[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's not just learning about weapons, right? There's other things you gotta do. You gotta get, you still gotta continue to live a hard life. You still gotta get mentally and physically conditioned for combat. And what better way to do that than some road marches?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some road marches, which we've talked about many times here.


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[Assistant] Back to the book. A whole battalion was on the march and my poor squad was tucked away somewhere at the center or center rear.


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[Assistant] Clouds of red dust settled upon us. My helmet banged irritably against the machine gun that was boring into my shoulder. Or else it was bumped forward, mattingly, over my eyes by the movement of my pack.


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[Assistant] Mile or so out, I dared not drink anymore from my canteen. I had no idea how far we had to go.


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[Assistant] My dungarees were saturated with sweat, their light green darkened by perspiration.


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[Assistant] There had been joking, and even some singing the first mile out. Now, only the birds sang.


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[Assistant] But from us, it was just the thud of feet, the clank of canteens, the creak of leather rifle slings, the occasional horse cracking of voice raised and breath wasted in a curse. Every hour, we got a ten minute break. Then came the command, off and on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It means off your behind and on your feet. Cursing, hating both command and commandant, straining, we rose to our feet and began again the dull plotting rhythm of the march.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's, and so they're doing this type of hard training, and they're going, they're doing maneuvers, they're preparing, they're doing mock beach landings, they're doing all those things, and they're also getting some occasional liberty. Do you guys know what liberty is as a civilian?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] See, it's a word that I throw out there sometimes. It means time off. Liberty means time off. And it's from the Navy, but the Marine Corps uses it as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It means time off. And so these guys, even though they're working hard...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When bootcamp, you don't get any liberty. No, you just stay in bootcamp for 13 weeks. You don't get any liberty. And once you're, you know, a fleet marine or you're in the regular Navy, you get liberty. So you can go do, you know, go out and do some stuff. And so these guys are going out and doing stuff. And what do you think they're doing? 18 years old. Getting ready to go to war. They're gonna go out and get after it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, from the context of going out and partying. Yes, yes, exactly. And I don't know, partying is what we're talking about. That's a term that sounds pretty lame, but that's what we're talking about. I think everybody understands that term. Drinking, chasing girls, partying. That's what we're talking about. And I guess it's a commonly used term because you hear people say,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like I remember seeing an article about some school, some college being the number three ranked party school. So, so party implies, party doesn't imply birthday cake. A party. Yeah, party, party implies drinking, getting crazy. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which is different, getting crazy is different from getting nuts, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, so we're just talking about getting crazy and partying, and that's what these guys were doing.


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[Assistant] Here we go back to the book. We were impatient. We were wound up. We could no more relax than we could think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In those days, there was not an introspective person among us. We seldom spoke of the war, except as it might relate to ourselves, and in an abstract way. The ethics of Hitler, the extermination of the Jews, the yellow peril, these were matters for the gentlemen of the editorial pages to discuss.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We lived for thrills, not the thrills of the battlefield.


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[Assistant] But of the speeding auto, the dimly lighted cafe, the drink racing the blood, the texture of a cheek, the sheen of a silken calf.


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[Assistant] Nothing was permitted to last. All had to be fluid. We wanted not actuality, but possibility.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's a pretty interesting statement. We all had to be fluid. We wanted, not actually, they didn't actually want that. They wanted to chase that thing. We could not be still.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Always movement, everything changing. We were like shadows fleeing, ever fleeing. Condemned men. Souls in hell.


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[Assistant] Soon the spate of 62-hour liberties was ended. Mid-May of 1942 saw me go home for the last time. My family would not set eyes on me again for nearly three years.


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[Assistant] And again, obviously there's some very important experiences in that section.


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[Assistant] It's great. It's great to hear his perspective. You're going to see Robert Leckie. He's


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A very, he's a very intelligent, and he became a writer, I mean he became a writer, this isn't the only book, I think he wrote 40 plus books in his life, he worked for big newspapers, and he's a writer, so he's a very smart guy. And, and he talks about that, and we'll get to that point in here, but that's why his perspective is so interesting. And he brings a lot of that in this book.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But eventually, obviously they finished their training. No more partying. And now, it's time to fight. Back to the book.


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[Assistant] Fires flickered on the shores of Guadalcanal Island when we came on the deck.


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[Assistant] They were not great flaming leaping fires, and we were disappointed. We had expected to see the world alight when we emerged from the hatches. The bombardment had seemed fierce. Our armada, for such, we judged it to be, seemed capable of blasting Guadalcanal into perdition.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But in the dirty dawn of August 7th, 1942, there were only a few fires flickering like the city dumps to light our path to history. We were apprehensive, not frightened. So, in case you haven't gathered, these guys are about to do the landing at Guadalcanal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The little Higgins boats, the little landing craft. And here we go, the assault began. Now I was praying again. I had prayed much the night before, carefully, deliberately, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the vanity of youth, I was positive I would die.


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[Assistant] In the same vanity, I was turning my affairs over to the Almighty.


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[Assistant] And I think what he means by vanity, that he was sure he would die, you'd think somebody that's vain would be like, hey I can't be killed.


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[Assistant] But I think what he means by that is the vanity that...


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[Assistant] Like he's gonna die. No, you don't even know that!


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[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I know what's gonna happen. I know I'm gonna die. That's vanity in its own right. That's what he's saying.


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[Assistant] So they hit the landing back to the book, but there was no fight. The Japanese had run. From somewhere, came the command, move out.


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[Assistant] We formed staggered squads and slogged off. We left our innocence on Red Beach. It would never be the same.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They spend a night, they're now patrolling in and in the night they're in security positions and they hear a little gunfire and we're going to the book. At dawn we learn the import of the gunfire. A medical corpsman had been killed. He had been shot by his own men.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When the sentry had challenged him, as he returned from relieving himself, he had boggled over the password, Lilliputian. And so met death.


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[Assistant] Little heads up, Lilliputian is not a good challenge and reply password for everyone. You don't want to come up with something that's not totally obvious, but don't make a guy that's scared out in the middle of the jungle remember the word Lilliputian.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, and you know we talk about blue on blue, there you go. Like their first casualty is blue on blue. Their first casualty is blue on blue. Their first casualty is a guy, a medic, a corpsman being killed by sentries. It's a nightmare.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I peered at the captain, anxiety was on his face as though carved there by the night's events. It startled me.


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[Assistant] Here was no warrior, no veteran of a hundred battles, here was only a civilian like myself.


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[Assistant] Here was a man hardly more confident than the trigger happy sentry who had killed the corpsman.


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[Assistant] He was much older than I, but the responsibility of his charge, the unknown face of war had frightened him past trusting the evidence of his senses.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, imagine you're going into combat, you're in charge, you're a civilian, but now you're in charge, and you're going out on your first combat patrol, you lay up, and the first thing you do is you kill one of your own guys, kills one of your other guys. It's a nightmare, and he can see it on his face.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They spend the rest of the day out there still no heavy enemy contact. Back to the book. That day was a dull, lost witness to the cycle of the sun. Of which I have neither memory nor regret.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The night I shall never forget. I awoke in the middle of it to see the sky on fire. So it seemed. It was like the red mist of my childhood dream when I imagined judgment to have come while I played baseball on the castle grounds at home. We were bathed in red light as though fixed in the eye of Satan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Imagine a myriad of red traffic lights glowing in the rain and you will have a replica of the world in which I awoke. The lights were the flares of the enemy. They hung above the jungle roof, swaying gently on their parachutes, casting their red glow about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Motors throbbed above. They were those of Japanese seaplanes we learned later. We thought they were hunting us. But they were actually the eyes of a mighty enemy naval armada that swept into Sea Clark Channel.


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[Assistant] Soon we heard the sound of cannons, and the island trembled beneath us. There came flashes of light, white and red, and great rocking explosions.


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[Assistant] The Japs were hammering out one of their greatest naval victories.


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[Assistant] It was the Battle of Savo Island. What we learned to call more accurately, the Battle of Four Sitting Ducks.


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[Assistant] They were sinking three American cruisers, the Quincy, Vincennes, and Astoria, and one Australian cruiser, the Canberra.


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[Assistant] As well as damaging one other American cruiser and a US destroyer.


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[Assistant] And so they, then during this they move towards the beach.


