Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (4 page)

For the next week or so we merely went through the motions while awaiting assignment. We talked easily of “sea duty” or “guard duty.” In these waking dreams we all wore dress blue uniforms, drank copiously, danced, copulated, and generally played the gallant. Occasionally, as the name of a family miscreant haunts the conversation of reunions, the name of “New River” popped up. This is the base where the First Marine Division was forming. At New River there were no dress blues, no girls, no dance bands; there was only beer and that marshland called the boondocks. To mention New River was to produce painful pauses in the talk, until it would be forgotten in the next onrush of happy speculation.

The day for departure came.

We swung our sea bags onto supply trucks. We donned our packs. We fell out gaily on the sidewalk before the barracks. We stood in the shadow of the balcony, a place made odious to us one day, when, to punish a butterfingers who had dropped his rifle, Bellow had commanded him to stand there, erect, rifle at port arms, chanting from sunup to sundown: “I’m a bad boy, I dropped my rifle.”

There we stood, awaiting orders. Bellow fell us in. He ran us through the manual of arms. Our hands, slapping the rifle slings, made sure sounds.

“At ease. Fall out. Get on those trucks.”

We scrambled aboard. Someone at last mustered the courage to inquire: “Where we goin’, Sergeant?”

“New River.”

The trucks drove off in silence. I remember Bellow watching as we pulled away, and how astonished I was to see the sadness in his eyes.

We arrived at New River in darkest night. We had come from South Carolina by rail. There had been a good meal in the diner, as there always was in train travel. We had slept in our seats; packs on the racks above us, rifles by our sides.

They fell us out of the train with much shouting and flashing of lights, and we formed ranks on the siding. All was shadowy. None of these yelling rushing figures—the N.C.O.’s and officers who received us—seemed related to reality, except in those moments when a flashlight might pin one of them against the darkness. Black as it was, I was still able to gain the impression of vastness; the dome of heaven arching darkly overhead and stretching away from us—a limitless flatness broken only by silent huts.

They marched us quickly to a lighted oblong hut, with a door at either end. We stood at one end, while an N.C.O. called our names.

“Leckie.”

I detached myself from my platoon, ending, in that motion, my association with the majority of the men who had been my comrades for six weeks.

I walked quickly into the lighted hut. An enlisted man bade me sit down opposite his desk. There were three or four others like him in the hut, similarly “interviewing” new arrivals. He asked questions rapidly, interested only in my answers, ignoring me. Name, serial number, rifle number, etc.—all the dry detail that tells nothing of a man.

“What’d you do in civilian life?”

“Newspaper, sports writer.”

“Okay, First Marines. Go out front and tell the sergeant.”

That was how the Marines classified us. The questions were perfunctory. The answers were ignored. Schoolboy, farmer, scientist-of-the-future—all were grist to the reception mill and all came forth neatly labeled: First Marines. There were no “aptitude tests,” no “job analyses.” In the First Marine Division the presumption was that a man had enlisted to fight. No one troubled about civilian competence.

It may have been an affront to those vestiges of civilian self-esteem which Parris Island had not had time to destroy, but New River soon would take care of that. Here, the only talent was that of the foot soldier, the only tool the hand gun; here the cultivated, the oblique, the delicate soon perished, like gardenias in the desert.

I felt the power of that attitude, and I felt, for the first time in my life, an utter submission to authority as I emerged from the lighted hut and mumbled “First Marines” to a cluster of sergeants standing there expectantly. One of them pointed with his flashlight to a group of men; I took my place among them. About a half dozen other groups were being formed in the same way.

Then, at a command, I swung up on a truck with my new comrades. The driver started the motor and we rolled off, bumping over pitted muddy roads, past row upon row of silent darkened huts, rolling, ever rolling, until suddenly we stopped with a lurch and were home.

Home was H Company, Second Battalion, First Marine Regiment. Home was a company of machine guns and heavy mortars. Someone in that cheerless hut had decided that I should be a machine gunner.

The process of enrollment in H Company hardly differed from the method of our “assignment” the night before, except that we were run through a hut occupied by Captain High-Hips. He fixed us with his gloriously militant glass eye, he fingered his military mustache, and he questioned us in his clipped British manner of speech. Then, with an air of skepticism, he assigned us to our squad huts and into the keeping of the N.C.O.’s now arriving from other regiments.

These men came from the Fifth and the Seventh, the veteran line units in whose ranks were almost all of the First Division’s trained troops. My regiment, the First, had been disbanded, but now, after Pearl Harbor it was being reactivated. The First needed N.C.O.’s, and many of those who came to us betrayed, by a certain nervousness of voice, a newness of rank. Their chevrons were shiny. A few had not found time to set them onto their sleeves; they were pinned on.

A few weeks before these corporals and Pfc.’s had been privates. Some predated us as marines by that margin only. But in such an urgent time, experience, however slight, is preferred to none at all. The table organization had to be filled. So up they went.

But the First also received a vital leavening of veteran N.C.O.’s. They would teach us, they would train us, they would turn us into fighting troops. From them we would learn our weapons. From them we would take our character and temper. They were the Old Breed.

And we were the new, the volunteer youths who had come from the comfort of home to the hardship of war.

