Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

  Robert Leckie, 1942

  To Those Who Fell

  The Battle of the Tenaru, August 21, 1942

  by Robert Leckie

  A helmet for my pillow,

  A poncho for my bed,

  My rifle rests across my chest—

  The stars swing overhead.

  The whisper of the kunai,

  The murmur of the sea,

  The sighing palm and night so calm

  Betray no enemy.

  Hear!, river bank so silent

  You men who sleep around

  That foreign scream across the stream—

  Up! Fire at the sound!

  Sweeping over the sandspit

  That blocks the Tenaru

  With Banzai-boast a mushroomed host

  Vows to destroy our few.

  Into your holes and gunpits!

  Kill them with rifles and knives!

  Feed them with lead until they are dead—

  And widowed are their wives.

  Sons of the mothers who gave you

  Honor and gift of birth,

  Strike with the knife till blood and life

  Run out upon the earth.

  Marines, keep faith with your glory

  Keep to your trembling hole.

  Intruder feel of Nippon steel

  Can’t penetrate your soul.

  Closing, they charge all howling

  Their breasts all targets large.

  The gun must shake, the bullets make

  A slaughter of their charge.

  Red are the flashing tracers,

  Yellow the bursting shells.

  Hoarse is the cry of men who die

  Shrill are the woundeds’ yells.

  God, how the night reels stricken!

  She shrieks with orange spark.

  The mortar’s lash and cannon’s crash

  Have crucified the dark.

  Falling, the faltering foemen

  Beneath our guns lie heaped.

  By greenish glare of rocket’s flare

  We see the harvest reaped.

  Now has the first fierce onslaught

  Been broken and hurled back.

  Hammered and hit, from hole and pit—

  We rise up to attack!

  Day bursts pale from a gun tube,

  The gibbering night has fled.

  By light of dawn the foe has drawn

  A line behind his dead.

  Our tanks clank in behind him,

  Our riflemen move out.

  Their hearts have met our bayonet—

  It’s ended with a shout.

  “Cease fire!”—the words go ringing,

  Over the heaps of the slain.

  The battle’s won, the Rising Sun

  Lies riddled on the plain.

  St. Michael, angel of battle,

  We praise you to God on high.

  The foe you gave was strong and brave

  And unafraid to die.

  Speak to The Lord for our comrades,

  Killed when the battle seemed lost.

  They went to meet a bright defeat—

  The hero’s holocaust.

  False is the vaunt of the victor,

  Empty our living pride.

  For those who fell there is no hell—

  Not for the brave who died.

  1

  A cutting wind slanted up Church Street in the cheerless dawn of January 5, 1942. That day I departed for the United States Marines.

  The war with Japan was not yet four weeks old, Wake Island had fallen. Pearl Harbor was a real tragedy, a burning bitter humiliation. Hastily composed war songs were on the lips of everyone, their heavy patriotism failing to compensate for what they lacked in tune and spirit. Hysteria seemed to crouch behind all eyes.

  But none of this meant much to me. I was aware of my father beside me, bending into the wind with me. I could feel the wound in my lower regions, still fresh, still sore. The sutures had been removed a few days earlier.

  I had sought to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor, but the Marines had insisted that I be circumcised. It cost me a hundred dollars, although I am not sure to this day whether I paid the doctor or not. But I am certain that few young men went off to war in that fateful time so marked.

  We had come across the Jersey meadows, riding the Erie commuter line, and then on the ferry over the Hudson River to downtown New York. Breakfast at home had been subdued. My mother was up and about; she did not cry. It was not a heart-rending leave-taking, nor was it brave, resolute—any of those words that fail to describe the thing.

  It was like so much else in this war that was to produce unbounded heroism, yet not a single stirring song: it was resigned. She followed me to the door with sad eyes and said, “God keep you.”

  It had been a silent trip across the meadows and it was a wordless good-by in front of the bronze revolving doors at Ninety, Church Street. My father embraced me quickly, and just as quickly averted his face and left. The Irish doorman measured me and smiled.

  I went inside and joined the United States Marines.

  The captain who swore us in reduced the ceremony to a jumble. We all held up our hands. We put them down when he lowered his. That way we guessed we were marines.

  The master gunnery sergeant who became our momentary shepherd made the fact plainer to us. Those rich mellow blasphemous oaths that were to become so familiar to me flowed from his lips with the consummate ease of one who had spent a lifetime in vituperation. I would meet his masters later. Presently, as he herded us across the river to Hoboken and a waiting train, he seemed to be beyond comparison. But he was gentle and kind enough when he said good-by to the thirty or forty of us who boarded the train.

  He stood at the head of our railroad car—a man of middle age, slender, and of a grace that was on the verge of being ruined by a pot belly. He wore the Marine dress blues. Over this was the regulation tight-fitting overcoat of forest green. Green and blue has always seemed to me an odd combination of colors, and it seemed especially so then; the gaudy dark and light blue of the Marine dress sheathed in sedate and soothing green.

