No clever title; just "Sledgehammer's" journey to hell and back...

Gaiman's Endless, Including Despair

During April last year I wrote three entries anchored in T.S. Eliot's poems, Preludes, The Wasteland, and The Hollow Men. Eliot's pre-conversion work, soaked in post WWI disillusionment, offered a filter for the sadness that I was experiencing over the loss of a student and of my wife's longest held friend (non-biological sibling). I was looking for moments of light in those days of sadness; I was trying to live in spite of a sneaky sorrow; I charged ahead living in an exercise of "be the change you want to see"; I kept that sorrow in an intellectual place, and had little clue as to how dark things would become as the year progressed. Despair comes unexpectedly and from places unanticipated. Desperation pushes us against the ropes of our own limitations, as we get pounded by emotions that feel like stabbing shadows of acrid smoke jabbing out of the darkness. There is always light, though; there is always the living...

So another April has come and I have been traveling through a lot of dark places for a while now. I have been watching HBO's The Pacific this Spring while I have been teaching 20th century conflict to my sophomores. The miniseries weaves several stories taken from memoirs about the South Pacific theater of World War II. One of the two primary texts used was written by Eugene Sledge:

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is a World War II memoir by Eugene Sledge, a United States Marine. Since its first publication in 1981, With the Old Breed has been recognized as one of the best first-hand accounts of combat in the Pacific during World War II. The memoir is based on notes Sledge kept tucked away in a pocket-sized Bible he carried with him during battles. (Wikipedia)

Eugene Sledge

Joe Mazello

Eugene Sledge's character in the miniseries—played by Joe Mazello—struggles with a steady slip from a space of firm, nonjudgmental, principal to one of survival and, at times, near animal behavior.

Eliot's story-through-poetry is an assent from his demon spaces to a more well lit place of faith. Sledge's story told through HBO's lens is a descent to hell and a journey through the most terrible places soldiers can travel. (It does end well despite the terrible places Eugene had to go before returning to his core character.)

I wish to reproduce the synopsis from Wikipedia for context as it suscintly illuminates some of what I have been thinking about:

Sledge's memoir gives a firsthand and unapologetically honest perspective on the Pacific Theater of World War II. His memoir is a front-line account of infantry combat in the Pacific War. It brings the reader into the island hopping, the jungle heat and rain, the filth and malaise, the fear of potential "banzai attacks", and the hopelessness and loss of humanity that so uniquely characterized the campaign in the Pacific. Sledge wrote starkly of the brutality displayed by Japanese (and to a much lesser extent, American) soldiers during the battles, and of the hatred that both sides harbored for each other. In Sledge's words, "This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands."

Sledge describes one instance in which he and a comrade came across the mutilated bodies of three Marines, butchered and with severed genitals stuffed into their mouths. He also describes the behavior of some Marines towards dead Japanese, including the removal of gold teeth from Japanese corpses (and, in one case, a severely wounded but still living Japanese soldier), as well as other macabre trophy-taking. He details the process and mechanisms that slowly strip away a soldier's humanity and compassion, making the thought process accessible to those who have never served in combat.

Sledge describes in detail the sheer physical struggle of living in a combat zone and the debilitating effects of constant fear, fatigue, and filth. "Fear and filth went hand-in-hand," he wrote. "It has always puzzled me that this important factor in our daily lives has received so little attention from historians and is often omitted from otherwise excellent personal memoirs by infantrymen." Marines had trouble staying dry, finding time to eat their rations, practicing basic field sanitation (it was impossible to dig latrines or catholes in the coral rock on Peleliu), and simply moving around on the pulverized coral of Peleliu and in the mud of Okinawa.

Eugene Sledge "Sledgehammer" is depicted as a quiet, thoughtful, faithful, moral, kind, young man eager to be involved in the war. He reads his bible, doesn't smoke, offers no criticism of those around him and strives hard to learn his difficult job as a mortar man. As the miniseries progresses with depictions of island hopping, brutal fighting, and hellish conditions, we see our marines pushed to the limits of barbaric behavior and near insanity. Sledge is not spared. We watch a sweet innocent young man try to retain his humanity despite baby step after baby step toward the shell-shocked, haunted, soldier-type that surrounded him. It is quite depressing to watch. It is hard to see these men, clinging to humanity, as heroes; they seem more like victims; the combat they are engaged in feels purposeless, despite what I know as a history teacher of the import of their sacrifice and work. Their sacrifice overwhelms me; their suffering devastates me...

And the war ends. I have not yet finished the miniseries for the second time, but I have seen it once. I know the story. The war ends. The "good guys" win... with terrible cost. And the Greatest Generation is immortalized and memorialized and they go back to life... back to life! That's the message here. There is life after tragedy for those who live. There is Spring for those who endure the Winter. There is a "next"...

Eugene returned from the war scarred. He was unable to hunt birds and deer, as he had before serving. He had flashbacks of the slaughter in the coral islands of the south pacific; he wrote how hard it was to return to civilian life.

He got married. His wife urged him to put his ideas on paper... and he studied science. He earned his doctorate, became a professor and was loved by his students. He lived to see the 21st century. He lived and set an example so that those of us who know sadness can see that there is a way back, even from hell...