Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  Then the fever broke. Sweat poured from my pores like a balm. It bathed my body in a blessed cool, and I could laugh, sing, shout, if only I had the strength. It seemed ungrateful to lie there as the liberating fluid flowed from my body, not to make some sign of thanks. But I was too weak to move, like an atheist who has no God to thank for present favors; and because I had so far forgotten my own religion, I felt no impulse of mental thanksgiving.

  The sweat soaked my bedclothing, and the nurse, happy to see my ordeal ended, moved me with smiles to another cot. I soaked this one, too—and then came the chills. I kept on shivering and they piled the blankets higher over me. It was well over one hundred degrees outside, but they covered me with blankets as though it were only a quarter of that. And I still shook. But this I did not mind. I could even smile—like the Runner grinning with quivering lips, “It feels so good, it feels so good.”

  It was over, but several more days were required before I could sit up or take food. The smell of food nauseated me; tea and a slice of toast were all that I could bear. Finally, I ate with the rest of the patients, and I can remember the extreme effort needed to insert the first forkful of food into my mouth.

  But in a week, I was leaving the hospital. Back to an evacuation point on the beach, and thence to Cape Gloucester via a nocturnal crossing of the Dampier Strait in a converted fishing schooner. A storm broke upon our heads. Black water came over the sides, flooding the deck where we slept, and we retreated to a cabin where we spent the night, half of these “ambulatory patients” seasick by the dizzy rise and fall of our puny craft.

  Fate chided me gently upon my return to Cape Gloucester. Most of the battalion was away on an extended patrol—Lieutenant Big-Picture among them—and the battalion sergeant major, seeing that I was still weak, kindly gave me light duty in the Senior N.C.O.’s Mess. So my flight to New Guinea was almost futile; the threat of rupture was still with me; I had gained a delay only by being felled by that filthy bout of malaria, and here I was, on mess duty, to prove how presumptuous can be the private who believes he can accomplish anything by himself.

  But there was nothing to this assignment, merely a matter of keeping the tent clean, brushing the crumbs from the rough wooden table and setting out the places for the handful of men who had not gone on patrol. They helped themselves, eating in a sort of buffet from the pewter containers of food sent over from the main galley.

  In a few days, the battalion returned, with only a few wounded, and I was overjoyed to hear that Big-Picture had been transferred and that our new section commander was Liberal, the young second lieutenant who had distinguished himself by killing a Jap on his first patrol.

  Two or three more weeks passed in lolling about our tent area. We began to play bridge. We played obsessively, pausing only for meals or sleep so as to gain sustenance or refreshment for playing more bridge. Some of us even began to think in bridge terms—of finessing or reneging or crossruffs—and the breaking point of our mania was reached one night when the Gambler, exasperated by the play of a poor partner, rose up wrathfully to tear up the only deck of cards we possessed and to overturn the candles.

  But no one minded, for we were leaving the next day—as the Gambler well knew when he made his disgust so flamboyant.

  An Army unit was arriving as we were departing. There were hoots and mock falsettos from our raggedy ranks when we perceived the first equipment to be deposited on the beach—stoves and suitcases—and then we were marching aboard the L.S.T.’s, the now-familiar Trojan seahorses, and leaving that accursed island forever.

  We were going: As they say in the song, we don’t know where we’re going—but we’re going.

  1

  All the way from New Britain there had been foolish, hopeful talk of “going home.” All the way we had indulged in silly speculation on the impossibility of sending our diseased, decimated divison into action again without a rest in Australia, or New Zealand, if not back in the States. All the way we had pointed to our emaciated frames and rotting legs and festering armpits, and then, arguing out of jaundiced lips and prejudiced hearts, had pronounced ourselves unfit. All the way there had been the erection of castles in air upon the cobweb of the government’s new troop rotation plan and the single fact of our having served the required two years overseas.

  All the way high hearts and foolish hopes—and now, Pavuvu.

