Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (18 page)

“You can say that again!” came the Runner’s gloomy second. He had been silent, biting a thumbnail to shreds. In an instant he had brightened at the thought of the parade and turned to me, speaking in a voice muffled by his munching, “Supposing they do give us a parade, where’d it be, Lucky—up Fifth Avenue?”

“No. You’re thinking of St. Patrick’s Day. That’s where the Irish parade. Probably it’d be up Broadway—from the Battery.”

“Battery!” the Hoosier exploded. “What they gonna do, charge us up?”

Chuckler nodded. “Everybody. Everybody’s gonna get charged up on good old New York firewater. Right, Lucky?”

“Right. Thirty-day leave for all hands.”

“And two babes for every man—one white and one dark.”

Hoosier broke in sulkily, “Ah ain’t gonna parade. The hell with ‘em. Ah ain’t paradin’ for nobody. Soon as we get off the ship Ah’m gonna break ranks and lose m’self in the crowd.”

“Wouldn’t that be something?” said the Runner excitedly. “Supposing we came off the ship and everybody broke ranks and melted into the crowd. They couldn’t find you in a New York crowd. We’d all be gobbled up. Everybody’d be drunk, and they couldn’t do anything to you. Everybody’d be drunk, even the officers.”

Everyone fell dreamily silent, a quiet that was finally broken by the wistful voice of Hoosier.

“Ah bet they do, Chuckler—Ah bet they give us a parade.”

Two changes had been wrought: the skies of Guadalcanal had become American, and mail was coming through steadily. Both events improved our humor; so it was that a great ripple of mirth ran over the Ridge upon the arrival of a letter from my father.

I read the letter squatting on the hillside, my buttocks just above the wet ground. A torrential rain had fallen, filling the holes and pits in what seemed but a moment, subsiding suddenly and succeeded by an astonishing swarm of antlike insects so thick that one had to close one’s eyes and shield one’s mouth from them. Their tiny carcasses covered the ground when they fell (it seemed that they lived but a minute after that rain) and so it was that I was careful not to soil my freshly washed pants in either mud or the myriad of dead insects.

“Robert (my father wrote), your blue uniform is ready. Shall I send it to you?”

Ah …

There came to mind, swiftly and sharply, a set of marine dress blues. I saw that gorgeous raiment. I squatted, stuck up on our Ridge like Stylites on his pole, surrounded by wilderness and wetness and the minute corpses of millions of ephemeral ants. I squatted, clothed only in trousers cut off at the knee and a pair of moccasins stolen from an army duffle bag and I contemplated this vision of glory.

“Robert, your blue uniform is ready. Shall I send it to you?”

In an instant it had caught the fancy of the Ridge. Until we left the Ridge, I was “Lucky, the guy whose old man wants to send him a set of blues.” I would walk to chow, and the men from the other pits would greet me with “Hi’ya, Lucky—where’s yer blues?” or “Hey, Lucky, yer old man send you the blues yet?” My very approach was enough for smiles, as though each of them was envisioning the First Marine Division drawn up on our Ridge, resplendent in dress blues with flags flying and bands playing, marching off into the jungle to do battle.

There was no boisterousness, no guffaws; merely the smiles and the sallies and occasional rib-poking, as though the very quaintness of my father’s proposal were a thing to be cherished, like a family joke, a bit of whimsy to save one’s sanity on this mad island of ours.

Everyone thought my father a hell of a guy, and they often inquired after his health.

Sergeant Dandy gave us the bad news. He had visited us the day before to take our measurements for new clothing, and the inference had been so encouraging that we had spent the night in happy speculation. We were sure it meant we were leaving Guadalcanal; the question was, for where?

But Sergeant Dandy’s nasal cracker whine shredded our happiness like a whip.

“Stand by to move out in the mawnin’. Weah movin’ out from the Matanikau in a new offensive. Get all youah foul-weather gear ready and be sure youah guns is oiled and youah ammunition belt’s dry. Eighth Marines’ll be up to relieve us in the mawnin’.”

He stopped and we examined each other in silence. There was no pleasure on his straight-featured boy-man’s face, not even a hint of malicious satisfaction at being the bearer of bad tidings. The heart of Sergeant Dandy was as heavy as anyone’s. “Doan ask me whut it’s all about. Doan ask me no silly questions. Jus’ do what I tol’ you.” He turned and left.

After nearly five months, this.

Runner had malaria, Brick barely stirred from the pit except at night, Hoosier and Oakstump were subject to long periods of depression, Red had long since left us, I had dysentery, Chuckler was irritable—all of us were emaciated and weakened beyond measure.

But we were to move out on the attack. We could not move to chow without gasping for breath, but we were to move on the enemy.

We despaired.

In the morning, we crouched by our guns and waited for the order to dismantle them and move out. It did not come.

Nor did it come the next day or the next, and Hope came creeping back, blushing, ashamed of her disloyal flight but commending herself to us once more with the promise never again to desert the ramparts.

Then one morning the word came to move out.

Sergeant Dandy gave it to us.

“Leave the guns behind,” he said. “Take only your rifles and foul-weather gear.”

He grinned.

“We’re being relieved!”

