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

us. “We heard firing up here. What happened?”
    We told him. He nodded, but he was not listening; he was still intent on that yelling horde sweeping over the sandspit. When he spoke again it was to tell us who had been killed. There were more than a dozen from H Company, besides more than a score of wounded. Four or five of the dead were from our platoon. Two of them had been hacked to death. A Japanese scouting party had found them asleep in their hole on the river bank and sliced them into pieces.
    It is not always or immediately saddening to hear “who got it.” Except for one’s close buddies, it is difficult to feel deep, racking grief for the dead, and now, hearing the lieutenant tolling off the names, I had to force my face into a mask of mourning, deliberately adorn my heart with black, as it were, for I was shocked to gaze inward and see no sorrow there. Rather than permit myself to know myself a monster (as I seemed, then) I deliberately deluded myself by feigning bereavement. So did we all.
    Only when I heard the name of the doctor who had joked about the wormy rice did a real pang pierce my heart.
    Lieutenant Ivy-League arose, still staring into the river, and said, “I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to write those letters.” He turned and left.
    We got the second gun emplaced that morning. Then, the Hoosier and I sneaked off to the beach.
    Our regiment had killed something like nine hundred of them. Most of them lay in clusters or heaps before the gun pits commanding the sandspit, as though they had not died singly but in groups. Moving among them were the souvenir hunters, picking their way delicately as though fearful of booby traps, while stripping the bodies of their possessions.
    Only the trappings of war change. Only these distinguish the Marine souvenir hunter, bending over the fallen Jap, from Hector denuding slain Patroclus of the borrowed armor of Achilles.
    One of the marines went methodically among the dead armed with a pair of pliers. He had observed that the Japanese have a penchant for gold fillings in their teeth, often for solid gold teeth. He was looting their very mouths. He would kick their jaws agape, peer into the mouth with all the solicitude of a Park Avenue dentist—careful, always careful not to contaminate himself by touch—and yank out all that glittered. He kept the gold teeth in an empty Bull Durham tobacco sack, which he wore around his neck in the manner of an amulet. Souvenirs, we called him.
    The thought of him and of the other trophy-takers suggested to me, as I returned from the pits, that across the river lay an unworked mine of souvenirs to which I might rightfully stake a claim.
    When I had shot the Japanese fleeing down the river bank, something silver had flashed when the first one fell. I imagined it to be the sun’s reflection off an officer’s insignia. If he had been an officer, he must have been armed with a saber. This most precious prize of all the war I was determined to get.
    I slipped through the barbed wire and clambered down the bank. I left my clothes at the water’s edge, like a schoolboy on a summer’s day, and slipped into the water. I had a bayonet between my teeth; still the schoolboy, fancying myself a bristling pirate.
    I swam breaststroke. Not even the fire of the enemy would induce me to put my face into that putrid stream. The water was thick with scum. My flesh crept while I swam, neck stiff and head erect like a swan’s, the cold feel of the bayonet between my teeth, and my saliva running fast around it so that it threatened to slip out at any moment.
    I paddled carefully around the body of a big Japanese soldier, lying in the water with one foot caught in the underbrush. He swayed gently, like a beached rowboat. He seemed unusually bloated, until I perceived that his blouse was stuffed with cooked rice and that his pants were likewise loaded to the knees, where he had tied leather thongs to keep the rice from falling out. “Chow