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

battle.
    So it was that our ears prickled at strange new sounds: the lighter, shingle-snapping crack of the Japanese rifle, the gargle of their extremely fast machine guns, the hiccup of their light mortars.
    To our left, a stream of red tracers arched over to the enemy bank. Distance and the cacophony being raised around us seemed to invest them with silence, as though they were bullets fired in a deaf man’s world.
    “It’s the Indian’s gun,” I whispered.
    “Yeah. But those tracers are bad stuff. I’m glad we took ‘em out of our belts. He keeps up that tracer stuff, and they’ll spot him, sure.”
    They did.
    They set up heavy machine guns in an abandoned amtrack on their side of the river and they killed the Indian.
    Their slugs slammed through the sandbags. They ate their way up the water-jacket of his gun and they ate their way into his heart. They killed him, killed the Indian kid, the flat-faced, anonymous prizefighter from Pittsburgh. He froze on the trigger with their lead in his heart; he was dead, but he killed more of them. He wasn’t anonymous, then; he wasn’t a prelim boy, then.
    They wounded his assistant. They blinded him. But he fought on. The Marines gave him the Navy Cross and Hollywood made a picture about him and the Tenaru Battle. I guess America wanted a hero fast, a live one; and the Indian was dead.
    The other guy was a hero, make no mistake about it; but some of us felt sad that the poor Indian got nothing.
    It was the first organized Japanese attack on Guadalcanal, the American fighting man’s first challenge to the Japanese “superman.” The “supermen” put bullets into the breast of the Indian, but he fired two hundred more rounds at them.
    How could the Marines forget the Indian?
    Now we had tracer trouble of a different kind. We had begun to take turns firing, and I was on the gun. The tracers came toward me, alongside me. Out of the river dark they came. You do not see them coming. They are not there; then, there they are, dancing around you on tiptoe; sparkles gay with the mirth of hell.
    They came toward me, and time stretched out. There were but a few bursts, I am sure, but time was frozen while I leaned away from them.
    “Chuckler,” I whispered. “We’d better move. It looks like they’ve got the range. Maybe we ought to keep moving. They won’t be able to get the range that way. And maybe they’ll think we’ve got more guns than we really have.”
    Chuckler nodded. He unclamped the gun and I slipped it free of its socket in the tripod. Chuckler lay back and pulled the tripod over him. I lay back and supported the gun on my chest. We moved backward, like backstroke swimmers, almost as we had moved when we stole the case of beer out of the North Carolina shanty, trying, meanwhile, to avoid making noise that might occur during one of those odd and suspenseful times of silence that befalls battles—noise which might attract fire from the opposite bank—if anyone was there.
    For, you see, we never knew if there really was anyone there. We heard noises; we fired at them. We felt shells explode on our side and heard enemy bullets; but we could not be sure of their point of origin.
    But, now, there was no enemy fire while we squirmed to our new position. We set up the gun once more and resumed firing, tripping our bursts at sounds of activity as before. We remained here fifteen minutes, then sought a new position. Thus we passed the remainder of the battle; moving and firing, moving and firing.
    Dawn seemed to burst from a mortar tube. The two coincided; the rising bombardment of our mortars and the arrival of light. We could see, now, that the coconut grove directly opposite us had no life in it. There were bodies, but no living enemy.
    But to the left, toward the ocean and across the Tenaru, the remnant of this defeated Japanese attacking force was being annihilated. We could see them, running. Our mortars had got behind them. We were walking our fire in; that is