Review“Helmet for My Pillow is a grand and epic prose poem. Robert Leckie’s theme is the rigorously humane experience of war in the Pacific, written in the refined and tasteful imagery of a humane being who—somehow—survived.”—Tom Hanks
“One hell of a book! The real stuff that proves the U.S. Marines are the greatest fighting men on earth!”—Leon Uris, author of Battle Cry
About the AuthorRobert Leckie was the author of more than thirty works of military history as well as Marines, a collection of short stories, and Lord, What a Family!, a memoir. Raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, he started writing in a professional manner at age sixteen, covering sports for The Bergen Evening Record of Hackensack. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on the day following the attack on Pearl Harbor, going on to serve as a machine gunner and as an intelligence scout and taking part in all 1st Marine Division campaigns except Okinawa. Leckie was awarded five battle stars, the Naval Commendation Medal with Combat V, and the Purple Heart. Helmet for My Pillow (Random House, 1957) was his basi book; it received the Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association award upon publication.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Chapter One
Boot
A cutting wind slanted up Church Street in the cheerless dawn of January 5, 1942. That day I departed for the United States Marines.
The war with Japan was not yet four weeks old, Wake Island had fallen. Pearl Harbor was a real tragedy, a burning bitter humiliation. Hastily composed war songs were on the lips of everyone, their heavy patriotism failing to remunerate for what they lacked in tune and spirit. Hysteria seemed to crouch behind all eyes.
But none of this meant much to me. I was conscious of my father besides me, bending into the wind with me. I could feel the wound in my lower regions, still fresh, still sore. The sutures had been got rid of a few days earlier.
I had sought to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor, but the Marines had insisted that I be circumcised. It cost me a hundred dollars, altho I am not sure to this day whether I paid the doctor or not. But I am sure that few young men went off to war in that fateful time so marked.
We had come all over the Jersey meadows, riding the Erie commuter line, and then on the ferry over the Hudson River to downtown New York. Breakfast at home had been subdued. My mother was up and about; she did not cry. It was not a heart-rending leave-taking, nor was it brave, resolute—any of those words that fail to describe the thing.
It was like so much else in this war that was to invent unbounded heroism, yet not a single stirring song: it was resigned. She followed me to the door with sad eyes and said, “God keep you.”
It had been a silent trip throughout the meadows and it was a wordless good-by in front of the bronze revolving doors at Ninety, Church Street. My father embraced me quickly, and just as speedily warded off his face and left. The Irish doorman measured me and smiled.
I went inside and joined the United States Marines.
The captain who swore us in scaled down the ceremony to a jumble. We all kept up our hands. We put them down when he lowered his. That way we guessed we were marines.
The master gunnery sergeant who became our momentary shepherd made the fact plainer to us. Those rich mellow blasphemous oaths that were to become so intimate to me flowed from his lips with the consummate ease of one who had expended a lifetime in vituperation. I would meet his pros later. Presently, as he herded us all over the river to Hoboken and a waiting train, he seemed to be beyond comparison. But he was tame and kind sufficient when he said good-by to the thirty or forty of us who boarded the train.
He stood at the head of our railroad car—a man of middle age, slender, and of a grace that was on the verge of being ruined by a pot belly. He wore the Marine dress blues. Over this was the regulation tight-fitting overcoat of forest green. Green and blue has always seemed to me an odd combining of colors, and it seemed exceptionally so then; the gaudy dark and light blue of the Marine dress sheathed in sedate and comforting green.
“Where you are going it will not be easy,” the gunnery sergeant said. “When you get to Parris Island, you’ll find things a great deal dissimilar from civilian life. You won’t like it! You’ll think they’re overdoing things. You’ll think they’re stupid! You’ll think they’re the cruelest, rottenest bunch of men you ever ran into! I’m going to tell you one thing. You’ll be wrong! If you want to save yourself a great deal of heartache you’ll listen to me right now: you’ll do everything they tell you and you’ll keep your huge mouths shut!”
He could not help grinning at the end. No group of men ever had a saner counselor, and he knew it; but he could not aid grinning. He knew we would ignore his each word.
“Okay, Sarge,” someone yelled. “Thanks, Sarge.”
He turned and left us.
We called him “Sarge.” Within another twenty-four hours we would not dare address a lowly Pfc. without the cringing “sir.” But today the civilian shine was still upon us. We wore civvies; Hoboken howled around us in the throes of trade; we each had the citizen’s polite deprecation of the soldier, and who among us was not sure that he was not long for the ranks?
