EP33 Sledgehammer and Big Shot

41:14And it was actually 60 Minutes, I think, did a whole segment once on the popularity of these Vietnam courses that were springing up in college when I was in college. And we used to have every session you'd have a veteran come in and talk to you from that war. and there was a lot of reading that we did that talked about the difference between the way that generation was working through uh their war experiences versus what the second world war generation did for theirs a much quieter man in the gray flannel suit sort of thing versus a generation that sort of had a mass psychology experiment looking into their souls and trying to work the the long road home all those kinds of things what was your dad's opinion both on that war and the difference between the way that generation was working out what they went through, the combat veterans I'm talking about, and the way your dad's brethren did.

42:05I think, you know, that I have really clear memories of that because something like in the early 70s, some of my dad's students were young guys coming home from Vietnam. Um, and he got to be really good friends with one was an army vet. One was a Marine. And he got to be really good friends with these guys because they came home and were getting their lives together and trying to move forward and be productive citizens. Um, he admired that he respected that they respected him and admired him and they could, they could connect with each other, you know, in a way that some other college freshmen who literally had never done anything that my dad just had a little bit more of a difficult time relating to.

42:55He respected what they had done, but these were guys who didn't sit around and feel sorry for themselves and were moving on with their lives. Now, where it gets a little complicated with Vietnam, we all know that a lot of people came home from Vietnam and were treated very poorly. and that should have never happened and it's it's it's hard to think about that when you look at vietnam veterans who maybe didn't respond well to that um and who and i'm i'm trying to say this without sounding like i'm judging anybody dan so please understand that Sure. But when my dad saw maybe a story on the news or something about, you know, a veteran of Vietnam who was just outcasting himself from society and angry and bitter and turning to drugs and alcohol and, you know, just and I feel bad for the struggles that man was going through.

43:59but you got to understand now, here's a guy who'd been at Peleliu and Okinawa. Here's a guy who lost some of his best friends in those two battles. He's looking at that and he's saying, what you went through is no worse than what I went through. Probably not as bad. Well, you know, if you want to say that, by all means say that. If he wanted to say that, he could say that. I'm not going to say that because I don't want anybody saying to me, well, he's trying to judge certain people, and I'm not. But I'm telling you, my dad was really good friends with some Vietnam vets, but they were the ones who were getting their lives together and moving on.

44:37Anybody, I don't care, vet anybody, it doesn't matter. My father didn't have a lot of tolerance for somebody who would sit around and drown themselves in alcohol or worse, drugs, you know, which became more prevalent later on. and do nothing to better themselves or better their situation. He, whether rightly or wrongly, he had no tolerance for that because he's looking at it like, okay, I went through something every bit as bad, if not worse. I came home and got myself together. And that was just the way, that's why I say, I think I say somewhere in the closing pages of my book, and I've said it many times, there was a side of him that was a hard ass.

45:28And I'm not talking about the kind that a big, tough guy who's going to go. You were talking about grading. I remember like grading papers and then student conduct. Oh, yes. But I mean, I'm also saying it from the standpoint of just mental toughness. I mean, I don't mean the kind of guy who's going to walk into a biker bar and break a pool cue and go, okay, who wants to fight? You know, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a hard ass that just, there's a job to be done. Get it done. Do not feel sorry for yourself. And that whether people like to hear that or not, I'm sorry, but that's the kind of man he was.

46:07Well, that's a generational thing though, too. I mean, we all knew those guys. And the funny thing is I always say that that's a trope, right? That every generation thinks the next generations are weaker. And I always say that the first world war generation thinks that the second world war generation, the greatest generation, were a bunch of slackers. So that's just how it always is. But those guys, and we all knew them growing up, they, to us anyway, they looked pretty rough and tough and for better or for worse, right? I mean, did your dad feel the same way about veterans from his conflict too?

46:40I mean, if they came home to the States after the second world war and couldn't cut it anymore because of the the damage done to them remember we know shell damage now actually does real physical things to your head um any any more sympathy any less sympathy same amount of sympathy for those guys you mean from war or two back when he was younger yeah or his buddies even who served with him um yeah i mean there there yeah there would have been more sympathy. I mean, you know, I think that I just remember him telling me, and we said it with the Ulbree, but he told me too, you know, some of this just goes back to the strong feeling towards his enemy.

47:27I just remember him saying, you know, I knew, and I'm going to use the word Jap here because that's why he said it to me. And I'm not going to sanitize what he said to me in the name of political correctitude, because I don't think that's what people want to hear. They want honesty. He said, I knew the Japs could kill me, wound me, maim me for life. They could do terrible things, but I was not going to let them take my sanity. Well, let me talk about that for a minute, because that's one of the things. So I've always been fascinated with the different challenges that different soldiers on different fronts faced, right?

