Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  Frostier than either of us, the battalion sergeant major awaited us outside the colonel’s door. Tall, sharp-featured, his sandy hair thinning and the hairs of his military mustache bristling like bayonets, he seemed more a sergeant of Scots Guards than American Marines.

  “The prisoner,” he said, looking through me, heedless of my horror upon hearing myself so described—“the prisoner will enter the colonel’s office when I give the order. Upon the command to halt he will come to attention before the colonel and remain there until dismissed. Teen-shun! Forrr-rrd harch! Prisoner halt!”

  My eyes fell upon the pink bald pate of Mr. Five-by-Five, our battalion commander.

  Mr. Five-by-Five got his nickname from his build—a few inches over five feet in height and almost that much in breadth. It was an affectionate nickname, and we were really fond of him, or at least had been on Guadalcanal, when not a day passed that did not bring Mr. Five-by-Five toiling up and down those mountain ridges to look over his lines and his men.

  Now, the sergeant major was reading the charges, the crispness of his military style occasionally defeated by a difficulty with words.

  Then he had finished and the colonel looked up and through me, as though my stomach were transparent.

  “Lieutenant, let’s hear your version of what happened.”

  Ivy-League’s voice came floating over my shoulder. I felt Mr. Five-by-Five’s eyes upon me while Ivy-League, talking in a strained voice—as though either he, too, were abashed by the colonel, or else he were reluctant to do what he had to do—related the night’s events. He told the truth, including that most important piece of evidence, the fact that I had been drinking; for drunkenness goes a long way toward mitigating an offense in the Marine Corps.

  The colonel studied me sternly. I stared ahead, trying not to swallow, trying to put steel into my stature, trying to keep from blinking, trying to keep my tongue moist so that I might answer quickly and clearly when spoken to—trying in every way to raise a false strength upon the sinking sands of my craven stomach. The colonel’s manner was stern. I could learn nothing from his face, while he studied my record book, leafing the pages slowly, seeming to weigh these against the words of the sergeant major and of Ivy-League. Would he be cruel or kind? I could not tell. But I knew this, as every soldier knows in war: my future, my life, even, was his to dispose of. It is a most unsettling thought.

  “How d’ya plead?”

  Against my will, I cleared my throat and swallowed. “Guilty, sir.”

  He studied the book again.

  He raised his gaze and held my eyes.

  “I’m not going to ruin your life,” he said, and my stomach that had been fleeing seemed to pause, and turn. “I could put you away for a long time for what you’ve done. Being drunk is no excuse—a marine is supposed to be able to handle his liquor. You’ve got a good war record, though”—he went on, leafing the pages of my record book again—“and you seem to have a good background. So I’m not going to ship you back to Portsmouth, where the books says I should ship you—but I’m not going to let you get away with it, either.” His face hardened.

  “Five days’ bread-and-water. Reduced to private.”

  The sergeant major’s commands snapped out. I obeyed mechanically, so happy I almost missed the look of chagrin on Ivy-League’s face, the look of the hunter whose prey had eluded him. Ivy-League did not want to ruin me, either, but he would have appreciated a stiffer sentence. Five days’ bread-and-water! I could have got five years! I was elated and could have hugged the prison chaser when he appeared outside the colonel’s office, rifle at port arms, and escorted me away.

  Going to the brig in the Marine Corps—especially to the bread-and-water cell—is like going abroad.

  First you must go to sick bay for a physical examination to determine if you are strong enough to stand such a diet and confinement; then you must visit the company office, to have the black marks entered in your record, and more important, to be sure you are docked in pay for the time you spend imprisoned; next you must revisit your company area to surrender your weapon and your gear to your property sergeant—and then, clad only in baggy, faded dungarees, the livery of the brig, you are ready for the door to clang shut behind you.

  Back in your company, you are a dead man for five days. Even your bunk is denuded of pad and blankets. You are a cipher—the scapegrace whose picture is turned to the wall.