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[Assistant] If you don't know anything about the Pacific campaign, you're taking down islands. And your lifeline is the Navy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cause that's who's gonna bring you ammunition, food, water, gun support, fire support. That's where you're gonna take your casualties. So you have total reliance on the Navy. And these guys wake up in the morning and the Navy's gone. Other than sunken ships.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's nowhere to run to. You can't back, you can't, there's nowhere to go. The Navy's gone. So they get ordered to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Take up position where they think an attack might come from. And here we go, back to the book. We were ordered up from the beach to new positions on the west bank of the Teneru River.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our orders commanded us to urgency. The enemy was expected.


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[Assistant] The Teneru River lay green and evil like a serpent across the palmy coastal plain. It was called a river, but it was not a river. Like most of the streams of Oceania, it was a creek, not 30 yards wide. So they're placed there to set security.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they're there for a while. And finally, one night.


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[Assistant] Here we go back to the book. A man says of the eruption of battle, all hell broke loose. The first time he says it, it is true. Wonderfully descriptive.


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[Assistant] The millionth time it is said, it has been worn into meaninglessness.


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[Assistant] It has gone the way of all good phrasing. It has become cliche.


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[Assistant] But within five minutes of that first machine gun burst, of the appearance of that first enemy flare that suffused the battlefield in unearthly greenish light, and by its dying, accentuated the re-enveloping night, within five minutes of this,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All hell broke loose. Everyone was firing, every weapon was sounding voice, but this was no orchestration, no terribly beautiful symph- symphony of death as decadent rear echelon observers write. Here was a cacophony.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Here was a cacophony. Here was dissonance. Here was wildness. Here was the absence of rhythm. The loss of limit. For fires...


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[Assistant] Here was booming, sounding, shrinking, wailing.


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[Assistant] Hissing, crashing, shaking, gibberish noise. Here was hell. Yet each weapon had its own sound. And...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is odd with what clarity the trained ear distinguishes each one and catalogs it, plucks it out of the general din even though it is intermingled with coincidental with the voice of a dozen others.


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[Assistant] Even though one's own machine gun spits and coughs and dances and shakes in caloric fury.


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[Assistant] So it was that our ears pricked, prickled at strange new sounds. The lighter, shingle-snapping crack of the Japanese rifle, the gargle of their extremely fast machine guns, the hiccup of their light mortars.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And by the way, the movie The Pacific, or the series The Pacific shows the battle scenes of the Teneru River, and they're phenomenal. They do a great job of representing what's just, what he's talking about right there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back to the book, we dive for our holes in gun positions. I jumped the gun, I jumped to the gun with which Chuckler and I had left standing on the bank. I unclamped the gun and fired, spraying my shots as though I were handling a hose. All but one fell. The first fell as though his under part had been cut.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Jap, who had survived, who had survived was deep in the coconuts by the time I found him in the rifle sights. There was his back, bobbing large, and he seemed to be throwing his pack away. Then I fired, and he wasn't there anymore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Perhaps it was not I who shot him, but everyone had found their senses.


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[Assistant] For not everyone had found their senses and their weapons by then, but I boasted that I had. Perhaps too, it was a merciful bullet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Modern war went forward in the jungle. Men of the first battalion were cleaning up. Sometimes they drove a Japanese toward us. He would cower on the riverbank, hiding, unaware that opposite him were we. Already the victors, numerous, heavily armed, lusting for more blood. We killed a few more this way. The fever was on us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yet, it's interesting that he's looking back and thinking to himself that when he kills this Japanese soldier.


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[Assistant] That, that was a merciful thing to do. Because he, they haven't suffered yet.


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[Assistant] They've been on the island for a few days, even though they're scared, even though they've received fire, they haven't gone to the full length of suffering that they're gonna go through. So when the battle's over,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And Lekki gives everyone in the book, he just gives them these really kind of easy to understand nicknames based on their personality.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, he talks about this guy here who he calls Lieutenant Ivy League, which doesn't take a lot of explanation to picture what that guy is like. So, here we go back to the book. Lieutenant Ivy League strode up to our pits in the morning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So this is the battle's over. He sat on a coconut log and told us what had happened.


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[Assistant] He smoked desperately and stared into the river as he talked.


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[Assistant] The skin around his eyes was drawn tight with strain and with shock.


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[Assistant] His eyes had already taken on that aspect peculiar to Guadalcanal. That constant stare of pupils that seemed darker, larger, rounder, more absolute.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He kinda gives him a debrief on what happened with the battle. That where the Japanese had come from. And then he says, when he spoke again, it was to tell us who had been killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There were more than a dozen from H company besides more than a score of wounded. Four or five of the dead were from R platoon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Two of them had been hacked to death. A Japanese scouting party had found them asleep in their hole on the river bank and sliced them into pieces.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our regiment had killed something like 900 of them.


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[Assistant] Most of them lay in clusters or in heaps before the gun pits commanding the sand spit. As though they had not died singly, but in groups.


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[Assistant] One of the Marines went methodically among the dead armed with a pair of pliers.


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[Assistant] He had observed that the Japanese have a penchant for gold fillings in their teeth, often for solid gold teeth. He was looting their very mouths.


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[Assistant] He would kick their jaws agape, peer into the mouth with all the solicitude of a Park Avenue dentist. Careful, always careful not to contaminate himself by touch. And yank out all that glittered.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I kept the gold teeth in an empty Bull Durham tobacco sack, which he wore around his neck. Souvenirs. We called him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's another nickname they get, they call this guy souvenirs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're just holding in that position, and, and for a few nights.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] While they were holding this position on the river, they would see, they didn't know what it was, they would see sort of a V in the calm water, they would see like a V, a disturbance in the water, and they couldn't figure out what it was, they were scared out of it a couple times, they shot towards it, they didn't know what it was, they thought it was a spy or a scout trying to check them out, but they were crocodiles.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back to the book. I took the glasses from him and focused on the opposite shore where I saw a crocodile eating the fat Japanese.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I watched in debased fascination, but when the crocodile began to tug at the intestines, I recalled my own presence in that very river hardly an hour ago, and my knees went weak, and I relinquished the glasses.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That night the V reappeared in the river so they could see the little ripple in the river. Everyone whooped and hollered.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No one fired. We knew what it was. It was the crocodile.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Three smaller V's trailed afterwards, so there's even more crocodiles coming.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They kept us awake, crunching. The smell kept us awake. Even though we lay with our heads swathed in a blanket, which was now, which was how we kept off the mosquitoes, the smell overpowered us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Smell. The sense which somehow seems a joke is the one most susceptible to outrage. It will give you no rest. One can close one's eyes to ugliness or shield the ears from sound, but from a powerful smell, there is no recourse but flight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And since we could not flee, we could not escape this smell. And we could not sleep.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We never fired at the crocodiles, though they returned to the repast day after day until the remains were removed to mass burning and burial, which served as a funeral pyre for the enemy we had annihilated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which we called the Battle of Hell's Point was not so great as we had imagined it to be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was to be but one of the many fights for Guadalcanal, and in the end, not the foremost of them. But being the first in our experience, we took it for total triumph. Like those who take the present for the best of all worlds, having no reference to the past, nor regard for the future.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a mistake we all make. You know, something good happens and you think you think you're the victor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From the high plateau of triumph, we were about to descend into the depths of trial and tedium.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Japanese attack was to be redoubled and prolonged and varied. It would come from the sky, the sea, and the land.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In between every trial, there would stretch out the tedium that sucks a man dry, drawing off the juice from body and soul, as a native removes the contents of a stick of sugar cane, leaving it spent, cracked, good for nothing but the flames.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Coming from the interaction of trial and tedium. The first, shaking a man as the wind in the tree tops. The second, eroding him as the flood at the roots. So he's got these two things that are working on him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Trial, which is the actual fighting, the actual attacks, and tedium, which is the boredom and the waiting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And again, if you watch the Pacific, it does a great job of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Showing this, and one of the things that really got me when I watched that for the first time is it shows this landing and there's nothing happening. And you're waiting for it to happen, then you know it's gonna happen. And you're waiting for it, and that was a real, that, that, that, I remember that feeling.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] of being in the streets and you're waiting for it to happen. And you're just waiting. And it's a, you want it to happen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But here's, he's describing it as like a tree being eroded, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The first, shaking a man as the wind in the treetops. The second, so that's, that's what, that's what the actual thing does to you, shakes you around, but the tedium?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The second, that's the tedium, eroding him as the flood at the roots. Each fresh trial leaves a man more shaken than the last. And each period of tedium, with its time for speculative dread.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] leaves his foundations worn lower, his roots less firm for the next trial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sometimes there is a final shattering. A man crouching in a pit beneath the bombardment of a battleship might put a pistol to his head and deliver himself. Sometimes it is partial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Another man might break at the sound of a diving enemy plane and scream and shudder and wring his hands and rise to run.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is the terror I meant. This is the terror that strangles reason with the clawing hands of panic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I saw it twice, I felt it pluck at me twice, but it was rare. It claimed few victims.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's a really, I think that's just a phenomenal way to understand what these guys were going through. The waiting, and then the trial, and then the waiting, and then the trial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just, just thinking about, okay, what's the next attack gonna be like? Are we gonna be able to get through it? And you know, he's talking about guys killing themselves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right. Or, I thought you were gonna say that sometimes, you know, guys once they're surrounded by the SWAT team, Oh yea, then they just know, they just can't take it anymore, they killed themselves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This, and, and he, so he says this, and he says it claimed few victims. Meaning it didn't actually, most guys sucked it up, and you're gonna hear him. You know, cause he says he felt it. Twice. It plucked at him twice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was rare. He says it, but it was rare. And then he says, courage was commonplace. So that was what was normal. What was normal was courage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Courage was a common place. It formed a club, or corporation, much as do those other common things upon which men, for diverse reasons, place so great a value, like money, like charity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For it is in the common on which the exclusive rests. Our muddy machine gun pits were transformed into courage clubs when bombs fell or Japanese warships pounded us from the sea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There was protocol to be observed too, and it was natural that the poor fellow who might break into momentary terror should cause pained silences and embarrassed coughs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everyone looked the other way, like millionaires, confronted by the horrifying sight of a club member borrowing five dollars from the waiter. And then he says this,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We were not quite so puffed up that we could not recognize the ugly thing on our friend's face as the elder brother.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you see someone going through some trouble, to be able to recognize like, hey, you know, Echo's going through some issues right now, and I'm not looking down at you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm not judging you, I'm recognizing that what you're going through today,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Could be what I go through tomorrow and they all felt, he felt that, you know, I see Echo losing it and curling into a ball and not wanting to fight. And I recognize that as the older brother of the thing that I actually feel too. But I've got it under control today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Looking down my nose at you and that's why I'm not judging you. And I think that...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Form such a tight bond that these guys had, you know, these guys had.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Respect, enough respect and enough mercy on each other.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To say, look, Echo's having a hard time right now, it's okay. We're gonna get him through today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And tomorrow it might be me and he's not gonna look down on me. Powerful stuff. We tend to judge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but I don't even know when two's gonna become eight or ten. Yeah, yesterday I was at one, so I could very well be at, you know, eight. But the idea that when you're dealing with other people, you try and have their perspective, you try and take their perspective and understand what they're going through and have empathy for what's happening to them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Powerful. Instead we tend so often just to want to judge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Washing machine Charlie, so named for the sound of his motors, was the Nocturnal Marauder.


