After watching the HBO miniseries, “The Pacific” from 2010 several times, I was overcome by the hate, mud, isolation, and earth-shaking gun and artillery fire, the effect it had on one’s nerves and, the worst part, the ground war that often went hand-to-hand. Bitter combat to the death at close, closer, and then very personal, single combat.

I came away too with an indestructible love and awe for the First Marines in the Pacific theater of World War Two. I know that actors played the parts of these men who loved their country too much to let anything else come first. In the wake of tragedy during the savage attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, men couldn’t enlist fast enough. They were filled with what Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was reported (it was never confirmed that he said it, but he certainly had to think it) to have said after realizing that no U.S. Navy aircraft carriers had been in port: “I fear that we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with terrible resolve.”

Whether he said it or not makes no matter because that is exactly what the Empire of Japan had done.

Before the spring of 1942 came, the military and industrial behemoth that was the United States was gearing up to free Europe from the Blitzing Nazi Germany and Italy and to send every Japanese ship to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Watching and reading the real news articles newsreels of those days almost a century ago is one thing. I first saw the silent 16mm footage of the attack on Pearl Harbor in junior high school, shown by my (still) favorite teacher ever. He made no mistake about it: history was not nice to watch. Later in the year, he showed raw footage of American soldiers liberating a concentration camp as well as Soviet film from Auschwitz. History wasn’t a nice, clean subject.

The Pacific is a great piece of history itself, showing us the personal home lives of Marines heading to war after the Christmas of 1941. For so many men, it was their last Christmas with their families.

Eugene B. Sledge wanted to go but couldn’t. His father, a doctor of internal medicine, had detected a heart murmur. Gene wrote a book years later. Its title: With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, released in 1981. He would later give his readers (and himself) closure by writing a short sequel, China Marine, at the request of his wife, Jeanne. After watching the miniseries and reading the book, I, too, needed a cooling down and closure.

Far from my intention here is to diminish any of our brave military in peace and at war. Any war.

But the miniseries, a companion to the hit Band of Brothers, hit me especially hard. In fact, the two can no more be measured against each other than the European and Pacific wars can be. They’re different in too many ways. But where I had been emotionally touched in Brothers, I cried my way through most of Pacific. Both series had episodes that were difficult to watch, but nothing in Brothers, except for Episode 9, which was an ambush to many viewers, made me continue to run the waterworks like Pacific did. It’s already been noted by critics as being more packed with blood and bodies than Brothers, but this is necessary as the island fighting was often so close. At distance, artillery was used, and bodies were tossed, in pieces, long distances. Mortars, machine guns, and grenades could make men into something you’d see in one of Stephen King’s nightmares. He has enough of those to go around, doesn’t he?

But Sledgehammer writes in a graphic but controlled way. The first things that many Marines saw when taking an island were the first American KIA sitting up with their own penises in their mouths.

The savagery of the Japanese hit the gentle Sledge hard, so much so that his hatred of them is virtually instantaneous. That hatred only grows as the fighting on Peleliu goes on. He describes going without water, as the supplies aren’t quick in getting to them from the Navy.

He admiringly describes “Gunny” Elmo Haney, a man obsessed with bayoneting the enemy, and who scrubbed his genitals with a utility (hard bristle) brush. He was, Sledgehammer wrote, issued by God to the Marines, never having been humanly conceived. That’s not hyperbole when one marine describes another. Haney fought, reportedly but not officially, in World War I. He did fight in the so-called Banana Wars, and in World War Two, when he was among the oldest serving members of the First Marines Division. He finally broke on Peleliu, but nothing like in the series. He told Sledgehammer, “That was terrible.” He retired and went home. Peleliu was really that horrible.

Sledgehammer wrote about losing his captain Haldane. The two had shared talk about their families and the C.O. was patient with Eugene, seeing the new recruit changing into something less human and wishing it weren’t so. He gave Sledgehammer some advice, but he never left the island alive. The author sees changes in the eyes and on the faces of his fellow mortar squad members and imagines that he probably has that same look. He describes the battles well, with heavily researched facts and his own perspective, trying to be crisp and straightforward, and that makes this book all the more heartbreaking. Because, at times, he does let his feelings out. His narration mentions few names, using “buddies” instead, and yet does mention Snafu several times. He even quotes the New Orleans native by spelling words as Snafu pronounced them. That’s good writing.

