Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  There were many episodes in those ten days. But they were all the same—smeared with lust or bleared by appetite.

  Finally I was sated. I was jaded. San Francisco ended for me one night as I rode in a taxicab with Jawgia, the freckled, sharp-featured cracker from the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia, whose name suggested both his home state and his habit of jawing about the Civil War. Jawgia clambered out and the guard swung the gate open. I peered into the driver’s face, dropped three pennies—the only money we had left—into his outstretched hand, and said, “Buy yourself the best damn newspaper in town!” I slipped through the gate, and with a wild yell ran for my ship. One of the coins the driver threw hit me as I ran.

  Our ship left in the morning, in a drizzle, on June the twenty-second, 1942. It moved, unlovely gray hulk, under the Golden Gate Bridge. I sat on the stern and looked back, searching. In the manner of the immigrant who takes a clod of his country’s soil on his voyage with him, I sought a memory to take with me.

  High above, in the middle of the wetly gleaming bridge, stood a sentry in poncho and kelly helmet, his rifle a hump on his back. He waved. He waved steadily, for minutes, while all around me the snickers and the catcalls mounted. I loved him for it. He waved to me.

  1

  Fires flickered on the shores of Guadalcanal Island when we came on deck.

  They were not great flaming, leaping fires, and we were disappointed. We had expected to see the world alight when we emerged from the hatches. The bombardment had seemed fierce. Our armada, for such we judged it to be, seemed capable of blasting Guadalcanal into perdition.

  But in the dirty dawn of August 7, 1942, there were only a few fires flickering, like the city dumps, to light our path to history.

  We were apprehensive, not frightened. I was still angry from my encounter with the sailor messman. I had been overlong eating my breakfast of beans, and when I had finished I had perceived the sailors frantically cleaning up the galley. Perhaps this would become the ship’s surgery for the shore wounded. The chief messman behind the counter was just closing a crate of oranges, distributed as a sort of eve-of-battle gift to the troops, when I had rushed up to claim mine. He refused to reopen the crate. We shouted furiously at each other. I wanted that orange more than General Vandergrift wanted Guadalcanal. The sailor would not surrender it to me and threatened—oh, inanity of inanity!—threatened to report me for insolence. Report me! Report me who am about to spill my blood among the coconuts! I wanted to skewer him on my bayonet, but I thrust him aside, tore off the lid, seized my orange and fled up the ladder to my comrades on deck, the messman’s outraged cries dwindling behind me.

  So I was flickering, myself, like the long curving coastline of Guadalcanal, when Old Gunny bellowed:

  “First Platoon over the side! Down those cargo nets!”

  The George F. Elliott was rolling in a gentle swell. The nets swayed out and in against her steel sides, bumping us. My rifle muzzle knocked my helmet forward over my eyes. Beneath me, the Higgins Boats wallowed in the troughs.

  The bombardment was lifting; I looked to both sides of me, clinging, antlike, to the net. Sealark Channel was choked with our ships. To the left, or west of me, was hulking Savo Island. In front of me, to the north, but obscured by the side of the Elliott, stretched Florida Island and tiny Tulagi. The Marine Raiders and Paramarines were already at their bloody work on Tulagi. I could hear the sound of gunfire. Behind me, to the south, was Guadalcanal.

  Three feet above the rolling Higgins Boats the cargo nets came to an end. One had to jump, weighted with fifty or more pounds of equipment. No time for indecision, for others on the nets above were all but treading your fingers. So there it was—jump—hoping that the Higgins Boat would not roll away and leave only the blue sea to land in. But we all made it safely.

  Now I could see the assault waves forming near the other ships. Boat after boat would load up, then detach itself from the mother ship to join its mates, circling, circling, like monster water bugs on frolic.

  “Everybody down!”

  Now I could see the circles fan out into the attack line. Like my buddies, I was crouching below the gunwales, feeling the boat beneath me swing slowly round to point its nose shoreward. The deck vibrated in a rush of power.

  The assault began.

