Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (34 page)

In retrospect, it is easy to forgive my commanders this. But then, it was hard; it was too much like being unfairly condemned to death. The injustice of it overwhelmed me, and I burned with a resentment that was dangerous to carry around. When the departure of the lucky ones was succeeded by a period of the most rigid discipline, I resolved to get away from Pavuvu to a place of solace and rest where I might recover my equilibrium.

What better place than the hospital across the bay on Banika?

The episode with Lieutenant Big-Picture had shown me how a flight to the hospital—like a retreat to the wilderness—could solve my problems. Why not try it again? Because of the rain, falling daily even though the rainy season was supposed to have ended, my enuresis was more noticeable than before. Perhaps, too, the agitation of the moment aggravated it. I know that the men in my tent had been urging me to report it to sick bay. I did.

The doctor, who knew of my case, ordered me to Banika. I was to leave in the morning.

I walked back from sick bay with a sense of grim satisfaction, and strode into my tent to find Rutherford sitting on my cot. Suddenly the palms and the tropic night had vanished and I was standing in front of the bank on Station Square at home. Many a Saturday night, Rutherford and I and the others had stood there, rehashing the high school football game. He had joined the Marines the same month I did, and had been assigned to the Fifth Regiment. I had not seen him since New River.

He grinned cheerfully, and I said, “You no-good—how come you didn’t go home on rotation?”

Rutherford chuckled. “I wasn’t a good boy, I guess.”

“Same here,” I said, and then, as he drew a huge Japanese pistol from beneath his coat—“What the hell’ve you got there?”

He looked around furtively and thrust it beneath the blanket. “Keep it for me, will you?” he said. “I clipped it from the company commander this morning, and he’s raising hell about it. They’re gonna have a shakedown tomorrow.” His round sallow face darkened. “It’s mine, anyway. That lousy captain pulled rank and took it from me. I got it from a Jap major at Talasea. He killed himself with it.”

“Give it to me,” I said. “I’m going to the hospital on Banika tomorrow and I’ll take it with me.”

His eyes glowed. “Good! They can shake down the whole damn island tomorrow—and they’ll never find it.”

Rutherford left, immensely relieved.

In the morning, I hung Rutherford’s machine pistol underneath my armpit, by means of a length of white cord, put my coat over it, picked up my bag of toilet gear and went down to the division hospital. From there a landing boat took me to Banika.

Banika was a fleshpot, Banika was the big town, Banika was Broadway. Banika had women, it had buildings of steel and wood, it had roads, it had thousands of sailors as sleek as capons, it had movie amphitheaters, it had electric lights, it had canteens overflowing with candy and comforts. And Banika had beer.

Walking with the others from the beach to the Navy Hospital I felt like a hick on his first visit to New York. Jeeps and trucks and staff cars swept over the island’s roads, raising a busy cloud of dust. Cranes croaked and cranked on the beach, loading and unloading the boats. MP’s patrolled a stockade of pointed sticks behind which dwelt the women—the Navy nurses and Red Cross workers. Everyone was well fed and unworried, the seat of every pair of pants was well filled and happy. Banika was a bovine buttocks.

We lean ones who wore our discontent on our faces and carried our nervous impatience in our hands must have been a disturbing presence in that purring island incubator. Yet, as I walked along, I was filled with the uneasy suspicion that it would be the image of Banika and not Pavuvu that would be presented to America as the Pacific War. I thought of a U.S.O. singer whom I had known before the war, who had entertained us at New River. She had asked to see me, and when I was fetched, we walked about our barren base. “What do you think of it?” I asked. And she—perhaps thinking of other bases she had visited, shiny with brass and gay with military balls—she had looked down her nose at our poor tents and huts, and said, “Not very glamorous.” Pavuvu was like New River, like every place we had been: not very glamorous. But, ah Banika! There was glamor for you. This was war in the Pacific. This was what America would hear.

A Navy corpsman led me into a ward and off into a side room—a little cell.

