“He was my closest friend. I didn’t even know he was anywhere within 5,000 miles of where I was and then he came down the street looking for me, and when I say street I’m talking about rows of tents. He came walking down the company street and I thought, that could be Eugene and then I was certain it was him. I ran out of the tent and screamed out at Eugene and we hugged each other and beat on each other and rolled on the ground. People thought we were fighting. A crowd gathered around. Two weeks after that I went home but we had two weeks together. You couldn’t believe it was happening, you kept thinking you were having a dream. And that you’d just pinch yourself and wake up.”
“It’s hard to explain. I liken it to someone watching their mother die in a horrible car accident and then at the funeral someone they don’t really know coming up to them and asking, “ya feeling better yet?” A little cup of water from a pretty girl is such an inadequate consolation for going through 2 months of hell. And on another level, he hated them, he hated their pureness and innocence and naivete in a place like Pavuvu. He hated that he could never feel that way again, the way they do, after what he had seen. He could never go back to the innocent, pure guy that he was. And lastly, he didn’t recognize them. They were like aliens. They didn’t fit amongst the muck the death and brutality of war, which was all he knew anymore.”
“None of us would ever be the same after what we had endured. To some degree that is true, of course, of all human experience. But something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war’s savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others in to endure it.”
"Never in my wildest imagination had I contemplated Captain Haldane’s death. We had a steady stream of killed and wounded leaving us, but somehow I had assumed Ack Ack was immortal. Our company commander represented stability and direction in a world of violence, death and destruction. Now his life had been snuffed out. We felt forlorn and lost. It was the worst grief I endured during the entire war. The intervening years have not lessened it any.
Capt. Andy Haldane wasn’t an idol. He was human. But he commanded our individual destinies under the most trying conditions with the utmost compassion. We knew he could never be replaced. He was the finest marine officer I ever knew. The loss of many close friends grieved me deeply on Peleliu and Okinawa. But to all of us the loss of our company commander at Peleliu was like losing a parent we depended upon for security - not our physical security, because we knew that was a commodity beyond our reach in combat, but our mental security."
If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
Comments 138
- Sidney Phillips {The Pacific}
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- Joe Mazzello {re: Part 7 of The Pacific}
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- Eugene Sledge, With the Old Breed
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Capt. Andy Haldane wasn’t an idol. He was human. But he commanded our individual destinies under the most trying conditions with the utmost compassion. We knew he could never be replaced. He was the finest marine officer I ever knew. The loss of many close friends grieved me deeply on Peleliu and Okinawa. But to all of us the loss of our company commander at Peleliu was like losing a parent we depended upon for security - not our physical security, because we knew that was a commodity beyond our reach in combat, but our mental security."
- Eugene Sledge, With the Old Breed
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- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
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