Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (7 page)

When I went to New Bern and the cafés, it was usually with Corporal Smoothface. He called me “Licky.” “C’mon, Licky,” he’d say, “let’s go to New Bern,” running the syllables of the town’s name together so that they sounded as one.

Corporal Smoothface married a girl he met in a café. An hour after he met her, he took off for South Carolina in a car hired with money I got from pawning my watch. He couldn’t get married in New Bern on a Saturday afternoon, but he knew of a South Carolina justice of the peace who would perform the ceremony. After the wedding, he turned around and drove back, spending a one-day honeymoon in New Bern and appearing at Monday morning reveille in New River.

Smoothface never paid me back for the watch. I am sure he considered it a wedding present. So be it.

3

Liberty became less frequent as training grew more intense. Soon we were not going back to the base at all. The days clicked off dully, all the same. Saturdays and Sundays were no different from the rest, except that we could be sure to be routed out of bed every Sunday morning by a forest fire.

No one was ever positive that the Major set them, neither did anyone doubt that he did. There was no arson in his heart, we reasoned, merely an unwillingness to contemplate the troops’ resting easy in their sacks. But, as I say, there was no proof—who wants proof of fact?—except that the fires always seemed to occur Sunday morning in the same general area, and in parts of the wood where there was little danger of their spreading.

So we would be piled into trucks, heaping imprecation on the Major, beseeching heaven to fry him to a cinder in his own holocaust, and be bundled off to the burning.

We put out the fires by building backfires, digging trenches, or sometimes, merely squelching the upstarts among this red breed by flailing away at them with branches before they could blossom into flaming maturity. It was in one of these that my clothes caught fire.

I was standing in the middle of a scorched and smoking meadow, so hot that my feet felt on fire, even through the thick crepe soles of my shoes, through my heavy socks and formidable calluses. I looked down and saw with quick horror that at the inner ankle of my left leg my rolled pants cuffs were smoldering, now puffing into flame.

I ran like the wind, not in fright but in a deliberate sprint for a log fence on the other side of which lay high grass and cool earth. I knew that I could not extinguish the myriad smoldering places in my pants by slapping them; I had to roll on the ground, heap dirt on myself. This I could not do where I stood.

I ran. I raced for the fence; and my buddies, thinking me daft with fear, gave pursuit—bellowing entreaties for me to halt. I beat them to the fence and dived over it, landing on my shoulder, rolling over and over, over and over, scooping up handfuls of dirt and rubbing them on my burning pants and socks.

When they dived on top of me, as though I were liable to be up and off again, I had the fire out. It was Runner who landed on me first. Thank God I had had a head start on him, else I would never had made the fence; and I am no longer curious to know what my friends would have done, had they overtaken me in the middle of that hot and sparking meadow.

I got a nasty burn on my inner ankle where the sock had been alight. It crippled me for a few days and I still carry a faint scar.

Now the training was ending. Days, days, endless grinding days, aimless sweating complaining days, running into each other without point like the mindless tens of days of the French Revolution … days on the mock-up, clambering up and down the rough, evil-smelling cargo nets draped over the gaunt wooden structure, like the Trojan Horse, built to resemble the side of a ship … digging days, out in the field scooping out shallow holes, the depressions for which the men in the Philippines had given the name foxholes—digging, scooping, scraping; got to get below the contour of the earth, got to dig, got to flop into the earth’s fresh wound, the face pressed deep into the fragrant soil while the worms squirm round in consternation as though dismayed by the hastiness of the graves and the heartiness of the bodies that filled them. … days on the march, the sun on the helmet and the sweat gathering in the eyebrows like the sea in a marsh, powdering the upper lip with water, dropping off the point of the chin, while the whole body, soft no longer, rejoices in its movement, the fluid, sweat-oiled movement—the teasing trickle down the groove of the back, and the salt savor of it when the sensuous tongue curls out to kiss the upper lip … days of all kinds, boring and brutalizing, tedious hours wallowing in the gray sea troughs … days of lectures, of shooting, of inspections, of cleaning tents and weapons, of military courtesy, of ennui in the midst of birds singing and officers wrangling over maps … of tedium … of indifference to pain … of rain dripping in forests and wet blankets … of no God but the direct assault … of eyes brightening and bones hardening … and now the last day, like the stooks rising “barbarous in beauty,” we are finished.