  “Where you are going it will not be easy,” the gunnery sergeant said. “When you get to Parris Island, you’ll find things plenty different from civilian life. You won’t like it! You’ll think they’re overdoing things. You’ll think they’re stupid! You’ll think they’re the cruelest, rottenest bunch of men you ever ran into! I’m going to tell you one thing. You’ll be wrong! If you want to save yourself plenty of heartache you’ll listen to me right now: you’ll do everything they tell you and you’ll keep your big mouths shut!”

  He could not help grinning at the end. No group of men ever had a saner counselor, and he knew it; but he could not help grinning. He knew we would ignore his every word.

  “Okay, Sarge,” somebody yelled. “Thanks, Sarge.”

  He turned and left us.

  We called him “Sarge.” Within another twenty-four hours we would not dare address a lowly Pfc. without the cringing “sir.” But today the civilian shine was still upon us. We wore civvies; Hoboken howled around us in the throes of trade; we each had the citizen’s polite deprecation of the soldier, and who among us was not certain that he was not long for the ranks?

  Our ride to Washington was silent and uneventful. But once we had arrived in the capital and had changed trains the atmosphere seemed to lift. Other Marine recruits were arriving from all over the east. Our contingent was the last to arrive, the last to be crammed aboard the ancient wooden train that waited, puffing, dirty-in-the-dark, smelling of coal—waited to take us down the coast
to South Carolina. Perhaps it was because of the dilapidated old train that we brightened and became gay. Such a dingy, tired old relic could not help but provoke mirth. Someone pretended to have found a brass plate beneath one of the seats, and our car rocked with laughter as he read, “This car is the property of the Philadelphia Museum of American History.” We had light from kerosene lamps and heat from a potbellied stove. Draughts seemed to stream from every angle and there was a constant creaking and wailing of wood and wheels that sounded like an endless keening. Strange old train that it was, I loved it.

  Comfort had been left behind in Washington. Some of us already were beginning to revel in the hardship of the train ride. That intangible mystique of the marine was somehow, even then, at work. We were having it rough, which is exactly what we expected and what we had signed up for. That is the thing: having it rough. The man who has had it roughest is the man to be most admired. Conversely, he who has had it the easiest is the least praiseworthy.

  Those who wished to sleep could cat-nap on the floor while the train lurched down through Virginia and North Carolina. But these were few. The singing and the talk were too exciting.

  The boy sitting next to me—a handsome blond-haired youth from south Jersey—turned out to have a fine high voice. He sang several songs alone. There being a liberal leavening of New York Irish among us, he was soon singing Irish ballads.

  Across the aisle there was another boy, whom I shall call Armadillo because of his lean and pointed face. He was from New York and had attended college there. Being one of the few college men present, he had already established a sort of literary clique.

  The Armadillo’s coterie could not equal another circle farther down the car. This had at its center a stocky, smiling redhead. Red had been a catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and had once hit a home run at the Polo Grounds off the great Carl Hubbell.

  There was no measuring the impact of such a celebrity on our group, composed otherwise of mediocrities like myself. Red had been in the big time. He had held daily converse with men who were nothing less than the idols of his newfound comrades. It was quite natural they should ring him round; consult him on everything from pitching form to the Japanese General Staff.

  “Whaddya think it’ll be like at Parris Island, Red?”

  “Hey, Red—you think the Japs are as tough as the newspapers say they are?”

  It is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage. Scientists counsel on civil liberty; comedians and actresses lead political rallies; athletes tell us what brand of cigarette to smoke. But the redhead was equal to it. It was plain in his case what travel and headlines can do. He was easily the most poised of us all.

  But I suspect even Red’s savoir-faire got a rude jolt when we arrived in Parris Island. We had been taken from the railroad station by truck. When we had dismounted and had formed a motley rank in front of the red brick mess hall, we were subjected to the classic greeting.

  “Boys,” said the sergeant who would be our drill instructor. “Boys—Ah want to tell yawl something. Give youah hearts to Jesus, boys—’cause youah ass belongs to me!”

  Then he fell us in after our clumsy civilian fashion and marched us into the mess hall.

  There were baloney and lima beans. I had never eaten lima beans before, but I did this time; they were cold.

  The group that had made the trip from New York did not survive the first day in Parris Island. I never saw the blond singer again, nor most of the others. Somehow sixty of us, among the hundreds who had been aboard that ancient train, became a training platoon, were assigned a number and placed under the charge of the drill sergeant who had delivered the welcoming address.

  Sergeant Bellow was a southerner with a fine contempt for northerners. It was not that he favored the southerners; he merely treated them less sarcastically. He was big. I would say six feet four inches, two hundred thirty pounds.

  But above all he had a voice.

  It pulsed with power as he counted the cadence, marching us from the administration building to the quartermaster’s. It whipped us, this ragged remnant, and stiffened our slouching civilian backs. Nowhere else but in the Marine Corps do you hear that peculiar lilting cadence of command.

  “Thrip-faw-ya-leahft, thrip-faw-ya-leahft.”

