Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (39 page)

So the war ended for me.

From the operating room I was taken to the cots below, and in the space of three days my power of speech returned and I was able to walk.

Each day for a week I ascended the ladder to the deck and gazed in morbid fascination at Peleliu a mile or so away. They were still fighting. One could hear the sound of firing. Bloody Nose Ridge rose like a blasted lunar mountain from that pock-marked coral plain.

Each day the news was bad. We were winning, but at a fearful price.

Rutherford was killed. I heard it from his friend, the short sleek fellow who had come in out of the darkness with him that night to reclaim the pistol. He had been wounded, the friend. His arm was in a sling. He told me that Rutherford had been hit by a mortar shell and been blown to bits.

Rutherford had said, “See you in the old home town.” But now I would go home alone. May he rest in peace.

White-Man had been killed. He perished outside our lines during that fierce first-night rocket barrage. White-Man, born and bred to bigotry; but he died with his face to the enemy. May he rest in peace.

And the Artist. Killed by a cowardly hand. Returning alone from a night patrol, he had leapt the barbed wire guarding the C.P. and been shot in the chest by the major’s batman, a coward who had not the courage to issue the challenge before he shot. The Artist was dead, a brave man, may he rest in peace.

Three in our Section to whom we had not sung that macabre serenade of Pavuvu—Liberal, White-Man, the Artist. All dead.

It had become holocaust in the fullest sense. Scores of others in the battalion perished. Captain Dreadnought fell, dead of a sniper’s bullet (it had at last taken a direct bombardment from the battleship
Mississippi
, to reduce the blockhouse), his F Company but a remnant. There were those who have not been mentioned in this book, friends who did not fit the narrative, men whose faces I have not forgotten and whose bravery and sacrifice have deposited a vast spiritual credit for our nation to draw upon. These, too, fell—wrestling that island rock from the grasp of its most tenacious defender. May they rest in peace.

We were leaving. The battle had been won. Extermination had come to the Japanese ten thousand on Peleliu and my regiment—the First—was licking its wounds on the beach. Of my battalion—a force of some fifteen hundred men—there remained but twenty-eight effectives when the command came for the last assault on that honeycomb of caves and pillboxes which the Japanese had carved into Bloody Nose Ridge—in men and blood and agony the most costly spit of land in the wide Pacific. When the command came, they rose from their holes like shades from sepulchers … and advanced. They could not run, they could barely walk—and they dragged their weapons. But they obeyed, and they attacked. They were taken from the line on the brink of collapse.

We were leaving. The more badly wounded were to be transferred from our attack hospital ship to a splendidly equipped one that would sail directly for the States. Among those leaving was the Soldier, whom I had found on the third or fourth level below decks, lying on his bunk in an agony of suffering from a terrible hole in his thigh.

It had been stifling and I had found a helmet which I filled with water to bathe his forehead. I had found a doctor, too, who relieved him of his pain and ordered the dressings changed. I was sorry to say good-by to the Soldier, but my spirits rose as though rocketed when I saw Runner among the minor casualties transferred to our ship in exchange.

Runner still had a Japanese bullet in his arm. He was proud of it, quick to pull back the bandage and show it to me when I hailed him.

“That’ll get me plenty of free drinks back in Buffalo,” he giggled.

His good spirits were reassuring, almost a guarantee that the others were safe. But, of course, I asked the question, “How’re Chuck and Hoosier? How’d they make out?”

“Okay, I guess—but Chuck sure got a nasty wound. Hoosier got hit, too, but not bad. He didn’t get it until the sixth day. Chuck and I got hit on the fourth.”

“Together?”

“Not exactly, but almost. I’ll tell you.” His face saddened and his dark eyes shone with compassion. “You know that replacement from Texas? The good-looking kid, nice-mannered? Well, maybe you didn’t know, but he’d already had two brothers killed in the war. He was scared of dying, not for himself, you know, but for his mother. He was afraid of what it’d do to her if a third son was killed. Well, on the fourth day, they began to hit us with mortars. And this poor kid gets hit.” Runner looked closely at me. “Honest, Luck, I’ll never forget it. The corpsman gave him morphine right away, but it was no use. ‘I’m dyin’,’ he said to Chuckler. ‘Chuck, I’m dyin’.’ Chuckler tried to joke with him. ‘No, you’re not, kid. It’s just a bad wound, that’s all. You’ll be all right.’ ‘I’m goin’, Chuck, I’m goin’,’ the kid said. ‘I don’t want to go.’ And he died right there.” Runner paused, and then resumed his tale. “Then the mortars came in again. Chuckler got a big hunk in his left thigh, close up to the crotch.” Runner laughed in retrospect. “It was funny. He was so scared he’d lost the family jewels. ‘Are they all right?’ he asked the corpsman. ‘Quick, tell me—are they all right?’ ‘Take it easy,’ the corpsman tells him—’it wasn’t even close. You got plenty of sack time ahead of you.’ So the Chuckler lies back smiling. He was so relieved you’d think he’d only cut his finger or something. I swear he’d have begged the corpsman to shoot him if it had been the other way.”

The ship’s engines throbbed. We were moving. Runner and I crowded to the rail with the others, bumping against Rutherford’s friend with the slung arm. In silence we studied Peleliu, tan and blasted, a few scrubs standing starkly on Bloody Nose Ridge, their ragged branches raised to heaven in supplication, like the gaunt cross I had seen in the Ozarks.