47:58So the difference between being a GI, for example, in Europe, fighting the Germans versus being a Marine in the Pacific fighting the Japanese. And in your in your book, not with the Obri, but in your book, you specifically pointed out that your dad had said, talked a little bit about the difference in fighting the two. And for those who don't know, the Germans had some of the best equipment in the war, and that would have made them scary in their own right. The Germans long before the Nazi period were fantastic soldiers. There were a lot of reasons you wouldn't want to fight the Germans. But the Japanese didn't let you sleep, your dad said.

48:32And when I think about the damage, you know, the PTSD, the waking up with the dreams and all that sort of stuff, an enemy that's going to sneak up on you at night is something I would think would stick in your, you know, fight or flight memory for the rest of your life. You know, I think you said in your book, he said that the Germans eventually, you know, called it a day and would go to bed at night. And that's when some of the Japanese were just getting up ready to harass you. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect? Because your father has some of the most horrifyingly heartbreaking stories about guys in the middle of the night who jump out of their foxhole and get killed accidentally by their own guys.

49:09I mean, my God, it's Bill still sticks with me. Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure. I mean, so let's, I mean, let's just go back to it from a less emotional and more physical perspective. I mean, my dad was obsessed with making sure I went to bed early enough and got enough sleep. And I, you know, at first I was like, God, why is he constantly telling me to go to bed? I came to understand that a lot of that tied back to what you just said on Peleliu and everywhere in the Pacific, not just Peleliu, not just Okinawa. And I remember him saying this so many times when I was a kid, you know, how, you know, the Japanese were moving around at night.

49:53They moved around all night. You had to worry about infiltration. You know, he told me I spent many a night in my foxhole, the K-Bar in one hand, my 45 in the other. You know, one guy had to be awake on watch, the other guy slept.

50:08They're constant, you know, the way they, I mean, we know on Peleliu, they had troops who fought during the day while there were other troops who stayed back in the caves resting. And then the troops who fought during the day, they would rest, and the troops who rested during the day, they'd go out and infiltrate at night. Um, and they were masters at it. And, you know, you had to, he said, we had to attack them all day and fight them all night. And it was, it was exhausting. And I mean that, that, um, just that the combat in and of itself is, is just what is this accumulation of deprivation? You know, it's such a degrading experience on so many levels.

50:49it all just becomes even worse and compressed and magnetized to the exponential degrees when you have to deal with it not having had any sleep and you're just physically and mentally exhausted and you know he was in combat on Peleliu for what 30 32 days and 81 82 days on Okinawa and I actually thought the material that got that I was able to use that got edited out of with the old breed for Okinawa was even because there was just more of it. But he like, I mean, Dan, as I'm sitting there reading and researching his unpublished words, I almost felt like, God, he's just belaboring this point of how exhausted he was, how tired they were and how, you know, just, you just reached this point of utter exhaustion that you just cannot go on anymore.

51:43And yet you have to, you know, but yeah, many times, I mean, he would say, man, the Germans were fine soldiers. You know, I would not have wanted to fight them, but at least you could get some sleep at night with them.

51:58It's interesting. I'm thinking about, like I said, some of the, and folks, if you haven't read With the Old Breed, and then Henry's book is the perfect complement to it. This is one of the best books ever written by a Second World War American combat veteran. And part of what he does is, I I mean, there are images, the one of him sliding, seeing the guy slide down the hill or himself slide down the hill and then end up at the bottom covered in maggots and vomiting. These are the sorts of things that don't make it into your John Wayne movie, but turn it 360 degrees, giving you a much better sense of what we're really talking about here, right?

52:34It's a little like reading Paul Fussell's book, Wartime, where he talks about all the different ways you die in this war that nobody ever even talks about. And I remember the one he said was getting hit with a body part of your buddy. And once you start to realize that when we talk about like that army psychologist who wrote on the 50th anniversary, war's cost is to the soul or whatever he called it, what these people had to go through and then walk around and live their lives, which many of us find challenging enough without any combat experience in our backgrounds. That to me is as impressive as whatever they had to do actually in the combat.

53:12You know what I mean? To stick it out on the long haul decade after decade. Yeah. Well, that's, you know, and again, as I got older and began to really understand that, okay, I mean, here's a guy who survived what he survived and then, you know, comes home and and tries to piece it all back together and figure out what he wants to do. And first he got a business degree, which was not what he wanted. That was not his passion. And, you know, my grandfather was very wise perspicacious man and, and told him, look, science is what you love, you know, go to Auburn and get involved in one of their biology, their graduate biology programs.