  Every foot of the way in these progressions made at an odd, doglike pace, there follows your prison chaser, trotting grimly behind, his rifle at high port, like a canoeist with paddle poised—your shadow and your shame. The large black circles adorning front and back of your costume are almost endowed with weight, you feel them so poignantly; for you know that these are there for the prison chaser to aim at, should you break for freedom.

  The brig receives you, and you are nothing; even the clothes you wear belong to the brig and bear its mark; your very belt and razor blades have been entrusted to the brig warden—you have nothing—you are nothing.

  The steel cage door clangs behind you, O cipher, and there is the brig warden standing there, suggestively flexing a length of rubber hose, and you realize that he has been chosen for his cruelty. Suddenly, things have become serious. There is no one to appreciate the humor of the situation. A chill rises from the cement floor and the heart within you freezes, gazing upon the brig warden with the cruelty shining from his black eyes.

  It is cold and you are alone, and there against you stands the brig warden in his neatly pressed uniform, and behind him the United States Marines, and behind them the United States of America—and behind the brig warden, again in all reality, a door is opening and a voice commands, “Forrr-ward, harch!” and you walk in on stilts to greet your companions in the bread-and-water cell.

  I had entered a shadowy world. I had entered a place that seemed a cavern hollowed out of the submarine rock of a subterranean river. But then I heard the murmur of voices, and the shadows seemed to take on substance and I heard a laugh—and then even this foul place seemed to brighten with that great flaming thing, the human spirit, and I realized, of course, that I was not in hell at all, but only in the brig for five days.

  My eyes having adjusted to the gloom, I found myself in a room about twenty feet by fifteen, into which a murky light sneaked through a rectangle of thick glass high in one wall. The floor was of bare cement, as were the walls, and it sloped inward toward a drain set in the center. In the middle of the right-hand wall was a water tap, on which hung two or three metal canteen cups. The bread-and-water cell was a converted shower room, I noticed, now, that my shadows were leaning against the walls, regarding me with curiosity and expectation. A voice questioned from the murk.

  “What’re you in for?”

  I swallowed and answered. There was an awesome silence. Then—

  “What’re you—crazy, man? What d’ya want to try to shoot the O.D. for?”

  “He stole my cigars on Guadalcanal.”

  Somebody growled, “Too bad you didn’t kill the bastard,” and another asked, “What’d they give you?”

  “Five days’ bread-and-water,” I answered.

  This time there was a general ejaculation of disbelief.

  “How’d you get away with it? Hell! I got thirty days’ P-and-P just for going over the hill a couple of days. And you only get five! For what you did—they should’ve shipped you back to Portsmouth and brigged your ass forever!”

  “Hell, yes! Tryin’ t’shoot the O.D. Who do you know, fellah? Yer old man a general or sump’n?”

  Suddenly a rifle butt smacked sharply on the door.

  “Quiet in there!”

  There was a low grumbling, and gradually silence fell upon the bread-and-water cell. My eyes were now fully accustomed to the bad light and I studied my fellow brig-rats. There was no one from my company, although I saw other men, from the battalion, whom I knew by sight. Every face seemed disfigured by that look of peevish dejection common to v
ictims of petty persecution or to city youth or to disenchanted dilettantes; but not one but was mitigated by the suggestion that, let the prison gates fly open, and every trace of rancor or resentment would vanish. Apart from that look, aside from vain grumbling against the officers or N.C.O.’s who had landed them there, or direful but empty threats of vengeance, there was nothing to distinguish the brig-rats from the men on the outside; they were merely marines who had got into trouble.

  The shadows still stood, no one sat, and I asked a man close to me why. He pointed to the floor and said, “They wet the deck. You can’t sit down, unless you want a wet behind.”

  The floor was wet, and just then, the door flew open and a private began sloshing buckets full of water on the floor. Behind him stood another private, with rifle at high port. I felt myself go hot with anger. “Take it easy,” said the shadow beside me. “You’ll get used to it. The brig ain’t no country club, you know. They wet the deck whenever they catch somebody smoking in here.”

  “Smoking?”

  He nodded and I followed his eyes.

