Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

Compassion is a specialty; it is a hidden talent.

Soon the spate of sixty-two-hour liberties was ended. Mid-May of 1942 saw me home for the last time. My family would not set eyes on me again for nearly three years.

Not yet, though. Not for ten days would we go out the Golden Gate. They marched us aboard the George F. Elliott. She became our ship. She was an African slaver. We hated her. They let us go ashore every day.

Three feet above the rolling Higgins Boats the cargo nets came to an end. One had to jump, weighted with fifty or more pounds of equipment. No time for indecision, for others on the nets above were all but treading your fingers. So there it was—jump—hoping that the Higgins Boat would not roll away and leave only the blue sea to land in. But we all made it safely.

know now why men light fires.

A man says of the eruption of battle: “All hell broke loose.” The first time he says it, it is true—wonderfully descriptive. The millionth time it is said, it has been worn into meaninglessness: it has gone the way of all good phrasing, it has become cliché. But within five minutes of that first machine gun burst, of the appearance of that first enemy flare that suffused the battlefield in unearthly greenish light—and by its dying accentuated the reenveloping night—within five minutes of this, all hell broke loose. Everyone was firing, every weapon was sounding voice; but this was no orchestration, no terribly beautiful symphony of death, as decadent rear-echelon observers write. Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness; here was the absence of rhythm, the loss of limit, for everyone fires what, when and where he chooses; here was booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell.

Courage was a commonplace.

But there was a bit more charity in our clubs, I think. We were not quite so puffed up that we could not recognize the ugly thing on our friend’s face as the elder brother of the thing fluttering within our own innards. You today, me tomorrow.

We had been nearly two and a half months on Guadalcanal the night the worst shelling came, and I remember it chiefly because it was the night I nearly panicked.

The worst that could happen to us now was Dunkirk.

“Hell, yes! Guadalcanal. The First Marines—Everybody’s heard of it. You guys are famous. You guys are heroes back home …” We did not see him leave, for we had both looked away quickly—each embarrassed by the quick tears. They had not forgotten.

I packed and left the tent. It was still raining, as I returned to the company tent. The crowd had dispersed. The other “shanghais” stood in dejection in the rain, their heads, like mine, sunk lower than was needed to avoid the raindrops, their cringing bodies eloquent of disgrace.

First Marine Division, walking in that effortless yet wary way that marks the American fighting man moving to the front.

for drunkenness goes a long way toward mitigating an offense in the Marine Corps.

It is unfortunate that my memory is so miserably unproductive here; I wish I could recall more of that trial.

So we became friends and remain so still.