Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (35 page)

That night a corpsman awakened me each hour, the next night he did the same, and the following night. But the fourth night there was no call, and the enuresis claimed me again. So the awakenings were resumed, then, without warning, stopped. Active still. It was obvious what they were doing. They were only trying to establish the legitimacy of my complaint, for this affliction is a common dodge of fakers and malingerers anxious to gain a medical discharge.

Because it was a general suspicion, I did not resent it, and soon I even forgot about it. Life was much too pleasant in the P-38 Ward, and there were too many interesting things happening. Perhaps I should have said odd things.

Among the oddest was Captain Midnight, and it may have been from him that the ward gained its fancy name. During the day he was an avid reader of comic books, especially the strips about the adventurer Captain Midnight.

At night, he
was
Captain Midnight.

He would rise from his cot, stretch out his arms as though they were wings, hunch up his shoulders, and race on tiptoe about the ward, lifting and dipping his “wings” and canting his body like an airplane, all the while emitting a droning buzz.

“Cap’n Midnight callin’ the airfield,” he would call. “Cap’n Midnight callin’ the airfield.”

Immediately, the ward took up the cry.

“Hey, Cap’n, watch out there! There’s a Zero on your tail!”

“Ack, ack ahead. Careful of the flak, Cap’n!”

“Nice going, Cap—you shot that Zero clear to hell!”

The Kid was confined behind the bars which kept the violent patients separated from us. I saw him there, to my surprise. He looked at me sheepishly and asked me for some candy, which I gave him. I could not refrain from gazing at his hands, for it was the Kid who had strangled the Jap. They were the short, square hands of the painter—powerful. How much, I mused, had that deed to do with his insanity? How much was retribution, how much remorse? Or was there a difference?

I asked a corpsman about the Kid.

“He blew his stack,” he said simply. The corpsman had been on Pavuvu and knew the terrain.

“You know that road around the island? And the little airplane that they park on the road? Well, this kid went down to the road one day and climbed into the plane. They grabbed him when he started the motor. Somebody asked him where he thought he was going. ‘Home,’ he said, ‘I’m gettin’ the hell out of here.’ So they brought him here instead.”

They had brought him to Banika instead. Not as long a trip as the Kid’s insanely conceived flight home, but it would get him there eventually. The Kid’s war was over. He would go home, and, probably, regain his sanity when he got there. The unbearable pressure would be off. How much pressure will it take for me, I wondered; how much longer will I hold out?

Insanity had been my foremost fear since the moment I had vaulted over the side of the Higgins Boat on Guadalcanal and seen those spiky fronds swinging overhead. To be killed—even to be taken prisoner by a cruel and vindictive foe—seemed preferable to madness. And I had always thought madness possible, not so much from within, from the pressure of events upon the mind, but from without, from a bullet, a piece of shrapnel, concussion. I had thought it physical rather than psychical.

Here, in the mental ward, I saw that I was wrong. I saw what a man’s own mind, what despair, could do to him.

I am thinking of the pitiful beings they call manic depressives. These are the sons of despair. I saw them, I felt the dejection of their spirit, and I wondered sadly what could have happened to a man to turn him into a ghost walking the ward with silent lips and blank eyes.

If Banika was an island paradise, it had, for enlisted men, its forbidden fruit: the nurses.

“It isn’t personal,” explained the corpsman who had told me about the Kid. “It’s just that they’re women, and women out here are just no good. They cause too much trouble.” He reflected a moment. “You know, we didn’t have nurses when we first got to Banika. There was just the doctors and ourselves.” He sighed wistfully. “It was wonderful. The doctors shared their liquor rations with us and everything. It was like one big happy family. We ate good, too, as good as the doctors. You never heard of a doctor pulling his rank. We got along wonderfully together.” His face darkened. “Then the nurses came, and everything changed overnight. We weren’t good enough anymore. No more liquor, no more top chow, no more friendliness. The nurses talked only to doctors and the doctors talked only to God. And the trouble is, our work hasn’t gotten one bit easier. If anything, it’s harder, what with the tension.” His face got gloomier. “And look what the nurses did to the whole base. Look at the fancy stockade they had to build for them and get a whole MP battalion to stand guard over them. Look at how the men eat their heart out every time they see an officer riding around in a jeep with a nurse beside him. And how do you think they feel when they see the officer has a pistol on his hip? What the hell does that mean, eh? It means he’s supposed to defend this pure woman’s honor against an attack by us crummy enlisted men. We’re the only ones that’d do it, y’know. The lieutenant’s glands have been to Officers’ Candidate School.” His voice was bitter, now. “It’s crazy. It’s unfair. Women have no place out here. Not just a few of ‘em, anyway. If they can’t send a woman for every man, they’d better keep ‘em all the hell home!”

