside down to keep out the rain; bullets stuck together in the rifle magazines and machine gunners had to go over their belts daily, extracting and oiling and reinserting the bullets to prevent them from sticking to the cloth loops—and everything lay damp and sodden and squashy to the touch, exuding that steady musty reek that is the jungle’s own, that individual odor of decay rising from vegetable life so luxuriant, growing so swifly, that it seems to hasten to decomposition from the moment of birth.

  It was into this green hell that we were inserted a day or two after the march from Tauali-Sag Sag. And here was fought that battle with the rain forest, here the jungle and the men were locked in a conflict far more basic than our shooting war with the Japanese—for here the struggle was for existence itself.

  The war was forgotten, Who could comprehend it? Who cared? The day was but twenty-four hours and the mind had but two or three things to command it, objects like dryness, food—oh, most of all, most unbelievably of all, a cup of hot coffee—a clean, dry pair of pants and a place out of the rain! Hours passed in precocious contemplation of that moment just before darkness, when—with cigarette wrappings and the wax-paper covers of the K-rations, with matches carefully wrapped in a contraceptive and kept within the liner of the helmet—a tiny fire was lighted and water heated in a canteen cup, and thus was the belly fortified to face the cold black night.

  Once we had taken up these new positions, featureless in my memory except that a narrow but swift little stream swept through the Battalion C.P., I resigned myself to the dreary proposition that I would be wet so long as I stayed on New Britain. I would be wet not only from the rain—for sometimes it stopped, and at other times it did not fall so fast that a jungle hammock could not repel it—but because an affliction which had begun the moment I left Australia was now active again. It had begun during the discomforts of Guadalcanal, had disappeared in the civilized living of Melbourne, and had reappeared on Goodenough, New Guinea and now on New Britain. I learned later from doctors to call it enuresis. When one is asleep, the bladder empties—and that is that.