Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

just becoming marines. 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.”

we learned that nothing mattered so little as a man’s own likes or dislikes.

How that unfinished pheasant haunted me two months later on Guadalcanal, when hunger rumbled in my belly like the sound of cannonading over water.

We advanced on the enemy with all the stealth of a circus.

It is glorious to drink the wine of the enemy.

I know now why men light fires.

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.

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.

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

It is one thing to die, another to die uselessly.

Youth rebels and age conserves; between them, they advance.

this tent sagged so limply it might have been put up by an officer

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 low-brow 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.

Now, a person thought to be different can exercise a peculiar attraction among men,

Heroes turn traitor, warriors age and grow soft — but a victim is changeless, sacrifice is eternal.