Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific Read online

  Once he grabbed me by the ear when I had fallen out of step. I am short, but no lightweight; yet he all but lifted me off my feet.

  “Lucky,” he said with a grim smile, seeming to delight in mispronouncing my name. “Lucky—if you don’t stay in step they’ll be two of us in the hospital—so’s they can get mah foot out of youah ass!”

  Bellow boasted that though he might drill his men into exhaustion beneath that semitropical South Carolina sun, he would never march them in the rain. Magnificent concession! Yet there were other instructors who not only drilled their charges in the downpour, but seemed to delight in whatever discomfiture they could inflict upon them.

  One, especially, would march his platoon toward the ocean. His chanted cadence never faltered. If they hesitated, breaking ranks at the water’s edge, he would fly into a rage. “Who do you think you are? You’re nothing but a bunch of damned boots! Who told you to halt? I give the orders here and nobody halts until I tell them to.”

  But if the platoon would march on resolutely into the water, he would permit his cadence to subside unnoticed until they had gone knee-deep, or at least to the point where the salt water could not reach their precious rifles. Then he would grin and simulate anger. “Come back here, you mothers’ mistakes! Get your stupid behinds out of that ocean!”

  Turning, fuming, he would address Parris Island in general: “Who’s got the most stupid platoon on this whole damned island? That’s right, me! I got it!”

  On the whole, the sergeants were not cruel. They were not sadists. They believed in making it tough on us, but they believed this for the purpose of making us turn out tough. Only once did I see something approaching cruelty. A certain recruit could not march without downcast eyes. Sergeant Bellow roared and roared at him until even his iron voice seemed in danger of breaking. At last he hit upon a remedy. The hilt of a bayonet was tucked beneath the belt of the recruit, and the point beneath his throat. Before our round and fearful eyes, he was commanded to march.

  He did. But when his step faltered, when his eye became fixed and his breathing constricted, the sergeant put an end to it. Something like fear had communicated itself from recruit to sergeant, and Bellow hastened to remove the bayonet. I am sure the sergeant has had more cause to remember this incident than has his victim.

  2

  It was difficult to form a lasting friendship then. Everyone realized that our unit would be broken up once the “boot” period ended. Some would go to sea, most would fill the ranks of the Fleet Marine force at New River, others would stay on at Parris Island. Nor was there much chance of camaraderie, confined as we were to those high-ceiled barracks. Warmth there was, yes, but no intimacy.

  Many friendships were mine in the Marine Corps, but of these I will write in another place. Here the tale concerns a method, the making of marines.

  It is a process of surrender. At every turn, at every hour, it seemed, a habit or a preference had to be given up, an adjustment had to be made. Even in the mess hall we learned that nothing mattered so little as a man’s own likes or dislikes.

  I had always suspected I would not like hominy grits. I found that I did not; I still do not. But on some mornings I ate hominy or went hungry. Often my belly rumbled, ravenously empty, until the noon meal.

  Most of us had established ideas of what passes for good table manners. These did not include the thick sweating arm of a neighbor thrust suddenly across our lips, or the trickle-down-from-the-top method of feeding, whereby the men at the head of the table, receiving the metal serving dishes from the messmen, always dined to repletion, greedily impervious of the indignant shouts of the famished ones in the middle or at the end.

  Some of us might be disquieted at the sight of knives laden with peas or the wolfish eating noises that some of the men made, but we were becoming less and less sensitive in more and more places. Soon my taste buds served only as intestinal radar—to warn me that food was coming—and my sense of propriety deserted for the duration.

  Worst in all this process of surrender was the ruthless refusal to permit a man the slightest privacy. Everything was done in the open. Rising, waking, writing letters, receiving mail, making beds, washing, shaving, combing one’s hair, emptying one’s bowels—all was done in public and shaped to the style and stricture of the sergeant.

  Even food packages from home were seized by the drill instructor. We were informed of their arrival; that the drill instructor had sampled them; that he had found them tasty.

