Helmet For My Pillow: From Parris Island To The Pacific Quotes
"The war with Japan was not yet four weeks old, Wake Island had fallen. Pearl Harbor was a real tragedy, a burning bitter humiliation."
"It was like so much else in this war that was to produce unbounded heroism, yet not a single stirring song: it was resigned."
"I had sought to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor, but the Marines had insisted that I be circumcised."
"But none of this meant much to me. I was aware of my father beside me, bending into the wind with me."
"‘God keep you,’ she followed me to the door with sad eyes and said."
"‘Where you are going it will not be easy,’ the gunnery sergeant said."
"But he was gentle and kind enough when he said goodbye to the thirty or forty of us who boarded the train."
"Green and blue has always seemed to me an odd combination of colors."
"I never heard it done better than by our sergeant."
"Character clings to clothes that have gone into the discard, as skin and hair stick to adhesive tape."
"I remember the oil stoves and how we slipped out at night, buckets in hand, to pilfer oil from the other companies’ drums."
"I never saw my family again for nearly three years."
"It was a wonderful way to ride off to war, like the Russian nobleman in War and Peace."
"We were like shadows fleeing, ever fleeing; the disembodied phantoms of the motion picture screen; condemned men; souls in hell."
"It was a lying map and it got us into trouble from the outset."
"We were drenched with sweat. Our progress through the kunai patches had nearly prostrated us."
"Oh, what a sweet sight would we have been for Japanese eyes! What a chance for massacre they missed!"
"It is nothing to be sopping in the jungle rain forest, and it is better if it be water than sweat."
"We knew nothing of our enemy, so we feared him."
"Once there came a burst of gunfire. It shattered the night."
"In that dismal dawn, the scraping of their entrenching tools was as plaintive as the scratching of a mouse."
"Anxiety was on his face as though carved there by the night’s events."
"We advanced on the enemy with all the stealth of a circus."
"It is glorious to drink the wine of the enemy."
"The bombs were not for us, but for our poor comrades on the airfield."
"The eyes are rounder. The tendency to stare is more pronounced."
"Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice."
"The world is full of the sacrifices of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim."
"Victory was possible, that was all; it would be easy or difficult, quick or prolonged, but it would be victory."
"The eyes seemed to get auburn, like the color of an Irish setter."
"We felt like theology students whose instructor takes his leave after presenting the most compelling arguments against the existence of God."
"Let me rather die out here than be tolerated down there."
"But when it rained heavily or persistently, I was done."
"I think of Judgment Day. I think of Götterdämmerung; I think of the stars exploding."
"Each morn-ing_Up with the sparrow_, As swift as an arrow_ Just leaving the bow."
"The glory was gone out of it now. Gone was Guadalcanal."
"I am not suggesting that because of their boldness or independence the brig-rats be forgiven."
"Every foot of the way in these progressions made at an odd, doglike pace, there follows your prison chaser."
"This time there was a general ejaculation of disbelief."
"But it was too late. Across the wharf and out of the great shadow cast by the ship came loping the officer of the day."
"We repose in the hollow of the hand of God, even we prisoners do this, and our guard must stand sleepless and erect, wary and fretful."
"The evening bread box has been and gone; there is nothing to expect, but the passage of a day and the approach of freedom."
"I've got another fifteen days to do—and it's my fourth visit."
"As veterans, we would talk more and joke more about the place we were going than the condition of life we would enter; of the latter, we had no doubts."
"But now I must defend myself against a pack of dogs that had gathered silently about me after I landed in their alley."
"Occasionally, a shade would rise to his feet and draw a cup of water from the tap, or take a pinch of salt from the grains spilled carelessly in the bottom of the box."
"So we plied our way up the Australian coast, sailing inside the Great Barrier Reef."
"The hand is the artisan of the soul. It is the second member of the human trinity of head and hand and heart."
"But once the officers’ mess appears... we know that victory is ours."
"There was no underbrush to be cleared, but there was ubiquitous mud to be conquered."
"But when they came and told us that none of us were going home on rotation, we strangled hope and turned into wooden soldiers."
"You should’ve seen it when they threw those tanks at us! We knocked them out with machine guns and hand grenades!"
"The vital force was fled. A bullet or a mortar fragment had torn a hole in these frail vessels and the substance had leaked out."
"It was a moment of supreme confidence. A fierce joy gripped me, banishing that silly conviction of death, and I ran my eye over all that bristling scene of conquest."
"Gone the camaraderie. Gone Guadalcanal. Gone the pagan naïveté of the first battle. How much easier to be a pagan again and to refuse to take the thing seriously."
"The glorious Fifth Marines have gone through, suh, and have achieved theah objective."
"To see a hand lying alone...was to see war in all its wantonness."
"Heroes turn traitor, warriors age and grow soft—but a victim is changeless, sacrifice is eternal."
"That is why, with the immemorial insight of mankind, there are gay songs and colorful bands to send them off—to fortify their failing hearts, not to quicken their lust for blood."
"And now to that Victim whose Sign rose above the world two thousand years ago, to be menaced now by that other sign now rising, I say a prayer of contrition."