The hospital had a good library, and reading became an obsession with me. I read two or three books a day, scorning the nightly movies, often reading in the head after lights out.

But at last I did go to the movies, when even my seemingly insatiable appetite for reading had been sated, and when there had begun to stir within me a vague sense of shame. The softness of my life in the hospital had begun to mortify me, and occasionally I would surprise myself comparing it with contempt to the Spartan regimen of my comrades on Pavuvu. My resentment of the “Stateside Lottery” had vanished, and I had forgotten even the reason for my flight to Banika.

Bored now with the books, and with everything around me, I decided to go to the movies. I accompanied a detachment of the men from the P-38 Ward, who were escorted there by corpsmen. There were the usual searching looks and rippling titter when we nuts took our seats in the amphitheater of coconut logs curving around the hillside. Then the island commander entered, and everyone stood at attention. When he sat down, the movie began.

There was an interruption.

Over a public address system, a voice announced: “Allied troops have just invaded Northern France. The Second Front has been opened.”

Cheers and exultant shouts rose into the soft night, to be followed by a buzz of excitement, but then the film began again and silence was restored.

I arose and left the amphitheater, my heart throbbing in excitement. It was difficult to comprehend, this excitement. In it was mixed a thrill of pride, but predominating was the heartbeat of anxiety, for suddenly it had been borne in upon me that great events were happening, that the war was now rushing downhill to victory—and here was I, clad in pallid pajamas and robe, lounging around a hospital. Yearning came upon me in a rush and I wept, hurrying along the dark road back to the hospital. I wanted to rejoin my comrades.

The doctors sent me back to them soon after.

I was summoned to Doctor Gentle’s office. Seated with him at his desk was the hospital commander. I noticed Rutherford’s pistol on the desk, and realized that I was not long for Banika.

“There’s not much that we can do for this trouble of yours,” the hospital commander told me. “There’s no curing it out here. What you need is a change of climate and a less nerve-racking assignment.”

“You mean shipment back to the States, sir?” I asked.

He smiled wanly. “Ordinarily, yes. Unfortunately, you marines can’t go home unless you’re carried home. So we are sending you back to duty with the suggestion that your commanding officer have the sentry wake you during the night.”

I laughed and he laughed and Doctor Gentle laughed. There was no bitterness or reproach, for they knew as well as I how impossible that suggestion was. Pity the poor sentry who should have the temerity to blunder about the lines solicitous for his comrade’s full bladder. There would be no trigger fingers so solicitous for him. But I suppose the doctors had to say something.

“Don’t forget your gun,” said Doctor Gentle. “Sure you haven’t changed your mind about selling it?”

“Sorry, sir. No, sir. Thanks again for your help.”

He nodded, and I left. I picked up my toilet gear and departed the P-38 Ward and caught the next boat back to Pavuvu.

2

Pavuvu throbbed with renewed spirit. I felt it the moment I came ashore, and saw the hundreds of men bathing in the bay. They were carefree again, laughing, shouting, frolicking in the bright water like porpoises, their strong bodies glistening in the sun, the bronze of their flesh accentuated by the white midriff. I could discern it in the tidiness of the tents lying in rows among the palms, the neatness of the company streets bordered by coconuts stuck into the earth, and of the busy vehicular commerce sweeping around the single road that girdled the island. There were screen-enclosed heads, there were showers, there were basketball courts blocked out on the dried clay, there was an open-air movie, there was even a laundry battalion! But best of all was this rebirth of spirit—the old sardonic sureness of the raggedy-assed.