“Take off your clothes,” he said, coldly, throwing pajamas and robe at me. Clearly, the duty was distasteful to him. I started to comply.

“Give me your belt and your razor blades,” he said.

It was an odd command, but I obeyed. I was still undressing, and my eyes traveled to the window. It was barred. Belt? Blades? Bars? Where was I? The corpsman intercepted my gaze and said, “This is just the overflow ward. There isn’t any room right now in the ward you’re supposed to go to.”

I nodded, but I did not believe him. I examined him. His face was still white with the pallor of civilization. He could not have been long out of the States. He was young, too. Above all, he had the sneering look of the sailor who finds it painful to associate with foot sloggers. I remembered Rutherford’s pistol under my arm. I had not yet taken off my coat, and I delayed it till last, waiting until the corpsman had gathered up my belt and shaving gear and had started to leave the cell for the “overflow ward.” I drew the pistol, shucked the coat, and then, standing naked, pointed the pistol at him, and said, “Hey.”

He turned, exasperated, saw the huge pistol pointed at him, and stood transfixed. I remained silent and motionless. It was pleasant to see the look of superiority fade from his face, to see the tongue flick out nervously, like a lizard’s. If I was in the Nut Ward (as I was), if they thought me crazy (as they thought all marines), I would play the part to the hilt, and enjoy it. A nude nut brandishing a blunderbuss.

At last I said, “What shall I do with this?”

He was too weak to reply, so I went on, “Here, you’d better take it and store it in the hospital property for me, or something.” He took it gingerly and left. Poor, superior fool, he had not the sense to determine if it was loaded or not—which it wasn’t.

In faded pajamas and red robe I went out in the ward. The first man I encountered stopped me and said, “I’m going to a party tonight and I’ve got to get my brain polished up. Would you mind holding it until I get a cloth?”

I knew where I was, now. Overflow ward!

“Sure,” I said, humoring him. “Hand it over.”

He placed his hands to his head, cupped them, affected to deposit something in my hands, scurried off, returned with a handkerchief, retrieved his “brains,” mumbled, “Thanks a lot,” and betook himself outdoors, to a little caged enclosure where he fluttered his handkerchief busily while murmuring nonsense to himself.

I watched him for a few moments, hoping that he would raise his head and burst into laughter. But he did not. He was really insane.

At the end of the brightly sunlit ward were tables on which the inmates could read, write or play games. Two men sat there now, playing cards. I came up and sat down.

After a time, I jerked my head in the direction of the brain-polisher and asked, “What the hell’s the matter with him?”

“He’s nuts,” they said in scornful unison, neither looking up from his cards.

Silence.

I spoke again, timidly, “What ward is this?”

“P-38 Ward,” they said, irritably.

I gathered that “P-38 Ward” was the lingo for mental ward, perhaps because many of its patients were certain that they could fly. The card players had stopped their game and were examining me attentively, as though waiting for me to expostulate, “But what am I doing here?” Rather than gratify them, I arose and wandered down to the other end of the room.

There, in a glass-enclosed cubicle, sat the Navy nurse. Hygienic, unfriendly—she would never lift a finger to nurse a man. The corps-men would do the nursing. The nurse would keep the records. So far from being angels of mercy in the Pacific, Navy nurses were recording angels, they were accountants. They surveyed us from the eminence of their rank, for they were not nurses and we patients—they were lieutenants and we enlisted men, dirty-mouthed, half-crazy marines, to boot. We wished the Navy nurses to hell and gone, to anywhere but in the hospitals, where they got in the corpsmen’s way, and infuriated the patients.

At the moment, a chubby patient was pestering her to look at a choice piece of pornography smuggled in to him by some well-meaning nitwit. I was to learn later that sex was this man’s problem, as it was for many of them. She pretended to admire it and got rid of him. Then she saw me, and her frosty look made me determined to play my part again.

“Nurse,” I said, looking at her fixedly, “I’d like to have my razor blades back.”

