Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (29 page)

We had safely negotiated the turn and had worked up a series of small hills—slick with mud—to reach high ground. We were on what might be called a cliff, or at least a steep bluff, from which the ground to our right fell away to the sea. The sound of the ocean breaking on the shore was just audible if one listened for it.

The birds and all the moving things were silent, and we were uneasy. Their quiet either was heralding our own approach, or it gave sign of an enemy. A rain was falling.

The Point was in view as we approached a curve. He crouched low to negotiate it, then softly on his belly to slither around it. Then his hand came up.

We vanished into the foliage.

The hand rose again, displaying four fingers. Four of the enemy.

I lay in some high grass that fringed this portion of the track, wondering if the thumping of my heart would betray me. Then it occurred to me that I could not see over the grass. Should the Jap pass by, I could see only his legs to shoot at. Then I remembered that the man in front of me occupied the left side of the track and that I must be careful not to hit him when I fired. When I recalled that the man behind me was to the left, I hoped that he would be as considerate.

Then I thought: perhaps we shouldn’t shoot at all. There were enough of us to overpower them. Should I suggest to the lieutenant that we capture them, once they had walked into our trap?

But Commando had different ideas. As I looked behind me, he signaled to a man and whispered to him when he came over. The man went sneaking up to the curve where the Point lay. In a minute, the Point came sneaking back and conferred with Commando. In another minute, a rifleman whom I did not know crawled alongside me, unslung his rifle, adjusted a grenade launcher on the muzzle and prepared to fire grenades.

Commando came up.

“About a hundred yards, left,” he whispered.

The rifleman nodded.

The Point returned to his vantage.

He raised a hand.

The rifleman fired. Again and again he fired. He must have sent five grenades arching up and down, and I could hear their explosions as they hit.

Back scurried the Point.

Commando eyed him eagerly—greedily, even.

The Point shrugged. His shoulders were more eloquent than his whispered observation: “I dunno. Mebbe. They were coming down a hill, four of ‘em. You might’ve got the first guy. They hit the deck.”

The lines of lust, drawn so bright and sharp on Commando’s face, were fading now. His face grew softer, then sharp again with irritation. I looked up at him. He ignored me. He had ignored my presence from the outset, and I made a mental note to correct the lie he would undoubtedly tell when we returned to headquarters.

“I dunno, Lieutenant,” the Point said again, and waited.

Commando’s oval Latin face brightened. “Four of them, eh?” he said, his accent chopping at the last word. “Good.” He leaned down and patted the rifleman on the shoulder. “Good work,” he said. He looked sharply at me, and I realized that he had been aware of me and of my identity all along. I would be expected to confirm the falsehood.

Suddenly, I was cold and aching. The rain had pierced my clothes and my neck was stiff from craning. At that moment, the man who had replaced the Point raised his hand.

The Point hastened back to his position, and in a minute rejoined Lieutenant Commando, who had resumed his old post at this new alarm. They conferred, and then, the Point went back up the track.

My teeth were jarred when the Point opened fire, and the rifleman belched away again with his grenades.

When the Point came tearing past me, his face tense, running wide-legged like a horseman, and when the man behind him also blazed away and retreated, I knew what was going on.

Lieutenant Commando was playing commando.

This was street-fighting technique. One man fires and retreats, covered by the second man now firing, and then he, too, fires and retreats, and so on down the line, a tactic that can go on to infinity, or at least until one has retreated as far as one wishes—as far back as the generals, even—or until all the ammunition is consumed. No doubt this is an excellent technique for the cities of civilization, but it was as impractical in the jungle as ski troops in the Sahara, or, more to the point, the employment of our style of patrol in that same desert. Such a tactic fits a situation in which there is little or no concealment. Who could ask for more concealment than the rain forest of New Britain?

My contempt for Lieutenant Commando’s misplaced tactics was confirmed the next moment, when the last man before me had fired and come running past me.

“Oh what a paper ass!” he said, cursing between clenched teeth. “Oh what a paper-assed shavetail son of a bitch.” He looked at me and growled, “Commando sits on his brains,” and when I saw that it was none other than the doughty Souvenirs, I felt as though my own judgment of the lieutenant had been fortified by an opinion from the Supreme Court.