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[Assistant] Who prowled our skies. So these are Japanese bombers.


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[Assistant] Like the dog whose bark is worse than its bite, the throb of Charlie's motors was more fearsome than the thump of his bombs. Charlie did not kill many people, but, like Macbeth, he murdered sleep.


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[Assistant] To these trials was added the worst ordeal, shelling from the sea.


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[Assistant] Enemy warships, usually cruisers, sometimes battleships, stand off your coast.


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[Assistant] It is night, and you cannot see them, nor could you if it were day, as they're miles and miles away.


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[Assistant] We could see the flashes of the guns far out to sea. We heard the soft, papoom, papoom, of their salvos.


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[Assistant] Then rushing through the night straining like an airy boxcar came the huge projectiles.


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[Assistant] The earth rocks and shakes upon the terrifying crash of the detonation. Though it be hundreds of yards away, your stomach is squeezed as though a monster, a monster hand were kneading it into dough.


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[Assistant] You gasp for breath like a football player who falls heavily and has the wind knocked out of him. Flash. Paboom.


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[Assistant] So, again, the, the unknown and uncontrollable experience of getting, you know, hit with mortars or artillery or in this case naval gunfire.


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[Assistant] And again, there's no U.S. Navy out there. They're just having their way. It's a nightmare.


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[Assistant] They continue to press on, but things are not looking good. Back to the book, everyone kept saying hopefully that the army was coming in next week to relieve us.


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[Assistant] Everyone was in despair. We heard that the army relief force had been destroyed at sea.


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[Assistant] Chuckler and I visited the cemetery. It lay to the south off the coastal road that ran from east to west through the coconuts. We knelt to pray before the graves of the men we had known. Only palm fronds marked the place where they were buried, although here and there were rude crosses on which were nailed the men's identification tags. Some of the crosses bore mess


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[Assistant] Gear tins affixed to the wood like rude medallions and on those the marines had lovingly carved their epitaphs. He died fighting. A real marine. A big guy with a bigger heart.


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[Assistant] The harder the going, the more cheerful he was.


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[Assistant] There was also this verse which I had seen countless times before and since the direct and unpolished cry of a Marine sardonic heart.


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[Assistant] And when he gets to heaven, so Saint Peter he will tell. One more marine reporting, sir. I've served my time in hell.


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[Assistant] Despair that they felt came from the fact that they began to feel expendable.


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[Assistant] Then he goes into that here. All armies have expendable items.


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[Assistant] That is a part or unit, the destruction of which will not be fatal to the whole. In some ordeals, a man might consider his finger expendable, but not his hand. Or, in extremity, his arm, but not his heart.


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[Assistant] There are expendable items which may be lost or destroyed in the field either in war or in peace without their owner being required to replace them.


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[Assistant] A rifle is so expendable, or a cartridge belt. So are men.


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[Assistant] Men are the most expendable of all. Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese. Not one, nor all of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability.


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[Assistant] This was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary.


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[Assistant] I do not doubt that if Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice. That is voluntary. Being expended robs you of that exaltation. The self


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[Assistant] The army shows up to help them out, and here we go. So we were glad to see the soldiers when they came trudging up to our pits. They came after another air raid, a very close one. But the thing had not infected them yet. War was still a lark.


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[Assistant] Their faces were still heavy with flesh, their ribs padded, their eyes innocent. They were older than we and averaged 25 to our average 20. Yet we treated them like children.


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[Assistant] Now even though they get relieved, they're still working and still fighting.


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[Assistant] And they're still suffering. Back to the book, we were growing irritable. Our strength was being steadily sapped. And a sort of physical depression afflicted many of us.


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[Assistant] The rain. The rainy season was upon us. On our exposed ridge, it fell upon us in torrents. A man was drenched in seconds, his teeth chattering and his hands darting swiftly to his precious cigarettes, transferring them to the safety of his helmet liner, cursing bitterly if he had waited too long before becoming conscious of their peril.


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[Assistant] After cigarettes, we were concerned about our ammunition.


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[Assistant] On the downward slope of the hill, the rain water ran into our pits and holes as though they were sewer receivers.


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[Assistant] We had to dash for the pits and lift the boxes of machine gun belts out of the water's way, piling them atop one another on the earth and gun platform.


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[Assistant] Any dry place in the pit was reserved for ammunition. He who sought refuge from the rain had to sit on the water cans.


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[Assistant] There were whole days of downpour where I lay drenched and shivering, gazing blankly out of my hole, watching as the sheeted gray rain whipped and undulated over the ridge.


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[Assistant] At such times, a man's brain seems to cease to function. It seems to retreat into a depth, much as the red corpuscles retreat from the surface of the body in times of excitement.


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[Assistant] One ceases to be rational. One becomes only sedent, like a barnacle clinging onto a ship. One is aware only of life, of wetness, of the cold gray rain.


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[Assistant] But without this automatic retreat of reasons, a man can go only one way. He can only go mad.


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[Assistant] Certain level of detachment there. Just checking out. Just checking out. You're just there, but you're not there.


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[Assistant] Good place to, it's a good place to visit sometimes.


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[Assistant] You know, I don't think you want to live there. You certainly don't want to live there. But it's a good place to visit.


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[Assistant] Why? I just think, I think it's important to get to a point where you're just detaching from your physical suffering and your physical pain and you just say, you know what? I'm just turned off. And you just retreat, like he said, you just retreat into almost like nothingness.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I think you've gained some clarity, and I think it's a, I think it's a very important defense mechanism to have. Oh yeah, huh. You know, sometimes when you're doing stuff,


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[Assistant] You just have to do it. Like you can't think about it anymore. You just have to turn your brain off and go. And I think that's what, that's what he's talking about right there. He's not, he's not participating in it. He's just detaching from it and doing what he's gotta, his body is doing what he's gotta do.


