Helmet For My Pillow [Illustrated Edition]

by Robert Leckie

The man who has had it roughest is the man to be most admired. Conversely, he who has had it the easiest is the least praiseworthy.

“Lucky,” he said with a grim smile, seeming to delight in mispronouncing my name. “Lucky—if you don’t stay in step they’ll be two of us in the hospital—so’s they can get mah foot out of youah ass!”

There was this verse, which I have seen countless times, before and since, the direct and unpolished cry of a marine’s sardonic heart: And when he gets to Heaven To St. Peter he will tell: One more Marine reporting, sir— I’ve served my time in Hell.

We devoured the food. What a banquet! Here was the lowly hot dog, but it was spiced with risk, flavored with prohibition and washed down with the nectar of a watering mouth.

“Look at them, Lucky,” said Hoosier. “Don’t kid yerself they’re out just to say good-by. They ain’t only wavin’, they’re waitin’—they’re waitin’ fer the first boatload of doggies coming into the harbor.” “So?” shrugged Chuckler. “You’d do the same if you was them. You’re just jealous.” “Hell, yes, Chuckler,” Hoosier said, replying with eagerness. “Ah’m just beefin’ because Ah’m on the wrong boat.”

To the north, one patrol discovered the body of an E Company scout who had been reported missing. The area bore marks of a struggle, as though he had fought hand to hand. His body bore dozens of bayonet wounds. They had used him for bayonet practice. In his mouth they had stuffed flesh they had cut from his arm. His buddies said he had had a tattoo there—the Marine emblem, the fouled anchor and the globe. The Japs cut it off and stuffed it in his mouth.

Even those armed with rifles expected to shoot from the hip—because all jungle encounters are sudden, and because the density of the rain forest affords a visibility of about five yards. Who needs to aim at such range, even if there were time?

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.

Captain Dreadnought might be stupid, but no one could say that he was not gallant. I felt disgusted and resigned myself to an unprofitable death. I looked at the men from the Fifth, who were regarding us with wonder, and envied them for having retained diplomatic relations with the state of sanity.

Of my battalion—a force of some fifteen hundred men—there remained but twenty-eight effectives when the command came for the last assault on that honeycomb of caves and pillboxes which the Japanese had carved into Bloody Nose Ridge—

Now I know. For myself, a memory and the strength of ordeal sustained; for my son, a priceless heritage; for my country, sacrifice.

world. It is to sacrifice that men go to war. They do not go to kill, they go to be killed, to risk their flesh, to insert their precious persons in the path of destruction.