Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (9 page)

It began to rain, while we set up our guns on top of a hill. The rain fell drearily as we sat hunched in our ponchos, bidden to keep silence, munching the cold rations we took from our packs—each man to himself alone, but all afloat on a dark sea of the night.

It could—it should—have been a night of purest terror. We were bewildered. We were dispirited. We were cold. We were wet. We were ignorant of our surroundings, so we were afraid of them. We knew nothing of our enemy, so we feared him. We were alone, surrounded by a jungle alive with the noise of moving things which could only seem to us the stealthy tread of the foe moving closer.

But we saw all these things dully, as a stunned boxer gaping with indifferent anticipation at the oncoming knockout blow, too paralyzed by previous punches to move, too stupefied to care. The steady drumfire of the day’s events had done this to us.

Once there came a burst of gunfire. It shattered the night. We leaned over our guns, our mouths agape in the darkness. But then the night closed in again. Darkness. The trees dripping. The jungle whispering.

No one came.

At dawn we learned the import of the gunfire. A medical corpsman had been killed. He had been shot by his own men.

When the sentry had challenged him as he returned from relieving himself, he had boggled over the password “Lilliputian” and so met death: eternity at the mercy of a liquid consonant.

I shall never forget the sad faces of the friends who buried him. In that dismal dawn, the scraping of their entrenching tools was as plaintive as the scratching of a mouse.

The light was still dim. Lieutenant Ivy-League asked the company commander for permission to smoke.

“I don’t know if it’s light enough,” said the captain. “Why don’t you go over by that tree and light a match? Then I can tell if it’s too dark.”

The lieutenant strode off. When he had reached the tree and lighted his match, we could just make out the tiny flare of it and hear him calling softly, “How’s that, Captain?”

The captain shook his head.

“No. Keep the smoking lamp out. It’s too dark, yet.”

I peered at the captain. Anxiety was on his face as though carved there by the night’s events. It startled me. Here was no warrior, no veteran of a hundred battles. Here was only a civilian, like myself. Here was a man hardly more confident than the trigger-happy sentry who had killed the corpsman. He was much older than I, but the responsibility of his charge, the unknown face of war, had frightened him past trusting the evidence of his senses.

He thought the tiny flare of matches might bring the enemy down on us, as though we were lighting campfires at night. In another minute, it was clear daylight; everyone was smoking; soon the captain was, too.

We marched all day. Grassy Knoll was still “up ahead” and so were the Japs. We squirmed up the side of rain-bright hills, in slow sideways progress, like a land crab or a skier; we slid down the reverse slopes, the poor gunners cursing weakly while their tripods banged cruelly against the backs of their heads. The terrain of Guadalcanal seemed composed of steel, over which the demons of the jungle had spread a thin treacherous slime. Our feet were forever churning for a purchase on these undulating paths, our hands forever clawing the air, our progress constantly marked by the heavy clanking fall of a gunner in full gear.

We advanced on the enemy with all the stealth of a circus. If there had been a foeman in that dim dripping jungle he would have annihilated us. The Japanese would have done to us what our military ancestor, Washington, prevented the French from doing completely to Braddock, what our forefathers did to the British on the retreat from Lexington.

We saw none of the enemy. That day was a dull, lost witness to the cycle of the sun, of which I have neither memory nor regret.

The night I shall never forget.

I awoke in the middle of it to see the sky on fire. So it seemed. It was like the red mist of my childhood dream when I imagined Judgment to have come while I played baseball on the Castle Grounds at home. We were bathed in red light, as though fixed in the eye of Satan. Imagine a myriad of red traffic lights glowing in the rain, and you will have a replica of the world in which I awoke.

The lights were the flares of the enemy. They hung above the jungle roof, swaying gently on their parachutes, casting their red glow about. Motors throbbed above. They were those of Japanese seaplanes, we learned later. We thought they were hunting us.

But they were actually the eyes of a mighty enemy naval armada that had swept into Sealark Channel. Soon we heard the sound of cannonading, and the island trembled beneath us. There came flashes of light—white and red—and great rocking explosions.

