Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (13 page)

“He died fighting.”

“A real marine.”

“A big guy with a bigger heart.”

“Our Buddy.”

“The harder the going, the more cheerful he was.”

There was this verse, which I have seen countless times, before and since, the direct and unpolished cry of a marine’s sardonic heart:

And when he gets to Heaven
To St. Peter he will tell:
One more Marine reporting, sir—
I’ve served my time in Hell
.

Other inscriptions, and most often the dead man’s name, were made by pressing bullets into the ground, so that the round brass end of the cartridges gleamed above the earth. Chuckler and I lifted our gaze from the cemetery to encompass the entire level plain sweeping back to the hills. Chuckler raised his eyebrows sardonically.

“Plenty of room,” he said.

“That’s for sure,” I said.

We said a prayer before the grave of one of the dead from our own platoon.

“You know,” Chuckler said, rising, “he had two hundred bucks in his kick before Hell’s Point. He won it in a poker game.”

“Yeah?”

“When they went to bury him he didn’t have a dime.”

We plotted the death of a rat that had become attached to our machine gun pit. We swore we would kill it and have fresh meat. Its habit was to scurry across the gun embrasure, almost flitting, it moved so fast in the half light. It seemed the rat grew bolder as we grew weaker from hunger, until in our extremity it actually sauntered across the embrasure! We never caught it. If we had, I doubt that we would have eaten it.

One night we were shelled by cruisers. A projectile landed in the river mud not far from us; the pit shook like jelly. No one spoke, until No-Behind said hopefully, “Must be a dud.” I said, “Didn’t you ever hear of a delayed fuse?” and everybody giggled, except No-Behind, who drew his breath sobbingly. I had to slap him.

Another night—a very black night—we huddled in the pits while the sounds of battle came to us from the hills on our right. We were alerted for an attack. We sat wonderingly the whole night, all of it, until morning brought the news that the first half of the battle of Bloody Ridge had been fought. The Japs had been repulsed.

When night fell again, the battle was resumed. We sat again in the black pit, waiting. This time there was almost no crackling of small arms fire, only the thump and crash of artillery—our artillery, we hoped. We took turns peering from the pit for signs of the enemy on our front, or crawled out on the river bank for a better look. We could only hope the Raiders and Paramarines would hold, up there in that black-and-scarlet hell, where the issue had become so close that our own artillery was falling upon our own positions, abandoned by the defending marines and overrun by the attackers. It was a most unbelievable barrage our one-hundred-and-five-millimeters threw out. I was nowhere near either end of it, yet it made my teeth ache.

Morning was a blessing. It chased away fear of the Japanese breaking our line up in the hills, pouring through the gap, spilling into the groves behind us. We knew the Japs had been beaten. Strange, how the anxiety of that vigil could be almost as wearing as the actual fight.

The Hoosier said it next day.

We were gathered in the shade of the only tree on the river bank. Hoosier sat leaning against the trunk, whittling on a stick.

He kept on plying the stick with his knife, slicing off long curly slivers of white wood, seeming not to care whether or not anyone heeded his words.

“They’re gonna whittle us,” he said, shaping his sentences proportionate to the slivers. “They come in last night against the Raiders, same as they come in against us. Sure, we beat them. So’d the Raiders. But ever’ time we lose a few chips. Ever’ time we lose a couple hundred men. What do they care what they lose? Life is cheap with them. They got plenty more, anyway.” He waved the stick. “They got plenty of sticks, but we just got the one, we just got us. Fellow from the Fifth came by this morning and said the Japs was unloading two more troop transports down at Kokum. They keep on whittlin’ us. Ever’ day we lose ten, twenty fellows from the bombing. Ever’ night Washing Machine Charlie gets a couple. When they hit us with them battleships, I dunno how many we lose.

“But they got it all their own way,” he continued, grunting as the knife cut into a hard spot, “‘cause we ain’t got no ships and we ain’t got no airplanes ‘cept a coupla Grummans that cain’t get off the ground half the time because we ain’t got no gasoline. They got the ships and they got the airplanes and it looks like they got the time, too. So Ah’m telling you”—the knife cut through and the stick broke—“they’re gonna whittle us.”

The Chuckler sought to make a joke of it.

“What’s eating you? You never had it so good. Here’s a guy getting lamb’s tongue in his rice and he wants to get back to civilization and stand in them long lines for his war bonds. Whaddya want—egg in your beer?”

“Don’t be a damn fool, Chuckler. Ah’m not kidding. They’re gonna wear us down.”

“No egg in my beer,” said the Runner. “Just give it to me straight, just let me have mine in a nice tall glass like they have at the Staler. Carling’s. Carling’s Black Label.”

Hoosier arose and looked down at us with a glance of wearied exasperation. He strode away, and we sat there in silence. We felt like theology students whose instructor takes his leave after presenting the most compelling arguments against the existence of God. Our faith in victory had been unquestioning. Its opposite, defeat, had no currency among us. Victory was possible, that was all; it would be easy or difficult, quick or prolonged, but it would be victory. So here came the disturbing Hoosier, displaying the other side of the coin: showing us defeat.

It shook us, and it was from this moment that we dated the feeling of what is called expendability.

All armies have expendable items. That is, a part or unit, the destruction of which will not be fatal to the whole. In some ordeals, a man might consider his finger expendable, but not his hand; or, in extremity, his arm but not his heart. There are expendable items which may be lost or destroyed in the field, either in peace or in war, without their owner being required to replace them. A rifle is so expendable or a cartridge belt. So are men.

