Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (32 page)

Small, quick actions were common. Here a patrol would destroy a half-dozen Japanese, sometimes losing one or two of our own in killed or wounded, and here another would surprise a larger group of the demoralized tan men, or perhaps blunder into one of their ambushes. But running through this irregular rhythm of patrol action was the regular measure of attrition. The enemy, to use the Hoosier’s phrase, was being whittled.

Days made uneasy with the anxiety of patrolling were capped by nights filled with the apprehension of infiltration by the foe. Not to say that the Japanese was a bloodthirsty human, alive only to the chances of killing. Rather the very disorganization of his forces made him more to be feared at night, for he would prowl within our lines, hungry for food—and, when detected, fight for his life.

The thought of a softly infiltrating enemy lay uppermost in our minds during the night watches, especially during a man’s careful progress from jungle hammock to sentry post.

On the night of a heavy storm, it was on my mind when I had finished my sentry trick and climbed into my hammock, lying there half awake, half asleep, my knife held loosely in my hand—when suddenly I heard a scream not six feet away.

I turned to see—by the light of a lightning flash—turned to see two dark figures flailing against each other, before both fled and darkness reclaimed the field.

The C.P. was in a turmoil. Voices rose, inquiringly, querulously, and I could distinguish among them the cry of one of them from my section: “Japs in the C.P.!” Then another familiar voice: “A Jap just tried to get me!” I let myself down from my hammock, switching my knife to my left hand, groping for my machete lying against a tree, shouting: “Over here! Over here! I saw ‘em!” In the quiet that followed, there rose the bellow of the major, commanding, “Don’t shoot! Get ‘em with your bayonets!” And then, in the ensuing silence, there was the distinct, the unmistakable, the lucid clicking of a hammer as the major cocked his pistol.

Ah, yes: get ‘em with your bayonets, lads: don’t shoot, lads, you may hit the major.

Click, click
.

I went back to bed, and listened to the storm of wind and the storm of commands and countercommands raging around me, until one or the other or both subsided, or else I fell asleep.

In the morning, it became clear that the two men of my section who claimed to have encountered the Jap prowler had really run into each other. They had not been fond of each other before this incident, but thereafter they made a cult of their dislike.

At last we were withdrawn from this miserable morass, and we took up new positions. We slopped through a soup of mud that had once been a dirty road, and on our way we were joined by Eloquent, who had fetched Chicken and me from the brig, who now had come to Cape Gloucester from the battalion rear echelon on Goodenough.

He told us the first sergeant back there had killed himself. He grew despondent one night, Eloquent said, and shoved the muzzle of a Tommy gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger: a most messy end of himself. None of us could comprehend it.

We were now in reserve. We no longer had a front to defend. But we had a new enemy. The trees.

Our position lay in a blasted wood so grim, so stark, so scarred that it might have been the forest of the moon. The Japanese had defended here and a fierce artillery barrage had been laid in on them. Our shells ravaged that forest of giant trees. They lay uprooted, or stood broken and splintered, limbs dangling like broken arms, or decapitated, with their foliage tops lolling over like a poorly cut head, or they listed, weakened by cannon fire and watersoaked with rain.

Through the day and the night this grotesque forest resounded to the crash of falling trees.

And no less than twenty-five men were killed by them, crushed to death. An equal number were injured. And once, when we began to dynamite them, we killed another man, to prove that a bad cure can be as deadly as the cause. A great boulder fell on him as he sat beside his hammock.

We all mourned him, for he was the buffoon of the battalion. He was the nearest thing to a fat man I ever saw in the Marine Corps. He was not really fat, Loudmouth, but heavy-jowled and of pinkish complexion that always seems to bespeak obesity. Without age, without gifts, without authority—a fat man has no chance. Poor Loudmouth had none, even though he was intelligent and sensitive. So they were always at him, and when he sought to retaliate by assuming a superior air, the gibes and taunts turned his foolish vanity against him.

He liked to strut and to pretend that he was above the humdrum or the hazards of our daily life. He was fond of saying things that would enforce that pose: “Me, I’m gonna be in B Company. I’m gonna be here when you leave and be here when you don’t come back”—“Next war, boys, there’s gonna be two persons missing. Me and the MP they send after me.”