53:51And, and, you know, that's what he ended up doing. And, and that was his passion. And, you know, the, the, how academically rigorous that was, And the fact that he could do that, I mean, I had such tremendous respect for that. Well, and again, I think that's part that plays into that humanity aspect. I mean, he's a guy who can't hunt anymore after the war, right? Because he doesn't want to inflict any suffering. He comes off like a professor who maybe is like a bird watcher almost. Let me ask a different question because I always found it interesting when somebody who was in a conflict, right, on a ground level, for example, went back later and started looking at the big picture, zoom out decisions that the, you know, the MacArthur's and the Eisenhower's and the people at the top jobs were making.

54:40Did your, did your father have specific views on the way the war were fought commanders that he, I don't mean like commanders of his unit, but I mean, you know, the Nimitz's and the guys at the big level, what were his views on, on the war from the sort of zoom out macro level that he was on the ground in? That's a great question. I wish, as I have, you know, become so passionate about World War II history through my life and read and researched it more and more, I look back and I wish I'd had more conversations with him along that subject, along those lines. However, I can't answer your question because what I can answer your question and what I'll say is when you look at Chester Nimitz.

55:22And look, I mean, I think I'm a Nimitz fan. I think he did a fantastic job doing what he did in the Pacific War. I think that on the subject of Nimitz, my father was negative. I think he had a hostile view of Nimitz. And the reason for that is because Nimitz could have called off Peleliu, but he chose not to. Now, a lot of people blame that on MacArthur. And I mean, after all, we attacked Peleliu to protect MacArthur's flank as he was advancing along that southwestern axis back to the Philippines. And then he didn't even need it. Didn't even need it, you know, because they, I heard my dad say in an interview, not without bitterness, that, you know, we were still grinding it out.

56:07You're trying to finish up on Peleliu and MacArthur walked ashore with cameras grinding, you know. I think, and he was no fan of MacArthur. Part of the reason for that was MacArthur was such an so egocentric, such an egomaniac. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. My father was egocentrism was a character trait that my dad just didn't have a lot of time for. So he was he was not happy with Nimitz for not calling off Pelewoo. He certainly felt some hostility towards MacArthur. Now, to speak to Nimitz, I mean, to be fair, I mean, if they'd have called off Peleliu, the 1st Marine Division would have just gone somewhere else, you know, and he certainly knew that, but the thing that made Peleliu just a little bit of a, well, the thing that made Peleliu so much of a tougher pill to swallow was the fact that it really wasn't needed, and he saw so much suffering and dying there among his friends.

57:12As far as, you know, like what he thought of Ernest J. King, I have no idea because we never talked about that. To get down to a slightly lower level, I know that he was not an admirer of General Rupertus, who was the 1st Marine Division commander, and I don't think too many men in the 1st Marine Division were because they reached a point where the 81st Infantry Division was ready and willing to come in and help after they had taken Angar just south of Peleliu, and General Rupertis did not want Army help. He was convinced the 1st Marine Division could do it alone, and the 1st Marine Regiment was decimated and had to be taken off the island after about a week of fighting, or slightly more than a week, along with 1st Marine Tank Battalion, and then that left the 7th Marine Regiment and the 5th Marine Regiment, which my dad was in the 5th Marines, and each of them became chewed up by the meat grinder of Bloody Nose Ridge, you know, which was the high ground on Peleliu.

58:18You know, and of course, it finally took General Geiger, who's the Corps commander, to come in and who's Rupert's boss to come in and say, look, you obviously need help here. Bring in the army. But, and so I think he actually thought pretty highly of General Geiger. but uh but like general pedro delvall took over the first marine division after rupertus uh and i have no idea what he thought of general delvall i think i think i may have read something that got edited out when i did my research that he he had some positive things to say about general delvall but um i ended up having to edit that part out of my manuscript just because it was just getting too long.

59:07Did your father read about these campaigns after the war? I mean, did he read books on Palaloo? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. He did. And of course, he was interviewed for some of them, but he did read. Look, Dan, one of the first books, I remember this because I talk about it. I remember in my dad's study, his bookcase, I remember his K-Bar sitting there with its scabbard on his bookcase. I remember a Japanese samurai saver over in the corner, and I remember some of the books on his shelf, and I remember one was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shire. He had a copy of that. I remember Strong Men Arm by Robert Leckie, a book that I've read many times.

