Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (21 page)

“Look at them crazy mutts,” said Chuckler. “We walk a hundred yards, and they run a mile. They’ll be pooped out before we get halfway there.”

He was right, although he could have shortened the distance. We had not gone four miles, before I saw the first of them lying exhausted along the roadway. His head was sunk between his paws and his tongue lolled sideways in the dirt, the lower half covered with dust. He watched us sorrowfully as we passed. Poor fellow, he was bushed. For the next mile, the way was littered with canine casualties. But they would not desert us.

I stopped feeling sorry for the dogs when I felt the blisters building up on the soles of my feet. They had issued some of us New Zealand Army shoes before the hike, and I was among these unfavored sons of the quartermaster. They were of heavy and astonishingly stiff black leather, with unbending soles and clickety heels.

They were not for us, accustomed as we were to our Marine “boondockers” of buckskin and crepe rubber, a wonderful soft and comfortable shoe designed to make no noise. But this New Zealand instrument of torture! This shoe of steel! This boot of pain! It was working on the soles of my feet with the exquisite delicacy of a vise!

Pain became my companion for the next ten miles, until all of me appeared to be concentrated in this incredible tenderness being pressed at every step against the cruel steel of my shoes. But I made it to our new camp, and when I presented myself to the battalion doctor, and he had examined the great blisters that now hung like udders from the balls of both feet, he said to me, “You should have walked the last ten miles on your hands.” I agreed, and sighed with sensual pleasure as he cut them and let the water run out, bandaged them, and sent me hobbling back to my buddies.

I was not the only one who wore those brutal boots. There had been others, similarly afflicted. The shoes were not issued again, for they had come close to ruining the feet of a quarter of the battalion.

Our new encampment accommodated the entire First Regiment. It was set on the slope of one of the hills, which a land pitifully poor in altitudinous earth has called the Yuyang Mountains. But they were no more than hills; gentle, rolling rises, with here and there a narrow brook. Poor Australia. Here, too, nature has withheld her favors. There are no rivers as we know them: only brooks, and one of them flowed at the foot of the hill on which our tent camp was located.

Of course it was raining, and of course there was mud. The food was a slop of mutton and soggy vegetables. For fuel, there was a ration of split logs for the wood-burning stove in the center of each tent. For recreation there was an occasional weekend liberty, and a slop chute a mile down the road where they served the greenest, foulest beer I have ever drunk—brewed, I am sure (if the word is not concocted), in the PX officer’s own lister bag, and served to us in our canteen cups in a room fit to hold twenty people, but filled every night with at least two hundred.

The weeks went by in night marches and night problems and daily drill in the fields, no different from the days as a New River recruit; more boring, perhaps even galling, because it was expected of us—the celebrated victors of Guadalcanal.

Sometimes we would be issued a handful of rice, or the equivalent of what a Japanese soldier lives on, and be ordered to maneuver at night and make forced night marches of thirty miles or so, and sleep by day. I remember sleeping in a field, and being awakened by a huge gentle-eyed cow which nuzzled me in meek reproof for having chosen the tenderest pasture for my couch. From night problems we learned one lasting lesson: when a map and a compass come into contact with a second lieutenant, prepare yourself for confusion.

Throughout, there had been an insensible drawing in of discipline, like a rider slowly pulling back on the reins. But there came a sudden rearing halt when they reshuffled the companies.

Sergeant McCaustic had taken charge of H Company as First Sergeant. He was a slender man hardly above the minimum height requirement, possessed of filthy tongue, twisted by an openly sadistic temperament but saved from being a monster by an excellent sense of humor and a quick brain.

In Sergeant McCaustic I had found my personal hair shirt. We had come to an understanding within a day or two; that is, we had agreed that we were incompatible. When the time for reshuffling came, Sergeant McCaustic disposed of me with gleeful dispatch.

I expected it as I walked to the company tent with the others at the fateful call. It was raining, but Sergeant McCaustic ignored the raindrops plastering his thin locks against his narrow skull. He spoke with unconcealed glee as he stood there, surrounded by grinning, smirking platoon sergeants and buck sergeants, while the men half encompassed them in a crescent.

“All right, here it is. This company has been goofing off long enough—and it’s all because of a few eight balls and yardbirds. So today we’re getting rid of them.”

