Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (15 page)

They would hardly need to take aim.

If they came tonight, we would die in our postage-stamp machine gun pit. We could not get away. Worse, we could not stop them; we could not even give them pause. It is one thing to die, another to die uselessly.

Night was upon us. We sat in the blackness, the sound-enhancing stillness, listening to our own breathing like a dying man feeling for his pulse, starting at the sound of the earth crumbling softly around us. Below, the jungle stirred uneasily.

We began to curse. Softly, ever softly, we cursed the stupidity of the officer who had laid out the lines, the thoughtlessness of Ivy-League; we cursed things singly or in pairs, generally or in the particular; and when we had done, when we had drawn off the venom of hopelessness, I turned to Cincinnati and said, “Start tearing the gun down. We’re getting the hell out of here. We’ll move up on top of the hill. I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to die without a fight.”

He whispered, “You can say that again,” and began to take the gun apart, while I crawled out of the cave to warn the men on the hillside.

I called softly to them, “Runner … Amish …”

“That you, Lucky?” It was Amish, surprise and just a tinge of suspicion in his voice.

“Yeah, it’s me. Look. We’re coming up, we’re bringing the gun up on top of the hill. It’s a trap down here. Keep us covered while we move and tell Runner to warn Chuckler and the others so they won’t shoot at us.”

He whispered, “Okay,” and I crawled back inside the cave. I said to Cincinnati, “You take the gun and the water can and I’ll take the tripod and the ammo box.”

He said nothing, and then I whispered, “Let’s go.” We didn’t bother to try to crawl out with our cumbersome gear. We kicked out the sandbags protecting the cave mouth and scrambled out and up and away from that claustrophobic pit.

We were sweating when we had done setting up the gun again, but it was with relief. There was elbow room. Now a man might fight.

But we had become unstrung. Not ten minutes later, I leaned forward and laid a hand on Cincinnati’s arm, thinking I heard movement below and to the left.

When I thought I heard a sibilant command like “Over here!” I whispered, “Here they come!” and snicked the gun bolt.

We waited for the little brown men, for the silhouette of the mushroom helmet against the black bulk of the jungle.

But no one came.

No one came all night, though we heard gunfire and the smash of mortars. In the morning we learned that the attack had come against the army, against the very unit that had replaced us that day. They sat in our great big pits, behind our barbed wire and our field of fire, and they massacred the Japs.

We felt disappointed; not that they had not come against us on the Ridge, but that we had not been in the fields to mow them down. We were glad they had not hit us on the Ridge, exposed as we were. They would have swept over us, though we might have held them up.

We learned that morning, too, that we had been expendable for the evening.

“Didn’t you know?” asked one of the other gunners who was stationed farther back on the Ridge. “We were under orders to shoot anything that came up the hill.”

“Yeah? Supposing we came up? Supposing it got too hot and we pulled back?”

The man shrugged. “What d’ya think we would do—ask to see your liberty card? We’d’a shot your ass off, that’s all.” Hoosier’s eyes went big and he swore indignantly. “Well I’ll be go-to-hell!”

No one criticized me for moving the gun. Lieutenant Ivy-League agreed to it when I showed him that from the spur we could command the entire trail with plunging fire, as well as the ravines below it, and that we also might set up a cross fire with the Gentleman’s gun, above and beyond up to the right. Also, should my gun be overrun, the Gentleman could deliver a plunging fire into it.

What a fortress we made of that Ridge snout!

We stripped the sides of the ravines of their cover. We leveled plateaus and covered them with barbed wire. We sowed the remaining jungle with booby traps fashioned with hand grenades. We filled gallon cans with gasoline and fastened these to trees at points where our guns had been sighted in, so that we could fire incendiary bullets into them and set them alight. We got one-hundred-and-five millimeter shells from the artillery and buried them in the jungle, preparing them for detonation by electric wires running down from our pits. We dug rifle holes between the pits, and later, trenches running from hole-to-hole-to-pit, so that the ridges commanded by our guns and the riflemen of G Company were honeycombed with fortifications. Finally, we explored the jungle front for all the flat ground, where the enemy might be most inclined to set up mortars or machine gun fire, or where an attack might most likely be mounted, and these we registered with our guns, sighting in on them, each man carefully measuring his own hand span, so that he could fire at night and hit the target.

