Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific, A Marine Tells His Story

by Robert Leckie

Great day, indeed! We hoped it would never end, but it did, and there was nothing left to do but to substitute for this rare and genuine exhilaration that other artificial sort which is kept, corked and capped, in inexhaustible supply within bottles.

I stood among the heaps of dead. They lay crumpled, useless, defunct. The vital force was fled. A bullet or a mortar fragment had torn a hole in these frail vessels and the substance had leaked out. The mystery of the universe had once inhabited these lolling lumps, had given each an identity, a way of walking, perhaps a special habit of address or a way with words or a knack of putting color on canvas. They had been so different, then. Now they were nothing, heaps of nothing.

Because it is gone you cannot say it will not return; even though you may say it has never yet returned—you cannot say that it will not. It is blasphemy to say a bit of metal has destroyed life, just as it is presumptuous to say that because life has disappeared it has been destroyed. I stood among the heaps of the dead and I knew—no, I felt that death is only a sound we make to signify the Thing we do not know.