On the last day Secretary of the Navy Knox came down from Washington to look at us. They drew us up in serried, toy-soldier ranks beside the Inland Waterway, in the shadow of our mock-up.

I do not recall how long we waited for Knox. It may have been an hour, or it may have been two. But it was not too uncomfortable, standing there in the sun, once they had given us a “parade rest.”

Suddenly a bugle call pealed from the Waterway. They snapped us to attention. A gleaming launch swept up the canal, banners streaming, prow high and haughty, stern down and driving—like a spirited horse. It was the Secretary.

The company commander joined the ranks of the official party as it reached our ranks, leaving Old Gunny behind to give the salute. He stood there, square and ancient, a mandarin of marines, hash-marked and privileged—an awesome figure to any officer below the rank of colonel. The Secretary and the others passed. The unpopular Major brought up the rear. Just as he came by, Old Gunny’s voice broke into a clear precise growl that could be heard by the battalion: “At ease!”

We slumped over our rifles. The Major’s face colored like sunrise at sea. A silent spasm of mirth ran through the company. You could not hear it; but it could be felt. The Major hastened on, as though departing a place accursed.

When Old Gunny swung round in that deliberate about-face of his, his wrinkled visage was creased in a curve of satisfaction; like the Cheshire Cat, he was all grin.

The Secretary did not inspect us—not my company, anyway. I have always felt that he came down to New River in those despairing days only to be sure that there were actually men there, as though he might have suspected that the First Marine Division, like so many of our military then, might be composed only of paper.

The period at the boondocks ended that day. No sooner had the Secretary regained his launch than we were breaking camp. We were going back to the comparative luxury of the huts, the mess halls, the slop chutes. We were glad of it. The war was still far away from us. Even then, no one grasped the import of the Secretary’s visit.

Life was easier on the base. Our officers became kinder. The sixty-two-hour liberty, from four o’clock Friday afternoon until reveille Monday, made its appearance. Immediately the surrounding towns lost their attraction and we began going home.

The highway outside the compound was thronged with taxicabs. On Friday afternoons it was a sight to see them load up with marines and roar off, one after another, like big race cars rolling out of the pits.

Usually five of us would charter a taxicab for Washington, approximately three hundred miles distant. From there we caught the regular trains to New York. It was expensive—something like twenty dollars apiece for the driver to take us up and to wait to take us back Sunday night. Naturally, the money had to come from our parents. Twenty-one-dollar-a-month privates could not afford it, nor could twenty-six-dollar privates first class, a rank I had recently attained. Though costly, the taxicab was the fastest and surest way to travel. Train service was slow and spotty. If a man missed connections, he was sure to be A.W.O.L. at Monday morning reveille.

At times the taxicab would sway with the speed of our homeward dash up the coast, especially if one of us would take the wheel from a driver reluctant to obey our commands to “step on it.” Then we would fairly fly—ninety, ninety-five, whatever speed we could reach by stamping the gas pedal down to the floor.

We usually arrived at Union Station in Washington at about midnight, never having left New River much before six o’clock. The trains to New York always were crowded. Every car seemed equipped with a Texan or a hillbilly, replete with banjo and nasal voice, or had its quota of drunks draped over the arms of the seats or stretched out on the floor like rugs. We stepped over them on our way to the parlor car, where we would drink away the night and the miles, until dawn crept dirtily, mosquito-in-the-morning-like, over the Jersey meadows.

That was the way of it: impatience burning in our bellies and only the whiskey to wet it down.

Who could eat? My father took me, on one of those flying visits, to a famous English fish and fowl house in downtown New York. I toyed with my half of a roast pheasant, able to swallow only a mouthful, impervious to savor, while eagerly gulping beer after beer. How that unfinished pheasant haunted me two months later on Guadalcanal, when hunger rumbled in my belly like the sound of cannonading over water.

