Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (26 page)

“Look at them, Lucky,” said Hoosier. “Don’t kid yerself they’re out just to say good-by. They ain’t only wavin’, they’re waitin’—they’re waitin’ fer the first boatload of doggies coming into the harbor.”

“So?” shrugged Chuckler. “You’d do the same if you was them. You’re just jealous.”

“Hell, yes, Chuckler,” Hoosier said, replying with eagerness. “Ah’m just beefin’ because Ah’m on the wrong boat.”

Just then, as though to fit the Hoosier’s estimate of the farewell scenes, as though to summarize the Great Debauch now lying behind us, that period receding ever faster with the ever widening water between the docks and our stern, the men aboard the ship took to a farewell gesture of their own.

They dug from their pockets and wallets those rubber balloon-like contraptions for which they had no longer any use, and they inflated them. These they set adrift on the currents of wind whipping about the fantail. Soon the space between the docks and our departing transport was filled with these white and sausage-shaped balloons—dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of them—dancing in the breeze, bouncing up and down, seeming to flutter even on the wind of noise raised between the ever-separating camps, the hoarse and vulgar hooting of the marines and the shrill and pseudo-shocked shrieking of the girls—answering one another like rutting beasts in the forests, counterpointing one another like the coarsest concerto grosso.

In the diminishing distance we could still see the balloons.

Hail and farewell, women of the West. We who are about to die insult you.

1

Like all Liberty Ships, our vessel was anonymous. Oh, it had a name, but not one you would remember for longer than it took to pronounce it. Squat, dark, uncomfortable, plodding ship, it served only to take us from place to place, like a ferry, without character, without interest, without adventure—anonymous.

It was the first Liberty Ship within our experience, although it would not be the last, and of this unlovely brood, the Runner expressed our contempt. “You know,” he said, gazing in disgust upon the crowded decks, talking above the ship’s shuddering rattle, “they make these things on a weekend. They get a lot of people who have nothing to do and get them all together in one place. Then they get them drunk. On Sunday night they have another one of these.” He waved his hand to embrace not only our bovine beauty but that entire cowlike line of transports plowing north along the Australian coast.

We ate on deck, and we also attended to our necessities on deck. A galley shed had been constructed above decks and there were also topside heads. In a strong wind, we fought to keep our food down on those unmanageable instruments of exasperation we called our mess kits—or to keep it down in the stomach, once the wind blew from the heads.

We had resumed taking atabrine pills. When one arrived at the end of the line, canteen cup of coffee in one hand, meal and mess kit balanced precariously in the other, an officer waiting there commanded one’s mouth to open. Whereupon a medical corpsman flicked a yellow atabrine pill into the cavity.

“Open your mouth, there.”

“Ah, that does it.”

“You missed, you fool!”

“Hey, there—watch your food. Ugh! You clumsy … watch it, watch it! …”

“I can’t help it, Lieutenant—the damned ship rolled …”

“Damn it, men, be careful of those canteen clasps. You’re spilling your coffee. Come on now, move on. You there, what are you blinking at? Move on, you’re holding up the line. Careful, now, corps-man. You’re missing too many of them. Careful, I tell you.

CAREFUL!”

“Oops, I’m sorry, sir.”

“It isn’t a bad burn, sir—not even a second degree, I don’t think.”

“Damn it, corpsman! I told you—”

“Watch it, sir. She’s rolling again. Ugh, smell that head. Watch it, sir! He’s turning green. Watch it, sir.”

So we plied our way up the Australian coast, sailing inside the Great Barrier Reef. We had the reef to starboard and shore to port. It was a natural protective barrier, and as we sailed at night, we were permitted to smoke on deck. No enemy undersea raider would risk snubbing its nose in such a submarine labyrinth.

We had no notion where we might be going, except to be sure that we were headed north and therefore back to war. By this time, the Japanese had been cleared from the Solomons, and most of New Guinea, and we had launched our northward, island-hopping progress across the watery wastes of Oceania. The frightful losses of Tarawa were uppermost in our minds.

But, as veterans, we would talk more and joke more about the place we were going than the condition of life we would enter; of the latter, we had no doubts. Conjecture kept our tongues wagging and our minds occupied during those days of ennui, when we would sit gossiping on the greasy canvas covering the hatches. Sometimes it would become a word game, or a slogan-inventing contest.

“Keep cool, fool, it’s Rabaul,” someone might say of the impregnable Japanese fortress on New Britain. Or: “The Golden Gate in Forty-eight,” meaning that we still had five years of war confronting us before we would see San Francisco again. “Will you be on the roster when we get back from Gloucester?” was a macabre reference to Cape Gloucester on the further end of New Britain, while the prospect of invading Korea presented the incipient Freudians in our ranks (and there were many) with an unrivaled opportunity to rhyme Korea with that word which stands for one of the consequences of Freudianism in action.

Idle, immobile, bored—a man is easily irritated. Even the prospect of food exasperates, because to eat, it is necessary to assemble mess gear and to arise and get in line; and after the meal, it is necessary to clean the mess gear and to stow it away and perhaps face the infuriating prospect of another person encamped upon your place on the sunny side of the hatch.