So a boulder crushed the life and the pitiful boasting out of him. We felt sad, because Loudmouth had always seemed so much a waif, so forlorn. The others might die beneath the falling trees—the “widow-makers” as we called them—and no one would feel melancholy. But with Loudmouth, it did not seem fair. Loudmouth never seemed really to be involved in the war, he seemed more spectator than participant. And that was how he died, as though a foul ball had risen from behind home plate and brained him. He sat beside his hammock and a boulder blotted him out.

The last patrol was a prolonged one of several days. We were taken by landing boat down the east coast to a place called Old Natamo, and there deposited.

The place had once been inhabited by the Japs, but all of their emplacements were now empty. Those of the enemy who were discovered were in the last extremities of ordeal. Some were overtaken crawling on their hands and knees, some so badly decomposed it was as though their feet were rotting off, some weighing perhaps no more than eighty pounds, some without weapons, all without food—and all possessed of that indomitable fighting spirit that was the Japanese Imperial Army’s greatest asset, the one single factor that made a poorly equipped soldier a first-rate foe.

They all resisted, and they were all destroyed, bayoneted, for the most part, for it was folly to fire a rifle on patrol in unfriendly, unknown territory. One of these stragglers was strangled in cold blood by The Kid, a youngster who, although already a veteran of Guadalcanal, was hardly acquainted with a razor. He was to go mad two months later.

So we mopped up.

At night a fierce rainstorm blew, and we huddled beneath the lean-tos we had built along the shore.

In the morning, it was still raining, but the sea had deposited a gift on our doorstep. The rain had caused a flash flood to sweep the forest of the “widow-makers,” where our comrades reposed, and all of their food had been carried away to the beach, where it was swallowed by the sea. But the sea had coughed it up again on our strip of sand.

We fell upon this donation of Neptune with whoops of delight. Even though the food was of common fare—cans of dried eggs, dried milk, sugar, coffee, dehydrated vegetables, syrup—it appeared to us the makings of a banquet, for we could use it as we wished and in whatever quantities we wished. Had we known that this was the lost food of our buddies, I suspect it would have tasted even better. We ate pancakes (fried in our mess gear) and drank coffee all that day, for it was storming intermittently and we did not go patrolling.

Next day, on a short patrol inland, I found a Japanese chest and carried it back with the help of Playboy. Solidly built, it was just the thing to hold my clothes and my books, which my father had now begun to send me from the States. I had perhaps a dozen books, now, among them a dictionary and an almanac—two works which sufficed to establish me as the Sage of the Second Battalion, First Marines. Many disputes were referred to me and my books of wisdom, with a confidence as unwarranted as the conceit it produced. In combat, my books were kept in company property, but presently, since we had come off the lines, I had reclaimed them—and the chest would make a magnificent locker library.

The landing boats came for us the next day and we piled aboard, Playboy and I carrying the Japanese chest between us. On our return, we found the battalion busily picking up and bidding good-by to that blasted unhappy forest, and moving to a new area where we were provided pyramidal tents and began to live with some degree of comfort.

Our comfort invited visitors. One morning the Artist reached for his poncho under his cot and found a bushmaster coiled beneath it. He seized his carbine and shot the snake through its horribly beautiful head. It measured about ten feet.

A week after our arrival, Lieutenant Big-Picture came to our tent and commandeered my chest. He took it in my absence. I would like to say stole, but I have already said commandeer, which is the word for official stealing. Grinding my teeth, I went down to see Big-Picture in the section tent.

It would be an unequal contest, it would be no contest. I would reason, he would command—and I would lose my chest, from which he had removed my books and clothes, casting them contemptuously on my cot—but I would still like Big-Picture to see my face.

“The Artist says you have my chest,” I began.

He looked at me coldly and said nothing. I ground my teeth and smiled.

“Are you just borrowing it, sir?”