  What! Now you are aroused! This is too much. This is tampering with the United States Mails! Ah, my friend, let me ask you this. Between the United States Mails and the United States Marines, who do you say would win?

  If you are undone in Parris Island, taken apart in those first few weeks, it is at the rifle range that they start to put you together again.

  Bellow marched us most of the way to the rifle range—about five miles—in close order drill. (There is close order drill and there is route march, and the first is to the last as standing is to slouching.) We had our packs on our backs. Our sea bags would be at the tents when we arrived. We would complain of living out of packs and sea bags, blissfully unaware of the day when either would be a luxury.

  Then more than ever Bellow seemed a thing of stone: still lance-straight, iron voice tireless. Only at the end of the march did it sound a trifle cracked; a heartening sign, as though to assure us there was an impure alloy of us in him, too.

  We lived in tents at the rifle range, six men to a tent. Mine had wooden flooring, which most of the tents did not, and my tentmates and I counted this a great blessing. Nor did we fail to perceive the hand of Providence in keeping us six New Yorkers and Bostonians together; northern wheat separated from southern chaff. But the morning, the cold coastal morning, brought an end to that flattering notion. Yankee sangfroid was shattered by those rebel yells of glee which greeted the sound of our chattering teeth and the sight of our blue and quivering lips.

  “Hey, Yank—Ah thought it was cold up Nawth. Thought you was used to it. Haw! Lookit them, lookit them big Yanks’ lips chatterin’.”

  Bellow was so tickled he lost his customary reserve.

  “Ah guess youah right,” Bellow said. “Ever time Ah come out heah Ah hear teeth chatterin’. And evra time it’s nawth’n teeth. Ah dunno.” He shook his head. “Ah dunno. Ah still cain’t see how we lost.”

  In another half hour, the sun would be shining intensely, and we would learn what an alternating hell of hot and cold the rifle range could be.

  After washing, a surprise awaited us new arrivals in the head. Here was a sort of hurdle on which the men sat, with their rear ends poised above a stained metal trough inclined at an angle down which fresh water coursed. A group had gathered at the front of this trough, where the water was pumped in. Fortunately I was not among those engaged on the hurdle at the time. I could watch the surprise. One of the crowd had a handful of loosely balled newspapers. He placed them in the water. He lighted them. They caught the current and were off.

  Howls of bitter surprise and anguish greeted the passing of the fire ship beneath the serried white rears of my buddies. Many a behind was singed that morning, and not for as long as we were at the rifle range did any of us approach the trough without misgivings. Of course, we saw the foul trick perpetrated on other newcomers, which was hilarious.

  We got our inoculations at the rifle range. Sergeant Bellow marched us up to the dispensary, in front of which a half dozen men from another platoon were strewn about in various stages of nausea, as though to warn us what to expect.

  Getting inoculated is inhuman. It is as though men were being fed into a machine. Two lines of Navy corpsmen stood opposite each other, but staggered so that no one man directly confronted another. We walked through this avenue. As we did, each corpsman would swab the bared arm of the marine in front of him, reach a hand behind him to take a loaded hypodermic needle from an assistant, then plunge the needle into the marine’s flesh.


  Thus was created a machine of turning bodies and proffering, plunging arms, punctuated by the wickedly glinting arc of the needle, through which we moved, halted, moved on again. It had the efficiency of the assembly line, and also something of the assembly line’s inability to cope with human nature.

  One of my tentmates, called the Wrestler because of his huge strength and a brief career in the ring, had no idea of what was happening. He stood in front of me, in position to receive the needle; but he was so big he seemed to be in front of both corpsmen at the same time.

  While the corpsman on his right was swabbing, jabbing, so was the corpsman on his left.

  The Wrestler took both volleys without a shiver. But then—before my horrified gaze, so quickly that I could not prevent it—the corpsmen went through their arm-waving, grasping motions again, and fired two more bursts into the Wrestler’s muscular arms.

  This was too much, even for the Wrestler.