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[Assistant] And one of the sergeants comes out and, and makes an announcement to him. Stand by to move out in the morning. Yea, we moving out. Into a new offensive.


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[Assistant] Get all your foul weather gear ready and be sure your guns is oiled up and your ammunition belt's dry. Eight marines will be up to relieve us in the morning.


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[Assistant] So they, they, they think they're gonna get relieved and go to a ship and relax and get, get, get into, get some relief. That's what relief is, right?


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[Assistant] But they get told, no, you're going on a new offensive.


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[Assistant] So they're in, well, here, going back to the book, after nearly five months. By the way, a lot of times you think of the island campaigns in Japan, these are little islands, you know, ten miles long. You think, oh, that probably took a week, two weeks, five months. After nearly five months, this.


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[Assistant] Runner, and he's gonna name all the different guys with different nicknames. You can hear him. Runner had malaria. Brick barely stirred from the pit except at night. Hoosier and oak stump were subject to long periods of depression. Red had long since left us. I had dysentery. Chuckler was irritable.


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[Assistant] All of us were emaciated and weakened beyond measure. But we were to move out on the attack.


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[Assistant] We could not move to chow without gasping for breath, but we were to move on the enemy. We despaired.


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[Assistant] In the morning, we crouched by our guns and waited for the order to dismantle them and move out. It did not come.


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[Assistant] Nor did it come the next day, or the next, and hope came creeping back, blushing, ashamed of her loyal dis- of her disloyal flight, but commending herself to us once more with the promise never again to desert the ramparts. Then one morning, the word came to move out. Sergeant Dandy gave it to us. Leave the guns behind, he said. Take only your rifles, and foul weather geared. He grinned.


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[Assistant] It was December 14th, 1942. We had been on the lines without relief since August 7th.


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[Assistant] My battalion, the second battalion, first regiment, was the last of those in the first marine division to come out of the lines. Guadalcanal was over. We had won.


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[Assistant] Next he's, they get pulled back off the island now and he's climbing aboard the ship, aboard cargo nets.


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[Assistant] He's exhausted. I was able to reach the top of the net, but could go no further. I could not muster the strength to swing over the gunnel, and I hung there, breathing heavily. The ship's hot sides swaying away from me in the swells, the very perdition lapping beneath me until two sailors grabbed me out of the armpits and pulled me over.


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[Assistant] I fell with a clatter among the others who had been so brought aboard, and I lay with my cheek pressed against a warm, grimy deck, my heart beating rapidly, not from this exercise, but from happiness.


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[Assistant] And he ends up having a sailor conversation. Him and his buddy Chuckler, who's like one of his best friends, they, they are, end up having a conversation with one of the sailors.


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[Assistant] And he says, the soldier seems surprised. He says, you mean Guadalcanal? The guy says, was it rough? How was it? Rough? Rough, we answered.


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[Assistant] Mechanically. Then Chuckler spoke up. You mean Guadalcanal? The soldier seemed surprised. Sorry, the conversation with the soldier that was on the ship that hadn't been to Guadalcanal. The soldier seemed surprised. Of course I do.


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[Assistant] Chuckler hastened to explain, I wasn't being wise, I meant, had you ever heard of the place before you got here? His astonishment startled us. An idea was dawning. You mean, hell yes.


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[Assistant] Guadalcanal, the first marines, everybody's heard of it.


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[Assistant] We did not see him leave, for we had both looked away quickly, each embarrassed by the quick tears. They had not forgotten.


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[Assistant] A lot of times when they're in those moments of despair, they'd be thinking, no one knows what's going on here. They don't know how bad this, but the reality was, was this, this war or this battle that lasted five months. There was all kinds of reporting and the glory of the Marines and what they were doing. And so they were.


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[Assistant] I guess, you know, they were just overwhelmed with the fact that this, this soldier had said, you guys, are you kidding me? Guadalcanal. This is it.


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[Assistant] Rest and relaxation. They get to go to Australia to do this. And they, they go into the book.


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[Assistant] Of all the regiments, ours, the first, was in the most advantageous position for the great debauch.


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[Assistant] Discipline already dissolved and the delicious squeals of the girls all but disappeared that night.


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[Assistant] We received part of our six months arrears of pay in Australian pounds. But we were issued no clothing. We still wore our disheveled dungarees. So you can imagine. These guys are coming off of Guadalcanal. Hell.


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[Assistant] And now they're rolling into Australia. And, and they describe it here as girls are waiting for them. These are the heroes of Guadalcanal.


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[Assistant] He, and this is one of the things I loved about this book, is that this, that Robert Leckie is so real. He's so real. He's just a, he's just real. And, and guess what he likes to do? He likes to get after it. He goes out, he drinks, they drink, they chase women, he goes hard.


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[Assistant] And he ends up getting in some, getting in some trouble. And he talks about brig rats, basically guys that have been thrown in the brig, which is, which is the military jail. And on a ship they actually have a little brig, you know, a little jail room. And you can get thrown in there. And so he talks a little bit about that.


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[Assistant] It is most especially a marine sediment, sentiment. And when analyzed, it turns out


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[Assistant] To be not shameless or shocking, but merely this.


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[Assistant] A man who lands in the brig is apt to be a man of bold spirit and independent mind who must occasionally rebel against the harsh and unrelenting discipline of the camp. I am not attempting to exalt what should be condemned.


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[Assistant] I'm not suggesting that because of their boldness or independence the brig rats be forgiven and escape punishment. Brigged they must be, and brigged they were.


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[Assistant] Nor am I speaking of the habitual brig rat, the steady maligner who


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[Assistant] The good for nothing, who is more often in the brig than out of it, and who seeks to avoid every consequence of his uniform even fighting.


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[Assistant] I speak of the young, high-hearted soldier whose very nature is bound to bring him into conflict with military discipline and to land him, unless he is exceptionally lucky, in the brig.


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[Assistant] I speak of chocolate, and chicken, and oak stump, and a dozen others. And of course, of myself. So, he's saying, look, you got guys that are high-spirited go-getters, and they're gonna, they're gonna get after it on the battlefield?


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[Assistant] And I thought that our officer, who's one of the best officers I ever worked for, I thought he was gonna really, you know...


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[Assistant] Just crush him and, and I thought he was gonna be really disappointed in all these horrible things. And this is a guy, the officer was a guy that we all loved and wanted to always impress and we wanted to do a good job for. And so when my buddy had this big incident that he did, which you know, he was drunk and got crazy and, you know, got arrested and all that, all that bad stuff.


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[Assistant] And I talked to our OIC about it. And I said, hey sir, you know, it's, I mean, what's going to happen with my buddy? And the officer goes, hey,


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[Assistant] You guys are young warriors and things like this are gonna happen. Don't let them happen much. But they're gonna happen and we'll deal with it. And I will say to myself.


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[Assistant] I don't know why I love this guy so much. But that's, that's exactly it. You know, he was, he knew that... that...


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[Assistant] You know, you had young rambunctious guys full of testosterone, and then you add alcohol into the equation, and you add chaos into the equation. Some guys might get in trouble. Again, I hate to...


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[Assistant] To give that credence to this type of stuff, cause when I look back, I wish I would have been a better leader. I wish I would have been doing other things, you know? But...


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[Assistant] If you're in a leadership position and you got guys like this and you condemn them instead of trying to help them, you're not helping them. It goes back to this judgment thing that we talked about earlier. If I'm looking at you saying, oh, you don't, you don't, uh,


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[Assistant] You got in trouble. You're a bad person. I don't want you on this team. Instead of saying, hey look,


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[Assistant] We gotta get you under control. You got the right attitude. You got the lot of energy. Let's focus it on somewhere correct. Let's focus it on something good.


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[Assistant] Let's get you doing something positive instead of doing something negative. Instead, sometimes, guys go into the judgmental mode. You know, I'm just gonna judge you.


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[Assistant] And oh, you got in trouble, so you're bad. That's the wrong attitude to have. How about you got in trouble? How about me as leader, I let you down. I didn't show you the right way to expend your energy. I didn't give you the opportunity to give you an outlet for this, this aggression that you have.