  Now I was praying again. I had prayed much the night before, carefully, deliberately, impetrating God and the Virgin to care for my family and friends should I fall. In the vanity of youth, I was positive I would die; in the same vanity, I was turning my affairs over to the Almighty, like an older brother clapping the younger on the back and saying, “John, now you’re the man of the house.”

  But my prayers were a jumble. I could think of nothing but the shoreline where we were to land. There were other boatloads of marines ahead of us. I fancied firing from behind their prostrate bodies, building a protecting wall of torn and reddened flesh. I could envision a holocaust among the coconuts. I no longer prayed. I was like an animal: ears straining for the sound of battle, body tensing for the leap over the side.

  The boat struck the shore, lurched, came to a halt. Instantly I was up and over. The blue sky seemed to swing in a giant arc. I had a glimpse of palm fronds swaying gently above, the most delicate and exquisite sight I have ever seen.

  There followed a blur. It was a swiftly shifting kaleidoscope of form and color and movement. I lay panting on the sand, among the tall coconut trees, and realized I was wet up to the hips. I had gotten some twenty yards inland.

  But there was no fight.

  The Japanese had run. We lay there, fanned out in battle array, but there was no one to oppose us. Within moments, the tension had relaxed. We looked around our exotic surroundings. Soon there were grins and wisecracks.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” the Hoosier pouted, “this is a helluva way to run a war.”

  Sergeant Thinface screamed shrilly at someone opening a coconut.

  “You wanna get poisoned. Doncha know them things could be full of poison?”

  Everyone laughed. Thinface was so stupidly literal. He had been briefed on Japanese propensities for booby-trapping or for poisoning water supplies; thus, the coconuts were poisoned. No one bothered to point out the obvious difficulties involved in poisoning Guadalcanal’s millions of coconuts. We just laughed—and went on husking the nuts, cracking the shells, drinking the cool sweet coconut milk. Thinface could only glower, at which he was expert.

  From somewhere came the command: “Move out!”

  We formed staggered squads and slogged off.

  We left our innocence on Red Beach. It would never be the same. For ten minutes we had had something like bliss, a flood of well-being following upon our unspeakable relief at finding our landing unopposed. Even as we stepped from the white glare of the beach into the sheltering shade of the coconut groves, there broke out behind us the yammer of antiaircraft guns and the whine of speeding aircraft. The Japs had come. The war was on. It would never be the same.

  We plodded through the heat-bathed patches of kunai grass. We crossed rivers. We recrossed them. We climbed hills. We got into the jungle. We cut our passage with machetes or followed narrow, winding trails. We were lost every step of the way.

  At intervals we would pass little knots of officers, bending anxiously over a map. That pitiful map! Here there was Red Beach, which was right enough, and there was the Tenaru River, which it was not, and there were the coconut groves—miles and miles of them, neatly marked out by symbols looking more like fleurs-de-lis than coconuts—and you would think this whole vast island was under cultivation by Lever Brothers.

  It was a lying map and it got us into trouble from the outset.

  The officers were apprehensive.

  They knew we were lost.

  “Hey, Lieutenant—where we headed?”

  “Grassy Knoll.”

  “Where’zat?”

  “Up ahead, where the Japs are.”

  Our very naïveté spoke. Grassy Knoll … up ah
ead … where the Japs are. Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, hide-and-seek—we were playing a game. Even the division commander had calmly announced an expectation of taking his evening meal on the summit of Grassy Knoll.

  “Synchronize your watches, gentlemen—the assault has begun.”

  Last one up to Grassy Knoll is a rotten egg.

  Ah, well, we had much to learn, and five months in which to learn it; and there would be precious few who would get to Grassy Knoll in the process.

  So began, on the very first day, the frustration. So, too, began the loneliness. The sounds of battle subsiding behind us had an ominous tinge, the faces of the officers we passed had an anxious tone. The Jap was closing the ring, and we—poor gallant fools—we thought we were pursuing him!

  We were drenched with sweat. Our progress through the kunai patches had nearly prostrated us. Now, in the clammy cool of the rain forest, our sweat-darkened dungarees clung to us with chill tenacity.