A few of the sergeants held their hands up to their mouths. They were enjoying it. It was obvious that the “eight-ball list” had not been drawn up by McCaustic alone.

“I pity the companies that get them, that’s all I can say,” McCaustic continued in his rapid way of talking. “But here we go. The following named men are to be shanghaied,”—there were snickers—“that is, transferred, to E Company. As soon as their name is called they will return to their squad area, gather up their gear and fall out in front of the company tent.”

Each time he called a name, McCaustic grinned. A sergeant or two would laugh. The mirth would pass from them out to the crescent. But the laughter in the crescent was never so hearty or unfeigned as was that in the sergeants’ circle. For each name meant the disgrace of some man, the departure of a buddy, the rending of the fabric of a friendship smelted in Parris Island and New River and tempered in the crucible of Guadalcanal. Each time a name was called, something was lost, something immeasurable, perhaps not even felt by most of the men in the crescent; but lost, nevertheless, like a clod of earth slipping silently off the river bank and into the current and on to the sea.

He called my name. There rose the laughter, and I walked to my tent in grief.

Good-by Chuckler, so long Hoosier and Runner, farewell to H Company. My spirit sank within me. I wept as I walked, and now the rain was merciful, for I could bow my head and pull my helmet low as though to keep it out of my face. I got to my tent and packed my things. But now grief was mingled with humiliation and indignation and I began to hate Sergeant McCaustic with an unforgiving, unforgetting, unrepentant hatred. My hands hungered for his neck. I yearned to be alone with him in his tent, I burned with the intensity of my hate, and if God Himself had bidden me then to love this man I cannot answer for my reply.

I packed and left the tent. It was still raining, as I returned to the company tent. The crowd had dispersed. The other “shanghais” stood in dejection in the rain, their heads, like mine, sunk lower than was needed to avoid the raindrops, their cringing bodies eloquent of disgrace. Within the company tent there was a buzz of voices and the cackle of McCaustic’s laughter.

We stood there until an E Company sergeant appeared. He cast us a lackluster glance and ducked into the tent, reappearing within a few minutes with our record books in his hands. He stuck these beneath his poncho and examined us with candor. He shrugged.

“Detail, tenn-shun!” he barked. We snapped to clumsily, encumbered by gear. “Right face.” We turned. “Forrr-ward, harch!”

We sloshed away.

The shanghais—or transfers—had gone back and forth between all companies in the battalion, perhaps because the commanders thought that reshuffling would end old family quarrels. In the confusion of it, I sought sanctuary. I decided to go over the hill, but, for once, I would try to get away with it.

My plan was thin and involved. It was based on three events of the morning: I had awakened with my upper arms covered with big red weals; the E Company gunnery sergeant had mistaken me for my friend Broadgrin, who had been shanghaied with me; and in a few hours E Company was to march to Rye for a week of firing weapons. Broadgrin was to remain behind on a wood-chopping detail, as I learned from the gunny. But no one had told him.

I got Broadgrin to agree to go out to Rye and to answer my name at reveille on two mornings. I told him that when Gunnery Sergeant Straight-Talk came around to put me on the wood detail, thinking me Broadgrin, I would tell him who I was and that Broadgrin had gone out to Rye. I would also tell him that I had been ordered to the hospital for treatment of hives. Broadgrin, after two days, was to tell the top sergeant at Rye who he was, pretending to be puzzled that his name had not been called at reveille. He was to say he didn’t know me.

My hope was that the top sergeant at Rye, once he found that I was absent, would hesitate to enter me as A.W.O.L. until he could determine the exact date of my departure. He would not like to admit to either the sergeant major or his company commander that he had been entering an absent man as present. He would wait, I reasoned, until he got back to camp and had the opportunity to pump me. Then, I would bluff him.

It was a slim chance, but I was desperate to be away from the unknown and unloved faces of my new companions. Broadgrin thought poorly of the plan.

“Hell!” he said, gloomily, “if it was me, I’d just take off. But, okay.”

When E Company marched off to the boondocks, I lay on my cot in the tent. I heard Gunnery Sergeant Straight-Talk bellowing in his whiskey bass for the men of the wood detail. I heard him call for Broadgrin twice, and flinched at the ensuing silence. Then Straight-Talk bawled out his instructions and commenced his hunt for Broadgrin. I peeped out and saw him clump along the duckwalk from tent to tent, sweeping back the flap, peering in, clumping on again. A few tents away, I drew back and lay on my cot.