It took but a moment, and then Souvenirs was behind me and it was I who had to fire now. I knelt and fired from the hip, pulling hard on the sling with my left hand to keep the muzzle from riding skyward, as submachine guns will do. I emptied my clip—a big one of thirty rounds—in the direction of the curve in the track, and then turned to run, but not before I had felt a fleeting repugnance for that insane clatter, shattering the jungle silence as it did, and a spasm of trepidation at the extreme exposure of my position.

We carried on the farce through each of the ten men and until we had disappeared behind another bend. Then, we set our faces for the perimeter and returned home, moving this time, at a much faster pace, for we had little fear of an ambush being set up in terrain we had already traversed.

The rain had stopped but the rain forest dripped on. Just before the perimeter, we turned a bend, and there, over the head of the man before me, I saw a monster spider, crouching in its web—one of those red and black horrors, with horrid furry legs stretching out crookedly from a body as large as your fist. At that moment it fell from its web upon the helmet of the forward men—encompassing it—and he, with a gesture of extreme loathing, swept his helmet from his head to send it clanking into the bush. I waited for him to retrieve it, turning to cover the trail behind us, and then we caught up with the rest.

Lieutenant Commando and I continued on to the command post after we had gained the perimeter. What looked like another patrol—a combat patrol, judging from the automatic weapons they carried—was drawn up outside the C.P. tent. The Commander was inside, talking earnestly to a young F Company officer, when we entered. His face relaxed when he saw us, and he grinned at the four fingers Commando brandished aloft. Even in the poor light of the tent, the Commander’s blue eyes seemed to glint.

“Never mind,” he told the young officer. Then he turned to us. “Glad to see you back, Lieutenant. We heard the gunfire. What was it all about?”

“We ran into an enemy point down near Tauali, sir,” Commando answered. He took a map from the pocket of his dungaree coat, unfolded it, marked it at the point where we had shot up the countryside and handed it to him. “There were four of them, sir. We destroyed them with small arms fire and rifle grenades.”

The Commander glanced up hopefully.

“Find anything on their bodies?”

“No sir,” said Commando without hesitation. “We had no time to search them. It looked like they were the point for a main body of considerably larger size.”

I looked at Commando from the corner of the tent to which I had retreated. I looked at him closely. If ever a man spoke with confidence or certainty, it was Lieutenant Commando.

The Commander shrugged.

“Too bad. We could use a little information right now. But then,” he said, laughing, “business is picking up. We’re killing the little bastards, and that’s the general idea. Unless I miss my guess,” he went on, obviously relishing the phrase and the notion, “unless I miss, my guess, they’re getting ready to come calling any day now.” He smiled again, showing his even white teeth. “That’ll be all, Lieutenant. Good work.”

Commando thanked the Commander and left. I watched him go, thinking: He is not a liar, he believes that he actually saw all that. Nor is he a coward, for I have seen him react to danger. Souvenirs is right: Commando sits on his brains.

Fortunately, Commando’s report had no effect on the precautions of the Commander. We remained on a twenty-four-hour alert in the expectation that the Japanese might “come calling.”

But they did not come that night.

In the morning, I was assigned to a fresh patrol ordered to explore the Tauali track. This one was led by Lieutenant Spearmint and it was one in which I was given my due and restored to the Point—but this may have been merely because I was the only one who had been over the ground before. Lieutenant Spearmint was sensible enough to take advantage of that.

Spearmint was a very capable, a very calm and a very sensible officer. He had been promoted from the ranks as had many of our leaders, but he had not been dazzled by the heights of his new eminence. As the surest sign of this aplomb in the face of such good fortune—for no sunnier smile of the gods seemed possible to us—Spearmint still chewed gum.

The clean-linen league, as we called the officer corps, had not conned him into a change of manners, and even now his jaws were working in slow, ruminative movement as he told us off into our positions and gave the command to move out.

“And remember, Lucky, let me know when we reach the spot where you hit them yesterday.”

