Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (37 page)

We were pinned down, but not by mortars alone. Machine gun fire came from an invincible outpost which the Japanese had blasted out of a coral promontory jutting into the bay. We had found an opening in it, and even then were filling it with all manner of small arms fire: grenades, sticks of dynamite hurled by men who had crept up to it, or billowing fire from the flame throwers who also had gained the hole—but the answering fire continued to rake our deadly picnic ground.

Examining our position, now, I saw that the beach lay before a line of scrub. Beyond this were the coveted airfield and the main enemy fortifications, which we were to call Bloody Nose Ridge. In the scrub I saw a yellow butterfly darting among the foliage and the waving pennant of a moving thing that turned out to be a tank—a Marine tank. There came a lull, and I could hear the shout that rose when the tank rumbled into position opposite the fortress that had pinned us down. It fired shell after shell down the hole, its machine gunner discharged a belt into it—but still that outpost’s guns worked against us.

Then began an odd procession. The hole suddenly was filled with the figure of a Japanese soldier. He jumped out of sight. Then another. Another. Each appearance set off a mad crackle of small arms fire. We might have been shooting at rabbits, for they appeared with the quick furtiveness of rodents, disappearing just as swiftly, as though their fortress were a warren—which is what it was, for the Japanese had possessed Peleliu for two decades and had blasted into the coral a network of mutually supporting caves. When a Jap jumped, he was making his exit to another position—perhaps even scurrying away beneath us.

One, only one, of these departing defenders died. He was fat and ponderous, with his blouse and trousers stuffed with rice like the poor chow hound consumed by the crocodiles on Guadalcanal, and because he moved so slowly the bullets struck him in a sheet and disintegrated him in a shower of flesh and rice.

It was hot. The white sand burned through our clothing. It was the enervating heat of the steam room. The sweat slid into one’s mouth to aggravate thirst. The water in our canteens was hot, and when I had drunk it all, I filled it with dirty rain water lying in shell craters. Peleliu has no water. The Japanese caught theirs in cisterns open to the sky, and ours had been floated in to us in gasoline drums, from which some fool supply officer had neglected to cleanse the residuary oil. Smelling and tasting of gasoline, it was undrinkable. A brazen sun beat upon us when, freed by the silence of the fortress, we rose and marched through the scrub to the airfield.

Just before the airstrip, on the edge of the scrub, lay an enormous shell crater. In this we took up positions. I met the Artist.

“Liberal’s dead,” he told me. “A mortar shell got him and the Soldier.”

“How about the Soldier? How’s he?”

“Tore his leg up pretty bad. But he’s okay.” The Artist laughed. “Better’n us, anyway—he’s out of it.”

“Yeah, too bad about Liberal, though. He was a nice guy.”

“He got it in the stomach. I saw him sitting up against a tree when I got off the beach. He was laughing. I asked him, and he said he was fine. But he died while he was sitting there.”

The Artist shook his head and walked away. Too bad about Liberal: all the fine education, all the good humor on that blond, blunt face, all the good will in his socialist schemes for humanity—all and everything gone, trickled away through some unknown fissure in this frail vessel of life, while the man leaned against the tree and smiled and smoked and contemplated a future made safe by an Allied victory and sure by this temporarily incapacitating wound. And so he perished, may he rest in peace.

We stayed in the crater. Our advance had halted. There had been many casualties. The defenders were resolute and resourceful. The marines began to chip foxholes in the airfield coral.

At noon I tried to eat, but I could not swallow even a mouthful of beans from the ration in my pack. I never ate on Peleliu.

Their tanks swooped suddenly upon us. They came tearing across that airfield, a dozen or so of them. It was startling. They came out of nowhere, and here were only riflemen and machine gunners to oppose them.

There was a violent outburst of gunfire. I poked my head above the crater. Through the lacy branchwork of the scrub trees I saw an enemy tank streaking along, with snipers in camouflage hanging onto the rear. It was but a moment’s glance, but at the same time, my eye caught sight of a marine from F Company, a veteran, running bowlegged to the rear, his face writhing, shouting, “Tanks! Tanks!”

