dual personalities

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!

Today is son #2’s birthday. Last year, he spent the day at home with family and friends.

This year he is far away at the Oxonmoot (the Tolkein Society’s annual conference) at Oxford having fun and being scholarly.

Although I’m not a huge Tolkein fan myself (don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against him), I heartily agree with his sentiment that “fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”  He’s absolutely right, you know. Our best ideas often come to us slyly, emerging unexpectedly from the shadow of a dream or as we ponder what we have just read, seen, or heard (music is definitely liberating).  So in honor of J.R.R. Tolkein, who created a whole world,  my son, who is wandering but not lost, and his cousin, Mary, who celebrated her birthday yesterday, escape into a poem, a book, a film, a painting, or some lovely music and free your mind and soul!

Go ahead, have an escapist weekend.