Atrocity Exhibition
Thanks to so many World War II movies being made before the collapse of censorship and most movies about Vietnam taking place afterward, there is a collective assumption that American soldiers always behaved honorably and with valor until the guerrilla conflict in Southeast Asia. Through horrifically graphic imagery, Sledge reveals this assumption is profoundly misplaced as a result of cinematic propaganda:
“The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand…the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth…The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer's lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out…he made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out.”
Filth
Sledge makes it known that one aspect of basic Marine training is cleanliness. It is drilled into them that a Marine may need to occasionally clean his language and his mind, but his weapon, uniform and person are never exhibited in a state that needs cleaning; they are at all times pristine. Once he gets to the battlefield, however, Sledge is forced to face over and over the impossibility of living up to this standard. “Filth” becomes the imagery that defines life during wartime:
“The infantryman’s calloused hands were nearly blackened by weeks of accumulation of rifle oil, mosquito repellant...dirt,dust, and general filth.”
“…immersion foot…was an unforgettable sensation of extreme personal filth and painful discomfort.”
“…we reached the point of rage over these filthy things [land crabs] and chased them out from under boxes, seabags, and cots.”
“The personal bodily filth imposed upon the combat infantryman by living conditions on the battlefield was difficult for me to tolerate. It bothered almost everyone I knew.”
Staving Off Madness
The ever-present danger of death is, of course, uppermost in the mind of any soldier during combat and a reality that those who have never come close to the military can immediately grasp. What may be more difficult to fully understand for those who have never been there is that there is another demon always lurking wait to pounce upon soldiers, especially those forced to endure prolonged periods of incessant warfare. Sledge describes in extraordinarily honest detail and visceral imagery the awareness of this demon and the effort to keep it at bay:
“...prolonged shelling simply magnified all the terrible physical and emotional effects of one shell…artillery was an invention of hell. The onrushing whistle and scream of the big steel package of destruction was the pinnacle of violent fury and the embodiment of pent-up evil...the essence of violence and of man's inhumanity to man....shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one's mind almost beyond the brink of sanity. After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted…I often had to restrain myself and fight back a wild, inexorable urge to scream, to sob, and to cry…feared that if I ever lost control of myself under shell fire my mind would be shattered.”
The Waiting
As he will make abundantly clear afterward, the waiting is not the hardest part of war. Nevertheless, it is omnipresent and hellish and in its own distinct and unique way certainly as bad as anything other a barrage of shells driving one closer to madness. As the author observes, the suspense of not knowing what is going to come is unbearable and expressed through the imagery of bodily reaction:
“I broke out in a cold sweat as the tension mounted with the intensity of the bombardment. My stomach was tied in knots. I had a lump in my throat and swallowed only with great difficulty. My knees nearly buckled, so I clung weakly to the side of the tractor. I felt nauseated and feared that my bladder would surely empty itself and reveal me to be the coward I was. But the men around me looked just about the way I felt.”
