Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (30 page)

I had emptied my thirty-round clip and had but my twenty-round clip left. I had no idea if there were more of them, so I abandoned my position across the trail, falling back around the curve to the next man, who received me with parted mouth and starting eyes.

“Stay here,” I said, and hastened back to Lieutenant Spearmint. He was not unnerved, but the sound of firing to his rear had not left him undisturbed. His face asked the question.

“A Jap patrol,” I panted. “Four of ‘em. I think I got them all. But there may be more.”

I had no need to wait, for Spearmint was on his feet motioning for another man to join us and for everyone else to stay where they were, on the alert. “C’mon,” he said. The three of us returned to the brink of the hill. “Any more of them?” I asked the man I had left behind, and he shook his head in the negative. I could hear groaning. I turned to the lieutenant. “Want me to give a look?” He nodded.

I lay on my belly and began to inch out on the slope. The big man lay where he had fallen. He was dead. There were two others lying further down the hill and just at that moment, just as I appeared, the furthest of them began to crawl away.

Explosions roared behind my ear. Lieutenant Spearmint’s man had cut loose with a Tommy gun and had done so almost inside my ear. It jarred me. Thinking perhaps more enemy were coming, I scrambled back to the high ground.

“He almost got you,” said the man who had fired.

“Who almost got me?”

“That Jap—the one I just let have it. He was sighting in on you.”

The man was excited. He had a handlebar mustache and it seemed to quiver as he spoke. I looked at the lieutenant. His face reflected concern, but it was an anxiety for the safety of a patrol seemingly cut off by the enemy. I thought: this guy’s crazy, the only live Jap out there is the wounded one. But I thanked him anyway.

Groaning rose from the hillside again, and the sound of movement.

The other man and I leaned out and finished off the wounded Jap. I fired short bursts, afraid of using up my last clip.

“Listen,” said Lieutenant Spearmint, when the deed had been done. “You two stay here. I’m going to strike off to the right, toward the ocean. No sense going back the way we came—there may be Japs behind us. As soon as you see the tail man, pull out.”

An intense silence had fallen, broken by what seemed to us the sound of movement down at the foot of the hill, where it ended in thick growth.

But our patrol made sound enough as it broke through the underbrush toward the sea, racketing like mastodons, so eager were they to be away from this mystifying plateau. When we saw the last man, we followed suit, but not before my comrade had swept the hillside with a long burst from his submachine gun.

Once we had passed the underbrush, we understood the reason for the noise. A field of smooth, wet, slippery rocks lay underfoot, covering a steep descent to the sea.

We slipped and slithered and bumped and rolled and clattered all that distance of a few hundred yards to the water, expecting that any moment would bring the enemy fire down upon us. It was a most awkward flanking movement, but it got us out of the box we imagined ourselves to be in.

We returned along the pebbly beach, sometimes walking through the ocean, sometimes cautiously climbing over steep rocks that thrust darkly into that flat gray sea. When Spearmint thought we had gone far enough, and when the ground to the right no longer rose so high above us, we left the beach and regained the trail.

After staking out a point and a rear guard, Lieutenant Spearmint called a rest. He approached me, taking off his helmet to mop the sweat from his brow.

“You’d better go back to the perimeter and let ‘em know what the firing was about.”

I turned. Spearmint suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you.” He jerked his head in a backward motion and grinned and said, “Good work.”

I felt better about that rear guard.

It was not far, now, to the lines—and I ran through the jungle at a dogtrot, eager to report my news and to bask in the admiration of my comrades. Suddenly the sentinel of one of our cossack posts confronted me over his rifle, and I grinned at him, flourishing four fingers aloft.

“Nice going,” he said, “who got ‘em, Lucky?”

“Me, I did,” I flung back at him, still running—and relished the surprised “Hey!” that broke from his lips.

Ardor had given way to truth by the time I reached the remaining men of the outpost, and I held up only three fingers this time, exchanging grins with them, and continuing on to the C.P.

The Commander immediately sent out a fresh patrol, with instructions to pass through Lieutenant Spearmint’s men and to investigate the track as far to the south as seemed wise.