We were impatient. We were wound up. We could no more relax than we could think. In those days there was not an introspective person among us. We seldom spoke of the war, except as it might relate to ourselves, and never in an abstract way. The ethics of Hitler, the extermination of the Jews, the Yellow Peril—these were matters for the gentlemen of the editorial pages to discuss.

We lived for thrills—not the thrills of the battlefield, but of the speeding auto, the dimly lighted café, the drink racing the blood, the texture of a cheek, the sheen of a silken calf.

Nothing was permitted to last. All had to be fluid; we wanted not actuality, but possibility. We could not be still; always movement, everything changing. We were like shadows fleeing, ever fleeing; the disembodied phantoms of the motion picture screen; condemned men; souls in hell.

Soon the spate of sixty-two-hour liberties was ended. Mid-May of 1942 saw me home for the last time. My family would not set eyes on me again for nearly three years.

The Fifth Marine Regiment left before we did. It departed during the night. When we awoke, their regimental area was deserted, picked clean, as though not even a shade had dwelt there, let alone thirty-five hundred exuberant young men. Not so much as a shredded cigarette butt or an empty beer can remained.

Clean.

My own First Regiment followed the Fifth within weeks. We packed our sea bags with all our excess clothing and personal gear. Each bag was carefully stenciled with our company markings. Then all were carried off on trucks. I never saw mine again until I returned to the States. From that day forward—save for brief intervals in Australia—we lived out of our packs, the single combat pack about the size of a portable typewriter case.

We were under orders to carry only our weapons and a prescribed amount of clothing; specifically, no liquor. A day before we left I managed to get into Jacksonville, where I pawned my suitcase for enough money to buy two pints of whiskey.

The two flat bottles were in my pack, hard and warm against my back, when we clambered aboard the train. We finished them that night, when the porter had made our beds and all was dark in our Pullman car. Yes, we traveled by Pullman and we had a porter. We ate in a dining car, too, and the porter could be bribed to fetch us a turkey sandwich at night. It was a wonderful way to ride off to war, like the Russian nobleman in
War and Peace
who dashed off to the fray in a handsome carriage, watching Borodino from a hillock while his manservant brewed tea in a silver samovar.

We had a jovial porter. He loved to josh the Texan, newly arrived in our platoon. Once, he overheard the Texan making one of his tall Texas boasts.

“Hell,” the porter laughed, “dat Texas so dried up a rabbit doan dare cross without he carry a box lunch and canteen.”

A roar of laughter rose around the blushing Texan, and the porter retired grinning happily.

Our spirits were high and our hearts light as we rode across America. Our talk was full of the air-sea Battle of Midway, which had just been fought, and we were full of admiration for the marine and navy pilots who had stopped the Japanese.

Mostly we played poker or watched the countryside flowing past. To me, who had never been west of Pittsburgh, almost every waking moment was one of intense excitement. This was my country. I was seeing it for the first time and I drew it into me, here in its grandeur, again in the soft beauty of a mountain like the curve of a cheek, in the vastness of its plains or the bounty of the fields. I cannot recall it all and, now, I regret that I took no notes. There are only blurs and snatches … disappointment at crossing the Mississippi at night, only the impression of a great wetness and the gentle sway of the railroad barge beneath us … the beauty of the Ozarks, green woods swelling to a fragile blue sky, with the White River leaping straight and clean like a lance beneath them, and the one hill with the cross at the crest, stretching its gaunt arms like an entreaty … the Rockies (Where was the grandeur? Were we too close?) seeming like peaks of vanilla ice cream down which coursed great runnels of chocolate sauce, but no grandeur, only when we had reached the heights and could look back, gasping … ah, but here it is, now, here is the splendid West, here is the Colorado River thrusting through the Royal Gorge in one white, frothing instant … up, up, up in Nevada, the train climbing like a great dignified roller coaster, and then the sweeping ascent into California and the sun.

But we lost the sun in the San Francisco mists. We were at the waterfront and surrounded by the brown hills of Berkeley. The great curving bay, like a watery amphitheater, was before us. There were seals playing in the bay.