Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

... digging days, out in the field scooping out shallow holes, the depressions for which the men in the Philippines had given the name foxholes — digging, scooping, scraping; got to get below the contour of the earth, got to dig, got to flop into the earth’s fresh wound, the face pressed deep into the fragrant soil while the worms squirm round in consternation as though dismayed by the hastiness of the graves and the heartiness of the bodies that filled them ...

They marched us aboard the George F. Elliott. She became our ship. She was an African slaver. We hated her.

Not actually a slave ship...just pack with men.

It was still light over the airfield when we left it and stepped into the gloom of the jungle. It was as though one had walked from a lighted, busy street into the murk and silence of a church, except that here was no reverence or smell of candle-grease, but the beginning of dread and the odor of corruption.

The flies were in possession of the field; the tropics had won; her minions were everywhere, smacking their lips over this bounty of rotting flesh. All of my elation at the victory, all of my fanciful cockiness fled before the horror of what my eyes beheld. It could be my corrupting body the white maggots were moving over; perhaps one day it might be.

There were whole days of downpour when I lay drenched and shivering, gazing blankly out of my hole, watching as the sheeted gray rain whipped and undulated over the Ridge. At such times, a man's brain seems to cease to function. It seems to retreat into a depth, much as the red corpuscles retreat from the surface of the body in times of excitement. One ceases to be rational; one becomes only sentient, like a barnacle clinging to a ship. One is aware only of life, of wetness, of the cold gray rain. But without this automatic retreat of reasons a man can go only one way: he can only go mad.