The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, August 18, 2023

Byblos: The New York Times did not review E.B., Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa when it first appeared in 1981, maybe because, making wrong assumptions about the book, it figured that Ronald Reagan’s election was enough jingoism for a while. A decade later when Oxford University Press re-issued the book, it still didn’t review it but for one paragraph in its “New and Noteworthy” book section, where it quoted Paul Fussell (who wrote two of the best books on World War I and World War II): “Readers of this book will find it hard to forget, and they will not easily brush away its troubling revelations about what the modern world periodically requires its boys to do and to suffer.” More recently The Times’s Dwight Gardner has kept up a column called American Beauties, a rediscovery of old works and classics, or works that should be classics. He wrote (in 2017): “It’s time to move this book to a higher shelf, to that of nonfiction that is literature. “With the Old Breed” is a deep pleasure. At this mad juncture in American history, it’s an honor to meet this decent, humble, loyal, courageous and truth-obsessed man. Sledge’s book is a stinging reminder of the sacrifices others have made to allow us to live the life that we do. If you can make it through without welling up at half a dozen spots, you are a stronger person than I.” Finally in 2021, the Library of America heard the call, and issued the book as one of three Pacific memoirs of World War II, the other two being Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator, by Samuel Hynes, and Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket’s Odyssey in World War II, by Alvin Kernan. I am two-thirds of the way through Sledge’s book, and can only say that it’s been a wonder that FlaglerLive has managed to get edited and published these days, because I find it incredibly intrusive on my harassing wish to go back to Sledge. Not reading him seems a bit of a sacrilege, considering the intensity of the experiences he writes about, most of which have so much to do with the impossibility of relief, the way the two campaigns he fought (Peleliu and Okinawa) made escape from the hell of it all impossible. To slide in the marker ribbon at the end of a reading session and go on to, say, a shower (of all things: the men went weeks without one) or a bowl of cereal seems especially presumptuous. It’s in these ordinary things, for these ordinary things, so much more than for abstract chants to liberty, that these men fought–well, these ordinary things, maybe, but primarily, they fought to survive. That Sledge did seemed another impossibility. He tries to convey that sense of the impossible. I have not seen the long interview below yet. But don;t let it substitute for the book.

—P.T.

Flagler Beach Webcam:

I had long since become used to the sight of blood, but the idea of sitting in that bloodstained gun pit was a bit too much for me. It seemed almost like leaving our dead unburied to sit on the blood of a fellow Marine spilled out on the coral. I noticed that my buddy looked approvingly at my efforts as he came back from getting orders for our gun. Although we never discussed the subject, he apparently felt as I did. As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how “gallant” it is for a man to “shed his blood for his country,” and “to give his life’s blood as a sacrifice,” and so on. The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited.

–E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.