“Why?” she countered, concerned.

“I want to settle a grudge.”

She gazed at me in astonishment and I returned her stare. She wrote the request down as though she were recording a mortal sin in the Book of Judgment, and I walked away satisfied. To hell with them all! If they thought I was a nut, all right, I’ll be a nut—at least until I see the psychiatrist.

I saw him the next day.

He regarded me good-humoredly as I came into his office and took the seat opposite him.

“What’s this about razor blades?”

“What? Oh, I was just kidding, sir.”

“I know you were,” he said, looking at me reprovingly. “But don’t do it again, eh? You got the nurse all upset.”

“Yes, sir.” It was difficult not to vent my vexation at having been placed in the P-38 Ward, rather than in some place which seemed more likely to cure my weak kidneys, as I called it. But I stayed silent, watching Doctor Gentle as he bent, grunting, to give me the “hammer test.” This was to strike a patient’s crossed leg just below the knee to measure the speed of his reflexes.

He was intent upon it, and I could study him. Square. Powerful. Squareness in body, hands and head, with power throughout. He was bald, a man of about fifty. Gentleness of manner and speech seemed to approach the effeminate, an impression fortified by a certain oversupple softness of face and body. But it was a bad impression to act upon, although it might have been deliberately cultivated by Doctor Gentle for just that purpose—to beguile the patient off his guard in order to learn more about his character.

He began the routine psychiatric examination, and from it I deduced that he was a Freudian. The majority of his questions, and all of his preliminary queries, were based upon sex. He sought abnormality. Then he asked of my childhood. Finally, after fifteen minutes, he concluded his interview, and since I seemed to be regarding him with the intentness of the accused awaiting the judge’s verdict, he said:

“Just take it easy. You’re going to be here for a month at least and we’re probably going to see a lot of each other. So relax. As far as I can see, you seem to be all right. A bit hot-tempered, but—”

“What do you mean, hot-tempered!” I blazed out at him.

He smiled, and I might have felt foolish had I not seen the humor in it—that I was like the man running about in a frenzy, exclaiming, “Who’s excited, who’s excited?” After a lifetime spent in denial of my hot temper, it was a relief to acknowledge it.

He began to question me about my experiences in the war, and, as I told them to him, he shook his head from side to side, as though to indicate that my whole division, not only myself, ought to be psychoanalyzed. Then we talked of books, for he was well read, and philosophy.

Suddenly he broke it off and said, “What did you say you were?”

“A scout,” I said, proudly. “I used to be a machine gunner.”

“But that’s no place for a man of your caliber.”

Now I was shocked! The old shibboleth, intelligence! Had not our government been culpable enough in pampering the high-IQ draftees as though they were too intelligent to fight for their country? Could not Doctor Gentle see that I was proud to be a scout, and before that a machine gunner? Intelligence, intelligence, intelligence. Keep it up, America, keep telling your youth that mud and danger are fit only for intellectual pigs. Keep on saying that only the stupid are fit to sacrifice, that America must be defended by the lowbrow and enjoyed by the high-brow. Keep vaunting head over heart, and soon the head will arrive at the complete folly of any kind of fight and meekly surrender the treasure to the first bandit with enough heart to demand it.

But Doctor Gentle seemed not to perceive the pride behind my words, and so I stammered and made some weak joke about it and hoped he would change the subject.

“Oh, by the way,” he said. “I have that gun of yours. How would you like to sell it to me? I’d like to send it home as a souvenir.”

“Sorry, sir, but I can’t. It’s not mine.”

“Too bad,” he said, rising, “but if you should change your mind, let me know. The folks back in Atlanta’d get a kick out of it.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “There isn’t very much to be done about that enuresis of yours. A corpsman will wake you at intervals during the night. You aren’t restricted to the ward, like the other patients. You can go to the movies and eat at the regular hospital mess. Oh, and remember—no more of that razor blades kind of thing.”