It was December 14, 1942. We had been on the lines without relief since August 7. My battalion—the Second Battalion, First Regiment—was the last of those in the First Marine Division to come out of the lines.

Guadalcanal was over.

We had won.

We came clanking down from the Ridge in a chill drizzle, while the men of the Eighth Marine Regiment came clambering up. They wore kelly helmets, the kind which our fathers wore in the First World War and which the British still wear. They looked miserable, plodding up the slippery Ridge in the drizzle. We pitied them, even though all the worst was past. But we could not resist needling them, these men from San Diego in sunny California. “Here come the Hollywood Marines.”

“Yeah, will you look who’s here. If it ain’t the Pogybait Marines!

Where’s your PX, boys?”

“Aw, blow it …”

“Tch tch—will you listen to them talk! That ain’t the way they do it in the movies. Shame on you!”

“Hey—what’s the latest from Hollywood? How’s Lana?”

“Yeah—that’s it—how’s Lana? How’s Lana Turner?”

They tried to appear disgusted but they could not conceal the awe with which the reliever must inevitably regard the relieved. We went down the Ridge, haggard but happy; they came up it, full-fleshed but with forebodings. I have said we were happy; we were; we were delirious.

The next week we spent beneath an improvised tent on a hillside where the ridges meander down to the kunai fields, Chuckler and I visiting and revisiting the food dumps until we had collected so much food that I could afford to devour a gallon can of preserved apricots, making myself wonderfully, wonderfully sick to my stomach. I lay on my belly and felt the stretching pain and marveled: “I’m sick. I ate too much. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world—I ate too much!”

Only desultory visits from Washing Machine Charlie served to remind us that the Japanese were still contesting Guadalcanal.

The following week was spent in a Garden of Eden. We marched to the mouth of the Lunga River to a tent encampment in a grove of coconuts. They gave us a ration of beer. Somehow we managed to gather enough of it to get mildly drunk every night. During the day, we swam in the Lunga, that marvelous river whose cold swift waters kept the malarial fire out of my blood. Swimming was often hazardous, due to the wags who delighted in throwing hand grenades into the water. Once I heard a mighty shout out on the seashore, and running over, was astonished to see the giant sting ray which some men had trapped in a native fishing net. Of course it was dead, punctured in a thousand pieces by having offered a thousand trigger-happy men the opportunity to “get their gun off.”

Then we were sleeping alongside a road, waiting to embark the next day. On that day, they brought us our Christmas packages from home. We could not take them aboard ship with us, for we were not allowed to carry more than our packs and weapons. Chuckler and I had already asked Lieutenant Ivy-League to carry our remaining boxes of cigars in his sea bag; officers would be permitted to carry sea bags. It puzzled us to see the reappearance of sea bags—strictly the issue of enlisted men—and it angered us to see them handed out to officers.

This was the first piece of discrimination which we encountered, the first flip of the Single-Sided Coin, whereby the officers would satisfy their covetousness by forbidding us things rightfully ours, and then take them up themselves, much as politicians use the courts to gain their ends. So we devoured what we could of these Christmas gifts from home, and threw the rest away.

“Stand by to move out. Forrr-ward, harch!”

We ambled down to the beach, our gait, our bearded, tattered aspect unable to match the precision of that command. We clambered into the waiting boats. We stood at the gunwales and watched the receding shoreline.

Our boat putt-putted to a wallowing halt beneath a huge ship that listed so markedly to port that it seemed drunk. It was one of the old Dollar Line ships; the
President Wilson
, I believe.

“Climb up them cargo nets!”

As we had come, so did we leave.

We were so weak that many of us could not make the climb. Some fell into the water—pack, rifle and all—and had to be fished out. Others clung desperately to the nets, panting, fearful to move lest the last ounce of strength depart them, too, and the sea receive them.

These also had to be rescued by nimble sailors swarming down the nets. I was able to reach the top of the net, but could go no farther. I could not muster the strength to swing over the gunwale, and I hung there, breathing heavily, the ship’s hot side swaying away from me in the swells, very perdition lapping beneath me—until two sailors grabbed me under the armpits, and pulled me over. I fell with a clatter among the others who had been so brought aboard, and I lay with my cheek pressed against the warm, grimy deck, my heart beating rapidly, not from this exertion, but from happiness.

Once belowdecks, Chuckler and I set out for the galley and a cup of hot coffee and conversation. We walked in and sat down, just as the last soldier who had been aboard this transport was rising to leave. He looked down at us as we sipped the coffee from thick white mugs.

“How was it?” he said, jerking his head shoreward.

“Rough,” we answered, mechanically. Then Chuckler spoke up, “You mean Guadalcanal?”

The soldier seemed surprised. “Of course I do.”

Chuckler hastened to explain. “I wasn’t being wise … I meant, had you ever heard of the place before you got here?”

His astonishment startled us. An idea was dawning, gladly.

“Y’mean …”

“Hell, yes! Guadalcanal. The First Marines—Everybody’s heard of it. You guys are famous. You guys are heroes back home …”

We did not see him leave, for we had both looked away quickly—each embarrassed by the quick tears.

They had not forgotten.