Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (33 page)

“But, sir,” I said, with plaintive respect. “I thought that Intelligence personnel were exempt from galley duty. That’s one of the benefits you talked about when you asked me to join the section.”

He avoided my eyes, but his voice was filled with the determination of revenge.

“Not anymore. From now on, we have to provide a man. And you’re it for the month of March.”

“Gee, sir, that’s too bad.”

“What’s too bad?” he repeated angrily, looking at me fiercely.

“I can’t go. I have to go to the hospital.”

He was so plainly frustrated and consumed with rage that it was embarrassing. I had come to gloat, but I could only hope that he would terminate the interview and let me free.

“What the hell d’ya mean, go to the hospital? Who the hell says so? I’m your commanding officer!”

“The doctor down at sick bay says I have a rupture,” I said, withholding the part about evacuation to New Guinea. No sense risking things. I would tell the battalion sergeant major in the morning before I left. “It may have to be operated on,” I added, just to fortify my position.

Now it was Lieutenant Big-Picture who did the staring. He gazed at me with unconcealed hatred, but with far too much sullenness for a person accustomed to the upper hand.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take care of you when you come back. You may think you’ve beaten me this time, but you’re still going into the galley.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “May I go now?”

The big transport plane rose with a roar from the airstrip at Cape Gloucester, and I settled with relief into my bucket seat while the plane leveled out to fly low over the Dampier Strait and then gained altitude over New Guinea, where the jungle had the appearance of row upon tightly packed row of Brussels sprouts.

Our airplane came down with a rush at Cape Sudest. There was a khaki-colored ambulance waiting for us. We were in the hands of the army now. We were being taken to one of their station hospitals.

The ward was in a Quonset building. A nurse—the first woman I had seen in nearly six months—gave me pajamas and assigned me to a cot. Two or three days passed like an idyll, reading, eating three fine meals a day, going to movies at night—and then came my examination. The doctors decided that they did not want to undertake such an operation in the tropics, nor did they consider the affliction serious enough to send me farther back to a general hospital in Australia or the States, even if they had had the authority to do so.

I was dejected. Back to Cape Gloucester and Big-Picture’s revenge, and good-by to the hospital library. But with nightfall the future changed again. I came down with malaria.

Never again may I have recourse to such a malignant savior! I was delivered from mess duty and the persecuting revenge of Big-Picture, but the fires that racked me and made of my body an oven were such as to make me wish for a year in the galley and a dozen Big-Pictures to command me. But of course I wished for no such thing. I wished only for release from this fiery vise, and if death were the only release, then I wished for death.

To lie on my back was torture, to lie on my stomach a torment. I tried to lie on my side, but even here my bones ached as though they were being cracked in the grip of giant pliers. I could not eat, I could not drink—not even water. They fed me through the veins, intravenously, for I do not know how long—ten days, two weeks. All the time I lay baking—not burning or flaming, understand, but baking, as though I were in an oven—feeling the will to live shrivel within me, yearning only for a tiny trickle of sweat to burst from my desiccated flesh, hearing people alive and talking around me, the touch of the nurse, the momentary cool of the alcohol being rubbed upon my back like a blissful reminder of the world I had left, but comprehending nothing, lying there, only a rag of aching bones slowly shrinking in the glowing oven of malaria.

Then the fever broke. Sweat poured from my pores like a balm. It bathed my body in a blessed cool, and I could laugh, sing, shout, if only I had the strength. It seemed ungrateful to lie there as the liberating fluid flowed from my body, not to make some sign of thanks. But I was too weak to move, like an atheist who has no God to thank for present favors; and because I had so far forgotten my own religion, I felt no impulse of mental thanksgiving.

The sweat soaked my bedclothing, and the nurse, happy to see my ordeal ended, moved me with smiles to another cot. I soaked this one, too—and then came the chills. I kept on shivering and they piled the blankets higher over me. It was well over one hundred degrees outside, but they covered me with blankets as though it were only a quarter of that. And I still shook. But this I did not mind. I could even smile—like the Runner grinning with quivering lips, “It feels so good, it feels so good.”

It was over, but several more days were required before I could sit up or take food. The smell of food nauseated me; tea and a slice of toast were all that I could bear. Finally, I ate with the rest of the patients, and I can remember the extreme effort needed to insert the first forkful of food into my mouth.

But in a week, I was leaving the hospital. Back to an evacuation point on the beach, and thence to Cape Gloucester via a nocturnal crossing of the Dampier Strait in a converted fishing schooner. A storm broke upon our heads. Black water came over the sides, flooding the deck where we slept, and we retreated to a cabin where we spent the night, half of these “ambulatory patients” seasick by the dizzy rise and fall of our puny craft.

Fate chided me gently upon my return to Cape Gloucester. Most of the battalion was away on an extended patrol—Lieutenant Big-Picture among them—and the battalion sergeant major, seeing that I was still weak, kindly gave me light duty in the Senior N.C.O.’s Mess. So my flight to New Guinea was almost futile; the threat of rupture was still with me; I had gained a delay only by being felled by that filthy bout of malaria, and here I was, on mess duty, to prove how presumptuous can be the private who believes he can accomplish anything by himself.

But there was nothing to this assignment, merely a matter of keeping the tent clean, brushing the crumbs from the rough wooden table and setting out the places for the handful of men who had not gone on patrol. They helped themselves, eating in a sort of buffet from the pewter containers of food sent over from the main galley.

In a few days, the battalion returned, with only a few wounded, and I was overjoyed to hear that Big-Picture had been transferred and that our new section commander was Liberal, the young second lieutenant who had distinguished himself by killing a Jap on his first patrol.

