Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

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.

It is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage. Scientists counsel on civil liberty; comedians and actresses lead political rallies; athletes tell us what brand of cigarette to smoke.

With each divestment, a trait is lost; the discard of a garment marks the quiet death of an idiosyncrasy. I take off my socks; gone is a propensity for stripes, or clocks, or checks, or even solids; ended is a tendency to combine purple socks with brown tie. My socks henceforth will be tan. They will neither be soiled, nor rolled, nor gaudy, nor restrained, nor holey. They will be tan. The only other thing they may be is clean.

We were like St. Augustine’s definition of time: “Out of the future that is not yet, into the present that is just becoming, back to the past that no longer is.”

If a man must live in mud and go hungry and risk his flesh you must give him a reason for it, you must give him a cause. A conclusion is not a cause.

Then came the command: “Off and on!” It means off your behind and on your feet.

But we lost the sun in the San Francisco mists. We were at the waterfront and surrounded by the brown hills of Berkeley. The great curving bay, like a watery amphitheater, was before us. There were seals playing in the bay. I was only twenty-one. I could see the Golden Gate, and out beyond lay the Thing that I would see.

Our ship left in the morning, in a drizzle, on June the twenty-second, 1942. It moved, unlovely gray hulk, under the Golden Gate Bridge. I sat on the stern and looked back, searching. In the manner of the immigrant who takes a clod of his country’s soil on his voyage with him, I sought a memory to take with me. High above, in the middle of the wetly gleaming bridge, stood a sentry in poncho and kelly helmet, his rifle a hump on his back. He waved. He waved steadily, for minutes, while all around me the snickers and the catcalls mounted. I loved him for it. He waved to me.

And there is terror, coming from the interaction of trial and tedium: the first, shaking a man as the wind in the treetops; the second, eroding him as the flood at the roots. Each fresh trial leaves a man more shaken than the last, and each period of tedium—with its time for speculative dread—leaves his foundations worn lower, his roots less firm for the next trial.

Courage was a commonplace. It formed a club or corporation, much as do those other common things upon which men, for diverse reasons, place so great a value; like money, like charity.

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.

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

Among us there raged a profane anger. I know now how a convict must feel upon being turned down at job after job because of his past. That was what disqualified us—our past. It made no difference that we had been punished—yes, punished again and again, for it had become customary to solve all problems of selection this way—by marking brig-rats for dirty duty and excluding them from special benefits. Nor did it matter that we had good war records.

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.

The hand is the artisan of the soul. It is the second member of the human trinity of head and hand and heart. A man has no faculty more human than his hand, none more beautiful nor expressive nor productive.

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—in men and blood and agony the most costly spit of land in the wide Pacific.

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

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

But I could not answer the first question, for I did not know what I had gotten out of it, or even that I was supposed to profit. Now I know. For myself, a memory and the strength of ordeal sustained; for my son, a priceless heritage; for my country, sacrifice.

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.

That is why there are no glorious living, but only glorious dead. Heroes turn traitor, warriors age and grow soft—but a victim is changeless, sacrifice is eternal.