With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [6]
In disbelief I stared at the face as I realize that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine's penis and stuffed it into his mouth. My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances. My comrades would field strip theirpacks and pockets for souvenirs and take gold teeth, but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead.
What I find most haunting about With the Old Breed is Sledge's empathy with those whom he might not have been expected to share a natural affinity, among them even at times the enemy—whom he often wishes not to kill gratuitously and whose corpses he refuses to desecrate. His is a very mannered Southern world where the martial chivalry of an Alabama, Louisiana, or Texas soldier shine through; implicit is a pride in the stereotyped manhood or the Old South, but also love for his Yankee comrades who he knows fight as well as his kinsmen. Sledge admits fear, occasionally acknowledging that his courage was the only result of desperation or rational calculation. He only incidentally notes his skill as a Marine. Yet through his own matter-of-fact descriptions the reader easily surmises why his comrades nicknamed a man of 135 pounds “Sledgehammer.”
Sledge's heroes amid the desolation of the charred islands—Sergeants Baily and Haney, Lieutenant “Hillbilly” Jones, and the beloved Captain Haldane—are singled out for their reticence, reflection, and humanity. Of Jones, Sledge writes, “He had that rare ability to be friendly yet familiar with enlisted men. He possessed a unique combination of those qualities of bravery, leadership, ability, integrity, dignity, straightforwardness, and compassion. The only other officer I knew who was his equal in all these qualities was Captain Haldane.”
While the reader is astonished at the élan and skill of Sledge's young compatriots, Sledge nevertheless describes them as apprentices in the shadows of the real “old-time” Marines—a near mythical generation that came of age between the wars and was made of even sterner stuff, fighting and winning the initial battles of the Pacific at Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester on New Britain against the supposedly invincible and ascendant Japanese of 1942 and 1943. Of Gunnery Sgt. Elmo Haney, who scrubbed his genitals with a bristle brush and cleaned his M1 and bayonet three times daily, Sledge concludes, “Despite his personal idiosyncrasies, Haney inspired us youngsters in Company K. He provided us with a direct link to the ‘Old Corps’. To us he was the old breed. We admired him—and we loved him.”
Indeed, in Sledge's Pacific, there are Homeric heroes of all sorts of an age now long gone by. Bob Hope at the height of his Hollywood career turns up as the devoted patriot at out-of-the-way Pavuvu, flying in at some danger to entertain the troops. And the future Illinois senator Paul Douglas—noted author and University of Chicago economics professor— appears in the worst of combat at Peleliu as a gray-haired, bespectacled fifty-three-year-old Marine enlistee, handing out ammo to the young Sledge. Douglas later becomes severely wounded at Okinawa and receives the Silver Star and Purple Heart. Again, if modern readers are amazed at the courageous breed of young Marines who surround Sledge, he advises us that we are even more removed than we think from these earlier Americans, since the real “old breed” antedated and was even superior to his own.
Sledge shares a hatred for the brutality of the Japanese, but it never blinds him to their shared horrible fate of being joined together in death at awful places such as Peleliu and Okinawa. So he is furious when he sees a fellow Marine yanking the gold teeth out of a mortally wounded, but very much