Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

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.