Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific (8 page)

I was only twenty-one. I could see the Golden Gate, and out beyond lay the Thing that I would see.

Not yet, though. Not for ten days would we go out the Golden Gate. They marched us aboard the
George F. Elliott
. She became our ship. She was an African slaver. We hated her.

They let us go ashore every day.

These days were the final and the frantic hours of our flight. Except for Chinatown, I saw nothing but bars and cafés in San Francisco. My father had sent me a hundred dollars in response to my last plea for money. Because of this, I could see the best cafés as well as the lowest bars. They are all one.

I can remember nothing of them, save for a juke box playing “One Dozen Roses” over and over again, and once, in a Chinatown walk-up being thrown out bodily because I had leapt in among the wearily gesturing chorus girls and shouted “Boo!”

The same night I chased two Chinamen away from a marine. I never saw the knives, but they must have had them, for the marine’s tan shirt was bright with blood. He lay slumped in a doorway—a lunch counter, I think. I shouted in fury at the proprietor. He had watched the assault stonily, but now, as I shouted, he moved to his telephone and called the police. I left, fearing the M.P.’s.

There were many episodes in those ten days. But they were all the same—smeared with lust or bleared by appetite.

Finally I was sated. I was jaded. San Francisco ended for me one night as I rode in a taxicab with Jawgia, the freckled, sharp-featured cracker from the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia, whose name suggested both his home state and his habit of jawing about the Civil War. Jawgia clambered out and the guard swung the gate open. I peered into the driver’s face, dropped three pennies—the only money we had left—into his outstretched hand, and said, “Buy yourself the best damn newspaper in town!” I slipped through the gate, and with a wild yell ran for my ship. One of the coins the driver threw hit me as I ran.

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.

1

Fires flickered on the shores of Guadalcanal Island when we came on deck.

They were not great flaming, leaping fires, and we were disappointed. We had expected to see the world alight when we emerged from the hatches. The bombardment had seemed fierce. Our armada, for such we judged it to be, seemed capable of blasting Guadalcanal into perdition.

But in the dirty dawn of August 7, 1942, there were only a few fires flickering, like the city dumps, to light our path to history.

We were apprehensive, not frightened. I was still angry from my encounter with the sailor messman. I had been overlong eating my breakfast of beans, and when I had finished I had perceived the sailors frantically cleaning up the galley. Perhaps this would become the ship’s surgery for the shore wounded. The chief messman behind the counter was just closing a crate of oranges, distributed as a sort of eve-of-battle gift to the troops, when I had rushed up to claim mine. He refused to reopen the crate. We shouted furiously at each other. I wanted that orange more than General Vandergrift wanted Guadalcanal. The sailor would not surrender it to me and threatened—oh, inanity of inanity!—threatened to report me for insolence. Report me! Report me who am about to spill my blood among the coconuts! I wanted to skewer him on my bayonet, but I thrust him aside, tore off the lid, seized my orange and fled up the ladder to my comrades on deck, the messman’s outraged cries dwindling behind me.

So I was flickering, myself, like the long curving coastline of Guadalcanal, when Old Gunny bellowed:

“First Platoon over the side! Down those cargo nets!”

The
George F. Elliott
was rolling in a gentle swell. The nets swayed out and in against her steel sides, bumping us. My rifle muzzle knocked my helmet forward over my eyes. Beneath me, the Higgins Boats wallowed in the troughs.

The bombardment was lifting; I looked to both sides of me, clinging, antlike, to the net. Sealark Channel was choked with our ships. To the left, or west of me, was hulking Savo Island. In front of me, to the north, but obscured by the side of the
Elliott
, stretched Florida Island and tiny Tulagi. The Marine Raiders and Paramarines were already at their bloody work on Tulagi. I could hear the sound of gunfire. Behind me, to the south, was Guadalcanal.

Three feet above the rolling Higgins Boats the cargo nets came to an end. One had to jump, weighted with fifty or more pounds of equipment. No time for indecision, for others on the nets above were all but treading your fingers. So there it was—jump—hoping that the Higgins Boat would not roll away and leave only the blue sea to land in. But we all made it safely.

Now I could see the assault waves forming near the other ships. Boat after boat would load up, then detach itself from the mother ship to join its mates, circling, circling, like monster water bugs on frolic.

“Everybody down!”

Now I could see the circles fan out into the attack line. Like my buddies, I was crouching below the gunwales, feeling the boat beneath me swing slowly round to point its nose shoreward. The deck vibrated in a rush of power.

The assault began.

Now I was praying again. I had prayed much the night before, carefully, deliberately, impetrating God and the Virgin to care for my family and friends should I fall. In the vanity of youth, I was positive I would die; in the same vanity, I was turning my affairs over to the Almighty, like an older brother clapping the younger on the back and saying, “John, now you’re the man of the house.”

But my prayers were a jumble. I could think of nothing but the shoreline where we were to land. There were other boatloads of marines ahead of us. I fancied firing from behind their prostrate bodies, building a protecting wall of torn and reddened flesh. I could envision a holocaust among the coconuts. I no longer prayed. I was like an animal: ears straining for the sound of battle, body tensing for the leap over the side.

