With the Old Breed

“I shuddered and choked. A wild desperate feeling of anger, frustration and pity gripped me. It was an emotion that always would torture my mind when I saw men trapped and was unable to do anything but watch as they were hit.” 

While the thought of being shot and killed tortures the author, he is also tortured acutely when he is forced to watch fellow Marines trapped and about to die. He knows he cannot save them and finds the scene unbearable.

“The corpsman was on his knees, bending over a young Marine who had just died on a stretcher. A blood-soaked battle dressing was on the side of the dead man’s neck. His fine, handsome boyish face was ashen. ‘What a pitiful waste!’ I thought. ‘He can’t be a day over seventeen years old.’ I thanked God his mother couldn’t see him.” 

Sledge is disgusted by the loss of life, especially when Marines are cut down in their youth. This victim of Peleliu is not even eighteen and his future has been ended by combat.

“I confided in him that many times I’d been so terrified that I felt ashamed, and that some men didn’t seem to be so afraid. He scoffed at my mention of being ashamed and said that my fear had been no greater than anyone else’s but that I was honest enough to admit its magnitude. He told me that he was afraid too and that the first battle was the hardest because a man didn’t know what to expect. Fear dwelled in everyone, Hillbilly said. Courage meant overcoming fear and doing one’s duty in the presence of danger, not being unafraid.”

In this conversation with an officer nicknamed Hillbilly, Sledge admits the fear he feels before entering into battle. He is given a definition of courage that serves him well for the duration of the war: that bravery is not an absence of fear but the ability to do what one must despite the dangers ahead. 

“Our filth added to our general misery. Fear and filth went hand in hand. It has always puzzled me that 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.” 

Sledge records in vivid detail the personal bodily filth that the men must endure during combat. He recounts how it impacts the men both physically (causing trench foot and other ailments) and psychologically (a much-needed rest time always begins with a wash and shave). Since filth is so present in their experiences, he sees it as a glaring omission that historians haven’t spoken of this wartime issue. 

“[A] buddy scolded in a low voice, ‘Sledgehammer, what the hell you staring at them birds for? You gonna get separated from the patrol,’ as he motioned vigorously for me to hurry. He thought I’d lost my senses and he was right. That was neither the time nor the place for something as utterly peaceful and ethereal as bird watching. But I had had a few delightful and refreshing moments of fantasy and escape from the horror of human activities on Peleliu.” 

Sledge stops to admire a pair of man-o-war birds, cozy in their nest, noting their plumage and impressive wingspan, and is called back to reality by a friend. Though the author realizes this is no moment for bird watching, still it gives him a very short reprieve from the endless horrors around him.

“We moved into the water and started the assault. My heart pounded in my throat. Would my luck hold out? ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ I prayed quietly and squeezed my carbine stock.” 

As men around him are hit, Sledge turns to prayer, hoping that he will somehow survive this second amphibious assault on Peleliu. Faith and his weapon are all he has at this vulnerable moment.

“A million thoughts raced through my terrified mind: of how my folks had nearly lost their youngest, of what a stupid thing I had done to look directly into a pillbox full of Japanese without even having my carbine at the ready.” 

When Sledge and company encounter a pillbox of Japanese soldiers, he makes a momentarily blunder that harbors the potential to cost him his life. However, he isn’t hit and is able to ultimately detonate a grenade that kills the enemy soldiers inside. Still, he is ashamed by his stupidity in this instance.

“I had just killed a man at close range. That I had clearly seen the pain on his face when the bullets hit him came as a jolt. It suddenly made the war a very personal affair. The expression on that man’s face filled me with shame and then disgust for war and all that misery that it causes.” 

When Sledge kills a man at close range, he feels sickened and disturbed. The impact of what he has done hits him immediately. The enemy is a human being and war senselessly snuffs out human life. Distance fighting makes it easier to disassociate from the act of death; such disassociation, in this environment, is not possible.  

 “The men gloated over, compared and often swapped their prizes. It was a brutal, ghastly ritual the likes of which have occurred since ancient times on battlefields…It was uncivilized, as is all war.” 

Sledge condemns the souvenir hunting that occurs among both American and Japanese. He sees it as a sign that decent men can be reduced to craven brutes by war, and that the terror and tension of combat erodes decency and humanity.

 “A hand grasped me by the shoulder and I straightened up to see who it was. ‘What are you gonna do, Sledgehammer?’ asked Doc Caswell. His expression was a mix of sadness and reproach as he looked at me intently… ‘You don’t want to do that sort of thing. What would your folks think if they knew?’” 

Sledge credits Doc Caswell with stopping him when he nearly begins hunting for gold teeth among Japanese corpses. The author appreciates the doctor’s efforts in helping him retain his ethics and humanity on the field of war.

“The dead were safe. Those who had gotten a million-dollar wound were lucky. None of us left had any idea that we were just midway through what was to be a month-long ordeal for the 5th and 7th Marines.” 

For a moment, Sledge is envious of the dead and the wounded. Both are free, able to depart from the battlefield. Company K is aware that a great deal waits ahead of them, though they have no idea how long the fight will go on for. Envying the dead and wounded is another mode of illustrating how war can alter one’s psyche; off the battlefield, few if any envy the dead or injured. 