  “Hey, how many of these do I get?”

  “One, stupid. Move on.”

  “One, hell! I’ve had four already!”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re the base commander, too. Get going, I told you—you’re holding up the line.”

  I broke in, “He isn’t kidding. He did get four. You both gave him two shots.”

  The corpsmen gaped in dismay. They saw unmistakable chagrin on the Wrestler’s blunt features and something like mirth on mine. They grabbed him and propelled him to one of the dispensary doctors. But the doctor showed no alarm. He made his diagnosis in the context of the Wrestler’s muscles and iron nerve.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Okay. Just burned up.”

  “Good. You’re probably all right. If you feel sick or nauseous, let me know.”

  It is the nature of anticlimax to report that the Wrestler did not feel sick. As for nausea, this engulfed the oversensitive among us who witnessed his cavalry charge upon the meat loaf some fifteen minutes later.

  The rifle range also gave me my first full audition of the marine cursing facility. There had been slight samplings of it in the barracks, but never anything like the utter blasphemy and obscenity of the rifle range. There were noncommissioned officers there who could not put two sentences together without bridging them with a curse, an oath, an imprecation. To hear them made our flesh creep, made those with any depth of religious feeling flush with anger and wish to be at the weather-beaten throats of the blasphemers.

  We would become inured to it, in time, have it even on our own lips. We would come to recognize it as meaning no offense. But then it shocked us.

  How could they develop such facility with mere imprecation? This was no vituperation. It was only cursing, obscenity, blasphemy, profanity—none of which is ever profuse or original—yet it came spouting out in an amazing variety.

  Always there was the word. Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have expanded into the single substance of the linguistic world. It was a handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole; verb, noun, modifier; yes, even conjunction. It described food, fatigue, metaphysics. It stood for everything and meant nothing; an insulting word, it was never used to insult; crudely descriptive of the sexual act, it was never used to describe it; base, it meant the best; ugly, it modified beauty; it was the name and the nomenclature of the voice of emptiness, but one heard it from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s—until, finally, one could only surmise that if a visitor unacquainted with English were to overhear our conversations he would, in the way of the Higher Criticism, demonstrate by measurement and numerical incidence that this little word must assuredly be the thing for which we were fighting.

  On the firing line, angry sergeants filled the air with their cursing, while striving to make riflemen of us in what had become an abbreviated training course. Marines must learn to fire standing, prone and sitting. Perhaps because the sitting position is the hardest to learn, that posture had some sort of vogue at the Parris Island rifle range.

  They impressed the fashion upon us for two whole days on that miserable island’s blasted blistering sand dunes. We sat in the sun with sand in our hair, our ears, our eyes, our mouths. The sergeants didn’t care where the sand was, as long as it was not on the oiled metal parts of our precious rifles. There was no mercy for the unfortunate man who permitted this to happen. Punishment came swiftly: a hard kick and a horrible oath screamed directly into the miscreant’s ear.

  To assume the sitting position, as the sergeant instructor would say, was to inflict upon yourself the stretching torture of the rack.

  The rifle was held in the left hand, at the center or “balance of the piece.” But the left arm had been inserted through a loop of the rifle sling, which was run up the arm to the bicep, where it was drawn unbelievably tight. Thus held, while sitting with the legs crossed, Buddha-style, the butt of the rifle was some few inches away from the right shoulder. The trick was to fit that butt snugly against the right shoulder, so that you could lay the cheek alongside the right hand, sight along the barrel, and fire.

  The first time I tried it I concluded it to be impossible, unless my back would part down the middle permitting each side of my torso to swing around and to the front as though hinged. Otherwise, no. Otherwise, the sling would cut my left arm in two, or my head would snap off from the strain of turning my neck, or I would have to risk it and aim the rifle single-handed, as a pistol. Fortunately, if I may use the word, the decision was not mine. Sergeant Bellow came over.

  “Trouble?” he inquired sweetly.