  It sounds like an incantation; but it is merely the traditional “three-four-your-left” elongated by the southern drawl, made sprightly by being sung. I never heard it done better than by our sergeant. Because of this, and because of his inordinate love of drill, I have but one image of him: striding stiff-backed a few feet apart from us, arms thrust out, hands clenched, head canted back, with the whole body following and the great voice ceaselessly bellowing, “Thrip-faw-ya-leahft, thrip-faw-ya-leahft.”

  Sergeant Bellow marched us to the quartermaster’s. It was there we were stripped of all vestiges of personality. It is the quartermasters who make soldiers, sailors and marines. In their presence, one strips down. With each divestment, a trait is lost; the discard of a garment marks the quiet death of an idiosyncrasy. I take off my socks; gone is a propensity for stripes, or clocks, or checks, or even solids; ended is a tendency to combine purple socks with brown tie. My socks henceforth will be tan. They will neither be soiled, nor rolled, nor gaudy, nor restrained, nor holey. They will be tan. The only other thing they may be is clean.

  So it is with it all, until one stands naked, struggling with an embarrassment that is entirely lost on the laconic shades who work in quartermaster sheds.

  Within—in the depths the psychiatrists call subliminal—a human spark still sputters. It will never go quite out. Its vigor or its desuetude is in exact proportion to the number of miles a man may put between himself and his camp.

  Thus naked, thus quivering, a man is defenseless before the quartermaster. Character clings to clothes that have gone into the discard, as skin and hair stick to adhesive tape. It is torn from you. Then the quartermaster shades swarm over you with measuring tape. A cascade of clothes falls upon you, washing you clean of personality. It is as though some monstrous cornucopia poised in the air above has been tilted; and a rain of caps, gloves, socks, shoes, underwear, shirts, belts, pants, coats falls upon your unfortunate head. When you have emerged from this, you are but a number: 351391 USMCR. Twenty minutes before, there had stood in your place a human being, surrounded by some sixty other human beings. But now there stood one number among some sixty others: the sum of all to be a training platoon, but the parts to have no meaning except in the context of the whole.

  We looked alike, as Chinese seem to Westerners and, I suppose, vice versa. The color and cut of our hair still saved us. But in a minute these too would fall.

  The cry rose as we marched to the barbers: “You’ll be sorree!” Before the last syllable of the taunt had died away, the barber had sheared me. I think he needed four, perhaps five, strokes with his electric clipper. The last stroke completed the circle. I was now a number encased in khaki and encompassed by chaos.

  And it was the second of these twin denominators of Parris Island that was the real operative thing. In six weeks of training there seemed not to exist a single pattern—apart from meals. All seemed chaos: marching, drilling in the manual of arms; listening to lectures on military courtesy—“In saluting, the right hand will strike the head at a forty-five-degree angle midway of the right eye;” listening to lectures on marine jargon—“From now on everything, floor, street, ground, everything is ‘the deck;’” cleaning and polishing one’s rifle until it shone like an ornament; shaving daily whether hairy or beardless. It was all a jumble.

  “Whadda we gonna do—salute the Japs to death?”

  “No, we’re gonna blind them with spit and polish.”

  “Yeah—or barber the bastards.”

  All the logic seemed to be on our side. The Marine Corps seemed a madness.

  They had quartered us on the second floor of a wooden barracks and they kept us there. Save for a week or so on the rifle range and Sunday M
asses, I never stirred from that barracks but at the beck of Sergeant Bellow. We had no privileges. We were half-baked; no longer civilians, just becoming marines. We were like St. Augustine’s definition of time: “Out of the future that is not yet, into the present that is just becoming, back to the past that no longer is.” And always the marching.

  March to the mess hall, march to the sick bay, march to draw rifles slimy with cosmoline, march to the water racks to scrub them clean, march to the marching ground. Feet slapping cement, treading the packed earth, grinding to a halt with rifle butts clashing. “To the rear, march! … Forrr-ward, march! … Left oblique, march! … Platoon, halt!” … clash, clash … “Right shouldeh, ahms!”… slap, slap … my finger! my red and white finger … “Goddammit, men! Strike youah pieces! Hear me? Strike youah pieces, y’hear? Ah want noise! Ah want blood! Noise! Blood! Pre-sent, ahms!” … my finger! … “Forrr-ward, march!” … now again … march, march, march …

  It was a madness.

  But it was discipline.

  Apart from us recruits, no one in Parris Island seemed to care for anything but discipline. There was absolutely no talk of the war; we heard no fiery lectures about killing Japs, such as we were to hear later on in New River. Everything but discipline, Marine Corps discipline, was steadfastly mocked and ridiculed, be it holiness or high finance. These drill instructors were dedicated martinets. Like the sensualist who feels that if a thing cannot be eaten, drunk, or taken to bed, it does not exist, so were these martinets in their outlook. All was discipline.

  It is not an attitude to be carried over into pursuits civilian; but it cannot be beaten for straightening civilian backs.

  Sergeant Bellow was as strict as most. He would discipline us in the ordinary way: command a man to clean out the head with a toothbrush, or sleep with one’s rifle because it had been dropped, or worse, called “a gun.” But above all he insisted on precision in marching.