 “Never in my wildest imagination had I contemplated Captain Haldane’s death. We had a steady stream of killed and wounded leaving us but somehow I assumed Ack Ack was immortal. Our company commander represented stability and direction in a world of violence, death and destruction…It was the worst grief I endured during the entire war. The intervening years have not lessened it any.” 

The death of Ack Ack is a staggering blow to Company K. As company commander, he inspired bravery and loyalty. His presence made the men feel more secure. The author and his fellows find it difficult to go on without him.

“None of us would ever be the same after what we had endured. To some degree, it is true, of course of all human experience. But something in me died in Peleliu. Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war’s savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.” 

Sledge takes stock of what he has gained and lost about his own humanity, in light of his service at Peleliu. He has matured, though what he has lost might seem to outweigh that newfound maturity. He also feels revulsion towards politicians who fan the flames of war but who most often do not have to witness the misery and death firsthand. 

 “The draftees sometimes had their laugh on us, though. If we griped and complained, they grinned and said, ‘What are you guys bitching about? You asked for it, didn’t you?’ We just grumbled at them; no one got angry about it. For the most part, the replacements were good men and the company retained its fighting spirit.” 

Before Okinawa, Company K acquires some recently-drafted Marines. At first, there are some minor tensions between the enlisted and drafted men. The two sides tease one another but they are still able to come together as a cohesive unit.

“It was the only time during my entire service in the Marine Corps that I got out of regular duties because of illness. Had we been civilians, I’m confident those of us with hepatitis would have been hospitalized. Instead we received APC pills from a corpsman.” 

Sledge, along with many other men in the unit, comes down with a serious case of hepatitis. He is given a “light duty slip,” which allows him a bit of rest but not on par with what a civilian might expect and need if suffering from the same ailment. The painkiller he is given is a non-prescription one, containing aspirin and caffeine among other ingredients.

“We threw knowing glances at each other and rolled our eyes like disgusted schoolboys listening to the coach brag that he could lick the opposing team single-handed.” 

When Mac becomes the new mortar section leader, all the men suppress the urge to laugh at him. His big talk makes Sledge feel embarrassed on Mac’s behalf. Sledge suspects that it is an attempt to conceal a lack of actual bravery.

“These people were the first civilians I had seen in a combat area. They were pathetic. The most pitiful things about the Okinawan civilians were that they were totally bewildered by the shock of our invasion and they were scared to death of us. Countless times they passed us on the way to the rear with fear, dismay and confusion on their faces.” 

Sledge notes the occupants of the villages that they pass through and is sympathetic towards the civilians they pass. They seem shocked to find themselves caught up in a war and utterly confused and hopeless. Most of the civilians he sees are women, children and the elderly.

“But there on Okinawa the disease was disrupting a place as pretty as a pastoral painting. I understood then what my grandmother had really meant when she told me as a boy that a blight descended on the land when the South was invaded during the Civil War.” 

Sledge laments how the disease of war has ruined the natural beauty of Okinawa. In both wars, he feels that the picturesque, wholesome beauty of nature was unjustly marred It says something about Sledge’s character to be able to be able to make his southern United States analogous to the plight of Okinawa, and the Japanese, the very people who mean to kill him.

“Fear has many facets and I do not minimize my fear and terror during that day. But it was over. I was a combat veteran of Peleliu. With terror’s first constriction over, I knew what to expect…I knew I could control my fear 

On Okinawa, Sledge feels more prepared to face his fears because of his experience in battle. It is not that he is unafraid. It is that he feels able to work through the fear. He has seen combat and now knows what it entails, what it looks, sounds and smells like.

“The increasing dread of going back into action obsessed me. It became the subject of the most tortuous and persistent of all the ghastly war nightmares that have haunted me for many, many years. The dream is always the same, going back up to the lines during the bloody, muddy month of May on Okinawa.” 

Here Sledge reveals the longstanding chronic psychological effects of his combat service at Okinawa. While Sledge is able to go on and obtain a doctorate in biology, and create for himself a thriving, civilian life after the war, the nightmares never cease for him. 

“I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war…we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.” 

Here, Sledge lives without hope for the future at Okinawa and can only think of the present. The environment around him is unbearable, from the mud, the corpses and the stench. We again see the toll of the psychological and moral degradation armed conflict brings to those who participate in it. 

“I vividly recall grimly making a pledge to myself. The Japanese might kill or wound me but they wouldn’t make me crack up. A peaceful civilian back home who sat around worrying about losing his mind probably didn’t have much to occupy him but in our situation there was plenty of reason for the strongest willed individuals to crack up.” 

At Okinawa, Sledge feels his mental wellness challenged but he fights to retain it. No matter what becomes of him, he wants to remain sane. He acknowledges, however, that the horrors surrounding him are enough to make any man lose his mind. Further, he uses a civilian analogy to try to make the experience relatable to those who have not been involved in war firsthand. 

“We had come back to civilization. We had climbed out of the abyss once more. It was exhilarating. We sang and whistled like little boys until our sides were sore.” 

After the war is officially over, Sledge feels a new lightness come over him and his fellow Marines. They managed to survive and can now leave behind the horrors they faced and return to the simple joys of living. This is, in some ways, however, a false dawn, as the horrors of the battles Sledge is involved in will remain with him.