  Hardly had the door closed on the bucket-wielding private, before two shades huddled opposite us lighted a blackened cigarette butt. They concealed the match flare by taking off both of their dungaree coats, and placing them, like a tent, over the head of one of them. They smoked by inhaling little bursts, expelling them quickly downward, and then dissipating the telltale clouds by quick, fanlike movement of the hands. It was a caricature, but no one thought it funny.

  There were fierce whispers of displeasure, but the smokers ignored them, continuing to jeopardize the entire room for a pleasure that could derive only from the knowledge that they were breaking a rule. Certainly the way they smoked could not be pleasant.

  “They’re long-termers,” the shade beside me explained. “They’ve each got about twenty, twenty-five days more to do. They don’t care if they get caught, now—a few more days don’t mean anything to them. That’s how they get the cigarettes,” he went on, “long-termers get a full meal every fourth day. When they march them down to chow with the regular straight-time prisoners, somebody slips them a cigarette. They smuggle it in by sticking it in their hair or between their fingers—or even in their mouth. They wait until it dries out.”

  The door flew open again, and I cringed—expecting more water.

  But it was mealtime.

  “Rookie, rookie, rookie—come and get your chow,” one of the guards chanted in a mock falsetto. Then he slid a big wooden box into the middle of the room, and slammed the door.

  They fell upon it like ravening wolves! They leapt upon that box and tore at the loaves of bread within it with the fury of a mob plucking at the flesh of a fallen tyrant. With a single soundless bound they pounced upon it and wrestled and shoved and pulled until, each with a handful of bread crammed against his lips, they fell back against the wall, there to crouch like caged animals, munching wordlessly on their fodder, their eyes angry and suspicious, their shoulders hunched and their very bodies suggestive of a snarl. Occasionally, a shade would rise to his feet and draw a cup of water from the tap, or take a pinch of salt from the grains spilled carelessly in the bottom of the box.

  This was bread-and-water.

  It was repeated morning, noon and night; and I, who had stood off in horror when that first shattering leap had come, I found only a crust or so to reward my revulsion. Thereafter, I learned to leap upon the first syllable of the guard’s mocking chant.

  Night falls in the brig with the swift silent plunge of dark dropping on the jungle. There is no dusk. A last feeble ray of light dies in the air about you, and suddenly it is pitch dark. Suddenly, too, you are tired. The evening bread box has been and gone; there is nothing to expect, but the passage of a day and the approach of freedom. Better to sleep, to forget it, to pass the night in soft and blissful oblivion and to awake one day nearer release.

  The guards appear with the blankets, two to a man; one to place between body and the still-damp concrete, the other for a cover. Like Robin Hood’s men, we throw ourselves upon this rude couch and go to sleep. We, the prisoners, are more fortunate than our jailors; for while we sleep, a guard must stand among us. We repose in the hollow of the hand of God, even we prisoners do this, and our guard must stand sleepless and erect, wary and fretful even, that some prisoner may outwit him and escape. But we sleep.

  Morning brings the melancholy. We stand or crouch, faceless and formless; waiting for the bread box; longing for the night and dreading the dawn; counting the days and cursing the explosion of time, the eruption of minutes into hours and hours into days and four little days into an era; hating the officers and inventing impossible means of vengeance; sinking, sinking, sinking so deep into the abyss of self-pity that soon the very world is thrown out of balance, and blankets and bread box become magnified beyond proportion, occupying a man’s whole mind, usurping the dwelling place of the world by a process of inverse mysticism that destroys time in reverse, that is the very black and evil heart of despair.

  But there is a morning that brings freedom. The prison chaser trots behind again, there are the visits to the sick bay and the company office, and then, release. The steel cage door clangs behind; behind are the melancholy inmates of the bread-and-water cell, ciphers once again, their faces featureless and irretrievable.

  The thing has left its mark. Five little days, even, and there is a scar. There is the memory of a debasing thing to be shared with all birds whose wings have been clipped, with all caged beasts and imprisoned vagrants, with the lowest and the highest in the history of time.

  Yet, a man who is getting out of the brig in which he has been imprisoned for the first time—if such a man has spirit and the sense to profit by misfortune—a man like this will turn and gaze upon the place and smile. Then he will laugh. Because who can hurt him now? He’s had bread-and-water!

