A war story, and "write what you know" · 8:33pm Jul 12th, 2023
This is from Helmet For My Pillow, a non-fictional recounting of World War 2 by Robert Leckie, a Marine who fought at Guadalcanal and other places in the Pacific. I'm trying to figure out why this story hits me more powerfully than the combat stories in the same book, and how or whether I can write anything like it.
Brick, from my squad, suffered terribly from the ulcers. His legs were thick with them. He suffered from the heat, too, as did Red. It was an ordeal for both of them, both having the fairest skin to match their flaming hair and light-blue eyes. But they reacted differently.
Brick succumbed. Each day when the sun reached its zenith he retired to the pit and lay with his face against the cool water cans, a wet piece of cloth on his brow. Sometimes he passed out, or became so exhausted he was unable to move. Only assignment to working parties at cooler points on the lines, or a blessed visitation from the rain, saved him from his daily agony.
Red became a mole. He kept his helmet forever jammed down over his eyes, and covered his body as though he were in the Arctic. He withdrew within himself.
He ceased to talk to us, except to dispense medical counsel with an aplomb rivaled only by an outrageous ignorance of his subject, or else to carry on a sort of frantic monologue concerning his chances of being assigned to duty near his home town of Utica, should he survive Guadalcanal.
But that helmet! He wore it always. He wore it for fear of the heat and for fear of the bombs. He slept with it on. He bathed with it on. It was not uncommon to see him, standing in the middle of the stream near E Company’s lines to our rear, his body ridiculously white—his helmet on!
To mention it to him, to shout “Red, take that damned helmet off!” was to draw a look of animal hatred. Under the helmet, his face became small and sharp and hateful, like an animal with pointed teeth.
Soon the helmet became a fixation with us. We wanted it off. It was a sign that Red was going loco—and after him, who? We schemed to rid ourselves of it.
“The only thing we can do, is shoot it full of holes,” said Chuckler. We were squatting on the hillside, where we always did, midway between the Chuckler’s pit and mine. Red sat apart from us, molelike, his helmet slumped over his inward-looking eyes. Hoosier reflected and grinned slyly. “Who’s gonna do the shooting?”
“Me,” said the Chuckler.
“Oh, no, you’re not. We’ll draw straws.”
The Chuckler protested, but we outvoted him. It made no difference. He won the draw.
The plan was for Runner to engage Red in conversation while I came up behind him and knocked off his helmet. Chuckler was to spray it with machine gun bullets while it rolled down the hill.
Runner strolled over and sat down beside Red, wondering out loud if it would be possible—once we were delivered from Guadalcanal—to obtain a soft billet upstate. Red immediately shifted the venue to Utica, and the question to his heart. I stole up behind him and knocked off his helmet.
Chuckler’s gun gave roaring, stuttering voice.
The twin shocks of the loss of his helmet and the sound of the gun sent Red to his feet as though from a spring released. He clutched his head, his unkempt flaming mop, as though the top of it had gone off with the helmet. There was terror on his face. Everyone was jumping, waving his arms and whooping.
“Let ‘er go, Zeke!”
“Yip, yip, yip—yahoo!”
“Hey, Red—too bad your silly head ain’t in that helmet!”
“Shoot ‘er, Chuck—shoot the sides out of the blasted thing!”
“Yaaaa—hoo!”
Filled with holes, the helmet rolled out of sight beneath the hill. Runner yelled to the Chuckler to cease fire and dashed down to retrieve it, setting it atop a barbed-wire pole where it was shot into a sieve. Then it was brought up the hill and flung at Red’s feet.
He gazed at it in horror. He turned to look at us and there was not even hatred in his eyes, only gathering tears and the dumb pleading look of the animal that has been beaten to the ground.
We had half hoped that he would laugh. But he wept and ran up the hill to the Battalion Aid Station.
There he stayed, until a new helmet was found for him and he could be persuaded to return to our pits. When he did, his manner was more distant than ever and his chin strap was never again undone. Nor did anyone dare joke with him about the time we shot his helmet into bits.
This story feels more real and honest to me than any combat story. Maybe because I've never been in combat. But I get more of a sense of who these people are, how they relate to each other, and what kind of stress they're under. Hopefully someone with combat experience will comment on that.
Everybody in this story is borderline crazy, Red (maybe) for always wearing his helmet, and everybody else (definitely) for being so bothered by Red's behavior that they shot his helmet up with a machine gun. Not completely crazy, like men sometimes get in combat. This is a sign of a slow, simmering craziness, like the steam escaping from a poorly-sealed pressure cooker. This is a tragedy shown more-clearly by the shadow it cast than it could be by the thing itself.
