dual personalities

And he will. Happy Birthday to my youngest son, who turns twenty today!

My, but how time flies. He was just a little peanut barely big enough to sit on the front steps of our house.

I’m happy to see that he hasn’t lost the mischievous smile or the twinkle in his eye. Long may it be so!

If, while you are contemplating your own past, you want a good read over the weekend (or maybe several; it’s long) and you haven’t already read it, dive into Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Its quite wonderful and deserves all the accolades it has received over the years. Yes, it could have used some editing — it’s a little long-winded in places — but I applaud her point; beautiful things — art, literature, music, knowledge — make life worth living. The truth is, “that fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.” Amen to that.

*Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Last Tuesday, September 15, marked the seventy first anniversary of the Marine Corps’ landing on Peleliu, an island  in the Pacific about 500 miles east of the Philippines. High command reckoned the operation would take 3-4 days, but in the end it took more than two months and cost over 8,000 Marine casualties (dead and wounded). Of the 10,700 Japanese defenders, only 19 soldiers surrendered; the rest died. Peleliu introduced Eugene Sledge, who wrote the wonderful memoir, With the Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa, to the grim realities of war.

The conditions on the island were unbelievably brutal. Temperatures rose to 115 degrees, water was scarce, and many Marines succumbed to heat exhaustion.  Unburied Japanese corpses putrefied and rotted. Flies that fed on the corpses and then the Marines’ rations spread disease, so that almost everyone suffered from diarrhea. But the hard coral ground made digging impossible and all waste stayed on the surface. Rest became impossible, since at night the Japanese infiltrated the Marine positions and attacked them with knives, swords, or grenades. Under these conditions, men tended to abandon all vestiges of civilization. After recounting one incident, in which a Marine attempted to extract gold teeth from a wounded Japanese soldier, Sledge wrote,

Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman’s war. Our code of conduct toward the enemy differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP (p. 120).

He then went on to emphasize that

To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a nether world of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. 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 (p. 121).

I highly recommend Sledge’s book, which is one of the truly great war memoirs. If it is not immediately available to you, take five minutes to listen to him. He was a scholar and gentleman.

After the war, Sledge became a professor of Biology at the University of Montevallo in Alabama. He died in 2001.  I’ll save his experience on Okinawa for another post.

This weekend let’s be grateful for the sacrifice of others. And remember, Tout va bien!