Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (40 page)

Robert Leckie, finally in his dress blues, 1945

Robert Leckie, office of the Associated Press, Buffalo, New York, 1947

Robert Leckie receiving the Marine Corps
Combat Correspondents Association award
for
Helmet for My Pillow,
1958

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROBERT LECKIE was the author of more than thirty works of military history as well as
Marines
, a collection of short stories, and
Lord, What a Family!
, a memoir. Raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, he started writing professionally at age sixteen, covering sports for
The Bergen Evening Record
of Hackensack. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on the day following the attack on Pearl Harbor, going on to serve as a machine gunner and as an intelligence scout and particpating in all First Marine Divison campaigns except Okinawa. Leckie was awarded five battle stars, the Naval Commendation Medal with Combat V, and the Purple Heart.
Helmet for My Pillow
(Random House, 1957) was his first book; it received the Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association award upon publication.

2010 Bantam Books Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1957 by Robert Hugh Leckie
“The Battle of the Tenaru” copyright © 2001 by Robert Hugh Leckie

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1957.

Photographs courtesy of the Leckie family

eISBN: 978-0-553-90748-3

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