Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific Read Online Free PDF Page A

the sergeant.”
    That was how the Marines classified us. The questions were perfunctory. The answers were ignored. Schoolboy, farmer, scientist-of-the-future—all were grist to the reception mill and all came forth neatly labeled: First Marines. There were no “aptitude tests,” no “job analyses.” In the First Marine Division the presumption was that a man had enlisted to fight. No one troubled about civilian competence.
    It may have been an affront to those vestiges of civilian self-esteem which Parris Island had not had time to destroy, but New River soon would take care of that. Here, the only talent was that of the foot soldier, the only tool the hand gun; here the cultivated, the oblique, the delicate soon perished, like gardenias in the desert.
    I felt the power of that attitude, and I felt, for the first time in my life, an utter submission to authority as I emerged from the lighted hut and mumbled “First Marines” to a cluster of sergeants standing there expectantly. One of them pointed with his flashlight to a group of men; I took my place among them. About a half dozen other groups were being formed in the same way.
    Then, at a command, I swung up on a truck with my new comrades. The driver started the motor and we rolled off, bumping over pitted muddy roads, past row upon row of silent darkened huts, rolling, ever rolling, until suddenly we stopped with a lurch and were home.
    Home was H Company, Second Battalion, First Marine Regiment. Home was a company of machine guns and heavy mortars. Someone in that cheerless hut had decided that I should be a machine gunner.
    The process of enrollment in H Company hardly differed from the method of our “assignment” the night before, except that we were run through a hut occupied by Captain High-Hips. He fixed us with his gloriously militant glass eye, he fingered his military mustache, and he questioned us in his clipped British manner of speech. Then, with an air of skepticism, he assigned us to our squad huts and into the keeping of the N.C.O.’s now arriving from other regiments.
    These men came from the Fifth and the Seventh, the veteran line units in whose ranks were almost all of the First Division’s trained troops. My regiment, the First, had been disbanded, but now, after Pearl Harbor it was being reactivated. The First needed N.C.O.’s, and many of those who came to us betrayed, by a certain nervousness of voice, a newness of rank. Their chevrons were shiny. A few had not found time to set them onto their sleeves; they were pinned on.
    A few weeks before these corporals and Pfc.’s had been privates. Some predated us as marines by that margin only. But in such an urgent time, experience, however slight, is preferred to none at all. The table organization had to be filled. So up they went.
    But the First also received a vital leavening of veteran N.C.O.’s. They would teach us, they would train us, they would turn us into fighting troops. From them we would learn our weapons. From them we would take our character and temper. They were the Old Breed.
    And we were the new, the volunteer youths who had come from the comfort of home to the hardship of war.
    For the next three years, all of these would be my comrades—the men of the First Marine Division.

    Robert Leckie, 1942



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    Huts, oil, beer.
    Around these three, as around a sacramental triad, revolved our early life at New River. Huts to keep us dry; oil to keep us warm; beer to keep us happy. It is no unholy jest to call them sacramental; they had about them the sanctity of earth. When I remember New River, I remember the oblong huts with the low roofs; I remember the oil stoves and how we slipped out at night, buckets in hand, to pilfer oil from the other companies’ drums, passing the men from the other companies, thieves in the night like ourselves; I remember the cases of canned beer in the middle of the hut and how we had pooled our every penny to go down to the slop chute to buy them,