All the while, a terribly bright sun beat down on us. There was not a single tree on the Ridge. We had no shade, except to duck into the pits; and by mid-afternoon even these had become unbearable.

Sweat streamed from us and the ulcers yawned on our hands and legs. What bitter desperate anger at the sight of blood from a barbed-wire prick, and the hopeless foreknowledge of the flies that would be upon it. Only constant motion kept the greedy, filthy flies away. High as we were, we were not too high for them. We had out-climbed the mosquitoes, but the flies fed on us unceasingly.

Sometimes the pus built up painful pressures, whereupon Red, our corpsman, would draw a pitted, rusty scalpel from his kit and probe the wound. He would look at a particularly wicked sore and whistle, “Phewee! How long have you had this one?”

“’Bout a week.”

“That so?” he would inquire mildly, like a man discussing his neighbor’s zinnias, and then drive his knife into the sore with all the verve of the man who likes his work.

Brick, from my squad, suffered terribly from the ulcers. His legs were thick with them. He suffered from the heat, too, as did Red. It was an ordeal for both of them, both having the fairest skin to match their flaming hair and light-blue eyes. But they reacted differently.

Brick succumbed. Each day when the sun reached its zenith he retired to the pit and lay with his face against the cool water cans, a wet piece of cloth on his brow. Sometimes he passed out, or became so exhausted he was unable to move. Only assignment to working parties at cooler points on the lines, or a blessed visitation from the rain, saved him from his daily agony.

Red became a mole. He kept his helmet forever jammed down over his eyes, and covered his body as though he were in the Arctic. He withdrew within himself.

He ceased to talk to us, except to dispense medical counsel with an aplomb rivaled only by an outrageous ignorance of his subject, or else to carry on a sort of frantic monologue concerning his chances of being assigned to duty near his home town of Utica, should he survive Guadalcanal.

But that helmet! He wore it always. He wore it for fear of the heat and for fear of the bombs. He slept with it on. He bathed with it on. It was not uncommon to see him, standing in the middle of the stream near E Company’s lines to our rear, his body ridiculously white—his helmet on!

To mention it to him, to shout “Red, take that damned helmet off!” was to draw a look of animal hatred. Under the helmet, his face became small and sharp and hateful, like an animal with pointed teeth.

Soon the helmet became a fixation with us. We wanted it off. It was a sign that Red was going loco—and after him, who? We schemed to rid ourselves of it.

“The only thing we can do, is shoot it full of holes,” said Chuckler. We were squatting on the hillside, where we always did, midway between the Chuckler’s pit and mine. Red sat apart from us, molelike, his helmet slumped over his inward-looking eyes. Hoosier reflected and grinned slyly. “Who’s gonna do the shooting?”

“Me,” said the Chuckler.

“Oh, no, you’re not. We’ll draw straws.”

The Chuckler protested, but we outvoted him. It made no difference. He won the draw.

The plan was for Runner to engage Red in conversation while I came up behind him and knocked off his helmet. Chuckler was to spray it with machine gun bullets while it rolled down the hill.

Runner strolled over and sat down beside Red, wondering out loud if it would be possible—once we were delivered from Guadalcanal—to obtain a soft billet upstate. Red immediately shifted the venue to Utica, and the question to his heart. I stole up behind him and knocked off his helmet.

Chuckler’s gun gave roaring, stuttering voice.

The twin shocks of the loss of his helmet and the sound of the gun sent Red to his feet as though from a spring released. He clutched his head, his unkempt flaming mop, as though the top of it had gone off with the helmet. There was terror on his face. Everyone was jumping, waving his arms and whooping.

“Let ‘er go, Zeke!”

“Yip, yip, yip—yahoo!”

“Hey, Red—too bad your silly head ain’t in that helmet!”

“Shoot ‘er, Chuck—shoot the sides out of the blasted thing!”

“Yaaaa—hoo!”

Filled with holes, the helmet rolled out of sight beneath the hill. Runner yelled to the Chuckler to cease fire and dashed down to retrieve it, setting it atop a barbed-wire pole where it was shot into a sieve. Then it was brought up the hill and flung at Red’s feet.