For the next three years, all of these would be my comrades—the men of the First Marine Division.

Robert Leckie, 1942

1

Huts, oil, beer.

Around these three, as around a sacramental triad, revolved our early life at New River. Huts to keep us dry; oil to keep us warm; beer to keep us happy. It is no unholy jest to call them sacramental; they had about them the sanctity of earth. When I remember New River, I remember the oblong huts with the low roofs; I remember the oil stoves and how we slipped out at night, buckets in hand, to pilfer oil from the other companies’ drums, passing the men from the other companies, thieves in the night like ourselves; I remember the cases of canned beer in the middle of the hut and how we had pooled our every penny to go down to the slop chute to buy them, carrying them back boisterously on our shoulders, shouting and cheerful, because the warm dry huts awaited us, and soon the beer would be in our bellies and the world would be ours.

We were privates, and who is more carefree?

Like the huts, oil and beer, I had a trinity of friends: Hoosier, the Chuckler and the Runner.

I met Hoosier the second day at New River. He had arrived two days before us, and Captain High-Hips had made him his runner. In that first unorganized week, his clothes were always spattered with mud from his countless trips through the mire between the captain’s office and the other huts.

I disliked him at first. He seemed inclined to look down on us from his high position in Captain High-Hips’ office. He seemed surly, too, with his square strong figure, tow hair and blue eyes—his curt intelligences from on high: “Cap’n wants two men bring in the lieutenant’s box.”

But I was too inexperienced to see that the surliness was but a front for his being scared, like all of us. The immobile face was a façade; the forced downward curve of the mouth a hastily erected defense against the unknown. With time and friendship, that mouth would curve in a different direction, upward in a grin that was pure joy.

Chuckler was easier to know. We became friends the first day of gun drill, our introduction into the mysteries of the heavy, water-cooled, thirty-caliber machine gun. Corporal Smoothface, our instructor, a soft-voiced, sad-eyed youth from Georgia, made the drill a competition between squads to see which one could get its gun into action sooner. As gunner, Chuckler carried the tripod. As assistant gunner, I lugged the gun, a metal incubus of some twenty pounds. At a command, Chuckler raced off to a given point, spun the tripod over his head and set it up, while I panted off after him to slip the gun’s spindle into the tripod socket. We beat the other squad and the Chuckler growled with satisfaction.

“Attaboy, Jersey,” he chuckled, as I slid alongside him and placed the machine gun box in feeding position. “Let’s show them bastards.”

That was his way. He was fiercely competitive. He was profane. He had a way of chuckling, a sort of perpetual good humor, that stopped his aggressiveness short of push, and which softened the impact of his rough language. Like Hoosier and me, he was stocky, and like Hoosier, he was fair; but he had a rugged handsomeness that the Hoosier’s blunt features could not match.

The three of us, and later, the Runner, who joined us on Onslow Beach, were all stocky and somewhere under five feet ten inches tall—a good build for carrying guns or tripods or the tubes and base plates which the men of our Mortar Section had to lug. And flinging these heavy pieces about seemed to constitute all of our training.

Gun drill and nomenclature. Know your weapon, know it intimately, know it with almost the insight of its inventor; be able to take it apart blindfolded or in the dark, to put it together; be able to recite mechanically a detailed description of the gun’s operation; know the part played by every member of the squad, from gunner down to the unfortunates who carried the water can or the machine gun boxes, as well as their own rifles.

It was dull and it was depressing, and the war seemed very far away. It was always difficult to remain attentive, to keep from falling asleep under that warm Carolina sun, while the voice of the gunnery sergeant droned on—“Enemy approaching at six hundred yards … up two, right three … fire …”

But for every hour there was a ten-minute break, in which we might talk and smoke and clown around. Hoosier and I were the clowns. He loved to mimic the Battalion Executive Officer, the Major, who had a mincing walk and a prim manner that was almost a caricature in itself.

“All right, men,” said the Hoosier, sashaying back and forth before us like the Major, “let’s get this straight. There’ll be no thinking. No enlisted man is permitted to think. The moment you think, you weaken this outfit. Anyone caught thinking will be subject to a general court-martial. Anyone in H Company having brains will immediately return them to the Quartermaster. They’re running short of them up in Officer’s Country.”

In these times also we would sing. Neither the Hoosier nor I could carry a tune, our idea of a scale being to raise or lower our voices. But we liked to bellow out the words. Unfortunately for us—for all of us—we had no songs to sing except those tuneless pointless “war songs” then arriving in a sticky flood.

Refrains like “Just to show all those Japs, the Yanks are no saps” or “I threw a kiss in the ocean” hardly fill a man with an urge to kill or conquer. After a few days of singing these, we came to scorn them, and turned to singing the bawdies, which are at least rollicking.

It is sad to have to go off to war without a song of your own to sing. Something like a rousing war song—something like the “Minstrel Boy” or something jolly and sardonic like the Englishman’s “Sixpence”—might have made the war a bit more worth fighting. But we got none. Ours was an Advanced Age, too sophisticated for such outdated frippery. War cries or war songs seemed rather naïve and embarrassing in our rational time. We were fed food for thought; abstractions like the Four Freedoms were given us. Sing a marching song about that, if you can.