Eugene B. Sledge is eager to enlist in the case of saving democracy from the fascist threat following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One year after that that day of infamy, the Mobile, Alabama resident makes the decision to join enlist in the Marine Corps. Upon his family’s advice, he takes advantage of the opportunity to enroll in officer training. Soon thereafter, however, he learns that this decision will delay by at least two years any chance of seeing any actual combat which he, stirred by patriotism and images of heroism on the battlefield, is eager to pursue. In his naïve innocence and optimism fueled countless portrayals of war as an exhibition of glorious heroism presented in sterile, antiseptic and bloodless black and white images, the young man writes of his fellow officer training students: “Most of us felt we had joined the Marines to fight, but here we were college boys again. The situation was more than many of us could stand.” And just like, Sledge reverses the decision to wait and enter the war as an officer and instead signs on the lowest of the low on the military totem pole: an infantryman.
With three-quarters of a century’s worth of novels, movies and TV shows to reflect upon, much of Sledge’s narrative may come across as almost a stereotype of a war story. For instance, enlistment lends to basic training where he must deal with Cpl. Doherty, one-hundred-sixty pounds of drill instructor muscle packed into less than six feet of mean. The experience that Sledge describes will be instantly familiar to anyone who has watched Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket from the cruelty and humiliation to the personification of the Marine’s rifle as his best friend. Sledge learns to despise his drill instructor just as every other teenager who joined the service has learned to do. Rather that explode from the pressure and use that best friend to enact revenge like Pyle does in the film, however, by the time Sledge has survived his experience in combat he has come to appreciate the point of Doherty’s torture. In retrospect with experience behind him, that torture becomes the preparation which Sledge credits as literally being the difference between survival and death and sanity and madness.
Once trained to become a killing machine, the story shifts overseas to the Pacific war theater where the stereotype of the World War II movie about a platoon in combat shifts into high gear. Immediately, the reader is introduced the members of Company K who all sport colorful nicknames, most of which seem absolutely inappropriate. The author becomes “Sledgehammer” whose foxhole companion is “Snafu” Shelton under the command of Captain Andrew “Ack Ack” Haldane.” In addition, there is “Hillbilly” Jones, the anonymous despised lieutenant referred to only as “Shadow,” the replacement machine-gunner called “Kathy” not because that’s his wife’s name, but a girl he has become obsessed with. From the point at which these men are introduced to the point at which Sledge finally experiences combat, all vestiges of stereotypical war stories come to an end.
The engagement of Company K at Peleliu sets the stage for brutally honest and brutally violent portrait of World War II combat that those who poured in to watch John Wayne win the war single-handedly on the silver screen never saw. The bulk of the book details two particular battles as described by Sledge. They are in a sense ironically juxtaposed: the officers confidently predict things at Peleliu will go so smoothly that the whole thing will be over in a couple of days. Instead, it is a protracted engagement made all the worse by Japanese suicide raids. Worst of all, however, is the loss of their beloved CO, Capt. Haldane.
The next major landing is at Okinawa and this time the big brass predicts that it will be long, hard and result in many casualties. Just as at Peleliu, the exact opposite is what occurs: the landing goes quickly and so effortless that Company K suffers not one casualty. The rest of the battle of Okinawa, of course, was quite so efficiently handled.
What separates Sledge’s account of both the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa is precisely the reverse of those aspects of the book which are stereotypical. What is absolutely not a stereotypical aspect of accounts of World War II combat is the visceral description of the reality of war. Sledge refuses to hide behind the emotional protection of wartime heroics and the glorified image of the Marine. His account of combat is one in which the two dominant images are fear and filth. He confesses to feeling fear throughout the engagements, but then goes on to describe how incessant and prolonged artillery shelling drives him almost to madness as a result of the terror. The filth is ever-present to the point that he actually wonders in writing why “this important factor in our daily lives has received so little attention from historians and often is omitted from otherwise excellent personal memoirs by infantrymen.”
And that is precisely what separates Sledge’s account of World War II from the overwhelming abundance of others both fictional and historical. Sledge provides a portrait of the soldiers making up the “greatest generation” that belies the whitewashed images flickering through a thousand movies, hundreds of television shows and countless stories. He writes of inhumane atrocities perpetrated upon the corpses of both armies by both sides, refusing to censor such horrific scenes as a Marine trying to remove the gold teeth of a Japanese soldier near-death, but not yet dead or the hated Ivy League student who makes a habit of urinating into the mouths of dead Japanese bodies.
Sledge provides an almost unique account in the annals of World War II literature in which he paints the experience in terms that most people might associated only Americans at war since Vietnam: a “ghastly, macabre… kaleidoscope of the unreal, as though designed by some fiendish ghoul to cause even the most hardened and calloused observer among us to recoil in horror and disbelief.”
By the time the nightmare is over, the teenage boy who sacrificed two additional years of innocence and safety in exchange for living his dream of fighting for America has become the battle-scarred witness to a holocaust whose opinions on engagement with an enemy have undergone a profoundly and significant transformation: “War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste.”