A shaft of daylight preceded Straight-Talk into the tent. I closed my eyes.

“What the damn hell you doing in your sack?” I opened my eyes, feigned surprise, and jumped to my feet. I looked at him blankly. “Ain’t you Broadgrin?” I shook my head silently. “What’s yer name, then?”

“Lucky,” I said. “I came over from H Company.”

“I know, I know,” he mumbled, pulling out a soiled notebook. Peering at it, he fixed me with a bleary look. “You know Broadgrin?”

“Yes.”

“You seen him?”

“Yes—he went out in the field with the second platoon.”

He cursed in exasperation. His breath was fragrant with Aqua Velva, Sergeant Straight-Talk, known the battalion over for his fondness for after-shave lotion, must have drained the bottle that morning. Then he looked fiercely at me.

“What the hell are you doing here? Ain’t you supposed to be out in the field?”

“No,” I said, rolling up my sleeve. “See. I’ve got hives. Top Sergeant told me to go to the hospital.”

Straight-Talk looked at the red welts and recoiled. To an old salt, there is nothing more horrifying than skin disease, any form of bodily uncleanliness; for these are men who have spent a lifetime in communal living and have seen the spread of epidemics. To them, everything is contagious. He left me, without further questioning.

I put on my liberty clothes, stuffed a few clean khaki shirts and field scarfs into a little traveling bag, and lay down again. At noon, while the wood detail was at chow, I retreated down the slope and out the rear of the camp where there were no guards, caught a tram to the Dandenong Station, and from there a train to Melbourne. I spent four restful days in Melbourne, at the home of a friend, doing the crossword puzzle every morning at Dave’s, drinking only a little, reading, even, and returned to camp on the fifth day, a Friday.

It was payday. A desk had been set up in the company street, behind which sat the company commander, who would pay us once we had signed the payroll books spread out before him.

“All right,” bellowed Gunnery Sergeant Straight-Talk, lapsing into the pay call formula, “line up in alphabetical order, irregardless of rank—regulars first, reserves last. Sign the book first-name-middle-initial-and-junior-if-you-are-one.” I had a premonition.

Gunnery Sergeant Straight-Talk called my name and surveyed the line with the fierce stare of the huntsman.

I stepped forward and signed the payroll.

The company commander looked at me steadily, with calm, appraising eyes. He paid me.

I sighed with relief, and turned—but an angry hand caught my shoulder and spun me.

“You Lucky?”

It was Straight-Talk.

“Yes.”

“Get the hell up to the company office.”

His breath was as redolent of Aqua Velva as ever, and I reflected, going up to the company office with sinking heart, that today being payday, the battalion PX would undoubtedly be out of shaving lotion by nightfall. I reflected, too, that I had never dealt with the E Company top sergeant before.

His anger had no conviction in it as I stood there, looking down at him, sitting at his desk. He had not the look of a passionate man, not at all the manner of a hard-boiled top sergeant. His rugged face, with its large nose and larger ears, failed to conceal the fact that he was probably not quite thirty, a tender age for a top sergeant in the Marine Corps.

“You’d better stay here,” he said. “You’re going to see the man.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got a hell of a nerve asking that! For going A.W.O.L., that’s why, and you know it—absent without leave.” He looked at me sternly. “Where were you?”

I remained silent, my heart pounding and my head hoping that Broadgrin had been able to answer one reveille—just one, that’s all—and throw them into confusion.

“Where were you?” he repeated, not so forcefully.

“Out in the field,” I said.

He snorted contemptuously. “Don’t give me that. We know you weren’t there. We know what you told the gunny, too. You went over the hill, didn’t you?”

Silence.

His exasperation melted into cajolery, and he showed himself more adept at wheedling than at wrath. “Look, I know what’s eating you, I know you got a dirty deal from McCaustic. So you got to thinking about it and flipped your lid and went over the hill for a few days. Okay, I don’t blame you—maybe. Why don’t you be smart? Why don’t you admit it, and let me talk to the captain? He’ll go easy on you. C’mon—don’t go doing something stupid, now, and louse yourself up.”