We were going to a naval hospital on Manus Island in the Admiralty group. There we would find Hoosier, and poor Smoothface, his fine white skin drawn like parchment across his small-boned face, lying in bed with a hole in his kidney, hiccuping to aggravate the pain, yet smiling at the sight of us, and there we would find many others like Amish and Oakstump until Manus would become a reunion for the remnant of the originals.

There would be a bigger reunion in San Diego, when all of us would have arrived home at last—even Chuckler would be there, leaning on a cane with the laughter rumbling from his deep chest—and once more we would be as carefree as the early days in New River, the ordeal behind us and the prospect of home before us.

But now we, the preserved, were leaving Peleliu, departing the holocaust. The ship was gaining speed. We gazed upon that diminishing dot of rock.

“So long, boys,” Runner said, as we reached the open sea.

I lay in the hospital ward and the Sign of the Mushroom rose over the world.

I lay in a hospital for the tenth time since I had chosen to enter the Marines. My comrades and I had suffered in our persons as the world had suffered in her peoples since the Nazi swastika had clasped the Japanese rising sun in spidery embrace—the whole world, racked for six years like a giant organism; and now the Sign of the Mushroom was rising over it.

The ward in Newton D. Baker Army Hospital in Martinsburg, West Virginia, was quiet—shocked, still. The impersonal radio voice said, “America has just dropped the first atomic bomb in history on the major Japanese city of Hiroshima. The city has been destroyed.”

Monster cloud rising over Hiroshima, over the world—monstrous, mushrooming thing, sign of our age, symbol of our sin: growth; bigness, speed: grow, grow, grow—grow in a cancer, enlarge a factory, swell a city, balloon our bellies, speed life, fly to the moon, burst a bomb, shatter a people—explode the world.

So it rose and I shrank in my cot, I who had cringed before the body-squeezing blast of a five-hundred-pound bomb, hearing now this strange cold incomprehensible jargon of the megaton. Someone had sinned against life, and I felt it in my very person.

But then I, too, sinned. Suddenly, secretly, covertly—I rejoiced. For as I lay in that hospital, I had faced the bleak prospect of returning to the Pacific and the war and the law of averages. But now, I knew, the Japanese would have to lay down their arms. The war was over. I had survived. Like a man wielding a submachine gun to defend himself against an unarmed boy, I had survived. So I rejoiced.

A few days later, the war did end, and there was a victory celebration in Martinsburg. The townspeople walked and rode around the square twice and then everyone went home. A slender Chinese gentleman, noticing my green uniform among the khaki, my ribbons and my shoulder patch, perhaps concluding from these that I had fought the Japanese, came up to me out of the crowd as I stood before the beer hall, and said, “Thank you.” Then he walked away. That was victory, that was jubilation—under the Sign of the Mushroom. I returned to the hospital, stark sober. In a few weeks, I was a civilian.

A woman made heavy with the girth of affluence said to me: “What did you get out of it? What were you fighting for?” I thought to reply, “Your privilege to buy black-market meat,” but I did not, for flippancy would only anger her and insult my comrades. Nor did I answer, “To preserve the status quo—to defend what I now have,” for this would have pandered to her materialism, which is always a lie. Most of all I could not tell the truth: “To destroy the Nazi beast, to restrain imperialist Japan,” for this she would not have understood. This we had done, and done it without a song to sing, with no deep sense of dedication.

But I could not answer the first question, for I did not know what I had gotten out of it, or even that I was supposed to profit.

Now I know. For myself, a memory and the strength of ordeal sustained; for my son, a priceless heritage; for my country, sacrifice.

The last is enough for all, for it is sacrifice—the suffering of those who lived, the immolation of those who died—that must now be placed in the scales of God’s justice that began to tip so awkwardly against us when the mushroom rose over the world. It is to sacrifice that men go to war. They do not go to kill, they go to be killed, to risk their flesh, to insert their precious persons in the path of destruction.

It is sacrifice that answers the interminable argument about peace and war; whether the meek Jesus is not betrayed by the man of Mars. We have the answers of the philosophers and theologians, that a man may fight in a just war. We have, too, the ancient wisdom of the Church pointing to the impossibility of any man’s ever ascertaining the justness of his cause, bidding him, if he believes his leaders to be honest, to obey them and shoulder arms.

But we have the men who say: “This is too weak. I cannot kill upon a casuistry. I must know my cause to be just. I will always fight to defend my country against an invader or to suppress an aggressor or chastise a tyrant. But I must know that this is so, and, turning to my account your own demonstration of the impossibility of ever knowing—I say with a logic as compelling as yours, a logic that does not require the blood of my brothers—I will not go.”

But sacrifice says: “Not the blood of your brother, my friend—your blood.”

That is why women weep when their men go off to war. They do not weep for their victims, they weep for them as Victim. That is why, with the immemorial insight of mankind, there are gay songs and colorful bands to send them off—to fortify their failing hearts, not to quicken their lust for blood. That is why there are no glorious living, but only glorious dead. Heroes turn traitor, warriors age and grow soft—but a victim is changeless, sacrifice is eternal.

And now to that Victim whose Sign rose above the world two thousand years ago, to be menaced now by that other sign now rising, I say a prayer of contrition. I, whom you have seen as irreverent and irreligious, now pray in the name of Chuckler and Hoosier and Runner, in the name of Smoothface, Gentleman, Amish and Oakstump, Ivy-League and Big-Picture, in the name of all those who suffered in the jungles and on the beaches, from Anzio to Normandy—and in the name of the immolated: of Texan, Rutherford, Chicken, Loudmouth, of the Artist and White-Man, Souvenirs and Racehorse, Dreadnought and Commando—of all these and the others, dear Father, forgive us for that awful cloud.