Two or three more weeks passed in lolling about our tent area. We began to play bridge. We played obsessively, pausing only for meals or sleep so as to gain sustenance or refreshment for playing more bridge. Some of us even began to think in bridge terms—of finessing or reneging or crossruffs—and the breaking point of our mania was reached one night when the Gambler, exasperated by the play of a poor partner, rose up wrathfully to tear up the only deck of cards we possessed and to overturn the candles.

But no one minded, for we were leaving the next day—as the Gambler well knew when he made his disgust so flamboyant.

An Army unit was arriving as we were departing. There were hoots and mock falsettos from our raggedy ranks when we perceived the first equipment to be deposited on the beach—stoves and suitcases—and then we were marching aboard the L.S.T.’s, the now-familiar Trojan seahorses, and leaving that accursed island forever.

We were going: As they say in the song, we don’t know where we’re going—but we’re going.

1

All the way from New Britain there had been foolish, hopeful talk of “going home.” All the way we had indulged in silly speculation on the impossibility of sending our diseased, decimated divison into action again without a rest in Australia, or New Zealand, if not back in the States. All the way we had pointed to our emaciated frames and rotting legs and festering armpits, and then, arguing out of jaundiced lips and prejudiced hearts, had pronounced ourselves unfit. All the way there had been the erection of castles in air upon the cobweb of the government’s new troop rotation plan and the single fact of our having served the required two years overseas.

All the way high hearts and foolish hopes—and now, Pavuvu.

“What is it?” asked Eloquent, when first we heard the island’s name from Lieutenant Liberal. “What in the name of heaven is Pavuvu? A tropical disease, like the mumu?”

“It’s Pavuvu with a capital P,” said Lieutenant Liberal reprovingly.

“So?”

“It’s a place. It’s where we’re going. Pavuvu Island in the Russells. Part of the Solomons.”

“Sounds poetic,” said Playboy dreamily.

“Oh, I’ll bet it is,” said Eloquent, with heavy sarcasm. “The wind sighing gently in the palm fronds, white beaches kissing the blue sea, undulating island beauties coming down to meet us with songs and leis—”

“Leis? Who’s gettin’ leis?”

“… Songs and leis,” Eloquent continued, loftily ignoring the interruption. “Oh, it’ll be peachy dandy. When do we get to this wretched place, Lieutenant?”

“Tomorrow,” said Liberal.

We marched ashore in the rain and inched up a mud-slicked slope into a coconut grove, and there sat down to contemplate our misery. This was our new home. Pavuvu was to be our rest area. Here we were to make ready for our next campaign.

Instead of a machete we were given shovels and buckets. There was no underbrush to be cleared, but there was ubiquitous mud to be conquered by quarrying uncounted tons of coral from an open cut in a hill opposite us.

We shared Pavuvu with multitudes of rats, and these, too, we set to conquering with our busy American ways. But soon our supplies of poison ran out and the piles of little carcasses became more obnoxious in their state of stinking corruption than the live rats had been in pelting flight across our tent tops.

When dusk set a limit to our assault upon mud or rat, a soft rustling in the palm fronds suggested a more exotic foe, for then we would see the darkly beautiful bat stretching its silent wings upon the winds of evening.

In the end, it was only the mud we conquered. We left the rats alone, and never bothered the bats, only wondering, sometimes, where the rats came from; and, if it were the palm fronds, as many believed, how did they get along with their laconic neighbors, the bats.

The food was bad, too, and our tents were rotten and punctured with holes. There was no water except what was caught in our helmets during the night. We bathed by dashing naked into the rain, soaping ourselves madly in a race against the probability of the rain’s ceasing and being left streaked with sticky soap, and we washed our clothes by boiling them in cans of rain water. Our jungle rot had become so bad, so persistent, that there was an appointed time each afternoon for the men to take off shoes and socks and to lie on their sacks with corrosive feet thrust out into the sun.

But we had borne all this before and we could bear it again, nor could mere bad food or leaky tents press upon the ardor of my comrades. It was the death of hope that bore us down.

There had always been hope; hope of relief, hope of the sun, hope of victory, hope of survival. But when they came and told us that none of us were going home on rotation, we strangled hope and turned into wooden soldiers. The future looked to innumerable enemy-held islands and innumerable assaults, and we had already noticed how the ranks of the New River originals were dwindling with every action. There were even a few suicides to suggest how despairing some could find the situation.

We lay on our sacks and listened to the rain or the rats and contemplated some drab substance the color of gray.

Then the thing changed.

They came and said half of the originals could go home.

There was joy, and then, once the method of selection for the Stateside bound became known, there was anger. There would be a drawing, a “Stateside Lottery,” in which men’s names would be pulled from a hat, but only the names of those who had never been in trouble.

I was among those whose name did not go into the hat, and so were Runner and Hoosier and Chicken and Souvenirs and a host of others. It seemed that the originals of the Second Battalion, First Marines, had been neatly divided into good guys and bad guys.

Among us there raged a profane anger. I know now how a convict must feel upon being turned down at job after job because of his past. That was what disqualified us—our past. It made no difference that we had been punished—yes, punished again and again, for it had become customary to solve all problems of selection this way—by marking brig-rats for dirty duty and excluding them from special benefits. Nor did it matter that we had good war records.

It must have been even harder for a third group, a few men, like the Artist, whose skills were so rare they could not be spared whether they had been good or bad. Without the Artist, we had no map-making section. I suspect that if the Artist had had a violation against him, they would have barred him under that pretext, just as I suspect that someone high in command was a believer in Smedley Butler’s axiom about brig-rats.