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[Assistant] You, you don't think, you get a, you get a guys that are in the military. Do you want someone in your platoon? Do you want them to be not aggressive?


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[Assistant] Of course you want me. I want the most aggressive bastard you can imagine. And guess what? If you don't give them something to do with that aggression, they're gonna find something to do with it. And it's not gonna be good. So as a leader, let's find something positive that they can do with their aggression.


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[Assistant] No, no. You're right, you're right. But when it happened, and I think truly that officer who was a great guy, he truly probably felt exactly what I just said, I should have given them a better outlet for this aggression. You know, I should have let, I should have figured something better out for them to do.


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[Assistant] We gotta do something. You give us idle hands?


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[Assistant] So, as leaders, what we need to do is give them a proper outlet. Right, right. Because those guys want to get after it, but you gotta give them the right way. Yea. You know, you gotta give them something positive that they can work on. And if you're gonna let them do something negative...


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[Assistant] Then let's put some barriers around them so they don't get into trouble.


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[Assistant] When I was coming up, I would have done more positive stuff instead of more negative stuff. So now, we're getting to the trouble piece.


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[Assistant] And these, he's got so many great stories about how these guys, what these guys were going through.


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[Assistant] And this, so, they're out. He's out drinking. And one of his buddies...


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[Assistant] The guy that I mentioned before, his name is Chuckler. Chuckler's actually on duty. So he's standing duty, which means he's in uniform, he's not allowed to drink, he's watching and he's being, you know, he's on duty.


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[Assistant] And so, here we go, I found Chuckler standing glumly outside the slop chute entrance.


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[Assistant] Out of which, Chuckler might take a surreptitious sip.


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[Assistant] There were more side L's until Chuckler said, I gotta go to the head. Here, cover for me. He gave me his pistol belt and helmet and made off. So now, Lecky's drunk right now. Okay, so.


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[Assistant] First entry to be drunk and then to desert his post and surrender as a weapon is to combine cardinal sin with unforgivable offense. I was anxiously hoping that he would hurry back.


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[Assistant] But then, an unfortunate thing happened. Lieutenant Ivy League came striding down the corridor.


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[Assistant] I say it was unfortunate because Ivy League was the officer of the day. More than that, he was still the man who had filched my cigars. The enlisted men's cigars, if you will. So at one point he had gotten hold of some cigars and this officer had taken them.


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[Assistant] You know, uh, uh, Robert Leckie, he's an Irishman.


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[Assistant] And I'm not gonna, you know, make a generalization.


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[Assistant] And he actually gets bread and water, which they still do that in the military. They get bread and water.


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[Assistant] You can get, he gets bread and water for five days. So in the break, bread and water for five days. That's, that's the punishment that he gets. And he gets docked pay and he gets busted down in rank. One time I was on a ship, deployed. And we were in a seal platoon.


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[Assistant] And I think I've told this story before. It was the one where the marines, like we would stay on the ship when we pulled into port and it would


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[Assistant] It would take like an hour to get off the ship because everyone would be waiting in line. And so what we would do is we would just work out for that hour, hour and a half, and then we would go up, we could just walk right off the ship. Well, in that hour and a half!


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[Assistant] The marine, this, this young marine had gone off the ship and was getting carried back onto the ship like passed out, drunk, covered in puke in an hour and a half. So that's what I think of what I think of these poor guys. Can you imagine coming off of Guadalcanal? You haven't even had water for six months. Never mind alcohol. It's a nightmare. But, and of course they don't punish him too bad. Well, they, they punish him, but


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[Assistant] They gotta keep him, you know, I mean, he's an able-bodied Marine. They're not gonna, they're not gonna waste an able-bodied Marine.


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[Assistant] And hopefully the Colonel in the back of his mind was thinking to himself, you know what?


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[Assistant] I want this guy in my- I want this guy with me, you know? This guy that's just gonna- You stole cigars from me? Cool. I'm gonna threaten your life. Yea, he's getting nuts.


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[Assistant] So, they, but now Australia ends, they roll back out and it's time for them to start getting prepared to, they go to, they go to New Guinea, and if you remember New Guinea,


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[Assistant] Another hard battle was fought there. Primarily by the Australians. It was primarily, but the Australians definitely fought. Because I read that letter.


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[Assistant] From the Australian soldier to his two year old daughter, that's where he died, was in New Guinea, but now New Guinea is, is owned by


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[Assistant] The allies and they go there to train to start to prepare for their next big push. And here we go back to the book. The truck climbed a series of small hills and finally deposited us in the middle of a field of kunai grass, our new home.


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[Assistant] This is how the Marines train their men. Keep them mean and nasty like starving beasts, says the Corps, and they will fight better.


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[Assistant] When men are being moved from one place to another, spare no effort to make it painful. And before they've arrived at their destination, dispatch a man ahead to survey the ground with an eye toward dis- discomfort.


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[Assistant] They do a decent amount of training and now they're preparing to assault.


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[Assistant] Another island called New Britain, and this is, I found this very interesting, so.


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[Assistant] Back to the book, the commander called us together that night and delivered an eve of battle speech.


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[Assistant] He spoke in deliberate but angry tones. He spoke like a man who hated the Japanese. As though he had suffered a personal affront at their hands and was bent on personal vengeance.


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[Assistant] As though this were a personal, not mechanical war.


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[Assistant] His harangue seemed unreal. It was unreal, because it could never produce the desired effect. Kill the Japs, the commander was saying. I want you to kill Japs, and I want you to remember that you're Marines.


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[Assistant] We've got a tough job where we're going, and where we're going you won't have much room for ammunition, so you'd better be sure you see something before you shoot.


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[Assistant] Don't squeeze the trigger until you've got meat in your sights. And when you do, spill blood. Spill. Yeller. Blood.


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[Assistant] That was all. We walked back to the tents. It was Christmas Eve.


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[Assistant] And I find this, it's Christmas Eve, he gets this speech and you can see like, he's sitting here thinking, okay, this guy's trying to get them all riled up and it's not having any impact.


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[Assistant] And this is what I found to be real dichotomy here at the tents.


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[Assistant] Father straight was preparing to say midnight mass. So they have a chaplain there, Catholic chaplain, father straight. And here's what he says. Father straight spoke gently.


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[Assistant] He reminded us that not all of us would live to see another Christmas, that perhaps some of us might die this very day.


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[Assistant] He told us to be sorry for our sins, to ask the forgiveness of God to forgive those who had wronged us, to prepare our souls for death.


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[Assistant] Nineteen hundred and forty odd years ago the babe had been born in Bethlehem and we celebrated him this night in a dark and misty forest that his father had wrought.


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[Assistant] And hark the herald angels sing, Mild he lays his glory by, Born that man no more may die.


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[Assistant] And tomorrow, our hands would be stained with the blood of our brothers.


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[Assistant] But we sang on half-heartedly, half-hopingly, sometimes mechanically, sometimes with a desperate driving poignancy. One hand on the heart, the other on the hilt of a bayonet.


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[Assistant] In the morning, we marched down to the ships.


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[Assistant] So much more impactful on him was what Father Straight and much more than the fiery Colonel that said we're going to go kill Japs. Here these guys are.


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[Assistant] I mean, can you imagine you go in for comfort to midnight mass, Christmas Eve, and you get told that


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[Assistant] That's what these guys are facing. That's what their most trusted, the most trusted person in their lives, right? Their spiritual counselor is telling them, prepare for death.


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[Assistant] That we cut the Japanese to pieces literally when that devouring jungle did not dissolve them. And it was here that we pitied them.


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[Assistant] Now, to pity the enemy is either madness, or is it a sign, or it is a sign of strength.


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[Assistant] I think that with the 1st Marine Division on New Britain, it was a sign of strength.


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[Assistant] The soft, effete Americans who had learned to get along in the jungle and who bore up the best beneath the ordeal of the monsoon.


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[Assistant] So what they're saying here is, you know, the Americans, what do people around the world think of the Americans, even in 1943?


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[Assistant] Americans are soft. Americans are lazy. Americans, they have too much comfort. And you think the exact opposite of the Japanese, especially in World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army. It was highly disciplined. It was extremely strict. It was a Spartan lifestyle.


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[Assistant] They're fighting for freedom, and that makes all the difference in the world. Fighting for individual freedom, fighting for their personal freedom, and fighting for their nation's freedom, and fighting for their nation's freedom, and it's a nation that is based upon freedom. That right there is stronger than any tyrannical government.