“I’m taking it. We need it in headquarters to store the gear in.” I followed his eyes and saw the chest. In one corner of it reposed our meager map-making gear; in the other, Lieutenant Big-Picture’s clothing. An insane rage swelled within me. Ivy-League stealing cigars, Major Major-Share taking all the bacon out of the battalion ration, the officers kidnapping Kolo, and here, Big-Picture stealing my chest. He spoke again. “You know an enlisted man can’t have a thing like that in his tent.” What could I say? This thing within me was bursting to be free and to do violence, my insides were like a cavern in which a chained demon bellowed and clamored—and I dared not speak for fear the sound of my own voice would set it free. I could only look at Big-Picture and let my face tell him that I wanted to kill him. And then I left him.

Next day, the map-making gear was back on the ground and the chest was in Big-Picture’s tent, filled with his clothing and personal articles. The chest became a fixation with me and the insult and injustice ballooned far beyond proportion. I talked stupidly about killing Big-Picture, being careful to say the most dire things in the presence of those closest to him, men who would be sure to repeat my words to him.

It was all talk, big, empty, windy talk—but it had the desired effect. In a few days Big-Picture sent an emissary to my tent. He chose well, for his spokesman was the Gambler, perhaps the best-liked man in the battalion. A tough man across the poker table, the Gambler was a soft-touch in his position as Battalion Quartermaster.

“What’s eatin’ ya, kid? What’s all this crazy talk about killin’ Big-Picture?” He laughed as though it were all a joke, and I laughed, too.

“Who told you?”

“Who told me? Don’t make me laugh. You’ve practically got it written in neon on your back: ‘I’m gonna get Big-Picture.’” His tone changed and he spoke earnestly. “C’mon, now, kid, you oughtn’t to be talking like that. Somebody’s liable to take you seriously. And you’ve got poor Big-Picture going nuts.”

“I hope they do take me seriously—and I hope that lousy little shavetail blows his stack.”

“What’ve you got against him?”

“He stole my foot locker.”

Gambler grinned. “How d’ya mean—stole? Where’d you get it?”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “But the Japs can come and take it back any time they want. I said he stole it, and that’s what he did. He said he was taking it for the section property, but he’s using it to keep his clothes in.”

Though warned that Big-Picture might take reprisal, I remained stubborn. The Gambler’s visit only made me apprehensive. I was relieved when, a few minutes later, Eloquent and the Playboy came into the tent and suggested a swim at the waterfall.

The waterfall lay upstream of the narrow river that ran behind our tents. It fell about fifteen feet into a deep and foaming pool. About a third of the way down it, and behind it, was a hollow space in the rock. You could climb down to it, and then, standing on a smooth stone platform, dive into the waterfall.

The moment you entered that downpour of water, it took hold of you, forcing you to fall like a stone into the cold pool, down, down, down, into the blackness and the thrill of fear when the lungs begin to strain and the legs start kicking, braking your descent, thrusting frantically, now, for the surface and the good sweet air and the roar of the falls and the sound of voices.

But this day, on my first dive, I felt a sudden pain in my lower regions. Perhaps it was a minor rupture, or the sign of an incipient one. On Guadalcanal, I had felt similar pains while burying the heavy crates of ammunition. But there had been no hope of treatment there, and I had ignored it. Here it was again, though, and it worried me.

It was difficult to walk. There was a heavy sensation. Playboy helped me back to the tent. Still, I did not want to turn in to the hospital, hoping that the affliction would disappear. But when I got there, I changed my mind.

“Big-Picture wants to see you,” said the Artist. “He’s going to put you into the galley. What happened to you?”

I said, “I think I got myself a big fat rupture.”

“What’s so funny about that?”

“It means I won’t be going to the galley, and I can’t wait to tell Big-Picture.”

I hobbled down to sick bay. The doctor examined me and began writing on a blue ticket.

“What’s that, sir?” I asked.

“Evacuation order. They can’t do anything for you here. I’m evacuating you to New Guinea. Report here in the morning with your toilet gear.”

What a pretty blue ticket! What a lovely way to run a war! I eyed it like a prisoner receiving his pardon, and set off for Big-Picture’s tent.

“Did you want to see me, sir?” I could not have been more respectful.

His face was bleak, his tone resentful. “Yes. Get your gear and report to the mess sergeant. You’re going into the galley.”