In the end, the airfield on Peleliu wasn’t even used by General Douglas McArthur. That’s like spitting in the faces of the survivors and on the graves of those who made the ultimate sacrifice. And Marines never forget. Not something like that,  they don’t.

On Okinawa, the series showed Eugene come very close to losing his soul, or indeed losing it. But then, he reclaimed it by refusing to shoot a wounded native woman. She was gunshot and wanted him to pull the trigger, but he instead held her head in his arms gently until she passed.

That… did not happen. Sledge was so far gone that he couldn’t. He turned to leave her, and someone else shot her.

At this point, it’s necessary for me to point out that it is highly improbable that this or any other women on Okinawa were Japanese.

They were possibly native to that island but more likely were “comfort women” that had been taken by force from occupied territories like Vietnam, Australia, the Netherlands (!), China, and, mostly, Korea. What the term means is “sex slaves” to be used by the fighting men of the Empire. But they were not merely sex slaves. They were horribly mistreated and tortured, and they took beatings regularly. According to Wikipedia and in-depth articles I’ve read, these women were often killed, and many committed suicide. The Japanese were never sorry for this sad and evil thing that they did. They never included the women in their reparations, and after that article I read, they were forced, by the growing knowledge of that obscure part of the war, to apologize. To save face.

According to everything I have learned about the Japanese, there was never an intention of making apologies for sex trafficking and sexual war crimes. In fact, Eastern attitudes about sexuality have never failed to disgust me. For a society like the Japanese to regard honor above life itself, they seem quite dishonorable to me. During fighting on Okinawa and other locations, women were shoved out ahead of soldiers, as diversions, shields, and booby traps (explosives were concealed under their robes). I’ll note here that while this is indeed a war crime, I don’t know if this type of offense was ever addressed in the post-war trials (there were similar atrocities in the Korean and Vietnam wars).

Even today, and I have seen the proof with my own eyes, there’s underground pornography from Japan that’s left me with trauma. I don’t know how people can do such things (you want to know about evil? I’ve seen it. I know there is a real devil).

Some things in the series didn’t happen or happened differently or with people not shown on film. That’s okay. I still think Sledgehammer would have been pleased with it. He went home in the sequel book China Marine, in which he describes the winter of 1945 to part of 1946 in China. It was cold, the barracks were unheated, and the chow was terrible. He stood a guard post when, several times, he encountered dogs left behind by the Japanese infantry. Specially bred and trained attack dogs, vicious to begin with, now roaming free, cold, hungry, and twice as dangerous. Sledge doesn’t want to shoot the first one he sees in a frightening face-off. The dog eventually left, but he did report it, and the hunt to kill the dogs was on.

And I believe that’s what saved Eugene: he had a love for animals and nature. He would go on to earn a PhD. in Biology and was a college professor for years.

Of the train ride home, touching as it was, I don’t know who was at the table with him in the L&M dining car. He does not record it that way. But he does note that leaving such close and dependable friends was very difficult for him.

Without further assistance from me, I can still recommend both books for great reading. World War Two was full of men and women fighting courageously for the right thing, justice, and the greater good it brought. And now I have learned about more of them. It gave me hope. There’s a lot of evil here on this earth. But there are always good people to help set things right. That’s really heartening. Especially these days, as monsters masquerade as patriots and come as ravenous wolves in the form of sheep.

If you worry about men like Donald Trump taking this country to the grave, then at least we have the miniseries like The Pacific and books like those of Eugene Sledge  to remind us how things used to be. He should have returned with medals. He was never wounded, so he never got a Purple Heart, but he was brave and helped his mates and weathered and survived things that would surely have killed a man like me. He, Snafu, and everyone they served with should have been decorated numerous times. They received nothing for their sacrifices of blood, sweat, terror, and trauma. Instead, they got nightmares and extra work.

It’s  a Tom Hanks kind of touch that, in the last minutes of the series, Eugene lies back in a meadow and holds a daisy up to the sun. For just an instant, it looks very like the Rising Sun flag of the now vanquished Empire of Japan. Maybe it’s him weighing the cost of keeping his hatred or letting it go. He was finally beginning to accept his wounds of the soul. Those wounds never leave us; we just learn to live with them.

Remember these men. Do this, and their pain wasn’t in vain.