  Chuckler was awaiting summary court-martial when I got out, and his counsel called me as a defense witness. Runner, too, was to appear, as a character witness.

  All three of us were filled with fear when the day of trial came—Chuckler because of the gravity of his offense and the possibility that he might be remanded to the far graver trial of a general court-martial, Runner because his loyalty to Chuckler might lead him to an inadvertent disclosure of his own sins; myself for the same reason, fortified by the fact that I had already tasted the brig.

  We were fearful, too, because at first glance, the court seemed such a travesty of justice.

  I say at first glance, for from its make-up and its conduct, such it would seem to have been; yet it was no such thing at all, for it ended in a finding that was as just as it was practical.

  A lawyer might still insist that Chuckler’s court was a travesty. A lawyer might be convulsed with mirth by Chucklers’ counsel, a brand-new second lieutenant, younger, even, than we, fresh from an uncompleted pre-law course in a New York City college, most obviously destined to be a politician rather than a pleader. A lawyer would sneer at the prosecution and the judges, all chosen from the ranks of lieutenants and captains who had but two years ago been college boys with no more pressing judgments to make than to decide whether or not to spend the weekly allowance on beer or books. Such was Chuckler’s court. But it ended by reducing him from corporal to private and giving him ten days in the straight-time brig. No one, least of all Chuckler, could dispute such a wise and merciful sentence.

  It is unfortunate that my memory is so miserably unproductive here; I wish I could recall more of that trial.

  Once, I remember, the prosecution halted Chuckler’s counsel as he questioned me on my friendship for the defendant. “That’s a leading question,” the prosecutor snapped, whereupon the defense counsel—at first startled that this typical courtroom phrase should be turned against him, the only man in the room with legal training—gathered his facial muscles together in a crushing look of contempt and continued his interrogation.

  The judges, all too aware of the defense
counsel’s legal talent, uncrossed and recrossed their legs, fluttered their hands—and let the objection die.

  So Chuckler lost his chevrons and drew ten days in the comparative comfort of the straight-time brig, and his only complaint when he finally emerged was that, unlike me, he had been incarcerated under a brig officer who delighted in shaving the heads of his brigrats as clean as a rat’s tooth. Poor Chuckler was a skin-head when he came out, and he displayed a heretofore unsuspected vanity by wearing an overseas cap pulled down over his shining skull until the beautiful blond hair grew back.

  2

  Military police were more numerous. The hated black brassard with its block white lettering—MP—was becoming a roving wet blanket.

  When we boarded the Australian ship, H.M.S. Manoora, preparatory to maneuvers in Melbourne Bay, the MP’s came down to guard the gate. They became the hair shirts of our existence. Only a clever man indeed might slip past them.

  We were all eager to go ashore, hating the Manoora as we did—finding the ship’s very name coarsely expressive of our dislike—hating the tedium of just waiting there for maneuvers to begin, eating, meanwhile, such barbaric food as tripe and boiled potatoes for breakfast, sleeping in hammocks below decks and spending our waking hours polishing the Manoora‘s endless expanses of lacquered wood.

  But one night came the news that the MP’s had been withdrawn from the gate. Only civilian guards remained. Within an hour, the ship was emptied of marines. They clambered over the wire fence between docks and road, or even sauntered boldly through the gate, rightly anticipating no restraining hands being laid upon them by the aged civilian guards.

  Chuckler and Runner and I and another Louisville lad, a cousin of the Gentleman’s, called the Chicken for his tender years—now, not quite nineteen—came with us. We slipped ashore the bold way, the grapevine having informed us that the civilians didn’t care.

  We stopped at the first restaurant we found, one lying on the coastal road. The Manoora’s tasteless cuisine had so impoverished our palates that we were ravening for our favorite Australian dish: steak and eggs, with wine or beer, or sometimes even with pitchers of thick, creamy milk and plates of Australian bread—milky white and of the texture of cake, sliced thin and overspread with butter as thick as cheese.