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[Assistant] And that is why these, quote, soft Americans, that is why they were able to conquer.


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[Assistant] And this talks a little bit about what we were facing.


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[Assistant] To the north, one patrol discovered the body of an e-company scout who had been reported missing.


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[Assistant] The area bore the marks of a struggle as though we had fought hand to hand.


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[Assistant] His body bore dozens of bayonet wounds. They had used him for bayonet practice.


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[Assistant] In his mouth, they had stuffed flesh they had cut from his arm.


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[Assistant] His buddy said he had a tattoo there. The marine emblem. The fouled anchor and the globe.


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[Assistant] The Japs cut it off and stuffed it in his mouth.


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[Assistant] Again, to the north, two Japanese officers had been caught snooping around our positions and had been killed.


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[Assistant] An e-company outpost scouting the terrain at their front had discovered a Japanese force in platoon strength, sleeping. Sleeping on the ground, sleeping. They fired into them.


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[Assistant] And after this, after the bulk of the battle takes place, and it was fair, it was, it was, it was not a fair fight, and you're about to find out why.


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[Assistant] Back to the book, four Japanese soldiers and one officer had been taken alive.


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[Assistant] And had been brought down to the CP, their arms bound behind them, knives at their throats, and from them we learned that the 3rd Company, 53rd Regiment of the Japanese 17th Division had been dispatched from the main body at Cape Clouster to defend against our landing.


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[Assistant] Their passage had been through near impenetrable jungle and they had not arrived on the scene until two days after our own coming.


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[Assistant] They attacked us, some 100 of them against our force of some 1200. And, but for the prisoners, we had annihilated them.


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[Assistant] Were they brave or fanatical? What had they hoped to gain? Had their commander really believed that a company of Japanese soldiers could conquer a battalion of American marines, experienced, confident, better armed and placed on higher ground?


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[Assistant] Why had he not turned around and marched his men home again? Was it because no Japanese soldier can report failure, cannot lose face?


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[Assistant] Our dead were six men, among them the stubby intrepid Obi.


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[Assistant] Help to drive them out in a counter attack and who had been alternatingly firing and hurling imprecations at them until one of their bullets took him squarely in the forehead.


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[Assistant] The Japanese dead lay in heaps on the hillside, and they filled the trench where Obi's gun had been located.


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[Assistant] That shows the will of the Japanese fighters. No doubt about it. They were hardcore.


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[Assistant] And they got told to attack with 100 guys against 900 or 1200 and they said alright, let's do this.


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[Assistant] In this jungle was harsh. Back to the book. The puffing of my lips and eyes symbolized the mystery and poison of this terrible island. Mysterious. Perhaps I mean to say New Britain was evil. Darkly and secretly evil. A malefactor, an enemy of humankind.


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[Assistant] Green insects and bugs and treacherous tree bark turning the sun from his bones and cheer from his heart dissolving him.


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[Assistant] The rain, the mold, the damp, steadily plucking each cell apart like tiny hands tearing at the petals of a flower, dissolving him.


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[Assistant] I say into a mindless, formless fluid like the sop of mud into which his feet forever fall in a monotonous slop suck, slop suck, that is the sound of nothingness, the song of the jungle wherein everything falls apart in hollow harmony with the rain.


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[Assistant] Nothing could stand against it. A letter home had to be read and re-read and memorized for it fell apart in your pocket in less than a week. A pair of socks lasted no longer. A pack of cigarettes became sodden and worthless unless smoked that day.


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[Assistant] Pencils swelled and burst apart, fountain pens clogged and their points separated, rifle barrels turned blue with mold and had to be slung upside down to keep out the rain. Bullets stuck together in rifle magazines and machine gunners had to go over their belts daily, extracting and oiling and reinserting the bullets to prevent them from sticking to the cloth loops.


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[Assistant] And everything lay damp and sodden and squashy to the touch, exuding that steady musty reek that is the jungle's own. That individual odor of decay rising from vegetable life so luxuriant, growing so swiftly that it seems to hasten the decomposition from the moment of birth.


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[Assistant] It was into this green hell that we were inserted a day or two after the march. And here was fought that battle with the rainforest. Here, the jungle and the men were locked in conflict far more basic than our shooting war with the Japanese. For here, the struggle was for existence itself.


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[Assistant] The war was forgotten. Who could comprehend it?


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[Assistant] What do you say? And I have not spent that much time in the jungle. I spent some, I think the longest I've been in the jungle is maybe a month.


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[Assistant] And it wasn't as bad as this. It wasn't raining as that much. But I can't even imagine just that constant, there's no escape from it.


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[Assistant] There's no escape from it, and it's even worse for Lekki, and I'll tell you why. Back to the book. I would be wet, not only from the rain,


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[Assistant] For sometimes it stopped, and at other times it did not fall so fast that a jungle hammock could not repel it. But because an affliction


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[Assistant] Which I had begun, which had begun the moment I left Australia, was now again active.


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[Assistant] It had begun during the discomforts of Guadalcanal, had disappeared in the civilized living of Melbourne, and had reappeared.


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[Assistant] On Good Enough Island, New Guinea, and now on New Britain.


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[Assistant] I laid, I learned later from doctors to call it enuresis. When asleep, the bladder empties. And that is that.


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[Assistant] So, he puts that really nicely, but here's what's going on. Because of the stress that he's under, when he goes to bed, he pisses in his pants. And, it's just, he can't stop it. And there's nothing he can do about it. And, it won't go away.


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[Assistant] In fact it went away, uh, it will go away when the stress stops.


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[Assistant] Get back out there in the stress of combat, the stress of the environment. And when he goes to bed, he pisses himself.


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[Assistant] And there is, there is, it does fall into the story a little bit, but the reason I love that he put it in there,


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[Assistant] Is because it's just another thing that he's dealing with. And he's not even ashamed of it. He's like, yeaah.


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[Assistant] Can't, yeaah, I'm, I'm stressed out. I'm scared. And I'm pissing myself. But guess what? I'm still going on patrol.


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[Assistant] Back to the book. The last patrol was a prolonged one of several days. We were taken by landing boat down the east coast to a place called Old Natimo. And there, deposited.


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[Assistant] The place had once been inhabited by the Japs, but all their emplacements were now empty. Those of the enemy who were discovered were in the last extremities of ordeal.


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[Assistant] Some were overtaken, crawling on their hands and knees. Some so badly decomposed, it was as though their feet were rotting off.


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[Assistant] Some weighing perhaps no more than 80 pounds, some without weapons, all without food, and all possessed of that indomitable fighting spirit that was the Japanese Imperial Army's greatest asset.


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[Assistant] The one single factor that made a poorly equipped soldier a first rate foe.


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[Assistant] And they were all destroyed, bayoneted for the most part.


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[Assistant] For it was file, for it was folly to fire on patrol in unfriendly, unknown territory. One of these stragglers was strangled in cold blood by the kid, a youngster who, although already a veteran of Guadalcanal, was hardly acquainted with a razor. He would go mad two months later.


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[Assistant] So they come up across these Japanese total 80 pounds. Malnourished.


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[Assistant] Some of them didn't even have weapons and they're just trying to fight anyways.


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[Assistant] So, Lekki ends up with a hernia, and he gets pulled off to go take a look at his hernia, and they say, yeah, you got a bad hernia, but it's not bad enough, you're going back to the front.


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[Assistant] Then the army comes and replaces them there and next thing, next move is they go to train at a place called Pavuvu. Pavuvu Island are doing another training to get ready for another island campaign.


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[Assistant] We bathed by dashing naked into the rain, soaping ourselves madly in a race against the probability of the rain ceasing and being left streaked with sticky soap. And we washed our clothes by boiling them in cans of rainwater.


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[Assistant] Our jungle rot had become so bad, so persistent that there was an appointed time each afternoon for the men to take off their shoes and socks and to lie out on their sacks with corrosive feet thrust out into the sun.


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[Assistant] Nor could mere bad food or leaky tents press upon the ardor of my comrades. It was the death of hope that bore us down.


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[Assistant] There had always been hope, hope of relief, hope of the sun, hope of victory, hope of survival. But when they came and told us that none of us were going home on rotation.


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[Assistant] We strangled hope and turned into wooden soldiers. The future


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[Assistant] Looked to innumerable enemy-held islands and innumerable assaults, and we had already noticed how the ranks of the New River originals were dwindling with every action.