An officer grabbed him and spun him around and kicked him and propelled him back to his post. In the crater, we prepared for defense, like a caravan attacked by Indians. The enemy tanks whizzed past, their little wheels whirling within their tracks. Machine guns clattered, bazookas whammed—our airplanes came screeching down from heaven, and there rose the detonation of their bombs and the roar of exploding tanks.

Once a torpedo plane flashed by, so low its belly might have scraped the coral. To my right, I saw a line of our tanks advancing, firing as they came, seeming to stop each time their guns stuttered. Then it was over.

The Jap tanks had been destroyed.

I got up and made for the airfield. About twenty yards away was a burning tank. Some of the enemy dead were inside. The snipers hung in their nets like dolls stuffed in a Christmas stocking. I turned to go, and as I did, nearly stepped on someone’s hand. “Excuse me,” I began to say, but then I saw that it was an unattached hand, or rather a detached one. It lay there alone—open, palm upwards, clean, capable, solitary. I could not tear my eyes from it. The hand is the artisan of the soul. It is the second member of the human trinity of head and hand and heart. A man has no faculty more human than his hand, none more beautiful nor expressive nor productive. To see this hand lying alone, as though contemptuously cast aside, no longer a part of a man, no longer his help, was to see war in all its wantonness; it was to see the especially brutal savagery of our own technique of rending, and it was to see men at their eternal worst, turning upon one another, tearing one another, clawing at their own innards with the maniacal fury of the pride-possessed.

The hand saddened me and I offered it a respectful inclination of the head while recovering my balance and making a careful circle around it.

I gained the edge of the airfield and saw the other tanks and the scattered piles of corpses. Among them prowled Souvenirs, busy with flashlight and pliers. His curled mustache bristled in anticipation. But this was Souvenirs’ last plundering excursion among the mouths of the dead. He was killed an hour later in an assault on an enemy position. So was Lieutenant Commando, whose epitaph Souvenirs himself had spoken. May they rest in peace.

Our casualties were extremely heavy. Before the day was done they would total five hundred in the First Regiment, something like twenty percent. This, on the first day.

We were advancing again. Our objective was Bloody Nose Ridge. This was the high ground visible from across the airfield. It gave the enemy perfect observation. Advancing across the flat table of crushed coral on which there was hardly a single depression, we were as easily sighted as clay ducks in a shooting gallery. But there was no other route and we had to take it. Grass-cutting machine gun fire swept the airfield. Mortar shells fell with the calm regularity of automation. It was as though they had determined at what rate they could kill the most of us and were satisfied with it, unhurried in its application. Marines fell. They crumpled, they staggered, they pitched forward, they sank to their knees, they fell backward. They kept advancing.

Now the day was dying amid hoarse cries for water or help for the wounded. An empty amtrack from another unit had strayed into our sector, and Lieutenant Racehorse, seeing it, bounded alongside, sprang aboard and ordered the driver to our front. Racehorse wanted to bring back the wounded.

But the driver was not eager to obey. He was from another outfit, he was tired, he saw no reason in risking his flesh for a strange officer. He said he could not obey. Racehorse told him he had better. The driver refused openly.

Racehorse drew his pistol and laid it against the driver’s head and said, “Get youah ass moving,” and the driver quickly shifted gears and drove frontward with a roar. Racehorse had won a Navy Cross for his bravery on Guadalcanal. He won another on Peleliu, but it was awarded posthumously. He perished attacking a pillbox, may he rest in peace.

Now it was growing dark but it was still the first day of battle. We had drawn back to consolidate, and I, with Filthy Fred, lay inside the big crater again. I had tried to eat another mouthful of beans but I could not. Tension made my stomach a vibrating intestinal harp. Finding the water in the crater exhausted, I scrambled out and headed toward the beach, hoping to find some there. Perhaps they had gotten rid of the gasoline-filthy stuff—which had already sickened many men—and had brought clean water ashore. I made my way cautiously through the brush. Runner came out of the brush.

