Helmet For My Pillow

One thing I like about living in the future....  You can be reading about an account of Marines landing on Guadalcanal's Red Beach on your Kindle, wonder where that is, and on the same device, different app, look up the battle maps and modern day pictures.  Amazing.  In the 80s I'd have had to get up, go downstairs, open up a World Book, letter G, and read the account in the encyclopedia, which was never enough detail.   (and I had been composing this post for a while, and Tam comes out and notices similar stuff about reading these days, right in the middle of my train of thought.  Middle, well, actually, her insight beat me by SIX YEARS.)

Leckie is famous because he was in The Pacific.  And he wrote this.  Helmet for a Pillow.  He was a writer before the war, so he ain't shabby at stringing words together.

The narrative is all about him and the 3 or 4 enlisted Marines near him at the time.  Leadership is mostly absent or hapless.  And the Marines are hapless at soldiering at the beginning.  Not like the Marines of today.  Whom I'd think would have a lot more training before landing on an enemy beach.

But Leckie left stuff out though.  The narrative goes from swilling beer and walking around at Camp LeJuene, to the landing.  And I know there was at least one practice landing in New Zealand before that.  But a book can only be so long.  Obiously, he trained.  He lands on Guadalcanal and knows most everything about operating a heavy machine gun and does so.  Training is implied. 

It's one man's personal account.  He's not gonna speak to big concepts and capital T truth much beyond that, but there is plenty to mine in another man's experience.  He's also froofing it up a bit, making is a war story, not a documentary.  As most war account do.  And like I said, he does it pretty well. 

A big reason I am reading if for later chapters about Peleliu.  Though he isn't going to pick out my grandfather for me.

He does sorta pick out his Regimental Commander.  Well likes, but the Skipper's nickname is Colonel Five by Five.   Because he is that tall and that wide.  Colonel James W. Webb?  Can't find a picture of him... Wait. Clifton Cates?  Marine division/battalion/regiment nomenclature always gets me.  Leckie was 2/1, as the convention goes.  H company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division.