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

carrying them back boisterously on our shoulders, shouting and cheerful, because the warm dry huts awaited us, and soon the beer would be in our bellies and the world would be ours.
    We were privates, and who is more carefree?
    Like the huts, oil and beer, I had a trinity of friends: Hoosier, the Chuckler and the Runner.
    I met Hoosier the second day at New River. He had arrived two days before us, and Captain High-Hips had made him his runner. In that first unorganized week, his clothes were always spattered with mud from his countless trips through the mire between the captain’s office and the other huts.
    I disliked him at first. He seemed inclined to look down on us from his high position in Captain High-Hips’ office. He seemed surly, too, with his square strong figure, tow hair and blue eyes—his curt intelligences from on high: “Cap’n wants two men bring in the lieutenant’s box.”
    But I was too inexperienced to see that the surliness was but a front for his being scared, like all of us. The immobile face was a façade; the forced downward curve of the mouth a hastily erected defense against the unknown. With time and friendship, that mouth would curve in a different direction, upward in a grin that was pure joy.
    Chuckler was easier to know. We became friends the first day of gun drill, our introduction into the mysteries of the heavy, water-cooled, thirty-caliber machine gun. Corporal Smoothface, our instructor, a soft-voiced, sad-eyed youth from Georgia, made the drill a competition between squads to see which one could get its gun into action sooner. As gunner, Chuckler carried the tripod. As assistant gunner, I lugged the gun, a metal incubus of some twenty pounds. At a command, Chuckler raced off to a given point, spun the tripod over his head and set it up, while I panted off after him to slip the gun’s spindle into the tripod socket. We beat the other squad and the Chuckler growled with satisfaction.
    “Attaboy, Jersey,” he chuckled, as I slid alongside him and placed the machine gun box in feeding position. “Let’s show them bastards.”
    That was his way. He was fiercely competitive. He was profane. He had a way of chuckling, a sort of perpetual good humor, that stopped his aggressiveness short of push, and which softened the impact of his rough language. Like Hoosier and me, he was stocky, and like Hoosier, he was fair; but he had a rugged handsomeness that the Hoosier’s blunt features could not match.
    The three of us, and later, the Runner, who joined us on Onslow Beach, were all stocky and somewhere under five feet ten inches tall—a good build for carrying guns or tripods or the tubes and base plates which the men of our Mortar Section had to lug. And flinging these heavy pieces about seemed to constitute all of our training.
    Gun drill and nomenclature. Know your weapon, know it intimately, know it with almost the insight of its inventor; be able to take it apart blindfolded or in the dark, to put it together; be able to recite mechanically a detailed description of the gun’s operation; know the part played by every member of the squad, from gunner down to the unfortunates who carried the water can or the machine gun boxes, as well as their own rifles.
    It was dull and it was depressing, and the war seemed very far away. It was always difficult to remain attentive, to keep from falling asleep under that warm Carolina sun, while the voice of the gunnery sergeant droned on—“Enemy approaching at six hundred yards … up two, right three … fire …”
    But for every hour there was a ten-minute break, in which we might talk and smoke and clown around. Hoosier and I were the clowns. He loved to mimic the Battalion Executive Officer, the Major, who had a mincing walk and a prim manner that was almost a caricature in itself.
    “All right, men,” said the Hoosier, sashaying back and forth before us like the Major, “let’s get this straight. There’ll be no thinking. No enlisted