“Chicken got it,” he said. “Damn fool kept pulling out the plasma needle the corpsman stuck in his arm. You know how Chicken was. Stubborn. I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head gloomily, “I don’t know. Maybe he would have died anyway. It was a nasty wound. But he didn’t help himself any, poor kid.” Runner peered at me through the dusk. I got the feeling that he had distinguished himself that day and was struggling with his modesty to tell me. “Boy, it was rough!” he burst out. “Ask Chuckler—he’ll tell you Guadalcanal was a pink tea compared to today. I mean for the fighting. And this one was supposed to be easy! You should’ve seen it when they threw those tanks at us! We knocked them out with machine guns and hand grenades!” he proclaimed triumphantly.

“How’s everybody else?”

“Okay. Chuck and Hoosier are all right. The Gentleman got hit, though—but he’s okay. Lucky bastard—he’s had it.” He peered at me again. “How about you? How’d you guys make out?” I told him about Liberal and the others, and he shook his head. “There won’t be too many left after this one. And did you notice who’s getting it?” I nodded. “All the veterans.”

I asked him if he had found any water, but he turned his canteen upside down in reply. We walked back together, sadly, each to himself alone, wondering if this were to be the end.

“Remember the guys who got it back on Guadalcanal?” Runner asked. “We used to think they were poor slobs—getting it so soon. Maybe they were the lucky ones. They didn’t have to go through all of this crap and wind up getting it anyway.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But they never got to Melbourne, either.”

“That’s true. But right now I’m thinking about anything but Melbourne. I’ve been doing plenty of praying. And it isn’t any of that no-atheists-in-a-foxhole crap, either.”

Runner’s dark oval face had never been so serious. I remembered that he had been baptized by Father Straight on Pavuvu. How different he was! How different everything was! Gone the camaraderie. Gone Guadalcanal. Gone the pagan naïveté of the first battle. How much easier to be a pagan again and to refuse to take the thing seriously.

We parted at the lip of the shell crater. I had never missed him and Chuckler and Hoosier more.

It was dark now but the noises of battle were resuming. Mortars were crashing again. From point to point on our lines rose the angry chatter of machine guns and rifles, sometimes sounding indignant, as though the marines resented these nocturnal intrusions in the manner of a farmer chasing poachers. Even the dark retreated, for we began to use flares. They were of the kind that had illuminated our second night of warfare, when they were dropped above the jungle roof on Guadalcanal: persistent, greenish, eerie.

Then our rockets roared overhead in a dreadful hissing barrage that must have been terrible to receive. Someone within the crater muttered that the Japs had carved a gap in our lines and that the rockets were being used to plug the hole with steel. I tried to snatch moments of sleep, lying against the crater rim with my helmet over my eyes. But it was impossible. The night passed like an interminable waking nightmare.

We met the heat of morning with dried mouths, and lips that were beginning to crack, and stomachs grumbling with unrequited hunger. The heat began to rise again refracted off the coral surface of Peleliu, baking the atmosphere, encompassing us in an oven.

“Let’s go,” said Lieutenant Deepchest. “Right,” I said, and told Filthy Fred and the Twin to get their gear on. We left the hole and made for an opening in the scrub to the left, through which the airfield was visible. It was early morning.

We passed two marines lying in their foxholes, asleep. I bent to wake them. “Hey,” I said, shaking one of them. “Wake up. We’re moving out.” He did not answer. He lay inert. I rolled him over. There was a bullet hole in his head. He was dead. So was his comrade.

Through the gap in the scrub I could see F Company attacking again. The Artist was standing there, watching them.

The mortars had stopped. The first F Company wave was advancing across the airstrip, running low with ranks scattered, breasting a withering machine gun fire that had begun to rake the runway. They were falling. It seemed unreal, it seemed a tableau, phantasmagorical, like a scene from a motion picture. It required an effort of mind to recall that these were flesh-and-blood marines, men whom I knew, whose lives were linked with mine. Still more was required in facing up to the fact that my turn was next. And here is the point in battle where one needs the rallying cry. Here where the banner must be unfurled or the song sung or the name of the cause flung at the enemy like a challenge. Here is mounted the charge, the thing as old as warfare itself, that either overwhelms the defense and wins the battle, or is broken and brings on defeat. How much less forbidding might have been that avenue of death that I was about to cross had there been some wholly irrational shout—like “Vive l’Empereur,” or “The Marine Corps Forever!”—rather than that educated voice which said in a sangfroid that was all at odds with the event, “Well, it’s our turn, now.”