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[Assistant] There were even a few suicides to suggest how despairing some could find the situation.


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[Assistant] They came and said half of the originals could go home.


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[Assistant] So these guys get the word. Hey look, we're preparing for another assault, but half of you originals are gonna go home. There was joy, and then...


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[Assistant] Once the method of selection for the stateside bound became known, there was anger.


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[Assistant] There would be a drawing, a stateside lottery, in which men's names would be pulled from a hat.


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[Assistant] But only the names of those who had never been in trouble.


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[Assistant] I was among those whose name did not go into the hat.


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[Assistant] And so was Runner and Hoosier and Chicken and Souvenirs and a host of others.


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[Assistant] It seemed that the originals of the 2nd Battalion 1st Marines had been neatly divided into good guys and bad guys.


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[Assistant] Among us there raged a profane anger.


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[Assistant] I know now how a convict must feel upon being turned down a job after, being turned down a job after job because of his past.


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[Assistant] That was what disqualified us, our past. It made no difference that we had been punished. Yes, punished again and again for it to become customary to solve all problems of selection this way by marking brig rats for dirty duty and excluding them from special benefits.


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[Assistant] In retrospect, it's easy to forgive my commanders this, but then it was hard. It was too much like being unfairly condemned to death.


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[Assistant] The injustice of it overwhelmed me and I burned with a resentment that was dangerous to carry around.


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[Assistant] They say, look, we're gonna have a little lottery. Some of you guys are gonna get home. Everyone's happy. And they say, by the way, if you've been in any trouble, you don't get on the list.


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[Assistant] And that's a death sentence. The way he's seeing it right now. They're seeing it as a death sentence. We're gonna keep doing this island hopping campaign. We're gonna keep going. There's all these innumerable islands that need to be taken down. You're gonna be on all of them. And you've already seen X number of guys that you had killed.


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[Assistant] And you're gonna keep going until you're killed. And so this was like a death sentence.


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[Assistant] And those guys probably did a lot of the same crap, right?


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[Assistant] So, back to the book, my enuresis was more noticeable than before.


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[Assistant] Perhaps to the agitation of the moment aggravated it.


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[Assistant] I know that the men in my tent had been urging me to report it to sickbay. I did. The doctor who knew of my case ordered me to Benica. I was leaving in the morning, so. With that.


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[Assistant] He basically says, okay, you know what? I'm pissing on myself. The guys have been telling me to go see the doctor about it. I haven't done that.


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[Assistant] I have a hernia. I'm gonna go to medical. So he goes to medical and the doctor says, okay, you're gonna go to Benica and Benica is a, is a island where they just are set up to handle wounded.


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[Assistant] Back to the book. Benica was a flesh pot. Benica was the big town. Benica was Broadway.


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[Assistant] Spanika had women. It had buildings of steel and wood. It had roads. It had thousands of sailors as sleek as campons.


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[Assistant] It had movie amphitheaters. It had electric lights. It had canteens overflowing with candy and comforts. And Benica had beer. Walking with the others from the beach.


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[Assistant] After the Navy Hospital, I felt like a hick on his first visit to New York. Jeeps and trucks and staff cars swept over the island's roads, raising a busy cloud of dust. Cranes croaked and cranked on the beach, loading and unloading the boats. MPs patrolled a stockade of pointed sticks behind which dwelt the women.


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[Assistant] The Navy nurses and Red Cross workers. Everyone was well fed and unworried. The seat of every pair of pants was filled and happy. We.


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[Assistant] The lean ones who wore our discontent on our faces and carried our nervous impatience in our hands must have been a disturbing presence in that purring island incubator.


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[Assistant] Yet as I walked along, I was filled with the uneasy suspicion that it would be the image of Benica and not Pervuvu that would be presented to America as the Pacific War.


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[Assistant] They do a pretty good job of this in the pacific, in the series. Not as good as they


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[Assistant] Maybe could have done because they show, they show the guys coming onto a beach and there's nurses and they're dressed in like beautiful clean white and they're literally handing out lemonade and it's such a contradiction to what they've been living.


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[Assistant] So you get that, but this image is even crazier in my mind of coming onto this island. You'd be coming off Pavoovoo, you're living in the hell.


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[Assistant] And here these guys are, whatever, a quick flight away, and they've got movie theaters, and they've got beer, and they've got women running around. It's just totally, totally different. And I've talked about that a bunch of times on here. Like, you could be, you could be in World War II.


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[Assistant] Wasn't that much of a sacrifice as it was compared to somebody that was on the Island Happening campaign. Just, it's not.


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[Assistant] They got a nice gym, they got a nice chow hall, then you'd go out to some...


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[Assistant] Some outstation in the middle of some forward operating base and these dudes would be living hard. Totally different for different people.


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[Assistant] Now, Lekki gets put basically into a psych ward. They wanna look at him, and he's...


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[Assistant] He starts having this conversation with a psychologist.


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[Assistant] Then we talked of books, for he was well read, and philosophy. Suddenly he broke it off and said, what did you say you were?


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[Assistant] Meaning, what was he saying? Like, what did you say you did in the Marine Corps? A scout, I said proudly. I used to be a machine gunner. And the doctor says back, but that's no place for a man of your caliber. Now I was shocked. The old shibboleth. Intelligence.


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[Assistant] Had not our government been culpable enough in pampering the high IQ draftees as, as though they were too intelligent to fight for their country?


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[Assistant] Could not Dr. Gentle see that I was proud to be a scout? And before that, a machine gunner? Intelligence, intelligence, indeligence. Keep it up, America. Keep telling your youth that mud and danger are fit only for intellectual pigs.


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[Assistant] Keep fawning head over heart, and soon the head will arrive.


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[Assistant] At the complete folly of any kind of fight, and meekly surrender the treasure.


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[Assistant] I think that we do a really good job now in America.


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[Assistant] You know, there'll be enlisted kids with bachelor's degrees and master's degrees in the Army, in the Marine Corps, in the SEAL teams.


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[Assistant] I don't think we have that as much, but it's definitely something that you need to watch out for. And I think especially, this goes back to judgment.


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[Assistant] I met some young marine, not a young marine, but you know, a guy who's probably 25, 27 years old. And he came into the gym, and you know, someones like, oh he was in the Marine Corps, awesome man.


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[Assistant] What'd you do in the Marine Corps? He was like, I was a machine gunner. I'm like, yes. I'm like, yes, that's awesome. But to have somebody think, oh you were just a machine gunner, you must, no. No.


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[Assistant] Being a machine gunner should be a vaunted and elevated position.


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[Assistant] You wanna talk about a person that can get stuff done? Go talk to a machine gunner. They'll make some stuff happen. They're carrying a big pig of a gun around. They're laying down fire under pressure.


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[Assistant] I'll put the machine gunner up against one of these intellectuals any day of the week.


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[Assistant] I remember one time we had the awesome CBs that worked for, that were in Ramadi with us. And so they're building


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[Assistant] They're building bunkers. I'm not kidding. Like what were their priority builds when they were in Ramadi with me on our little camp, Camp Marklee? The priorities that they were working on were bunkers.


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[Assistant] were security walls on the river, getting barbed wire, those were the priorities they were working on. And my lead CB, my CB chief, he's, he had to go to our headquarters.


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[Assistant] For a couple days to get money and get equipment and whatever. And when he came back, he was a great dude. His nickname was Biggie. And he was big.


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[Assistant] Yeaah, yeaah, no his, he would, he would, he would, like his warm-up sets on bench were 315. He was big and he was strong, and he was strong. And he came back, and you know, he says, he says, hey sir, coming back from Fallujah. I was like, oh, everything cool out there? He goes, let me tell you something. I was like, what's that biggie? He says, you know what they're building out there?


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[Assistant] But those CVs man, they kept us, they kept everything wrong and rolling. Props, once you, props to the machine gunners, props to the CVs. For sure. So, they're in a theater, that had been built out here. And the movie began, there was an interruption.


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[Assistant] Over a public address system, a voice announced, allied troops have just invaded northern France. The second front has been opened.


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[Assistant] Cheers and shouts rose into the soft night to be followed by a buzz of excitement, but then the film began and silence was restored. I arose and left the amphitheater, my heart throbbing in excitement. It was difficult to comprehend this excitement.


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[Assistant] It was a mix of thrill and pride, but predominating was the heartbeat of anxiety, for suddenly it had been born in upon me that great events were happening.


