Free Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific by Robert Leckie

could only glower, at which he was expert.
    From somewhere came the command: “Move out!”
    We formed staggered squads and slogged off.
    We left our innocence on Red Beach. It would never be the same. For ten minutes we had had something like bliss, a flood of well-being following upon our unspeakable relief at finding our landing unopposed. Even as we stepped from the white glare of the beach into the sheltering shade of the coconut groves, there broke out behind us the yammer of antiaircraft guns and the whine of speeding aircraft. The Japs had come. The war was on. It would never be the same.
    We plodded through the heat-bathed patches of kunai grass. We crossed rivers. We recrossed them. We climbed hills. We got into the jungle. We cut our passage with machetes or followed narrow, winding trails. We were lost every step of the way.
    At intervals we would pass little knots of officers, bending anxiously over a map. That pitiful map! Here there was Red Beach, which was right enough, and there was the Tenaru River, which it was not, and there were the coconut groves—miles and miles of them, neatly marked out by symbols looking more like fleurs-de-lis than coconuts—and you would think this whole vast island was under cultivation by Lever Brothers.
    It was a lying map and it got us into trouble from the outset.
    The officers were apprehensive.
    They knew we were lost.
    “Hey, Lieutenant—where we headed?”
    “Grassy Knoll.”
    “Where’zat?”
    “Up ahead, where the Japs are.”
    Our very naïveté spoke. Grassy Knoll … up ahead … where the Japs are. Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, hide-and-seek—we were playing a game. Even the division commander had calmly announced an expectation of taking his evening meal on the summit of Grassy Knoll.
    “Synchronize your watches, gentlemen—the assault has begun.”
    Last one up to Grassy Knoll is a rotten egg.
    Ah, well, we had much to learn, and five months in which to learn it; and there would be precious few who would get to Grassy Knoll in the process.
    So began, on the very first day, the frustration. So, too, began the loneliness. The sounds of battle subsiding behind us had an ominous tinge, the faces of the officers we passed had an anxious tone. The Jap was closing the ring, and we—poor gallant fools—we thought we were pursuing him!
    We were drenched with sweat. Our progress through the kunai patches had nearly prostrated us. Now, in the clammy cool of the rain forest, our sweat-darkened dungarees clung to us with chill tenacity.
    “Hey, Lucky,” the Hoosier called. “Ah bet Ah could get a quart of Calvert off your back. Wring out your jacket, Lucky, and give ever’-body a shot.”
    It was not whiskey we wanted, though. For the first time in my life I was experiencing real thirst. The heat, and now the dripping, enervating forest, seemed to have dehydrated me. I had water in my canteen, but I dared not touch it. Who could tell when it might be replenished? We had been walking three hours or more, and had seen no water.
    Then, in that sudden way of the jungle, there was revealed to us a swift-running river.
    With incautious shouts we fell upon her. She dissolved us, this river. We became a yelling, splashing, swilling, milling mass, and even Lieutenant Ivy-League shared the general retreat from discipline. Oh, what a sweet sight would we have been for Japanese eyes! What a chance for massacre they missed!
    Some even lay on their backs in this shallow stream—the lyrically named Ilu—and opened their mouths, letting the water plunge into their systems as though into yawning drains. Lieutenant Ivy-League was swinging water to his lips by the helmetful, bellowing meanwhile, “Don’t drink! It may be poisoned! Don’t drink until you’ve used your purifying pills.”
    Everyone nodded gravely and went right ahead with the orgy, drinking, drinking, drinking—sighing like a lover as the sweet, swift little river swept the salt sweat from our