Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (12 page)

Dead bodies were strewn about the grove. The tropics had got at them already, and they were beginning to spill open. I was horrified at the swarms of flies; black, circling funnels that seemed to emerge from every orifice: from the mouth, the eyes, the ears. The beating of their myriad tiny wings made a dreadful low hum.

The flies were in possession of the field; the tropics had won; her minions were everywhere, smacking their lips over this bounty of rotting flesh. All of my elation at the victory, all of my fanciful cockiness fled before the horror of what my eyes beheld. It could be my corrupting body the white maggots were moving over; perhaps one day it might be.

Holding myself stiffly, as though fending off panic with a straight arm, I returned to the river bank and slipped into the water. But not before I had stripped one of my victims of his bayonet and field glasses, both of which I slung across my chest, crisscross like a grenadier. I had found no saber. None of the dead men was an officer.

I swam back, eager to be away from that horrid grove. My comrades, who had covered my excursion with our guns, mistook my grimace of loathing for a grin of triumph, when, streaked with slime, I emerged from the Tenaru. They crowded around to examine my loot. Then, I went to chow.

Coming back, I noticed a knot of marines, many from G Company, gathered in excitement on the riverbank. Runner rushed up to them with my new field glasses.

He had them to his eyes, as I came up. I thought he was squinting overhard, then I saw that he was actually grimacing. I took the glasses from him and focused on the opposite shore, where I saw a crocodile eating the fat “chow-hound” Japanese. I watched in debased fascination, but when the crocodile began to tug at the intestines, I recalled my own presence in that very river hardly an hour ago, and my knees went weak and I relinquished the glasses.

That night the V reappeared in the river. Everyone whooped and hollered. No one fired. We knew what it was. It was the crocodile.

Three smaller V’s trailed afterward.

They kept us awake, crunching. The smell kept us awake. Even though we lay with our heads swathed in a blanket—which was how we kept off the mosquitoes—the smell overpowered us. Smell, the sense which somehow seems a joke, is the one most susceptible to outrage. It will give you no rest. One can close one’s eyes to ugliness or shield the ears from sound; but from a powerful smell there is no recourse but flight. And since we could not flee, we could not escape this smell; and we could not sleep.

We never fired at the crocodiles, though they returned to their repast day after day until the remains were removed to the mass burning and burial which served as funeral pyre for the enemy we had annihilated.

We never shot at the crocs because we considered them a sort of “river patrol.” Their appetite for flesh aroused, they seemed to promenade the Tenaru daily. No enemy, we thought, would dare to swim the river with them in it; nor would he succeed if he dared. We relied upon our imperfect knowledge of the habits of the crocodiles (“If they chase you, run zigzag: they can’t change direction.”) and a thick network of barbed wire to forestall their tearing us to pieces. Sometimes on black nights, in a spasm of fear, it might be imagined that the big croc was after us, like the crocodile with the clock inside of him who pursues Captain Hook in
Peter Pan
.

So the crocodiles became our darlings, we never molested them. Nor did any of us ever swim the Tenaru again.

3

Our victory in the fight which we called “The Battle of Hell’s Point” was not so great as we had imagined it to be. It was to be but one of many fights for Guadalcanal, and, in the end, not the foremost of them. But being the first in our experience, we took it for total triumph; like those who take the present for the best of all worlds, having no reference to the past nor regard for the future.

From the high plateau of triumph we were about to descend to the depths of trial and tedium. The Japanese attack was to be redoubled and prolonged and varied. It would come from the sky, the sea and the land. In between every trial there would stretch out the tedium that sucks a man dry, drawing off the juice from body and soul as a native removes the contents of a stick of sugar cane, leaving it spent, cracked, good for nothing but the flames.

And there is terror, coming from the interaction of trial and tedium: the first, shaking a man as the wind in the treetops; the second, eroding him as the flood at the roots. Each fresh trial leaves a man more shaken than the last, and each period of tedium—with its time for speculative dread—leaves his foundations worn lower, his roots less firm for the next trial. Sometimes there is a final shattering: a man crouching in a pit beneath the bombardment of a battleship might put a pistol to his head and deliver himself. Sometimes it is partial; another man might break at the sound of a diving enemy plane and scream and shudder and wring his hands—and rise to run. This is the terror I mean; this is the terror that strangles reason with the clawing hands of panic. I saw it twice, I felt it pluck at me twice. But it was rare. It claimed few victims.

Courage was a commonplace.

It formed a club or corporation, much as do those other common things upon which men, for diverse reasons, place so great a value; like money, like charity. For it is the common on which the exclusive rests. Our muddy machine gun pits were transformed into Courage Clubs when bombs fell or Japanese warships pounded us from the sea. There was protocol to be observed, too, and it was natural that the poor fellow who might break into momentary terror should cause pained silences and embarrassed coughs. Everyone looked the other way, like millionaires confronted by the horrifying sight of a club member borrowing five dollars from the waiter.

But there was a bit more charity in our clubs, I think. We were not quite so puffed up that we could not recognize the ugly thing on our friend’s face as the elder brother of the thing fluttering within our own innards. You today, me tomorrow.

A month had passed, and it seemed to us the falling bombs were as numerous as the flies around us. Three times a day and every Sunday morning (the Jap fixity of idea, nourished on the great success of Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor) the coconut grove was sibilant with the whispering of the bombs. It sounded like the confession of a giant.