The boat struck the shore, lurched, came to a halt. Instantly I was up and over. The blue sky seemed to swing in a giant arc. I had a glimpse of palm fronds swaying gently above, the most delicate and exquisite sight I have ever seen.

There followed a blur. It was a swiftly shifting kaleidoscope of form and color and movement. I lay panting on the sand, among the tall coconut trees, and realized I was wet up to the hips. I had gotten some twenty yards inland.

But there was no fight.

The Japanese had run. We lay there, fanned out in battle array, but there was no one to oppose us. Within moments, the tension had relaxed. We looked around our exotic surroundings. Soon there were grins and wisecracks.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” the Hoosier pouted, “this is a helluva way to run a war.”

Sergeant Thinface screamed shrilly at someone opening a coconut.

“You wanna get poisoned. Doncha know them things could be full of poison?”

Everyone laughed. Thinface was so stupidly literal. He had been briefed on Japanese propensities for booby-trapping or for poisoning water supplies; thus, the coconuts were poisoned. No one bothered to point out the obvious difficulties involved in poisoning Guadalcanal’s millions of coconuts. We just laughed—and went on husking the nuts, cracking the shells, drinking the cool sweet coconut milk. Thinface could only glower, at which he was expert.

From somewhere came the command: “Move out!”

We formed staggered squads and slogged off.

We left our innocence on Red Beach. It would never be the same. For ten minutes we had had something like bliss, a flood of well-being following upon our unspeakable relief at finding our landing unopposed. Even as we stepped from the white glare of the beach into the sheltering shade of the coconut groves, there broke out behind us the yammer of antiaircraft guns and the whine of speeding aircraft. The Japs had come. The war was on. It would never be the same.

We plodded through the heat-bathed patches of kunai grass. We crossed rivers. We recrossed them. We climbed hills. We got into the jungle. We cut our passage with machetes or followed narrow, winding trails. We were lost every step of the way.

At intervals we would pass little knots of officers, bending anxiously over a map. That pitiful map! Here there was Red Beach, which was right enough, and there was the Tenaru River, which it was not, and there were the coconut groves—miles and miles of them, neatly marked out by symbols looking more like fleurs-de-lis than coconuts—and you would think this whole vast island was under cultivation by Lever Brothers.

It was a lying map and it got us into trouble from the outset.

The officers were apprehensive.

They knew we were lost.

“Hey, Lieutenant—where we headed?”

“Grassy Knoll.”

“Where’zat?”

“Up ahead, where the Japs are.”

Our very naïveté spoke. Grassy Knoll … up ahead … where the Japs are. Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, hide-and-seek—we were playing a game. Even the division commander had calmly announced an expectation of taking his evening meal on the summit of Grassy Knoll.

“Synchronize your watches, gentlemen—the assault has begun.”

Last one up to Grassy Knoll is a rotten egg.

Ah, well, we had much to learn, and five months in which to learn it; and there would be precious few who would get to Grassy Knoll in the process.

So began, on the very first day, the frustration. So, too, began the loneliness. The sounds of battle subsiding behind us had an ominous tinge, the faces of the officers we passed had an anxious tone. The Jap was closing the ring, and we—poor gallant fools—we thought we were pursuing him!

We were drenched with sweat. Our progress through the kunai patches had nearly prostrated us. Now, in the clammy cool of the rain forest, our sweat-darkened dungarees clung to us with chill tenacity.

“Hey, Lucky,” the Hoosier called. “Ah bet Ah could get a quart of Calvert off your back. Wring out your jacket, Lucky, and give ever’-body a shot.”

It was not whiskey we wanted, though. For the first time in my life I was experiencing real thirst. The heat, and now the dripping, enervating forest, seemed to have dehydrated me. I had water in my canteen, but I dared not touch it. Who could tell when it might be replenished? We had been walking three hours or more, and had seen no water.

Then, in that sudden way of the jungle, there was revealed to us a swift-running river.

With incautious shouts we fell upon her. She dissolved us, this river. We became a yelling, splashing, swilling, milling mass, and even Lieutenant Ivy-League shared the general retreat from discipline. Oh, what a sweet sight would we have been for Japanese eyes! What a chance for massacre they missed!

Some even lay on their backs in this shallow stream—the lyrically named Ilu—and opened their mouths, letting the water plunge into their systems as though into yawning drains. Lieutenant Ivy-League was swinging water to his lips by the helmetful, bellowing meanwhile, “Don’t drink! It may be poisoned! Don’t drink until you’ve used your purifying pills.”

Everyone nodded gravely and went right ahead with the orgy, drinking, drinking, drinking—sighing like a lover as the sweet, swift little river swept the salt sweat from our bodies.

Refreshed, sated, we resumed the march.

We were sopping. But it was the clean wetness of water. It is nothing to be sopping in the jungle rain forest, and it is better if it be water than sweat.

Night came in a rush while we were still marching. We set up a hasty defense. The first day had passed without event, though we had lost one man. He had been wide on the flank of our advancing column and had simply disappeared.