Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (5 page)

If a man must live in mud and go hungry and risk his flesh you must give him a reason for it, you must give him a cause. A conclusion is not a cause.

Without a cause, we became sardonic. One need only examine the drawings of Bill Mauldin to see how sardonic the men of World War Two became. We had to laugh at ourselves; else, in the midst of all this mindless, mechanical slaughter, we would have gone mad.

Perhaps we of the Marines were more fortunate than those of the other services, because in addition to our saving laughter we had the cult of the Marine.

No one could forget that he was a marine. It came out in the forest green of the uniform or the hour-long spit-polishing of the dark brown shoes. It was in the jaunty angle of the campaign hats worn by the gunnery sergeants. It was in the mark of the rifleman, the fingers of the gun hand longer than those of the other. It characterized every lecture, every drill or instruction circle. Sometimes a gunnery sergeant might interrupt rifle class to reminisce.

“China, that’s the duty, lads. Give me ol’ Shanghai. Nothing like this hole. Barracks, good chow—we’d even eat off plates—plenty of liberty, dress blues. And did them Chinese gals love the marines! They liked Americans best, but you couldn’t get them out with a swabbie or a dog-face if they was a Gyrene around. That was the duty, lads.”

And because a marine is a volunteer there is always a limit to his griping. He can complain so far, until he draws down this rebuke: “You asked for it, didn’t you?”

Only once did I hear it possible that we might meet our match. At bayonet drill two lines of men faced each other. We held rifles to which were affixed bayonets sheathed in their scabbards. At a command the two lines met and clashed.

But we did not suit the sergeant. Perhaps it was our disinclination to disembowel each other. He screamed for a halt and strode over to seize someone’s rifle.

“Thrust, parry, thrust!” he shouted, swinging the rifle through the exercise.

“Thrust, parry, thrust! Then the rifle butt. Hit him in the belly! Damn it, men, you’re going to face the most expert bayonet fighter in the world. You’re going to fight an enemy who loves cold steel! Look what they did in the Philippines! Look what they did in Hong Kong! I’m telling you, men, you’d better learn to use this thing if you don’t want some little yellow Jap slashing your belly wide open!”

It was embarrassing.

Even the other sergeants were a bit red-faced. I could not help comparing this sergeant and his simulated rage to the methods of those other sergeants in Parris Island, who used to taunt us to come at them with drawn bayonet, and laughingly disarm us.

Poor fellow; he thought to frighten was to instruct. I see him now as he was on Guadalcanal: eyes sunken in sockets round with fear, unfleshed face a thing of bone and sinew stretched over quivering nerve. Mercifully they evacuated him, and I never heard of him again.

Nor did we ever have another unseemly suggestion of inferiority.

When we were done drilling we would form ranks and march home. Until a quarter mile from the huts, we walked in “route march.” Our rifles were slung; a man might slouch as he pleased. There was no step to be kept. Talking, joking, crying out to each other in the gathering dusk, it was a pleasant way to come home.

But at the quarter-mile point, the company commander’s voice roared out. “Commm-panee!” Our backs straightened. “Tennnshun!” The rifles snapped straight, spring came back to our step, the familiar cadence began. That was how we came home to the huts of H Company when the shadows were lengthening over the coastal marsh. Thirsty and dirty, we swung into the company street with the snap and precision of garrison troops on parade.

Within another hour we would have revived with a wash and a hot meal. Someone would check the oil supply.

“Hey, Lucky—we’re running low on oil.”

I would take the bucket and slip out into the night, bound for the oil dump.

Chuckler and Hoosier would head for the slop chute. They would be back soon with the beer. The Gentleman, or someone, would sweep out the hut. Perhaps Oakstump would help—Oakstump, that short, bull-like farm lad from Pennsylvania, who didn’t drink or smoke (at least not then) but loved to squat on the floor, throwing his dice, shuffling his cards, plastering his hair with scented oil. To Oakstump, this was living: dice, cards, hair oil.

