The Pacific Theater
World War II featured three major “theaters” of battle. In this case, theater is a term referring to the broad geographic stage on which concerted tactics were engaged to accomplish a precise strategic goal. In addition to the European theater, the war also featured the Mediterranean, African and Middle East. The focus of this book is a story taking place in the third, as described in metaphorical terms by Victor Davis Hanson in his Introduction:
“The Pacific ground theater of World War II from Guadalcanal to Okinawa that nearly consumed Sledge, as it did thousands of American youths, was no dream, but a nightmare unlike any other fighting in the nation's wartime history. It was an existential struggle of annihilation.”
The Ultimate Metaphor of War
There is a well-known metaphorical relationship which occurs during wartime that has been repeated in one way or another often enough in the movies that one need hardly be a soldier to find it familiar. It has become the defining metaphor of the soldier at war (whatever the actual service in which enlistment takes place):
“The rifle is a Marine's best friend.”
Darkness
Darkness as a metaphor has become such a familiar image in literature since the turn of the 20th century that it has reached the inevitable point where it loses some of its power. With that in mind, when the metaphor is used to make a powerful point, the result is all the more intensely felt:
“It was the darkest night I ever saw. The overcast sky was as black as the dripping mangroves that walled us in. I had the sensation of being in a great black hole and reached out to touch the sides of the gun pit to orient myself. Slowly the reality of it all formed in my mind: we were expendable!”
War is Worse than Hollywood Hell
One particularly well-written passage of metaphorical prose is quite successful at conveying one of the most difficult propositions in the post-Hollywood studio system era where the collapse of censorship has made portraying the hellishness of battle so vivid that one need never get a battlefield to imagine the previously unimaginable. No camera could truly capture the essence of this description of the genuine reality of the battlefield:
“In addition to the terror and hardships of combat, each day brought some new dimension of dread for me: I witnessed some new, ghastly, macabre facet in the kaleidoscope of the unreal, as though designed by some fiendish ghoul to cause even the most hardened and calloused observer among us to recoil in horror and disbelief.”
The Dead Marine’s Philosophy
One of the most ghoulish and haunting episodes recounted in the book concerns a dead Marine who appearance is nearly pristine: neatly laced, hand still clutching his weapon, dungarees unfaded and unmarked by the mud on his boots. Beneath his cap, however, was a skeletal remain among the worst the author would ever look upon; a face frozen in thought:
“that half-gone face leered up at me with a sardonic grin. It was as though he was mocking our pitiful efforts to hang on to life in the face of the constant violent death that had cut him down. Or maybe he was mocking the folly of the war itself: `I am the harvest of man's stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust.’”
