The dogs of war

Author Robert Leckie is pictured at work for the Associated Press in Buffalo, N.Y., two years after the end of World War II.

I've spent a lifetime reading books about World War II in the Pacific, trying to understand what my father and my uncle talked about only in guarded terms when I was growing up.

My father was a Navy Seabee during the campaign to wrest the Solomon Islands from the Japanese, and my Uncle Joe was stationed with the Army on Corregidor in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked; he spent the rest of the war as a POW.

I've read fiction and non-fiction alike. There can be much truth in fiction. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough when I first laid hands on Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead," written in 1948. I devoured "Battle Cry" by Leon Uris, written in 1953. Both novelists served in the Pacific and were what Shakespeare called "the dogs of war," meaning they were soldiers.

On the non-fiction front, I spent a summer about 30 years ago reading books by survivors of Japanese POW camps in an attempt to understand what my Uncle Joe had experienced. I remember sitting under the big maple tree in my back yard on hot, sticky days feeling a chill as I read accounts of the brutality they endured.

Perversely, fiction was more engaging -- probably because the novels were by men who went on to have illustrious careers as authors. To be blunt, they were better writers.

The first-hand, non-fiction accounts were more powerful. Their authors might have had only one book in them, but theirs were tales of unvarnished truth.

Now I have found a book that is a personal account of one Marine's experiences in the Pacific that is as engaging as any World War II novel and as powerful as the best non-fiction.

It's "Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific," a 1957 non-fiction account by Robert Leckie. While some might consider the title to be trite, the book is riveting, laced equally with bravery, wit, pathos and humor, and I highly recommend it.

Leckie served in the 1st Marine Division as a machine gunner and intelligence scout during the Battle of Guadalcanal and in later campaigns. "Helmet for My Pillow" and another book, "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" by Eugene Sledge, were the cornerstones for the scriptwriters of the recent HBO series "The Pacific."

Leckie, who later wrote many more books on military history, was also a sportswriter. (Despite having spent my life as a journalist, I've only written perhaps a handful of sports stories. But I admire good sportswriters and their colorful and insightful way of stringing sentences together to put the reader in the center of the action.)

Consider this from Leckie's description of his part in the desperate, deadly battle for Peleliu at the end of "Helmet for My Pillow":

"I ran with the heat shimmering in waves from the coral, with the sweat oiling my joints and the fear drying my mouth, with the shells exploding behind me, closer, ever closer -- and the air filled with the angry voices of the shrapnel demanding my life. I ran with an image in my mind of the Japanese gunner atop his ridge, bringing each burst carefully closer to my flying rear, chasing me across that baking table in a monstrous game of cat-and-mouse, gleeful at each greater burst of speed called forth by a closer explosion -- and then, tiring of the sport, lifting the gun and dropping one before me."

The war ended moments later for Leckie. A nearby ammunition dump was hit. The shock wave smashed into him with all its force. "I had been shattered. No good, a dry husk. Modern war had had me. A giant lemon squeezer had crushed me dry."

Fifty-four years and too many wars later, the words resonate still. And Leckie's story is as compelling as the snatches of stories I overheard my father and my uncle hinting at -- when they thought the children weren't listening -- in the years after they came home from World War II.