  “What is it?” asked Eloquent, when first we heard the island’s name from Lieutenant Liberal. “What in the name of heaven is Pavuvu? A tropical disease, like the mumu?”

  “It’s Pavuvu with a capital P,” said Lieutenant Liberal reprovingly.

  “So?”

  “It’s a place. It’s where we’re going. Pavuvu Island in the Russells. Part of the Solomons.”

  “Sounds poetic,” said Playboy dreamily.

  “Oh, I’ll bet it is,” said Eloquent, with heavy sarcasm. “The wind sighing gently in the palm fronds, white beaches kissing the blue sea, undulating island beauties coming down to meet us with songs and leis—”

  “Leis? Who’s gettin’ leis?”

  “… Songs and leis,” Eloquent continued, loftily ignoring the interruption. “Oh, it’ll be peachy dandy. When do we get to this wretched place, Lieutenant?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Liberal.

  We marched ashore in the rain and inched up a mud-slicked slope into a coconut grove, and there sat down to contemplate our misery. This was our new home. Pavuvu was to be our rest area. Here we were to make ready for our next campaign.

  Instead of a machete we were given shovels and buckets. There was no underbrush to be cleared, but there was ubiquitous mud to be conquered by quarrying uncounted tons of coral from an open cut in a hill opposite us.

  We shared Pavuvu with multitudes of rats, and these, too, we set to conquering with our busy American ways. But soon our supplies of poison ran out and the piles of little carcasses became more obnoxious in their state of stinking corruption than the live rats had been in pelting flight across our tent tops.

  When dusk set a limit to our assault upon mud or rat, a soft rustling in the palm fronds suggested a more exotic foe, for then we would see the darkly beautiful bat stretching its silent wings upon the winds of evening.

  In the end, it was only the mud we conquered. We left the rats alone, and never bothered the bats, only wondering, sometimes, where the rats came from; and, if it were the palm fronds, as many believed, how did they get along with their laconic neighbors, the bats.

  The food was bad, too, and our tents were rotten and punctured with holes. There was no water except what was caught in our helmets during the night. We bathed by dashing naked into the rain, soaping ourselves madly in a race against the probability of the rain’s ceasing and being left streaked with sticky soap, and we washed our clothes by boiling them in cans of rain water. Our jungle rot had become so bad, so persistent, that there was an appointed time each afternoon for the men to take off shoes and socks and to lie on their sacks with corrosive feet thrust out into the sun.

  But we had borne all this before and we could bear it again, nor could mere bad food or leaky tents press upon the ardor of my comrades. It was the death of hope that bore us down.

  There had always been hope; hope of relief, hope of the sun, hope of victory, hope of survival. But when they came and told us that none of us were going home on rotation, we strangled hope and turned into wooden soldiers. The future looked to innumerable enemy-held islands and innumerable assaults, and we had already noticed how the ranks of the New River originals were dwindling with every action. There were even a few suicides to suggest how despairing some could find the situation.

  We lay on our sacks and listened to the rain or the rats and contemplated some drab substance the color of gray.

  Then the thing changed.

  They came and said half of the originals could go home.

  There was joy, and then, once the method of selection for the Stateside bound became known, there was anger.
There would be a drawing, a “Stateside Lottery,” in which men’s names would be pulled from a hat, but only the names of those who had never been in trouble.

  I was among those whose name did not go into the hat, and so were Runner and Hoosier and Chicken and Souvenirs and a host of others. It seemed that the originals of the Second Battalion, First Marines, had been neatly divided into good guys and bad guys.

  Among us there raged a profane anger. I know now how a convict must feel upon being turned down at job after job because of his past. That was what disqualified us—our past. It made no difference that we had been punished—yes, punished again and again, for it had become customary to solve all problems of selection this way—by marking brig-rats for dirty duty and excluding them from special benefits. Nor did it matter that we had good war records.