At night Washing Machine Charlie picked up the slack. Washing Machine Charlie—so named for the sound of his motors—was the nocturnal marauder who prowled our skies. There may have been more than one Charlie—that is, more than one Nipponese pilot making the midnight run over our positions—but there was never more than one plane at a time overhead at night. That was all that was needed for such badgering work.

Like the dog whose bark is worse than his bite, the throb of Charlie’s motors was more fearsome than the thump of his bombs. Once the bombs were dropped, we would be relieved, knowing he would be off and away. But the drone of Charlie’s circling progress kept everyone awake and uneasy for so long as Charlie cared—or dared. Dawn meant departure for Charlie, for then our planes could rise to chastise him, and he would become visible to our anti-aircraft batteries.

Charlie did not kill many people, but, like Macbeth, he murdered sleep.

To these trials was added the worst ordeal: shelling from the sea.

Enemy warships—usually cruisers, sometimes battleships—stand off your coast. It is night and you cannot see them, nor could you if it were day, for they are miles and miles away. Our airplanes cannot rise at night to meet them. Our seventy-five-millimeter pack howitzers are as effectual as popguns opposing rifles. The enemy has everything his way.

We could see the flashes of the guns far out to sea. We heard the soft
pah-boom, pah-boom
of the salvos. Then rushing through the night, straining like an airy boxcar, came the huge projectiles. The earth rocks and shakes upon the terrifying crash of the detonation, though it be hundreds of yards away. Your stomach is squeezed, as though a monster hand were kneading it into dough; you gasp for breath like the football player who falls heavily and has the wind knocked out of him.

Flash. Pah-boom. Hwoo, hwoo-hwoee
.

They’re lowering their sights … it’s coming closer … oh, that one was close … the sandbags are falling … I can’t hear it. I can’t hear the shell … it’s the one you don’t hear, they say, the one you don’t hear … where is it? … where is it?

Flash! … Pah-boom! …
Thank God … it’s lifted … it’s going the other way.

Dawn blinks across the river. They go. The planes on the airstrip behind us rise in pursuit. We emerge from the pits. Someone says he is thankful the bombardment continued all night, for if it had ceased, an attack by land might have followed. Someone else calls him a fool. They argue. But nobody cares. It is daylight now and there are only the bombings to worry about—and the heat, and the mosquitoes, and the rice lying in the belly like stones.

The eyes are rounder. The tendency to stare is more pronounced.

We hated working parties. We were weak with hunger. We manned the lines at night. By day, they formed us into working parties and took us to the airfield. We buried boxes of ammunition there. Digging deep holes, lugging the hundred-pound crates, we only got weaker.

Once, returning from a working party, the bombers swept suddenly overhead. I fled before the crashing approach of the bombs they scattered throughout our grove. I leapt into a freshly dug slit trench with three others. I crouched there while roaring air squeezed my stomach. Behind me crouched another man, his face against my bare back. I felt his lips moving in prayer over my skin, the quivering kiss of fear and faith.

When I returned to the pits, they told me that the other working party, the one that I had missed, had been obliterated by the bombs. That was when Manners died, and the gay Texan.

Chuckler made corporal. He made it in a battlefield promotion. Lieutenant Ivy-League had recommended him for a Silver Star for our work on the riverbank in the Hell’s Point fight, specifying that our action in moving the gun from place to place may have discouraged an enemy flanking attack. The regimental commander reduced the citation to a promotion of one grade. Ivy-League had not mentioned me in his recommendation. I have no idea why not. Though it was Chuckler who had first grabbed our gun, it was I who had proposed the moves—and Ivy-League knew it. I resented being ignored, although I tried to conceal it, and Chuckler, embarrassed, did his best to pass over it, trying to make a joke of it. But he deserved both promotion and citation, for he was a born leader. I never forgave Ivy-League, and I think this marked the beginning of my dislike for him.

They brought us mosquito nets. We still slept on the ground—a poncho under us if it was dry, over us if it was raining. But the mosquito nets were a boon. Now we could use our blankets to sleep on, rather than to guard our head against mosquitoes. The poncho could be rolled up for a pillow; if it rained, it went over us. But the nets really came too late. We were full of malaria.

They brought in supplies. Each squad got a toothbrush, a package of razor blades and a bar of candy. We raffled them off. The Runner won the candy bar. Despairing of dividing it among ten men, he fell into a torment of indecision, until everyone assured him he should eat it himself. He slunk off to the underbrush to do so.

Oakstump continued to reinforce his private fort. Every time I saw him it seemed he had an ax in his hand or a coconut log on his shoulder. Once he carried a log so huge that it gouged a hole in his shoulder; a wound which, in civilization, would have required stitching.

Everyone kept saying hopefully that the army was coming in next week to relieve us.

Everyone was in despair. We heard that the army relief force had been destroyed at sea.

Chuckler and I visited the cemetery. It lay to the south off the coastal road that ran from east to west through the coconuts. We knelt to pray before the graves of the men we had known. Only palm fronds marked the place where they were buried, although here and there were rude crosses, on which were nailed the men’s identification tags. Some of the crosses bore mess gear tins, affixed to the wood like rude medallions, and on those the marines had lovingly carved their epitaphs.