  “Hey, Lucky,” the Hoosier called. “Ah bet Ah could get a quart of Calvert off your back. Wring out your jacket, Lucky, and give ever’-body a shot.”

  It was not whiskey we wanted, though. For the first time in my life I was experiencing real thirst. The heat, and now the dripping, enervating forest, seemed to have dehydrated me. I had water in my canteen, but I dared not touch it. Who could tell when it might be replenished? We had been walking three hours or more, and had seen no water.

  Then, in that sudden way of the jungle, there was revealed to us a swift-running river.

  With incautious shouts we fell upon her. She dissolved us, this river. We became a yelling, splashing, swilling, milling mass, and even Lieutenant Ivy-League shared the general retreat from discipline. Oh, what a sweet sight would we have been for Japanese eyes! What a chance for massacre they missed!

  Some even lay on their backs in this shallow stream—the lyrically named Ilu—and opened their mouths, letting the water plunge into their systems as though into yawning drains. Lieutenant Ivy-League was swinging water to his lips by the helmetful, bellowing meanwhile, “Don’t drink! It may be poisoned! Don’t drink until you’ve used your purifying pills.”

  Everyone nodded gravely and went right ahead with the orgy, drinking, drinking, drinking—sighing like a lover as the sweet, swift little river swept the salt sweat from our bodies.

  Refreshed, sated, we resumed the march.

  We were sopping. But it was the clean wetness of water. It is nothing to be sopping in the jungle rain forest, and it is better if it be water than sweat.

  Night came in a rush while we were still marching. We set up a hasty defense. The first day had passed without event, though we had lost one man. He had been wide on the flank of our advancing column and had simply disappeared.

  It began to rain, while we set up our guns on top of a hill. The rain fell drearily as we sat hunched in our ponchos, bidden to keep silence, munching the cold rations we took from our packs—each man to himself alone, but all afloat on a dark sea of the night.

  It could—it should—have been a night of purest terror. We were bewildered. We were dispirited. We were cold. We were wet. We were ignorant of our surroundings, so we were afraid of them. We knew nothing of our enemy, so we feared him. We were alone, surrounded by a jungle alive with the noise of moving things which could only seem to us the stealthy tread of the foe moving closer.

  But we saw all these things dully, as a stunned boxer gaping with indifferent anticipation at the oncoming knockout blow, too paralyzed by previous punches to move, too stupefied to care. The steady drumfire of the day’s events had done this to us.

  Once there came a burst of gunfire. It shattered the night. We leaned over our guns, our mouths agape in the darkness. But then the night closed in again. Darkness. The trees dripping. The jungle whispering.

  No one came.

  At dawn we learned the import of the gunfire. A medical corpsman had been killed. He had been shot by his own men.

  When the sentry had challenged him as he returned from relieving himself, he had boggled over the password “Lilliputian” and so met death: eternity at the mercy of a liquid consonant.

  I shall never forget the sad faces of the friends who buried him. In that dismal dawn, the scraping of their entrenching tools was as plaintive as the scratching of a mouse.

  The light was still dim. Lieutenant Ivy-League asked the company commander for permission to smoke.

  “I don’t know if it’s light enough,” said the captain. “Why don’t you go over by that tree and light a match? Then I can tell if it’s too dark.”

  The lieutenant strode off. When he had reached the tree and lighted his match, we could just make out the tiny flare of it and hear him calling softly, “How’s that, Captain?”

  The captain shook his head.

  “No. Keep the smoking lamp out. It’s too dark, yet.”

  I peered at the captain. Anxiety was on his face as though carved there by the night’s events. It startled me. Here was no warrior, no veteran of a hundred battles. Here was only a civilian, like myself. Here was a man hardly more confident than the trigger-happy sentry who had killed the corpsman. He was much older than I, but the responsibility of his charge, the unknown face of war, had frightened him past trusting the evidence of his senses.

  He thought the tiny flare of matches might bring the enemy down on us, as though we were lighting campfires at night. In another minute, it was clear daylight; everyone was smoking; soon the captain was, too.