  His manner should have warned me, but I mistook it for an unsuspected human streak.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My gracious.”

  It was too late. I was caught. I looked up at him with dumb, pleading eyes.

  “Okay, lad, you jes get that rifle firmly in the left hand. Fine. Now the right. My, my. That is hard, ain’t it?”

  Whereupon Sergeant Bellow sat on my right shoulder. I swear I heard it crack. I thought I was done. But I suppose it did nothing more than stretch a few ligaments. It worked. My right shoulder met the rifle butt and my left arm remained unsevered, and that was how I learned the unprofitable sitting position of shooting.

  I saw but one Jap killed by a shot fired from the sitting position, and this only when no fire was coming from the enemy.

  Still it was amazing how the marines could teach us to shoot within the few days they had us on the range; that is, teach the remarkable few among us who needed instruction. Most of us knew how to shoot; even, surprisingly, the big-city boys. I have no idea of how or where, in the steel-and-concrete wilderness of our modern cities, these boys had developed prowess in what seems a countrified pastime. But shoot they could, and well.

  All the southerners could shoot. Those from Georgia and the border state of Kentucky seemed the best. They suffered the indignity of the rifle sling while “snapping in” on the sand dunes. But when live ammunition was issued and the shooting butts were run up, they scorned such effete support, cuddled the rifle butts under their chins and blazed away. The drill instructors let them get away with it. After all, there is no arguing with a bull’s-eye.

  I was one of those unacquainted with powder. I had never fired a rifle before, except an occasional twenty-two in a carnival shooting gallery or the gaudy arcades of midtown New York. A thirty-caliber Springfield seemed to me a veritable cannon.

  The first time I sat on the firing line, with two five-round clips beside me, and the warning “Load and lock!” floating up from the gunnery sergeant, I felt as a small animal must feel upon the approach of an automobile. Then came the feared commands.

  “All ready on the firing line!”

  “Fire!”

  BA-ROOM!

  It was the fellow on my right. The sound seemed to split my eardrums. I jumped. Then the entire line became a splitting, roaring cauldron of sound; and I got my Springfield working with the rest of them, firing, ejecting, reloading. The ten rounds were gone in seconds. Silence
came, and with it a ringing in my ears. They still ring.

  It was not long before I overcame my timidity and began to enjoy shooting. Of course, I made the mistakes all neophytes make—shooting at the wrong target, shooting under the bull’s-eye, getting my windage wrong. But I progressed and when the day came to fire for record I had the monumental conceit to expect I would qualify as an expert. An Expert Rifleman’s badge is to shooting what the Medal of Honor is to bravery. It even brought five dollars a month extra pay, a not inconsiderable sum to one earning twenty-one.

  The day when we shot for record—that is, when our scores would be official and determine whether we qualified or not—dawned windy and brutally cold. I remember it as dismal, and that I longed to be near the fires around which the sergeants clustered, smoking cigarettes and forcing a gaiety I am sure no one could feel. My eyes ran water all day. When we fired from the six-hundred-yard range, I think I could just about make out the target.

  I failed miserably. I qualified for nothing. A handful qualified as marksmen, two or three as sharpshooters, none as experts. Once we had shot for “record” we were marines. There were a few other skills to be learned—the block-parry-thrust of bayonet drill or pistol shooting—but these had no high place in the marine scale of values. The rifle is the marine’s weapon. So it was that we marched back to the barracks, with our chests swelling with pride and our feet slapping the pavement, with the proud precision of men who had mastered the Springfield, or at least pretended that they had.

  We were veterans. When we arrived at the barracks, our path crossed that of a group of incoming recruits, still in civilian clothes, seeming to us unkempt, bedraggled as birds caught in the rain. As though by instinct we shouted with one voice: “You’ll be sorree!” Bellow grinned with delight.

  3

  In five weeks they had made us over. Another week of training remained, but the desired change already had taken place. Most important in this transformation was not the hardening of my flesh or the sharpening of my eyes, but the new attitude of mind.