Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific with Maps

by Robert Leckie

Often I quivered to draw my bayonet and skewer No-Behind where his behind was not.

I know now why men light fires.

here was booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell.

His eyes had already taken on that aspect peculiar to Guadalcanal, that constant stare of pupils that seemed darker, larger, rounder, more absolute.

I had to force my face into a mask of mourning, deliberately adorn my heart with black, as it were, for I was shocked to gaze inward and see no sorrow there.

Only the trappings of war change. Only these distinguish the Marine souvenir hunter, bending over the fallen Jap, from Hector denuding slain Patroclus of the borrowed armor of Achilles.

Sometimes on black nights, in a spasm of fear, it might be imagined that the big croc was after us, like the crocodile with the clock inside of him who pursues Captain Hook in Peter Pan.

But being the first in our experience, we took it for total triumph; like those who take the present for the best of all worlds, having no reference to the past nor regard for the future.

Sometimes there is a final shattering: a man crouching in a pit beneath the bombardment of a battleship might put a pistol to his head and deliver himself.

And when he gets to Heaven To St. Peter he will tell: One more Marine reporting, sir— I’ve served my time in Hell.

Favorite quote from the book

Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being expended puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this.

There is almost no argument against fatalism.

Perdition must be like this; the earth opening, the final betrayal, the nothingness under the feet and the eternal wailing plunge.

Each time a name was called, something was lost, something immeasurable,

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.

I saw what a man’s own mind, what despair, could do to him.

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.

Someone had sinned against life, and I felt it in my very person.

His reaction to dropping the A Bomb after everything he’s been through fighting the Japanese is truly something to be admired.

That is why women weep when their men go off to war. They do not weep for their victims, they weep for them as Victim.