The Japs were hammering out one of their greatest naval victories. It was the Battle of Savo Island, what we learned to call more accurately the Battle of the Four Sitting Ducks. They were sinking three American cruisers—the
Quincy, Vincennes
and
Astoria
—and one Australian cruiser—the
Canberra
—as well as damaging one other American cruiser and a U.S. destroyer.

The flares had been to illuminate the fight. At one point, the Japanese turned their searchlights on. These accounted for the eerie lights we saw, as we huddled in our slimy jungle.

It took us hardly a day to withdraw from the rain forest, although we had spent two days getting into it. But we knew the way back; we had not known the way in.

Amphibious tractors laden with food and water awaited us when we emerged and came down the slopes into the kunai fields. Chuckler was in front of me. He slipped on the last slope. As he fell, his tripod caught him wickedly behind the head.

He got up and kicked it. Then he swore. He swore with the shrill fury of exasperation.

He bent and grasped the tripod as though it were a living thing and he had it by the throat, turning his wrists to it as though he could choke the life from it—this hard cruel unbending thing in which was now concentrated the frustration, the hunger, the thirst, the wetness and the anxieties of these past two days. He flung it then. It sailed through the air and landed with an uncaring clank in the tall kunai.

Chuckler sat down and lit a cigarette, and that was where the battalion deployed as the men came spilling down from the hills in their mud-caked formless green twill, with their ugly cartridge belts and bowl helmets, their slung rifles and their stubble of beard, and the eyes that were just beginning to stare. Water and cans of C-rations came streaming off the amtracks. When we had refilled our canteens and our bellies, and sucked at blessed cigarettes, we were up again and off.

It was dusk when we reached the beach. We saw wrecked and smoking ships—a clean, unshipped expanse of water between Guadalcanal and Florida Island.

Our Navy was gone.

Gone.

We rested there. Columns of men were trudging up the beach. Their feet clapped softly against the sand. The sun had sunk behind the jungle. Night rolled toward us from the eastward-lying sea, gathering purplish over Florida as though it would come upon us in a bound.

Silhouetted against the gathering dark were the men. In the half light, they seemed to have lost the dimension of depth; they seemed shades. They moved, these weary men, as though chained to one another, with the soulless, mechanical tread of zombies. Behind them, low on the horizon, the reflected sun glowed dully. Despair seemed to walk in desolation.

I was glad when night closed in. Then my company was on its feet in turn, plodding up the silent beach in darkness.

We took up defensive positions. We scooped out shallow emplacements and turned the mouths of our machine guns toward the sea. We told off a guard and went to sleep, the last sound in our ears the pound of the surf against that long low coastline.

They bombed us the next day. But it was nothing to fear. It was not even the foretaste of how it would be.

“Condition Red!” someone shouted, and we heard the drone of their engines. They were high above, perhaps a dozen or so bombers, silvery and slender. They swept above us in a splendid V and loosed their loads over Henderson Field. We shouted and danced about in derision. We were fools. The bombs were not for us, but for our poor comrades on the airfield. We could hear the explosions and feel the earth shake, but it was not enough to make a child blink.

In that stupidity born of false security we laughed and shook our fists at the now departing bombers, as though we had taken their worst and put them to flight.

Ah, well. We had much to learn.

Not even the excitement of the bombing could match the delirium following discovery of the Japanese sake cache.

Case upon case of it was found in a log-and-thatch warehouse not far west of our beach positions. There were cases of wonderful Japanese beer, too—quart bottles clothed in little skirts of straw. Soon the dirt road paralleling the shoreline became an Oriental thoroughfare, thronged with dusty, grinning marines pushing rickshaws piled high with balloon-like half-gallon bottles of sake and cases of beer.

There was food at the warehouse, too; huge tins of flour and rice and smaller cans of fish heads, those ghastly delicacies of Nippon. But no one took the food.

Besides, each squad had set up its own mess. We had our own flour and Spam and cans of peaches and sugar and coffee—all stolen in raids on the piles of food which had been hastily unloaded by the transports, fleeing the armada that sank the cruisers. Our ship had been set aflame the day we landed when a Zero crashed amidships. So we had no battalion mess. Marvelously, these little squad messes sprang up all along the beach. The provender was of the best that could be stolen.