  It must have been even harder for a third group, a few men, like the Artist, whose skills were so rare they could not be spared whether they had been good or bad. Without the Artist, we had no map-making section. I suspect that if the Artist had had a violation against him, they would have barred him under that pretext, just as I suspect that someone high in command was a believer in Smedley Butler’s axiom about brig-rats.

  In retrospect, it is easy to forgive my commanders this. But then, it was hard; it was too much like being unfairly condemned to death. The injustice of it overwhelmed me, and I burned with a resentment that was dangerous to carry around. When the departure of the lucky ones was succeeded by a period of the most rigid discipline, I resolved to get away from Pavuvu to a place of solace and rest where I might recover my equilibrium.

  What better place than the hospital across the bay on Banika?

  The episode with Lieutenant Big-Picture had shown me how a flight to the hospital—like a retreat to the wilderness—could solve my problems. Why not try it again? Because of the rain, falling daily even though the rainy season was supposed to have ended, my enuresis was more noticeable than before. Perhaps, too, the agitation of the moment aggravated it. I know that the men in my tent had been urging me to report it to sick bay. I did.

  The doctor, who knew of my case, ordered me to Banika. I was to leave in the morning.

  I walked back from sick bay with a sense of grim satisfaction, and strode into my tent to find Rutherford sitting on my cot. Suddenly the palms and the tropic night had vanished and I was standing in front of the bank on Station Square at home. Many a Saturday night, Rutherford and I and the others had stood there, rehashing the high school football game. He had joined the Marines the same month I did, and had been assigned to the Fifth Regiment. I had not seen him since New River.

  He grinned cheerfully, and I said, “You no-good—how come you didn’t go home on rotation?”

  Rutherford chuckled. “I wasn’t a good boy, I guess.”

  “Same here,” I said, and then, as he drew a huge Japanese pistol from beneath his coat—“What the hell’ve you got there?”

  He looked around furtively and thrust it beneath the blanket. “Keep it for me, will you?” he said. “I clipped it from the company commander this morning, and he’s raising hell about it. They’re gonna have a shakedown tomorrow.” His round sallow face darkened. “It’s mine, anyway. That lousy captain pulled rank and took it from me. I got it from a Jap major at Talasea. He killed himself with it.”

  “Give it to me,” I said. “I’m going to the hospital on Banika tomorrow and I’ll take it with me.”

  His eyes glowed. “Good! They can shake down the whole damn island tomorrow—and they’ll never find it.”

  Rutherford left, immensely relieved.

  In the morning, I hung Rutherford’s machine pistol underneath my armpit, by means of a length of white cord, put my coat over it, picked up my bag of toilet gear and went down to the division hospital. From there a landing boat took me to Banika.

  Banika was a fleshpot, Banika was the big town, Banika was Broadway. Banika had women, it had buildings of steel and wood, it had roads, it had thousands of sailors as sleek as capons, it had movie amphitheaters, it had electric lights, it had canteens overflowing with candy and comforts. And Banika had beer.

  Walking with the others from the beach to the Navy Hospital I felt like a hick on his first visit to New York. Jeeps and trucks and staff cars swept over the island’s roads, raising a busy cloud of dust. Cranes croaked and cranked on the beach, loading and unloading the boats. MP’s patrolled a stockade of pointed sticks behind which dwelt the women—the Navy nurses and Red Cross workers. Everyone was well fed and unworried, the seat of every pair of pants was well filled and happy. Banika was a bovine buttocks.

  We lean ones who wore our discontent on our faces and carried our nervous impatience in our hands must have been a disturbing presence in that purring island incubator. Yet, as I walked along, I was filled with the uneasy suspicion that it would be the image of Banika and not Pavuvu that would be presented to America as the Pacific War. I thought of a U.S.O. singer whom I had known before the war, who had entertained us at New River. She had asked to see me, and when I was fetched, we walked about our barren base. “What do you think of it?” I asked. And she—perhaps thinking of other bases she had visited, shiny with brass and gay with military balls—she had looked down her nose at our poor tents and huts, and said, “Not very glamorous.” Pavuvu was like New River, like every place we had been: not very glamorous. But, ah Banika! There was glamor for you. This was war in the Pacific. This was what America would hear.

