Confederate Flag
In celebration of victory, members of Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines raise a Confederate flag over Shuri Castle, which the author describes as “the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance.” He and other soldiers hailing from Dixie all cheer wildly while those “Yankees among us grumbled.” The only other reference to the Confederacy in the entire narrative is a comparison of modern day Marines to “fast-moving Confederate infantry” during the Civil War. Elsewhere, the author openly displays his repugnance toward his fellow Marines who desecrate Japanese corpses and derisive references to “Japs” are dominated by appearances in the quotes made by others. The heritage versus hate argument made against those celebrating the flag of the Confederacy is often difficult to determine, but in Sledge’s case the evidence points rather overwhelming his enthusiasm at this particular moment being a symbolic of a genuine respect for the South as the region he calls home. There is very little in the text to suggest otherwise.
Capt. Haldane
Haldane aka “Ack Ack” is the commanding officer of Company K, highly respected and beloved. Sledge calls him the finest officer he ever knew. Even had tragedy not struck, Haldane would have emerged in the book as a symbol of something, but his unexpected death serves a blow which results in the most extreme grief the author felt during the war; a deep and profound grief which continued long after the war was over. Exuding a sense of immortality, Ack Ack comes to symbolize, in the words of Sledge, “stability and direction in a world of violence, death, and destruction" which makes his being cut down in his prime all the more emotionally devastating.
The Shriveled Hand
The Marines routinely collected “souvenirs” from the corpses of Japanese soldiers: watches, knives, and even gold teeth. Countering that the Japanese conduct themselves in the same way does little to undermine the essential lack of humanity at play here, but nevertheless most such plundering is overlooked. Only when things get extreme such as the Marine trying to extract gold teeth from a Japanese soldier almost dead, but not quite almost enough to feel the torture is the fundamental indecency called into the question. The supreme symbol of how the madness and horror of war can desensitize otherwise perfectly normal and average psyches, however, is the shriveled severed hand from the corpse of a Japanese soldier wrapped in wax paper one Marine was prepared to take all the way back home. An outraged and repulsed Sledge would later recall that his friend had at that point become “a twentieth-century savage now, mild mannered though he still was.”
“Going Asiatic”
“Going Asiatic” is referenced by the author as “a Marine Corps term denoting a singular type of eccentric behavior characteristic of men who had served too long in the Far East.” It is co-opted for a much broader sense of symbolism used to describe any questionable changes in behavior which originated as a result of exposure to the madness of war which surrounded them. For instance, at the initial sight of the severed hand mentioned above, the first thing the author says to his friend is “Have you gone Asiatic?”
Doc Caswell
In one singular transformative moment, Doc Caswell becomes the story’s central symbol of retaining sanity and battling against the temptations of indecency and inhumanity. Although up to this moment, Sledge has refrained from joining along in the almost company-wide practice of extracting gold teeth from dead Japanese soldiers, a mouth glowing with treasure finally becomes too much to resist. Just as he begins to dig the blade of his knife into the mouth of the corpse, Doc Caswell gently prods his conscience by appealing to his health. Only later does the author realize that Doc’s warning against the teeth being contaminated with germs was really a warning against an entirely different sort of contamination.