Then, with the fire alight, the beer case set in the middle of the floor, we would lie back on our cots, heads propped against the wall, swilling the beer and talking.

What did we talk about those nights?

There would have been much shop talk—gossip about our outfit and our destination, endless criticism of the food, the N.C.O.’s, the officers. There certainly would have been much talk of sex. Of course everyone would exaggerate his prowess with women, particularly the younger ones, as they would stretch the size of their income as civilians.

I suppose much of our conversation was dull. It would seem so, now, I am sure. It was dull, but it was homey. We were becoming a family.

H Company was like a clan, or a tribe of which the squad was the important unit, the family group. Like families, each squad differed from the other, because its members were different. They resembled in no way those “squads” peculiar to many war books—those beloved “cross sections” composed of Catholic, Protestant and Jew, rich boy, middle boy and poor boy, goof and genius—those impossible confections which are so pleasing to the national palate, like an All-American football team.

Nor was my squad troubled by racial or religious bigotry. We had no “inner conflict,” as the phrase goes. These things happen most often in the imagination of men who never fought. Only rear echelons with plenty of fat on them can afford such rich diseases, like an epicure with his gout.

We could not stand dissension, and we sank all differences in a common dislike for officers and for discipline; and later on, for the twin enemies of the Pacific, the jungle and the Jap.

The squad, as the sociological sample, squirming under the modern novelist’s microscope or pinioned on his pencil, is unreal. It is cold. It is without spirit. It has no relation to the squads I knew, each as gloriously different from the other as the men themselves were separate and alone.

Lew Juergens (“Chuckler”)

2

Sergeant Thinface took over our platoon. Lieutenant Ivy-League, our platoon leader, would join us a few days later. But, for the present, Thinface was in charge. He could not have been much older than I—perhaps a few months—but he had been in the Marines for three years. That made him ages my senior.

“All right, here it is,” he told us. He brushed back his lank blond hair quickly. His thin boy’s face was screwed up earnestly, as it always was when he was giving the troops the straight. “Here it is. We’re moving out to the boondocks. Enlisted men”—how N.C.O.’s love that phrase—“enlisted men will fall out tomorrow morning in full marching gear. Sea bags will be locked and left in the huts. Check your mess gear. Be sure your shelter half is okay. You better have the right amount of tent pegs or it’ll be your ass.

“All liberty is canceled.”

We grumbled and returned to our huts. We fell to assembling our packs. And then, for the first time, the officers began to amuse themselves at playing-with-soldiers. Every hour, it seemed, Sergeant Thinface burst in on us with a new order, now confirming, now contradicting his earlier marching instructions.

“C.O. says no tent pegs.”

“Battalion says to take your sea bags.”

“Belay that—get those tent pegs in your shelter halves.”

Only the Hoosier, who had the born private’s calm contempt for officers, refused to join the general confusion. Each time the harried Thinface came panting in with a fresh order, Hoosier arose from his cot and listened to him with grave concern. But when Thinface disappeared, he shrugged and returned to his cot to sit there, smoking, surveying us with a superior look.

“Hoosier,” I said. “Aren’t you going to pack?”

“I got my stuff out,” he said, pointing to an array of socks, shorts, shaving cream and other impedimenta. “Aren’t you going to pack it?”

“Hell, no, Lucky! I’ll pack it in the morning—soon’s they make their silly minds up.”

Chuckler’s husky voice cut it, that quality of mirth softening the rebuke.

“You’d better. They’ll have an inspection and it’ll be your ass. They’ll throw you so far back in the brig, they’ll have to feed you with a slingshot.”

Hoosier snorted derisively, lapsing into a wide-mouthed grin. All afternoon he watched us, smoking, pulling away at two cans of warm beer he had secreted the night before, certain all the while he would be proven right.