  A Navy corpsman led me into a ward and off into a side room—a little cell.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said, coldly, throwing pajamas and robe at me. Clearly, the duty was distasteful to him. I started to comply.

  “Give me your belt and your razor blades,” he said.

  It was an odd command, but I obeyed. I was still undressing, and my eyes traveled to the window. It was barred. Belt? Blades? Bars? Where was I? The corpsman intercepted my gaze and said, “This is just the overflow ward. There isn’t any room right now in the ward you’re supposed to go to.”

  I nodded, but I did not believe him. I examined him. His face was still white with the pallor of civilization. He could not have been long out of the States. He was young, too. Above all, he had the sneering look of the sailor who finds it painful to associate with foot sloggers. I remembered Rutherford’s pistol under my arm. I had not yet taken off my coat, and I delayed it till last, waiting until the corpsman had gathered up my belt and shaving gear and had started to leave the cell for the “overflow ward.” I drew the pistol, shucked the coat, and then, standing naked, pointed the pistol at him, and said, “Hey.”

  He turned, exasperated, saw the huge pistol pointed at him, and stood transfixed. I remained silent and motionless. It was pleasant to see the look of superiority fade from his face, to see the tongue flick out nervously, like a lizard’s. If I was in the Nut Ward (as I was), if they thought me crazy (as they thought all marines), I would play the part to the hilt, and enjoy it. A nude nut brandishing a blunderbuss.

  At last I said, “What shall I do with this?”

  He was too weak to reply, so I went on, “Here, you’d better take it and store it in the hospital property for me, or something.” He took it gingerly and left. Poor, superior fool, he had not the sense to determine if it was loaded or not—which it wasn’t.

  In faded pajamas and red robe I went out in the ward. The first man I encountered stopped me and said, “I’m going to a party tonight and I’ve got to get my brain polished up. Would you mind holding it until I get a cloth?”

  I knew where I was, now. Overflow ward!

  “Sure,” I said, humoring him. “Hand it over.”

  He placed his hands to his head, cupped them, affected to deposit something in my hands, scurried off, returned with a handkerchief, retrieved his “brains,” mumbled, “Thanks a lot,” and betook himself outdoors, to a little caged enclosure where he fluttered his handkerchief busily while murmuring nonsense to himself.

&
nbsp; I watched him for a few moments, hoping that he would raise his head and burst into laughter. But he did not. He was really insane.

  At the end of the brightly sunlit ward were tables on which the inmates could read, write or play games. Two men sat there now, playing cards. I came up and sat down.

  After a time, I jerked my head in the direction of the brain-polisher and asked, “What the hell’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s nuts,” they said in scornful unison, neither looking up from his cards.

  Silence.

  I spoke again, timidly, “What ward is this?”

  “P-38 Ward,” they said, irritably.

  I gathered that “P-38 Ward” was the lingo for mental ward, perhaps because many of its patients were certain that they could fly. The card players had stopped their game and were examining me attentively, as though waiting for me to expostulate, “But what am I doing here?” Rather than gratify them, I arose and wandered down to the other end of the room.

  There, in a glass-enclosed cubicle, sat the Navy nurse. Hygienic, unfriendly—she would never lift a finger to nurse a man. The corps-men would do the nursing. The nurse would keep the records. So far from being angels of mercy in the Pacific, Navy nurses were recording angels, they were accountants. They surveyed us from the eminence of their rank, for they were not nurses and we patients—they were lieutenants and we enlisted men, dirty-mouthed, half-crazy marines, to boot. We wished the Navy nurses to hell and gone, to anywhere but in the hospitals, where they got in the corpsmen’s way, and infuriated the patients.