Helmet for My Pillow

Leckie’s memoir of his own Pacific war: he enlisted in the Marines the day after Pearl Harbor and served as a machine gunner and scout with the 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu. The tone is that of a newspaperman who was also a private — funny about the Marine Corps, profane about officers, and then abruptly not funny at all once the fighting starts. Alongside With the Old Breed it is one of the two first-person accounts HBO’s The Pacific was adapted from.

Context: The list carries both this and Sledge’s memoir, which is a deliberate pairing: two men in the same division on some of the same islands, one a journalist and one a scientist, writing the same campaign differently.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Robert Leckie — the author, who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and later wrote military history professionally.
• With the Old Breed — the companion memoir on this list, by a mortarman in the same division.
• World War II — the Pacific campaign.
• War — at the level of the individual rifleman.