Such change is as sudden and inexplicable as a shift in the wind. The silent men take to cursing, and then they take to joking, and before the first sound of laughter has died in their throats, the change has been worked.

They begin to be careful of their clothes, they shave more frequently, someone finds a broom and sweeps out the tent, another takes a packing box and makes a locker of it and begins a fashion that has the whole division roaming the island for boxes or spare lumber, and, finally, a basketball or a volleyball arrives from division and teams form, by platoon, by company, or by battalion; challenges are laid down and accepted, rivalries grow, the old designations are hurled back and forth like howitzer shells, and the great thing is abroad again, the fighting spirit is unfurling like a banner on the winds of pride, and all that remains is to draw up the plan of battle.

So I met the old spirit when I came back, and I found a thing as good or better—a new friend.

The Scholar was among a shipload of replacements who had just arrived. They were being marched to their new units as my boat pulled up on the beach. As soon as they came to the company tents, they took off their shiny Stateside khaki to exchange it for the sun-bleached uniforms of the veteran, the “salty” clothing prized for its aura of experience. An insecure replacement would feel more confident clothed in the faded ensigns of “the old breed,” while the veterans, having no psychological problem of “belonging” to distort their sense of value, were quick to sense a sucker. Within a few days, the change was so complete that the veteran who could formerly be recognized by his lusterless garb was now identified by its shiny newness.

I sat in our tent, watching in amusement, when my view became blocked by a bulging sea bag being pushed through the entrance. Behind it was a sweating replacement.

“This the Intelligence Section tent?” he asked, half timidly. “Sure, c’mon in,” I replied, eyeing that sea bag and unwrapping a bar of chocolate I had brought from Banika. “Put it down anywhere you want. Here,” I said, breaking the bar in two, “have some candy.” He took his half and shoved it hungrily into his mouth. “Thanks. We haven’t eaten since we got off the ship this morning.”

“Whatcha got in that bag, huh? Got any shoes?” I needed shoes badly. But in dismay my eyes fell upon his feet.

“What the hell size shoe d’ya wear?”

“Five, five and a half. Pretty small, eh?” He snickered and I lost interest in his sea bag, and somehow he did not look like a man who would trade new khaki for old. He surveyed our tent and saw my bookcase made of a packing case. “Hey—where did you get the books?”

“My father sends them to me.”

“That’s great,” he said with quick enthusiasm. “I’ve got a load of books in the bottom of my bag. How would it be if I whipped them out and stuck them in with yours?”

“Fine,” I said, making room for his books on my shelf, and his friendship in my heart. It was not only the books—I recall only Romain Rolland’s
Jean Christophe
and something of Calderón, in Spanish—but it was the steel that I felt in him and perhaps most of all for the expression of stubbornness on that half scornful face. So we became friends and remain so still.

After the Scholar came four more replacements for our section, who were quartered in our tent. Two of them were hardly more than high-school boys, each about eighteen—the one quarrelsome, the other tractable; the first a midwesterner, the second a southerner; the quarreler aggressive and intelligent and often offensive, the mild lad shy and slow and likeable. Though dissimilar, they stuck together and became the Twins.

White-Man was the third replacement. From the hills of Virginia, White-Man was a bigot from the tip of his blunt-toed feet to the top of his high and narrow and brindle-haired head. “Lucky,” he said to me once, “know whut weah gonna do after the war? Weah gonna clean up them niggahs. And when weah finished with the niggahs—weah gonna staht on the Catholics!” The tent roared with laughter, for only a humorless bigot would resent White-Man’s amiable animus. White-Man was also the first drafted marine of my experience. The Corps had begun to accept draftees from the general pool—not many—but enough to weaken our own proud position as an elite. This was the only time White-Man rubbed us the wrong way, when he spoke scathingly of volunteers—“You damn fools asked for it. Ah didn’t. They had to come and get me.” Only our silence could express our contempt.