It was raining and the track was more slippery than ever—and so, our progress was even slower than it had been the day before. To the right, now faintly heard through the rustling of the rain, now inaudible, lay the ocean. These were the only sounds.

Word was whispered up to me that the lieutenant wanted to parley. I crept back to where he crouched by the side of the track. He had a map balanced on his knees and was holding his poncho over his head to shield the map from the rain. He motioned to me and I knelt in the mud beside him.

“Where are we?” he asked in a low voice.

A normal question, but it shook me. I had been concentrating so hard on the negotiation of those curves that I had forgotten to take bearings. My worries had been for the foe, not for direction.

I held my breath and listened for the ocean.

If I could hear it, and if it was on my right, it meant we were still traveling in the right direction. If I did not hear it or if I heard it on my left—it meant that we were lost.

I heard it—on our right—and I looked at the lieutenant’s map to see the scale of miles, and then calculating the distance we had come, the bends we had passed, the distance to the ocean, I pointed to what seemed a corresponding point on his map, and said, “There.”

Spearmint nodded. I peered up into his face. It was a controlled face, and looking into it now, I saw the lines of concern disappear from about his eyes and saw the gum-chewing begin again, and I obeyed without a word when he nodded and told me to move out once more.

It had stopped raining. The green of the jungle gleamed wetly while we worked up to the plateau where the fiasco under Lieutenant Commando had taken place. We came to an open place, a short expanse of low grass beneath a hole in the jungle roof, leading to a short sloping hill that disappeared around a curve before reappearing as Commando’s bluff.

Halfway up this hill, imprinted as clearly as though cast in plaster of Paris, was the mark of a foot. It was a bare foot, a broad foot, a foot with a prehensile toe. It was a native’s foot. It pointed at us, down-trail. It thrilled and mystified us. I had beckoned to Spearmint and was prepared to discuss it with him, but he looked nervously about him, and said, “C’mon, let’s get up that hill. This is bad ground.”

We trod carefully up the rise, for it was still slippery.

In the excitement of the footprint, I almost forgot to remind Spearmint of where we were, but then, I remembered, and said, “Lieutenant, this is where we hit them yesterday.”

Spearmint looked concerned.

“What about the footprint?” I asked.

He looked at me thoughtfully and pushed his helmet back. He chewed his gum methodically, with his lips drawn back and the big teeth showing. It was as though he drew strength and spirit from that rubbery wad.

“What about it?” he repeated softly, more to himself than to me. “It’s there, that’s all. Nothing we can do about it. Worst thing is—it’s just one print.” He shrugged and returned to contemplating me. “We’d better stop here awhile. You take rear guard, back by that hill.”

“But, Lieutenant,” I expostulated, trying to conceal my chagrin, “I’m supposed to be in the Point.”

“Go ahead,” he replied, unruffled. “Do as I say. Rear guard.”

I obeyed, feeling as though I had been degraded.

Just a trifle below the crest of the hill, and to the left, I concealed myself in the underbrush. I broke off a few twigs which obscured my line of vision, gaining, thereby, a clear view across this open expanse. I crouched there on my haunches, stewing, angry that I had been demoted to the rear. Though the rain had stopped, there was still not a single sound, not even the ocean.

A twig snapped.

I glanced up to see four men approaching me. They were close together.

For a moment, I thought they were our own, and I wondered why another patrol had been sent out, and why that big fellow in the lead, Major Major-Share himself, had chosen to lead it.

They kept coming and I saw their mushroom helmets and knew that they were Japs.

I reached down and unlatched my safety and said to myself: “Wait, and then shoot up and through them and maybe you will get them all with one burst.”

They were coming up the hill now. The big fellow had his head bent into it and his arms pumping, and he looked even more like Major Major-Share, as I swung my right foot wide to block the trail, and there, looking up at them, pressed the trigger and fired.

They fell screaming.

The big man threw his arms over his head and screamed and spun and fell with the clatter of his rifle, and those behind fell in other ways, screaming, too, with one rolling over and over, down the hill, to disappear from sight forever.