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[Assistant] That the war was now rushing downhill to victory, and here I was, clad in pallid pajamas and robe, lounging around the hospital.


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[Assistant] Yearning came upon me in a rush and I wept, hurrying along the dark road back to the hospital. I wanted to rejoin my comrades.


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[Assistant] So he goes into, see Dr. Gentle goes into his office and basically they work it out.


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[Assistant] Back to the book. There's not much we can do for this trouble of yours, the hospital commander told me. There's no curing it out here. What you need is a change of climate and a less nerve-wracking assignment.


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[Assistant] You're shipping me back to the States, sir? I asked. He smiled vainly. Ordinarily, yes. Unfortunately, you Marines can't go home unless you're carried home.


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[Assistant] So we are sending you back to duty with a suggestion that your commanding officer have the sentry wake you during the night. I laughed, and he laughed, and Dr. Gentle laughed.


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[Assistant] Because they knew that's not something that's feasible. What they're basically saying is you're gonna go back and you're just gonna piss yourself and you're gonna fight. And that's exactly what he wanted.


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[Assistant] Back to the book, we left Pavuvu, victors of Guadalcanal in New Britain. We went out to fight again, marching into the open jawed landing craft driven up on the beach. Never before were we so confident of victory. Never again would its price be so high.


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[Assistant] The island flat and almost featureless was an altar being prepared.


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[Assistant] So they're going on to Peladu and here we go right into it.


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[Assistant] They're in their landing craft. The water began to erupt and little geysers in the air became populated with exploding steel. The enemy was saluting us. They were receiving us with mortar and artillery fire. Ten thousand Japanese awaited on the island of Peleliu. Ten thousand men as brave and determined and skillful as ever a garrison was since the art of warfare began.


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[Assistant] Skillful, yes, it was a terrible rain and it did terrible work among us before we reached the beach.


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[Assistant] Our Amtrak was among the first assault waves yet the beach was already a litter of burning blackened amphibian tractors of dead and wounded


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[Assistant] A mortar garden of exploding mortar shells, holes had beer scooped in the white sand or had been blasted out by the shells. The beach was parked with holes all filled with green clad helmeted Marines.


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[Assistant] We found an opening in it, and even then we're filling it with all manners of small armed fire, grenades, sticks of dynamite hurled by men who had crept up to it, or bellowing fire from the flamethrowers who had also gained the hole. But the answering fire continued to rake our deadly picnic ground.


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[Assistant] And the reason for that is here. For the Japanese had possessed Peleliu for two decades and had blasted into the coral a network of mutually supporting caves.


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[Assistant] So that, so these, they've been there for 20 years preparing for this. And so they've got this massive cave network and every time they hit one of these locations, the more guys would just pop up.


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[Assistant] And they also, the Japanese also had tanks on Peleliu. Back to the book, their tanks swooped in suddenly upon us. They came tearing across the airfield, a dozen or so of them. It was startling. They'd come out of nowhere. And here were only riflemen and machine gunners to oppose them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There was a violent outburst of gunfire, I poked my head above the crater. Through the lacy branchwork of the scrub trees, I saw an enemy tank streaking along with snipers and camouflage hanging onto the rear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was but a moment's glance, but at the time, my eye caught sight of a Marine from F Company, a veteran running bow-legged to the rear, his face writhing, shouting, tanks, tanks! An officer grabbed him and spun him around and kicked him and propelled him back to his post.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the crater we'd prepared for defense like a caravan attacked by Indians.


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[Assistant] The enemy tanks whizzed past, their little wheels whirling within the tracks. Machine guns clattered, bazookas whammed, our airplanes came screeching down from heaven. And there rose the detonation of their bombs and the roar of exploding tanks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To my right, I saw a line of our tanks advancing, firing as they came, seeming to stop each time their guns stuttered. Then it was over, the Jap tanks had been destroyed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I turned to go and as I did nearly stepped on someone's hand.


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[Assistant] Excuse me, I began to say, but then I saw that it was an unattached hand, or rather a detached one. It lay there alone, open, palm upwards, clean, capable, solitary.


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[Assistant] I could not tear my eyes from it. The hand is the artisan of the soul.


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[Assistant] It is the second member of the human trinity of head and hand and heart.


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[Assistant] A man has no faculty more human than his hand. None more beautiful, nor expressive, nor productive.


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[Assistant] To see this hand lying alone as though contemptuously cast aside, no longer a part of man, no longer his help.


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[Assistant] Was to see war in all its wantonness. It was to see the especially brutal savagery of our own technique of rending.


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[Assistant] Turning upon one another, tearing one another, clawing at their own innards with the maniacal fury of the pride possessed. Not much I can comment on that one.


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[Assistant] Back to the book. Our casualties were extremely heavy.


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[Assistant] Before the day was done, they would total 500 in the first regiment. Something like 20%. This on the first day. We were advancing again.


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[Assistant] Our objective was Bloody Nose Ridge. This was the high ground visible from across the airfield. It gave the enemy perfect observation.


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[Assistant] Advancing across the flat table of crushed coral on which there was hardly a single depression as we were easily sighted as clay ducks in a shooting gallery. But there was no other route and we had to take it.


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[Assistant] Grass cutting machine gun fire swept the airfield. Mortars, mortar shells fell with the calm regularity of automation. Marines fell. They crumpled. They staggered.


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[Assistant] They pitched forward, they sank to their knees, they fell backwards.


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[Assistant] The first F company wave was advancing across the airstrip, running low with ranks scattered, breasting a withering machine gun fire that had begun to rake the runway.


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[Assistant] They were falling. It seemed unreal. It seemed a tablo. Like a scene from a motion picture.


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[Assistant] It required an effort of mine to recall that these were flesh and blood marines, men whom I knew, whose lives were linked with mine.


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[Assistant] Still more was required in facing up to the fact that my turn was next.


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[Assistant] Here where the banner must be unfurled or the song sung where the name of the cause flung at the enemy like a challenge. Here is the mounted charge.


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[Assistant] The thing is old as warfare itself, that either overwhelms the defense, and wins the battle, or is broken, and brings on defeat.


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[Assistant] How much less forbidding might have been that avenue of death that I was about to cross had there been some holy irrational shout, like, Viva la Emperor, or the Marine Corps forever, rather than that educated voice.


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[Assistant] They're continuing to advance and he's watching this group go across this airfield getting mowed down.


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[Assistant] And what does he get? Well, it's our turn now. Crazy.


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[Assistant] I bade goodbye to the artist. He looked at me sadly from beneath his helmet, his face made darker and more angular by its shadow. He cast a ruleful glance in the direction of the airstrip and the still falling men. Good luck, kid, he said and turned away. I began to run.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The heat rose and stifling waves, the bullet whispered at times, at other times they were not audible. I ran with my head low, my helmet bumping crazily to obscure my view, like waves rising around a small ship. In a moment.


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[Assistant] I could not see Lieutenant Deepchest or Filthy Fred. I was alone and running. There were men to my left.


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[Assistant] Still falling. I ran and threw myself down, caught my breath, rose again, and ran again. Suddenly I ran into a shell crater full of men, and I stopped running. So, the only cover that they have is a shell crater. And he dives into this shell crater, and there's, uh, ten guys or so in there. And one of them, he's calling this one guy walkie talkie.


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[Assistant] Back to the book, walkie talkie sat below me on the crater floor. He hunched his shoulders toward me and asked me to twirl certain dials. I did, but he could not seem to get through.


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[Assistant] There came the screech of a shell. I braced my back for it even though I knew that the ones you hear are not the ones to be feared. But how fear the one that gets you. The one you do not hear.


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[Assistant] Another voice was audible now. The 5th Marine's Lieutenant, who was wounded, who was in fact dying as I learned later, was speaking by walkie talkie to his regimental commander.


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[Assistant] The glorious fifth marines have gone through, sir. He was saying. And have achieved the objective.


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[Assistant] We are now in contact with the first regiment.


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[Assistant] Now, there's ten guys in there. And finally, one of the captains speaks up. How many men, how many men here from the first marines? He asked. We raised our hands.


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[Assistant] Six, eh? That oughta be enough. We better take that block house over there. That's where all the machine gun fire seems to be coming from. As soon as this shell fire stops, we'll move out against it. Just like that.


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[Assistant] The blockhouse had resisted even naval gunfire. It had taken bombs point blank and remained standing.


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[Assistant] It was obviously covered by a maze of pill boxes. We, six of us, were to take it.