Men are the most expendable of all.

Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese, not one nor all of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability.

This was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice; that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being expended puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham. entirely without reproach; yet, for the same Master, he would have gone gladly to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifices of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim.

If we were to be victims, we were as firmly secured to our role as Isaac bound to the faggots. No day passed without accentuating it.

“Lieutenant, when are we getting off this island?”

“Search me. I don’t know.”

“Couldn’t you ask the Colonel?”

“What makes you think he knows?”

“This food is rotten, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah, I know—but you’d better eat it.”

“I can’t take another mouthful of this wormy rice.”

“Eat it.”

“But how can they expect us to—”

“Eat it.”

“But it gags me.”

“Okay. Don’t.”

“I think I’ve got malaria. Here—feel my forehead.”

“Cheez—I think you’re right. It’s hot as hell. You oughta turn in to the sick bay.”

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“What’s the point? They’ll only give me some aspirin. If my fever gets real bad, they’ll only put me in a tent with the rest of the bad ones. They won’t let me go home. They won’t take me off the island. Nobody leaves. So what’s the point.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Sure I’m right. So I’d rather suffer among friends. I’m telling yuh—nobody’s leaving this island, not even in a pine box.”

“You can say that again. Ain’t we got our own cemetery?”

It was so lonely. It was the loneliness of the night watch, listening to the myriad moving things and straining to detect, beneath this irregular rhythm of nature, the regular sound of man. Loneliness. This was the pit that yawned beneath our yearning, our constant reproach of the world at large.

In another sense, in an almost mawkish sense, we had gotten hold of the notion that we were orphans. No one cared, we thought. All of America’s millions doing the same things each day: going to movies, getting married, attending college commencements, sales meetings, café fires, newspaper drives against vivisection, political oratory, Broadway hits and Broadway flops, horrible revelations in high places and murders in tenements making tabloid headlines, vandalism in cemeteries and celebrities getting religion; all the same, all, all, all, the changeless, daily America—all of this was going on without a single thought for us. This was how we thought. It seems silly, now.

But it was real enough, then, and I think we might have become unwarrantably bitter alongside that evil river, had there not come at last a tearing, liberating change; we were ordered to new positions.

We left the river. We left without notice. We swung our packs onto our backs and our guns onto our shoulders, and walked over the wooden bridge where the Tenaru doubles back, past the crocodile lair, and up a hill and down into the fields.

4

It was a respite. The fields were like a mid-week holiday that saves a job from drudgery. It was a recess, a winter vacation. Fear seemed almost to vanish. It was as though we were members of an archaeological mission, or a hunting party. Only the absence of lights at night reminded us of the triune foe: the dark, the jungle and the Jap.

Even the terrible heat in these stifling fields of kunai grass could not distress us, for we had built our machine gun pit twice the size of its predecessors on the Tenaru and could take refuge in its cool confines. Our pit was indeed a fort, perhaps as big as a kitchen, six feet or more down. Overhead were double thicknesses of logs, a few inches of dirt and a heavy sodding of wild grass which took root almost as soon as we had planted it and which, from a hundred feet distant, gave the pit the aspect of a hillock.

With our great field of fire rolling away from us like the vast un-harvested sea, and with our nasty network of barbed wire like a wicked shoal to ensnare the unwary, we felt that we need reckon with only a direct hit from a bomber or a battleship.

We retired behind our defenses to loaf and to nurse our “tropical ulcers.” This is a name which we conferred upon any running or festering sore, and most especially upon those which ate into the outer covering of the bone. There were few of us whose legs and hands were not dappled with these red-and-white rosettes of pain; red with blood, white with pus and often ringed with the black of feeding flies.

Yet, there was luxury in the fields. We had beds. A supply of Japanese rope had been discovered in our area. We made beds with it, driving logs into the ground to shape an oblong, and plaiting a mattress of the rope.

What comfort! Dry, warm, and above the ground. No mere voluptuary in his bed of feathers and satin, with his canopy stretching silkily overhead, with his bell-pull next to his hand and his mistress curled at his feet, could have surpassed us for pure pleasure.

Chuckler and the Hoosier slept alongside each other, erecting their beds only inches apart, as did all other watch mates, such as Runner and myself. Their beds were about a dozen yards distant in the scrub between the pits and the jungle. It seemed that almost every night, while Runner and I lay whispering to each other, we would hear the thunderous progress of a land crab through the brush. We would hear, too, the snoring of the Hoosier, and we would cease to whisper and wait.

Then there would be silence, like the pause between notes of music. It would be broken, simultaneously, by an indignant shriek from Hoosier, a shout of laughter from the Chuckler and an unbelievable clatter-and-crash that was the land crab scuttling to safety.

“Dammit, Chuckler, it ain’t funny.”

“Whatsa matter, Chuckler? What happened?”

That would be Runner, his voice strangled with suppressed laughter.

“It’s the crab again. Hoosier’s crab. It came through again and cut the rope and pinched Hoosier’s ass.” Hoosier’s reply shocked the night.

But laughter rose up to assuage the injury, great shouts of it leaping skyward until even the aggrieved Hoosier could not remain aloof.

Now how can a man be frightened with things like this happening around him?

Our airplanes had begun to challenge Japanese supremacy in the air above us. Aerial dogfights raged daily over Henderson Field, and because we were in such proximity to the airstrip, many were above our pits. But we had now such a well-developed fear of airplanes that we would not come aboveground so long as the bombers lingered or the shrapnel of anti-aircraft bursts kept falling.