With the Old Breed — Required Reading

Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; Reprint edition (September 1, 1990)
ISBN: 0195067142
Price: $15.95

With the Old Breed should be required reading in our classrooms, for this is the brutal reality of war at its most horrific. No sensationalism here; E. B. Sledge merely tells it the way it was. There is no glory in war, in the shedding of another man's blood; in digging a foxhole in a torrential downpour only to uncover the badly decomposing body of a Japanese soldier crawling with maggots; in watching helplessly as four of your comrades retrieve, on a stretcher, a wounded Marine amid machinegun fire ("If it were me out there," Sledge recounts, "I would want to know I wouldn't be left behind."); in enduring a night while being shelled by enemy artillery; in stumbling upon fellow Marines that have been tortured, decapitated and butchered in the worst way imaginable; in suffering sleep deprivation, from malaria and jungle rot, and from hunger, thirst, and, alternately, heat and cold. This is why war should be avoided at all costs, and this is why no one man should ever be given the authority, with a flourish of his signature, to risk the lives of young men and women.

My dad fought on Okinawa, receiving a citation from the office of the president for his participation in the taking of Shuri Ridge. I never knew my dad as a Marine, as he retired from the Corps before getting married and starting a family. I asked him once, when I was a boy, to tell me about his service, but he refused. I asked him again, about six and a half years ago, during the final year of his life, and he again refused. I had hoped that by sharing his pain a healing could take place. Unfortunately, what he saw, what he endured, died with him.

Sledge, in this memoir of his service on Peleliu and Okinawa, told me everything my dad withheld from me. This incredible account, told with frank detachment, is hailed as the best World War II memoir of an enlisted man, and with good reason. Part adventure, part history, "Sledgehammer" not only relates many of the clichés every Hollywood movie depicted on the subject, but also everything they left out.

Thanks, Sledgehammer, for sharing your story, and my dad's, with me. He perhaps felt I couldn't understand what he endured. Perhaps no civilian can. Yet after having read With the Old Breed, I understand a little better why he was the way he was.

Your generation is truly the greatest generation.