With these, and the sake and beer, we lived a rollicking, boisterous life for about a week, until the liquor ran out and the Major came around to commandeer the food.

What a wonderful week it was! What a delicious way to fight a war!

Chuckler, Hoosier, Runner and I had buried our sake and beer in the sands, deep down where the sea had seeped and where it was cool. It was our cache, and no one else could touch it. So it was the four of us who drank the most of it, except when the drink within us enkindled the warmth of generosity. Then we invited others into the circle.

We sat squatting. Because the huge sake bottles were difficult to pour, we had to push them to one another, and we drank by turns, as the Indians smoke the peace pipe. But our method needed the skills of a contortionist. One would grasp the huge bottle between one’s thighs, and then, with one’s head bent forward so that one’s mouth embraced the bottleneck, one would roll backward, allowing the cool white wine to pour down the throat.

Oh, it was good!

My palate was not at all sophisticated, yet no mere refinement of taste could ever match the sheer exuberance flowing from every mouthful of that sake. It is glorious to drink the wine of the enemy.

And we were getting gloriously drunk.

After one of these nocturnal drinking bouts I retired tipsily to my sleeping quarters; that is, I rolled back a few feet from the circle and fell into the shallow depression I had scooped out of the ground. High above me sighed the palm fronds, like lovely asterisks through which filtered the soft and starlit tropic night. I fell asleep. I awoke to the tiny twanging of hordes of invisible insects winging over my chest. I realized they were bullets when I heard the sound of firing to my rear. I went back to sleep, sadly convinced that the Japanese had got behind us.

Such was the power of sake.

In the morning someone explained that the firing had been two companies of the Fifth Regiment, each mistaking the other for the enemy. “Trigger-happy,” he said. I believed him. He needed no authority. He had a theory, which was the only authority required on Guadalcanal.

Morning was the best time for the beer; it was cool with the cool of night and the dark sea beneath the sands.

Oakstump did not last long with the beer. It was not that he drank so much, but that he drank it so fast—which is the same thing, perhaps. He arose unsteadily from our circle, stepped from the shade and keeled over almost the instant the sun touched his head. We adorned his body with palm fronds and stood an empty sake bottle on his chest so that he resembled a Shinto shrine.

Then Hoosier became solemnly aware that he was not properly dressed. He had no trousers on. Such a breach of decorum, even in the company of men not customarily correct in these matters, seemed to pain the Hoosier. He lurched to his feet, groped for his missing trousers and staggered down to the water.

“Hey, Hoosier—where you going with those pants? You going to wash your pants, Hoosier?”

“Ah’m gonna put mah pants on.”

“In the water?”

He showed his big strong teeth in a silly grin: “Ah always put mah pants on in the ocean.”

His dignity was matchless. Each time the surf receded, he would place his left foot in the trouser leg. With the exaggerated care of the inebriate, he would draw that leg up, and then, while balanced precariously on the right foot, a wave would pound up behind him and smack him on his pink behind.

He arose each time in dignity. Gravely, he would go through it once more. Merrily, the wave would roll up again and let him have it. Once or twice, he would teeter for a moment on that disloyal right foot, looking quickly behind him with a half grin, as though to see if his old friend the wave were still there. It always was.

Such was the power of Japanese beer.

Since that first day we had been bombed regularly; at least once, often several times daily. Enemy naval units began to appear in the channel. Contemptuous of our power to retaliate, they sailed in and bombarded us in broad daylight. The Japanese were returning to the battle.

To protect vital Henderson Field against an enemy who seemed determined now to fight for Guadalcanal, special nocturnal patrols were required. The first time that my company was commanded to furnish the patrol marked the end of our drinking, and our careers as beachcombers came crashing to a close in tragicomic style.

It was the day our liquor ran out I was among those who joined the other men from our company and marched away from the beach, through the coconut grove, into the kunai, and so to the point we would defend outside Henderson Field.