But they found nothing. There were only the bodies of three Japanese soldiers, the signs of the escape of a wounded fourth, possibly a fifth—and that was all. Even the native’s footprint had been obliterated. Nor did there ever come to us any explanation of how that enemy patrol came to be behind us. The swirling mists of the rain forest had enshrouded the incident in mystery.

In the dark of that night the Japanese “came calling.”

Out of the jungle dark they rushed, out of the blackness of a night made wilder still by the wailing of a wind that might have been a hurricane.

I was not in it; in fact, no more than twenty or thirty marines were in it. It came against G Company, which occupied the center and highest ground of our perimeter. This eminence rose from around our C.P., except at the western or sea anchor, of course, so that the headquarters lay in the center of a horseshoe rising around us.

The attack came at two in the morning, just as the wind rose to a pitch of fury—when the night was full of its shrieking, and the tearing, crashing sounds of the jungle reeling beneath the lash of its eternal tormentor—when the surf, too, roared in pain behind us.

And all the while it rained.

On such a night it was impossible to know more than what the sounds might tell us. Because the noise was predominantly our own because not even a spent bullet fell in our declivity, we knew that we were not losing. But we knew no more.

I sat in our C.P. tent, fully armed, awaiting instructions from either the Commander or Major Major-Share. I had with me a thermal grenade, with which I was to destroy all of our papers, should the Japanese break through. Some others from the section had been impressed as ammunition carriers, but I remained in the tent, crouching wonderingly in the dark, spared the ordeal of carrying mortar shells to the “stovepipe” crews.

I could hear the carriers cursing as they plodded past the C.P. tent, the shamrock-shaped triple shell casings on their shoulders, and sometimes I could see them in the momentary, flickering light cast by exploding shells or lightning flashes—I cannot now remember which. Some sobbed with bitter, molar-grinding exasperation when they would have slid down the muddy slope for the second or third time, to be struck cruel blows by their heavy burdens or else forced to grope blindly for them in the dark and mud before resuming the ascent.

But the stovepipes needed ammunition. From their sounds it was plain that they were widening and making denser their rain of shells. They had raised a fearful racket and had almost obliterated the wild wail of the storm. Our machine gun fire had ceased, except for a sporadic burst. Once in a while there was the pop of a single rifle or the spreading crackle of many rifles firing simultaneously. There were no enemy sounds. The battle was dying. The mortars were its death rattle. We had won.

By the first light of day we learned what had happened.

Four Japanese soldiers and one officer had been taken alive, and had been brought down to the C.P., their arms bound behind them, knives at their throats, and from them we learned that the Third Company, 53rd Regiment of the Japanese 17th Division had been dispatched from the main body at Cape Gloucester to Tauali, to defend against our landing.

Their passage had been through near impenetrable jungle and they had not arrived on the scene until two days after our own coming. Nevertheless, they attacked us. They attacked us, some one hundred of them against our force of some twelve hundred, and, but for the prisoners, we had annihilated them.

Were they brave or fanatical? What had they hoped to gain? Had their commander really believed that a company of Japanese soldiers could conquer a battalion of American marines, experienced, confident, better armed, emplaced on higher ground? Why had he not turned around and marched his men home again? Was it because no Japanese soldier can report failure, cannot “lose face”?

I cannot answer. I can only wonder about this fierce mysterious enemy—so cruel and yet so courageous—a foe who could make me, in his utmost futility, fanaticism, if you will, call upon the best of myself to defend against him.

Our dead were six men, among them the stubby, intrepid Obie, whom I had last seen in Melbourne so drunk he could barely stand, whose gun pit had been overrun when the Japs overwhelmed a section of the lines in their first silent rush up the hillside—Obie, who had helped to drive them out in the counterattack, and who had been alternately firing and hurling imprecations at them until one of their bullets took him squarely in the forehead. May he rest in peace.

