| Andrew Lisec
Kelvyn Park High School |
 |
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier boys march by
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go
(Siegfried Sasoon, "Suicide in Trenches")
E.B. Sledge uses the above poem, written in the muddy trenches
of WWI, to illustrate one of the underlying themes of his account
of the fighting in the Pacific in the next World War. What Sassoon
and Sledge are impressing on their audience is the fact that nobody
who has not gone through combat can possibly fathom the visceral
combination of emotion and experience -- the sounds and the fear,
the smells and the horror, the peaks of terror, and the depths
of disgust -- that combat soldiers undergo. Niether can we understand
the fundamental ways in which combat changes those who survive
it. Occasionally, Sledge is explicit in this admonishment, as
when he writes of the campaign of Peleliu that,
to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a
nether world of horror [in which] time had no meaning; life
had no meaning.
The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded
the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed
in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the
lines -- service troops and civilians.
Mostly, however, simply by describing in his sparse and taut
language the sights, smells, and emotions he experienced, the
author makes it clear to his readers that, even as he is painting
for us this vivid picture of horror, it is an image we can see
but darkly. It is, however, a picture we would be well advised
to attempt to discern in these times.
In recent years, the United States has witnessed a wave of books,
magazine articles, movies, and documentaries resurrecting and
lauding what Tom Brokaw has termed "The Greatest Generation,"
the men (and, rarely in these examinations, the women) who served
in WWII. In the national mood prevailing after September 11 the
impulse to hark back to past heroes is if anything even more pronounced.
While many of the books and movies which have come out in the
past few years are praiseworthy as a whole, they can perhaps be
faulted for glorifying war overmuch and, realistic-seeming battle-footage
aside, even sanitizing it. It would perhaps be better for us to
remember Robert E. Lee's observation that it was well that war
was to terrible, "lest we grow too fond of it."
What Sledge's book does, though not intentionally, is to provide
an antidote these more recent and somewhat rose-colored versions
of war. Perhaps only a first-hand account can effectively impart
the true nature of war as an abyss of horror. This the author
does in passage after passage, as when he recounts the digging
of a foxhole on a muddy ridge in Okinawa when he released a "mass
of wriggling maggots."
With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting
Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the
metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty
whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shovel skidded
into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly
overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels.
These vivid descriptions of the grinding daily exposure to sights,
smells, and sounds of the hellish worlds of Peleliu and Okinawa,
as well as Sledge's accounts of the sheer terror of combat and
being shelled, should give us pause. Thanks to the author's honesty
and willingness to share his own traumatic experiences, we can
more fully appreciate the sacrifices of the generation of men
who fought in WWII. Perhaps we might also be somewhat less sanguine
about subjecting another generation of Americans and others to
a similar ordeal.
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