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A review by justabean_reads
Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific by Robert Leckie
adventurous
dark
funny
medium-paced
4.0
This is the 1957 memoir by the US Marine Crops machine gunner/scout Robert Leckie, who many of you will remember as "that fuck up with way too many sex scenes from The Pacific."
The memoir is one of the three tent poles the series is based on, and the one written closest to the war. As opposed to Burgin's book, which came out after the tv show went to air, Leckie's was started in 1951 and is meant as a work of creative non-fiction. That is, it's not just a war record, or setting the record straight (though apparently it started because he was grumpy with the musical South Pacific), but is meant to actually be a book people want to read, as written by a professional author, not a soldier with a helper-writer.
Having read a lot of the soldier/helper writer books that came out after the series (Winters x2, Guarnere/Heffron, Malarkey, and Burgin, plus Chester Nez), I will say that the professional author angle was a nice change. The prose in this is snappy, funny, full of life and character. It's very much what you'd expect from someone who did sports reporting in the 1950s. You get a lot more life and personality out of descriptions, and there's an actual narrative structure to the thing. That said, it also felt over studied in places, and I wondered if even during the events he was trying to find a way to put the war into words, and contextualise his experience through language. Some of it feels like he's worked on phrases so much they don't feel real any more, but like an image of what he thinks the feeling should be. And there were times I missed the more stripped down simple storytelling of a soldier as told to...
The book strictly covers the war, from Leckie signing up after Pearl Harbour to the Japanese surrender, including training, Guadalcanal, Melbourne, Cape Gloucester, Pavuvu, Paleliu, and various military hospitals along the way. No real names are used, and I enjoyed all the silly nick names he gave people. He is a lot more open and frank about the ups and downs of military life, the cruelties and the crimes, the stolen joys, the imperfections than a lot of the other authors. I vaguely feel like he and Burgin may have been in different wars.
On the whole, if you want a war memoir that's actually a pleasure to read on its own grounds, I'd pick this one of the bunch I've read so far, so long as you don't mind vaguely pretentious my classical allusions let me show them to you, etc.
The memoir is one of the three tent poles the series is based on, and the one written closest to the war. As opposed to Burgin's book, which came out after the tv show went to air, Leckie's was started in 1951 and is meant as a work of creative non-fiction. That is, it's not just a war record, or setting the record straight (though apparently it started because he was grumpy with the musical South Pacific), but is meant to actually be a book people want to read, as written by a professional author, not a soldier with a helper-writer.
Having read a lot of the soldier/helper writer books that came out after the series (Winters x2, Guarnere/Heffron, Malarkey, and Burgin, plus Chester Nez), I will say that the professional author angle was a nice change. The prose in this is snappy, funny, full of life and character. It's very much what you'd expect from someone who did sports reporting in the 1950s. You get a lot more life and personality out of descriptions, and there's an actual narrative structure to the thing. That said, it also felt over studied in places, and I wondered if even during the events he was trying to find a way to put the war into words, and contextualise his experience through language. Some of it feels like he's worked on phrases so much they don't feel real any more, but like an image of what he thinks the feeling should be. And there were times I missed the more stripped down simple storytelling of a soldier as told to...
The book strictly covers the war, from Leckie signing up after Pearl Harbour to the Japanese surrender, including training, Guadalcanal, Melbourne, Cape Gloucester, Pavuvu, Paleliu, and various military hospitals along the way. No real names are used, and I enjoyed all the silly nick names he gave people. He is a lot more open and frank about the ups and downs of military life, the cruelties and the crimes, the stolen joys, the imperfections than a lot of the other authors. I vaguely feel like he and Burgin may have been in different wars.
On the whole, if you want a war memoir that's actually a pleasure to read on its own grounds, I'd pick this one of the bunch I've read so far, so long as you don't mind vaguely pretentious my classical allusions let me show them to you, etc.