Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

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.

It was a darkness without time. It was an impenetrable darkness. To the right and the left of me rose up those terrible formless things of my imagination, which I could not see because there was no light. I could not see, but I dared not close my eyes lest the darkness crawl beneath my eyelids and suffocate me.

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, wading, hissing, cradling, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell.

Realities of war

Hector denuding slain Patroclus of the borrowed armor of Achilles.

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. 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. Sometimes it is partial; another man might break at the sound of a diving enemy plane and scream and shudder and wring his hands — and rise to run. This is the terror I mean; this is the terror that strangles reason with the clawing hands of panic. I saw it twice, I felt it pluck at me twice. But it was rare. It claimed few victims. Courage was a commonplace.

The lifelong effects of war and services that are rarely recognized

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. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham, entirely without reproach; yet, for the same Master, he would have gone gladly to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifices of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim. If we were to be victims, we were as firmly secured to our role as Isaac bound to the faggots. No day passed without accentuating it.