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

man is permitted to think. The moment you think, you weaken this outfit. Anyone caught thinking will be subject to a general court-martial. Anyone in H Company having brains will immediately return them to the Quartermaster. They’re running short of them up in Officer’s Country.”
    In these times also we would sing. Neither the Hoosier nor I could carry a tune, our idea of a scale being to raise or lower our voices. But we liked to bellow out the words. Unfortunately for us—for all of us—we had no songs to sing except those tuneless pointless “war songs” then arriving in a sticky flood.
    Refrains like “Just to show all those Japs, the Yanks are no saps” or “I threw a kiss in the ocean” hardly fill a man with an urge to kill or conquer. After a few days of singing these, we came to scorn them, and turned to singing the bawdies, which are at least rollicking.
    It is sad to have to go off to war without a song of your own to sing. Something like a rousing war song—something like the “Minstrel Boy” or something jolly and sardonic like the Englishman’s “Sixpence”—might have made the war a bit more worth fighting. But we got none. Ours was an Advanced Age, too sophisticated for such outdated frippery. War cries or war songs seemed rather naïve and embarrassing in our rational time. We were fed food for thought; abstractions like the Four Freedoms were given us. Sing a marching song about that, if you can.
    If a man must live in mud and go hungry and risk his flesh you must give him a reason for it, you must give him a cause. A conclusion is not a cause.
    Without a cause, we became sardonic. One need only examine the drawings of Bill Mauldin to see how sardonic the men of World War Two became. We had to laugh at ourselves; else, in the midst of all this mindless, mechanical slaughter, we would have gone mad.
    Perhaps we of the Marines were more fortunate than those of the other services, because in addition to our saving laughter we had the cult of the Marine.
    No one could forget that he was a marine. It came out in the forest green of the uniform or the hour-long spit-polishing of the dark brown shoes. It was in the jaunty angle of the campaign hats worn by the gunnery sergeants. It was in the mark of the rifleman, the fingers of the gun hand longer than those of the other. It characterized every lecture, every drill or instruction circle. Sometimes a gunnery sergeant might interrupt rifle class to reminisce.
    “China, that’s the duty, lads. Give me ol’ Shanghai. Nothing like this hole. Barracks, good chow—we’d even eat off plates—plenty of liberty, dress blues. And did them Chinese gals love the marines! They liked Americans best, but you couldn’t get them out with a swabbie or a dog-face if they was a Gyrene around. That was the duty, lads.”
    And because a marine is a volunteer there is always a limit to his griping. He can complain so far, until he draws down this rebuke: “You asked for it, didn’t you?”
    Only once did I hear it possible that we might meet our match. At bayonet drill two lines of men faced each other. We held rifles to which were affixed bayonets sheathed in their scabbards. At a command the two lines met and clashed.
    But we did not suit the sergeant. Perhaps it was our disinclination to disembowel each other. He screamed for a halt and strode over to seize someone’s rifle.
    “Thrust, parry, thrust!” he shouted, swinging the rifle through the exercise.
    “Thrust, parry, thrust! Then the rifle butt. Hit him in the belly! Damn it, men, you’re going to face the most expert bayonet fighter in the world. You’re going to fight an enemy who loves cold steel! Look what they did in the Philippines! Look what they did in Hong Kong! I’m telling you, men, you’d better learn to use this thing if you don’t want some little yellow Jap slashing your belly wide open!”
    It was embarrassing.
    Even the other sergeants were a bit red-faced. I could not help