  We marched all day. Grassy Knoll was still “up ahead” and so were the Japs. We squirmed up the side of rain-bright hills, in slow sideways progress, like a land crab or a skier; we slid down the reverse slopes, the poor gunners cursing weakly while their tripods banged cruelly against the backs of their heads. The terrain of Guadalcanal seemed composed of steel, over which the demons of the jungle had spread a thin treacherous slime. Our feet were forever churning for a purchase on these undulating paths, our hands forever clawing the air, our progress constantly marked by the heavy clanking fall of a gunner in full gear.

  We advanced on the enemy with all the stealth of a circus. If there had been a foeman in that dim dripping jungle he would have annihilated us. The Japanese would have done to us what our military ancestor, Washington, prevented the French from doing completely to Braddock, what our forefathers did to the British on the retreat from Lexington.

  We saw none of the enemy. That day was a dull, lost witness to the cycle of the sun, of which I have neither memory nor regret.

  The night I shall never forget.

  I awoke in the middle of it to see the sky on fire. So it seemed. It was like the red mist of my childhood dream when I imagined Judgment to have come while I played baseball on the Castle Grounds at home. We were bathed in red light, as though fixed in the eye of Satan. Imagine a myriad of red traffic lights glowing in the rain, and you will have a replica of the world in which I awoke.

  The lights were the flares of the enemy. They hung above the jungle roof, swaying gently on their parachutes, casting their red glow about. Motors throbbed above. They were those of Japanese seaplanes, we learned later. We thought they were hunting us.

  But they were actually the eyes of a mighty enemy naval armada that had swept into Sealark Channel. Soon we heard the sound of cannonading, and the island trembled beneath us. There came flashes of light—white and red—and great rocking explosions.

  The Japs were hammering out one of their greatest naval victories. It was the Battle of Savo Island, what we learned to call more accurately the Battle of the Four Sitting Ducks. They were sinking three American cruisers—the Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria—and one Australian cruiser—the Canberra—as well as damaging one other American cruiser and a U.S. destroyer.

  The flares had been to illuminate the fight. At one point, the Japanese turned their searchlights on. These accounted for the eerie lights we saw, as we huddled in our slimy jungle.

  It took us hardly a day to wi
thdraw from the rain forest, although we had spent two days getting into it. But we knew the way back; we had not known the way in.

  Amphibious tractors laden with food and water awaited us when we emerged and came down the slopes into the kunai fields. Chuckler was in front of me. He slipped on the last slope. As he fell, his tripod caught him wickedly behind the head.

  He got up and kicked it. Then he swore. He swore with the shrill fury of exasperation.

  He bent and grasped the tripod as though it were a living thing and he had it by the throat, turning his wrists to it as though he could choke the life from it—this hard cruel unbending thing in which was now concentrated the frustration, the hunger, the thirst, the wetness and the anxieties of these past two days. He flung it then. It sailed through the air and landed with an uncaring clank in the tall kunai.

  Chuckler sat down and lit a cigarette, and that was where the battalion deployed as the men came spilling down from the hills in their mud-caked formless green twill, with their ugly cartridge belts and bowl helmets, their slung rifles and their stubble of beard, and the eyes that were just beginning to stare. Water and cans of C-rations came streaming off the amtracks. When we had refilled our canteens and our bellies, and sucked at blessed cigarettes, we were up again and off.

  It was dusk when we reached the beach. We saw wrecked and smoking ships—a clean, unshipped expanse of water between Guadalcanal and Florida Island.

  Our Navy was gone.

  Gone.

  We rested there. Columns of men were trudging up the beach. Their feet clapped softly against the sand. The sun had sunk behind the jungle. Night rolled toward us from the eastward-lying sea, gathering purplish over Florida as though it would come upon us in a bound.

  Silhouetted against the gathering dark were the men. In the half light, they seemed to have lost the dimension of depth; they seemed shades. They moved, these weary men, as though chained to one another, with the soulless, mechanical tread of zombies. Behind them, low on the horizon, the reflected sun glowed dully. Despair seemed to walk in desolation.