He gazed at it in horror. He turned to look at us and there was not even hatred in his eyes, only gathering tears and the dumb pleading look of the animal that has been beaten to the ground.

We had half hoped that he would laugh. But he wept and ran up the hill to the Battalion Aid Station.

There he stayed, until a new helmet was found for him and he could be persuaded to return to our pits. When he did, his manner was more distant than ever and his chin strap was never again undone. Nor did anyone dare joke with him about the time we shot his helmet into bits.

It was November, three months and more since we had landed. The Japanese had been coming at our Division perimeter all of October, it seemed, always attacking over a narrow front, penetrating slightly during the night, and then, in the morning, being driven back with terrific loss. Yet they kept coming. Hardly a battalion of our three infantry regiments—First, Fifth and Seventh—had not fought its battle. So had the doggies of the 164th Regiment. But the Japanese kept coming. We could see them, sometimes, pouring off the beached transports down at Kokumbona.

Sometimes the old Airacobras would rise off the field and lumber down to the transports to bomb and strafe them. We cheered and danced as they passed overhead, en route to the carnage. We watched, fascinated, as the Airacobras dived to strafe or to release their bombs in that slow, yawning, dreadful parabola.

But they kept coming. They had heavy artillery, now; at the Matanikau River they had used heavy tanks. They kept coming at our lines, kept being thrown back; but every night we expected them. Time had become a terrible catchy rhythm, like the breathing of a child frightened by sounds in the dark. Each night we held our breath, the men of the First Marine Division and the soldiers who had joined us—on the ridges, in the ravines, looking seaward from the beach, guarding the rivers, crouching in airport shelters—all held their breath like a single, giant organism, harking for the sounds of the intruder in the dark. Each morning we released it—a long, slow, silent exhalation.

… They kept coming.

With them came more and more of their airplanes, winging in from Rabaul silvery and bright, like flying fish, high up in that most blue sky. Sometimes, before or after the bombers had dropped their loads, dogfights would growl over our Ridge so close that it seemed we had only to put out a hand to touch the combatants.

From such a melee one day, a Zero took to playing with us, strafing us. Chuckler became so angry he dragged his gun out of the pit and set it up to return the fire. He was aware of the difficulty of hitting a streaking Zero by firing a puny thirty-caliber machine gun over open sights, yet he could not bear huddling in the pit while the Jap made sport of us.

He swore at the Zero as it banked gracefully, and he struggled to get his gun in position, shouting at me, “C’mon, Luck—give me a hand.”

I ran to assist him. But the Zero had turned and was coming back. Before I could reach him, it was upon us with a roar. Seeing the puffs of dust its bullets kicked up, hearing the musical tinkle of its empty shells falling on the Ridge, I turned and ran. Chuckler had sprawled flat. I ran. It was behind me, roaring, spitting, tinkling. I jumped off the hillside above the cave which I had abandoned the first night. I heard it roar over me before I hit the ground six feet below.

Atop the hill Chuckler was cursing wildly. I scrambled back up, helped him to get the gun erect and loaded, and squatted beside him to feed it. We waited for the Zero’s return.

It banked and made for us.

“C’mon, you son of a bitch,” Chuckler growled. “You won’t find it so easy this time.”

The tinkling had begun again; the dust puffs were dancing toward us; our gun was hammering—when, from behind the Ridge, appeared two Airacobras flying wingtip-to-wingtip, and the Zero disappeared. I say it disappeared. I suppose it blew up, disintegrated under the impact of the cannon which the Airacobras mounted in their nose. But I heard no explosion, perhaps because by then our Ridge had become a perfect cauldron of sound, what with the dogfighting, the bombing of the airport and the answering
wham
of the airport anti-aircraft guns.

It was the AAA guns that gave us as much pause as did the enemy. Most of their flak bursts were directly overhead, and often our ridge would sound like a xylophone registering the falling shrapnel.

We took cover, as much from fear of this brimstone rain as from enemy bombs or bullets. It was not pleasant to be walking the Ridge, far removed from cover, and to see the beautiful enemy host approaching and the black shell clusters popping into sight around them—and then to hear the rattling of the shrapnel.