Our ride to Washington was silent and uneventful. But once we had arrived in the capital and had changed trains the atmosphere seemed to lift. Other Marine recruits were arriving from all over the east. Our contingent was the last to arrive, the last to be crammed aboard the ancient wooden train that waited, puffing, dirty-in-the-dark, smelling of coal—waited to take us down the coast to South Carolina. Perhaps it was because of the dilapidated old train that we brightened and became gay. Such a dingy, tired old relic could not help but provoke mirth. Someone pretended to have found a brass plate beneath one of the seats, and our car rocked with laughter as he read, “This car is the property of the Philadelphia Museum of American History.” We had light from kerosene lamps and heat from a potbellied stove. Draughts seemed to stream from each angle and there was a ceaseless creaking and wailing of wood and wheels that sounded like an endless keening. Strange old train that it was, I loved it.
Comfort had been left behind in Washington. Some of us already were beginning to revel in the hardship of the train ride. That intangible mystique of the marine was somehow, even then, at work. We were having it rough, which is incisively what we expected and what we had signed up for. That is the thing: having it rough. The man who has had it roughest is the man to be most admired. Conversely, he who has had it the easiest is the least praiseworthy.
Those who wished to sleep could cat-nap on the floor while the train lurched down through Virginia and North Carolina. But these were few. The singing and the talk were too exciting.
The boy sitting next to me—a handsome blond-haired youth from south Jersey—turned out to have a fine high voice. He sang assorted songs alone. There being a liberal leavening of New York Irish amongst us, he was soon singing Irish ballads.
Across the aisle there was another boy, whom I shall call Armadillo because of his lean and pointed face. He was from New York and had attended college there. Being one of the few college men present, he had already established a sort of literary clique.
The Armadillo’s coterie could not equivalent another circle further down the car. This had at it is center a stocky, smiling redhead. Red had been a catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and had once hit a home run at the Polo Grounds off the great Carl Hubbell.
There was no measuring the affect of such a celebrity on our group, composed other than as supposed or expected of mediocrities like myself. Red had been in the big time. He had held each day discourse with men who were not one thing less than the idols of his newfound comrades. It was rather natural they will have to ring him round; consult him on everything from pitching form to the Japanese General Staff.
“Whaddya think it’ll be like at Parris Island, Red?”
“Hey, Red—you think the Japs are as tough as the newsprints say they are?”
It is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage. Scientists counsel on civil liberty; comedians and actresses lead political rallies; athletes tell us what brand of cigarette to smoke. But the redhead was equivalent to it. It was plain in his case what travel and headlines may do. He was effortlessly the most poised of us all.
But I suspect even Red’s savoir-faire got a rude jolt when we arrived in Parris Island. We had been taken from the railroad station by truck. When we had dismounted and had formed a motley rank in front of the red brick mess hall, we were subjected to the classic greeting.
“Boys,” said the sergeant who would be our drill instructor. “Boys—Ah want to tell yawl something. Give youah hearts to Jesus, boys—cause youah ass belongs to me!”
Then he fell us in after our clumsy civilian fashion and marched us into the mess hall.
There were baloney and lima beans. I had never eaten lima beans before, but I did this time; they were cold.
The group that had made the trip from New York did not survive the primary day in Parris Island. I never saw the blond singer again, nor most of the others. Somehow sixty of us amongst the hundreds who had been aboard that ancient train, became a training platoon, were assigned a number and placed beneath the charge of the drill sergeant who had delivered the welcoming address.
Sergeant Bellow was a southerner with a fine contempt for northerners. It was not that he bestloved the southerners; he merely treated them less sarcastically. He was big. I would say six feet four inches, two hundred thirty pounds.
But above all he had a voice.
It pulsed with power as he counted the cadence, marching us from the administration building to the quartermaster’s. It whipped us, this ragged remnant, and stiffened our slouching civilian backs. Nowhere else but in the Marine Corps do you listen that peculiar lilting cadence of command.
“Thrip-faw-ya-leahft, thrip-faw-ya-leahft.”
It sounds like an incantation; but it is merely the established “three-four-your-left” elongated by the southern drawl, made sprightly by being sung. I never heard it done better than by our sergeant. Because of this, and because of his inordinate love of drill, I have but one effigy of him: striding stiff-backed a few feet detached from us, arms thrust out, hands clenched, head canted back, with the whole body following and the outstanding voice endlessly bellowing, “Thrip-faw-ya-leahft, thrip-faw-ya-leahft.”
Sergeant Bellow marched us to the quartermaster’s. It was there we were stripped of all vestiges of personality. It is the quartermasters who make soldiers, sailors and marines. In their presence, one strips down. With each divestment, a …
Profound and distinguishable clear or deep perception into the WWII Pacific experience