The Japanese dead lay in heaps on the hillside, and they filled the trench where Obie’s gun had been located. The souvenir-hunters were prowling among them, carefully ripping insignia off tunics, slipping rings off fingers or pistols off belts. There was Souvenirs himself, stepping gingerly from corpse to corpse, armed with his pliers and a dentist’s flashlight that he had had the forethought to purchase in Melbourne.

I stood among the heaps of dead. They lay crumpled, useless, defunct. The vital force was fled. A bullet or a mortar fragment had torn a hole in these frail vessels and the substance had leaked out. The mystery of the universe had once inhabited these lolling lumps, had given each an identity, a way of walking, perhaps a special habit of address or a way with words or a knack of putting color on canvas. They had been so different, then. Now they were nothing, heaps of nothing. Can a bullet or a mortar fragment do this? Does this force, this mystery, I mean this soul—does this spill out on the ground along with the blood? No. It is somewhere, I know it. For this red-and-yellow lump I look down upon this instant was once a man, and the thing that energized him, the Word that gave “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name,” the Word from a higher Word—this cannot have been obliterated by a quarter-inch of heated metal. The mystery of the universe has departed him, and it is no good to say that the riddle is solved, the mystery is over—because it has changed residences. The thing that shaped the flare of that nostril, that broadened that arm now bleeding, that wrought so fine that limply lying hand—that thing exists still, and has still the power to flare that nostril, to bend that arm, to clench that fist exactly as it did before.

Because it is gone you cannot say it will not return; even though you may say it has never yet returned—you cannot say that it will not. It is blasphemy to say a bit of metal has destroyed life, just as it is presumptuous to say that because life has disappeared it has been destroyed. I stood among the heaps of the dead and I knew—no, I felt that death is only a sound we make to signify the Thing we do not know.

I went back down the hill.

En route, I stopped off to see the Digger. He and his natives had a spot to themselves on high ground just behind E Company. He was glad to see me and he was quite plainly shaken. He made tea.

“Where in ‘ell did yer Yanks learn to shoot like that?” he said. I held my tongue. “Blimey—that was a racket you made last night. I don’t mind saying I was a bit nervy.” He finished his tea in quick gulps, and eyed me half-sheepishly, half-grudgingly. “Yer marines are bleddy good. Bleddy near as good as the A.I.F.”

It was the accolade.

The storm had subsided by morning. It had swamped two of our amphibian tanks and an L.C.V. But no one ventured down to the little black beach, for a new peril had arisen. At daybreak, a mysterious enemy gun had tried to range in on us from the hills. It could not be located. But all of its shells fell in the water.

I led a patrol every day now. Still unable to shoot an azimuth, able to read a map only with difficulty—yet I continued to lead patrols, listening for that good old reliable ocean.

Most of my patrolling was to the north, toward what was called Dorf Point—where the beaches were lined with the wreckage of those ungainly barges which the enemy had relied on for moving supplies, until that nocturnal traffic had been shot to pieces by our torpedo boats operating out of New Guinea. On one of these patrols, commanded by the tall, good-natured Lieutenant Easy from E Company, we came to a cluster of native huts. The interior had that musky odor of fish, which we had learned to associate with the Japanese. I thrust my hand into a tangle of bedding. It was still warm. The touch thrilled me.

“It’s still warm,” I said to Lieutenant Easy, looking up at him. “They must have just pulled out.”

He nodded and gave the command to press on in pursuit.

But it was getting late, and we could not go much further from our lines, lest we risk night falling between ourselves and a safe arrival home. So we turned our faces to the south.

I fell back with the lieutenant, and another man took the point.

Almost at that instant he raised his hand.

The patrol’s vanishing act was ragged, and before we had cleared the track there appeared at the end of it—materializing from the underbrush, itself, so it seemed—a young and powerful native. He stood in rigid salute, British-style, grinning broadly at us, as though he was both glad to see us and amused at our clumsy attempts to elude detection.

Easy and I regarded him and each other in amazement. The lieutenant motioned him forward. But the native remained at attention. He seemed to have a reason for not moving. He seemed to be guarding someone or something.

“Let me go up to him, Lieutenant,” I asked. “Maybe he speaks pidgin.”