He was. We put and took incessantly, veering like weather vanes in the shifting wind of orders blowing down from officer’s country. But Hoosier was right. In the morning the final order came from the battalion commander. He had abstained from playing soldier. But when his order came through it was like none of the others, because it was official.

We tore our packs down, reassembled them, and then swung the whole bulky business onto our backs.

I do not recall how much the marching order weighed. Maybe twenty pounds. Even in this, men are so different. I carried the barest minimum, exactly what the colonel prescribed. But a man concerned for cleanliness might slip in a few extra bars of soap or carry a bottle of hair oil; another might cache two cans of beans in the bottom of his pack; a third could not bear to come away without a bundle of letters from home.

A soldier’s pack is like a woman’s purse: it is filled with his personality. I have saddened to see the mementos in the packs of dead Japanese. They had strong family ties, these smooth-faced men, and their packs were full of their families.

We fell in in front of the huts. The packs had a warm comfortable heavy feeling.

“Forrr-ward—harch! Route step—harch!” Off we went to the boondocks.

Perhaps we walked ten miles; not much by the standards of veterans, but it was a great distance then. The route was through the pine woods, over a dirt road barely wide enough to admit a jeep. A whole battalion was on the march, and my poor squad was tucked away somewhere at center or center rear. Clouds of red dust settled upon us. My helmet banged irritably against the machine gun that was boring into my shoulder, or else it was bumped forward maddeningly over my eyes by the movement of my pack. A mile or so out, I dared not drink any more from my canteen. I had no idea how far we had to go. My dungarees were saturated with sweat, their light green darkened by perspiration. There had been joking and even some singing the first mile out. Now, only the birds sang; but from us there was just the thud of feet, the clank of canteens, the creak of leather rifle slings, the occasional hoarse cracking of a voice raised and breath wasted in a curse.

Every hour we got a ten-minute break. We lay propped against the road bank, resting against our packs. Each time, I reached under my pack straps to massage the soreness of my shoulders where the straps had cut. We would smoke. My mouth was dusty dry, my tongue swollen. I would moisten them with a swig of precious water, and then, stupidly, dry the whole thing out again, instantly, with a mouthful of smoke. But it was blissful lying there against the road bank, with all the pain and strain and soreness gone—or at least suspended—and our nostrils filled with the mistaken pleasures of tobacco.

Then came the command: “Off and on!”

It means off your behind and on your feet. Cursing, hating both command and commandant, straining, we rose to our feet and began again the dull plodding rhythm of the march.

This was how we came to where the Higgins Boats were waiting for us. It was where the road arrived at one of those canals which interlace this part of North Carolina and are part of the Inland Waterway System. It was like a live thing, this watery labyrinth, curving and darting through the pine wood, seeming to cavort on its way to the sea.

We climbed stiffly into the boats, sitting with our heads just above the gunwales, our helmets between our knees.

Hardly had our boat begun to move than the man on my left threw up. He was Junior, a slender, timid kid, much too shy for the Marines. Junior was from Upstate New York and was no sailor: leeward or windward were all one to him. He vomited to windward. It came back upon us in a stringy spray, unclean, stinking. Curses beat upon Junior’s head unmatched in volume even by the thin cry of the gulls wheeling overhead.

“Cain’t you use your helmet,” Hoosier growled. “Cripes, Junior. What do you think it’s fer?”

By this time others were sick and were making full use of their helmets. Poor Junior smiled his timid smile of appeal, obviously glad that he was not the only culprit. By the time we had reached the sea and were wallowing offshore in the deep troughs of the surf, half of the boat had become sick, to the immense glee of the boatswain.

Endlessly, with the finality of judgment, the boat lifted and dropped; the desolate ocean swelled and subsided; and above it all stood the boatswain behind his wheel, compassionate as a snake, obviously rehearsing the gleeful tale with which he would regale his swab-jockey buddies—of how the stuck-up marines survived their first ordeal with the great salt sea.