The hell of it is that I think I could write a pretty good combat scene, based just on stories I've read written by people who were in combat; but how could anyone come up with something like Red's story who hadn't been there? It's the kind of story that makes people say "write what you know", and "truth is stranger than fiction." It makes me wonder whether I have the right life experience to be a writer. Doesn't have to be a war (thankfully); I recently read a great story about people working at a dry cleaners. But I couldn't have written that story either.
It's a great job of balancing two different elements. If only one of the two reactions were listed, it would seem forced. Three might have worked, but at the expense of less focus on the target reaction. It's a bit like JK Rowling used focus in Harry Potter, with a character that everybody reacts around, which pushes the reader down a particular line of thought. "Everybody *else* is crazy, but this one in particular stands out."
That's a fantastic story! And yeah, it does make you wonder how you could write anything as genuine and compelling as that without the life experience to back it up. As another famous example, George Orwell was a police officer in British Burma, a tramp in England and France, and a partisan fighter in Spain, so when he writes Burmese Days, Down and Out, and Homage to Catalonia, he's writing from things he knows, and it shows.
However, as a famous counterexample, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote the fantastic Earthsea stories - about an archipelago setting where sailing is the dominant form of transport - without much in the way of sailing experience or knowledge. And you wouldn't think that from reading them. She says, in the essay "Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?":
... not to say I think people should write stuff they know nothing about. But it's clearly possible to create compelling stories that strike genuine, if not true, without a life story to match.
So, in conclusion, there's hope for authors with boring lives! Woo!
Reminds me a ton of Lord of the Flies, where a small thing becomes big becomes bullying becomes violent.
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Phew, I won't lie, that's a relief! Seriously; for example, Baltasar Gracián had a quite monotonous and everything-but-interesting life, and he's one of the best authors of Spanish literature, while Arturo Pérez Reverte has had the life of an adventurer, that has been in any kind of place, lived every kind of situation and talked with every kind of people, and he's just a decent author of Spanish narrative. I suppose that, in the end, life experience is just like a resource; lack of life experience does not prevent one from being an author, while to have life experience does not necessarily make an author a good one. Therefore, we can write pony without having to feel like a phony! 😁
I haven't been in a war myself, but I recall an instance where a few thousand gallons of aviation grade fuel were discovered in the wrong compartment (or three). Given the area of the spill, the proximity to other machinery spaces, and other assorted flammable objects nearby - some inanimate and some extremely animate - the ship was promptly set to general quarters
I was only temporarily assigned to the ship for this deployment, and thus not part of any damage control team. I had been through simulated fires before, the sort where you descend four flights of stairs through oily black smoke, only to stop when the handrail singes your palms through the leather gloves, and the only source of light is an L shaped pyre following the wall up to the overhead - a silhouette of several men blotting out the mouth of the blaze. The hands on your back both pushing you forward, and hanging on for guidance.
But that was only training. And a much smaller amount of fuel. Four hose teams had assembled in the hanger deck, ready to charge down four flights of ladder. We waited like that for some time, as others attempted to return the pond of JP-5 to it's proper receptacle. Not having a slot on the DC roster, much less my own coveralls, boots, helmet and SCBA gear, I was basically useless. In a bid to do something, I ran back to the galley and stole a water cooler along with a stack of paper cups, and booked it back to the hanger like some frat boy late to the keg party.
Nothing caught on fire. But nobody passed out from heat exhaustion while standing in their gear for an hour either. You win some, you lose some.
Well, "write what you know" is one of two (at least two) paths to being a good writer.
The other path is cultivating an enormous talent for deception. Fiction writing is professional lying in many ways. If you can fake sincerity, you've got it made!
Hopefully you can write about things you don’t know, because if that weren’t the case, there would no sci-fi works, and everything that would get written would be autobiographies, which I hate.
I feel like while writing what you know is valuable - it's easy, and fun, and instructive - it's also important and possible to produce good works by listening and thinking critically. I've never been a teacher, but I have had two teachers tell me my story about Cheerilee felt true to life. I and my friends came up with a setting for a cyberpunk dystopia almost eight years ago, and as time moves on, we find eerie parallels to some of the stranger, more particular elements we came up with in our own world. I've also found relatability to my own life in works by people that, as far as I know, did not share those particular experiences.
Study the world, put yourself in someone else's shoes, think through their situation, and the truth will out.