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

have annihilated us. The Japanese would have done to us what our military ancestor, Washington, prevented the French from doing completely to Braddock, what our forefathers did to the British on the retreat from Lexington.
    We saw none of the enemy. That day was a dull, lost witness to the cycle of the sun, of which I have neither memory nor regret.
    The night I shall never forget.
    I awoke in the middle of it to see the sky on fire. So it seemed. It was like the red mist of my childhood dream when I imagined Judgment to have come while I played baseball on the Castle Grounds at home. We were bathed in red light, as though fixed in the eye of Satan. Imagine a myriad of red traffic lights glowing in the rain, and you will have a replica of the world in which I awoke.
    The lights were the flares of the enemy. They hung above the jungle roof, swaying gently on their parachutes, casting their red glow about. Motors throbbed above. They were those of Japanese seaplanes, we learned later. We thought they were hunting us.
    But they were actually the eyes of a mighty enemy naval armada that had swept into Sealark Channel. Soon we heard the sound of cannonading, and the island trembled beneath us. There came flashes of light—white and red—and great rocking explosions.
    The Japs were hammering out one of their greatest naval victories. It was the Battle of Savo Island, what we learned to call more accurately the Battle of the Four Sitting Ducks. They were sinking three American cruisers—the Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria —and one Australian cruiser—the Canberra —as well as damaging one other American cruiser and a U.S. destroyer.
    The flares had been to illuminate the fight. At one point, the Japanese turned their searchlights on. These accounted for the eerie lights we saw, as we huddled in our slimy jungle.
    It took us hardly a day to withdraw from the rain forest, although we had spent two days getting into it. But we knew the way back; we had not known the way in.
    Amphibious tractors laden with food and water awaited us when we emerged and came down the slopes into the kunai fields. Chuckler was in front of me. He slipped on the last slope. As he fell, his tripod caught him wickedly behind the head.
    He got up and kicked it. Then he swore. He swore with the shrill fury of exasperation.
    He bent and grasped the tripod as though it were a living thing and he had it by the throat, turning his wrists to it as though he could choke the life from it—this hard cruel unbending thing in which was now concentrated the frustration, the hunger, the thirst, the wetness and the anxieties of these past two days. He flung it then. It sailed through the air and landed with an uncaring clank in the tall kunai.
    Chuckler sat down and lit a cigarette, and that was where the battalion deployed as the men came spilling down from the hills in their mud-caked formless green twill, with their ugly cartridge belts and bowl helmets, their slung rifles and their stubble of beard, and the eyes that were just beginning to stare. Water and cans of C-rations came streaming off the amtracks. When we had refilled our canteens and our bellies, and sucked at blessed cigarettes, we were up again and off.
    It was dusk when we reached the beach. We saw wrecked and smoking ships—a clean, unshipped expanse of water between Guadalcanal and Florida Island.
    Our Navy was gone.
    Gone.
    We rested there. Columns of men were trudging up the beach. Their feet clapped softly against the sand. The sun had sunk behind the jungle. Night rolled toward us from the eastward-lying sea, gathering purplish over Florida as though it would come upon us in a bound.
    Silhouetted against the gathering dark were the men. In the half light, they seemed to have lost the dimension of depth; they seemed shades. They moved, these weary men, as though chained to one another, with the soulless, mechanical tread of zombies. Behind them, low on the horizon, the reflected sun glowed dully.