There is candy to be bought from the ship’s canteen; but this is even more infuriating. To get it, one must stand in line, perhaps for three hours, while the storekeeper attends to the wishes of the sailors in the ship’s company, and then, when the time has arrived for the troops to make their purchases, risk the exasperation of an exhausted stock. The supply of candy seemed to give out each day, just as the marines prepared to buy, and then, miraculously, as though associated with the mysteries of some awesome sun god, to be replenished for the ship’s company with a new sunrise. (But at night, we could perceive the votaries of the canteen deity sneaking from bunk to bunk down in the hold, offering to sell the marines five-cent bars of candy at a dollar a bar. They also sold us sandwiches at somewhat unfriendly prices.) Mostly, we gazed over the rail on the fantail of the ship, looking deeply into the wake boiling and churning in a pale green froth. Sometimes the screws would whirl frantically when the prow of the ship dug too deeply into a wave, lifting the stern free. It was as though the propellers felt naked in the sunlight and were hastening to reclothe themselves with the sea. Here on the fantail, mesmerized by the wake, lulled by the turning of the screws, you sank into a pleasant torpor. You need not think, you need not feel, you need almost not be, except to become integrated with the wave or to flow with the motion of the ship—and it was only when the prow plunged and the stern rose and the water fell out of sight that the movement of the blue sky swinging across your vision and the whir of the freed propellers served as reminders of reality and the moment.

We were permitted on deck at night, although we were forbidden to smoke once we had left the protection of the Great Barrier Reef. There were dark nights that suggested security similar to that of the Reef, but then there were starry nights that cast a pale and enchanting glow over all the world, seeming even to profit from the danger inherent in their illumination.

We sailed through narrow seas fringed by green jungles crowding down to steep banks in riotous luxury. We were coasting New Guinea. Suddenly, we were in a harbor, and our motion had ceased and we were unloading. One of the other transports seemed to have run aground about half a mile to our starboard.

“They can send that skipper home,” said Chuckler.

“Yeah,” Runner said. “He’s probably one of those twenty-one-year-old captains they get from the Merchant Marine Academy.”

But there was no more time for talk. We were going ashore. The crews were swinging the landing craft free of their davits and lowering them into the water, prodded by the bumptious urgings of the bosun’s mates, come into their own now that there was an unloading to be done. We were drawn up on deck, and then, at the command, were clambering over the side, down the cargo nets, into the boats, and so ashore.

We saw quickly that this was no uninhabited island. There were no buildings, of course, but there was a harbormaster on the beach bellowing through his megaphone to direct the unloading, and there were lines of olive-green trucks waiting to carry both us and our stores away inland. But first we turned to unloading our ship, and in one of the intervals granted us, we took to swimming.

From the beach I saw a half-sunken fishing schooner about fifty yards away, and decided to investigate. I swam out, pulled myself aboard and made my way up to the point of the prow, which was out of the water. I was some fifteen feet from the surface when, on impulse, I dived off.

Falling, I saw to my horror a coral reef only about three feet submerged. I strained my body so as to make my dive as shallow as possible—but even so, I scraped the reef the length of my torso, and when I had swum hastily ashore and emerged on the beach, blood was streaming from a number of abrasions in such quantities as to startle a native who squatted there smoking a stick of tobacco.

But the cuts were superficial and were quickly dressed—with iodine, of course, probably only because it burns better. As I stood there, hands clenched and teeth on edge, a voice said: “That was a close call, Lucky. You’re well named. Does it hurt much?”

I turned to confront Father Straight. I knew before I turned that it was he, for his was the only gentle or cultivated voice I had encountered in the Marines. Father Straight was our chaplain—the first, in fact, that the Second Battalion ever had. He had joined us in Australia just as we shoved off. I saw him our second day out when I noticed a crowd of marines encircling an elderly-looking man. They had such a respectful air, such a hungrily respectful air, and the man was so obviously not one of us, that it was easy to conclude his calling.

“It stings like hell, Father,” I said, unconscious of any profanity in the word. Only the unprintables were thought unspeakable in a chaplain’s presence, and then not always so. “But I was lucky it didn’t cut my … it didn’t cut me wide open.”

“Yes, you can thank God for that.”

Father Straight was a man in his forties, but he was still that radiant type that the Irish call a “black Celt.” Looking at him, I saw that the sea voyage had spread a coat of tan over his visage, once white with the flour of civilization, and that the sedentary flesh about hips and waist had begun to vanish.

“How do you like the island, Father?” I asked.

“It’s very exciting,” he said, brightening. “This is my first time in the jungle.” He eyed me like a stranger about to ask directions. I asked: “Anything I can do for you, Father?”

“Perhaps there is. In the excitement, they seem to have forgotten me.”

“Stick with us,” I said. “We’ll take care of you.”

He hesitated. “Will it be all right?”

“Sure. It’s always fouled-up when we move.”

“Swell,” said Father Straight, and he accompanied us when we had loaded one of the trucks with the Intelligence Section’s gear and climbed aboard. The truck climbed a series of small hills and finally deposited us in the middle of a field of kunai grass—our new home.

This is how the Marines train their men. Keep them mean and nasty, like starving beasts, says the Corps, and they will fight better. When men are being moved from one place to another, spare no effort to make it painful; and before they have arrived at their destination, dispatch a man ahead to survey the ground with an eye toward discomfort. For sustenance give them cold food, and for tools a machete, and if the Commander has any influence with the gods of the clouds, he must see to it that it rains.