59:52I remember his copy of Helmet for My Pillow, where he, you know, came out in 1957, you know, the classic book by Robert Lakin. Yeah, same campaign. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. He was in H21. My dad was in K35. You know, I remember one of the first World War II books I ever read was Helmet for My Pillow. And I remember, and God, I don't know what happened to this. I wish I did. My dad's copy of it, we lost it. But I remember reading his copy, you know, and seeing where, you know, my dad had made notes in it. Um, because when he read that book, I mean, who knows it literally in his mind, he's thinking he was literally preparing himself to write with the old breed.

1:00:39And of course the process had already begun, you know, he had already taken the notes out of his Bible and started writing an outline and then, and then fleshing that out into, you know, that process began early on. uh but there were other books he read too you know yeah he did he was very well read about all things but he read books about the the european theater um you know and so and i'm sure reading all of these things and i gotta say this um i think one thing that bothered my dad because he he and i spoke about it um he always felt like you know that that our collective conscience of World War II was European-centric.

1:01:22It's like Normandy, Normandy, Normandy. That's all we hear about, and deservedly so. Not saying we shouldn't. But he looked at it like, what about what we went through on Peleliu or Okinawa? Or what about what my buddies went through on Cape Gloucester or Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, which obviously Iwo Jima is incredibly well-known, deservedly so too. But I think he just kind of felt like, you know, back in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up, that the war in the Pacific just wasn't as well known. It wasn't as well understood. It's harder to understand it for so many reasons. I mean, not not, you know, to talk about the the added human element of fighting the Japanese compared to fighting the Germans.

1:02:07You know, that was there were layers of complications to that. Right. that it was just a war of visceral hatred that maybe some of that wasn't there against the Germans. But not only that, but the enormous logistical complications of fighting in the Pacific. I mean, I've studied it for years and it still boggles my mind. You know, we should talk about that. I had a few questions in my mind about that, and it's related to the difference between fighting the Japanese and the Germans, but not in terms of tactics or equipment or strategy, more in terms of the kind of fight it was. To call the war in Europe a gentleman's war is a complete misnomer because we all know it wasn't.

1:02:51But you had things like the Malmedy Massacre during the Battle of the Bulge offensive, the Second Ardennes. And these sorts of things when we grew up were still trumpeted as these terrible outlier incidents that showed you just how terrible the Nazis were. And you start reading about the Pacific campaign and you realize that stuff's happening all the time. Right. Like your father said something once. So we talked earlier about the Carlton film that had some footage, the UK film that had some footage that I'd never seen before. It was stuff that we all knew. If you had done your research, you knew.

1:03:30If you talked to a bunch of veterans, you knew that the war in the Pacific was not a big prisoner war, especially if people were wounded. And your father talked about the possum squads. And I had to bring that up by name to some other people. And when you brought it up, they were OK talking about it. But they didn't volunteer that. And the Carlton film, and I hope it is a Carlton film. I should have written that down there. They show you footage of that. and and first of all i was amazed that the photographers took the footage uh these and it was it was film it wasn't uh uh still photos i was amazed that they took it and when your father explained it you turned around and you realized what a different war this was because the japanese were doing it on their side too it just was a very very viscerally you know we talked about how they moved around at night and how that changed the dynamic well the we're going to chop up any of your people we capture changes the dynamic.

1:04:22No one's taken prisoners. That changes the dynamic. And again, when we talk about PTSD, recovering after the war, having a Japanese American nurse, and whether you can stand that or not, I think a lot of that plays into it in a way, and look, let's throw in the R word because it's part of it, the racism too, right? You felt differently about people that were looked at as animals than you did about a bunch of blonde hair, blue-eyed germans right so there was a lot going into this that increased the exponentially i think that the damage and stuff done to people like your father and then the memory of the war afterwards and how you tell it in real truthful fashion but now we're in cold blood right we're not in hot blood anymore it's the same thing we talked about about how the veterans can't talk about what they've been through because the civilians have no context same way in the pacific here right Your father's trying to tell the truth in part to keep us out of future wars without thinking really strongly about what we're doing.

1:05:21And yet the truth is hard for people a generation or two later in cold blood to absorb. It's the same problem you have with the atomic bomb question, isn't it? Right. Well, you know, when you when you speak of the atomic bomb, I mean, my father and I had some conversations about that. And what I would say in this modern age, when we're so fond of judging our actions in the past as a nation is, you know, if you think that we shouldn't have dropped the atomic bombs, and I don't moralize about this one way or the other in my book, I eschew anything like that. But I speak of this through the eyes of a guy like my dad.

1:06:08When you have fought the Japanese across the Pacific and you've seen how you couldn't take prisoners, you couldn't even try, in many cases, to help a wounded Japanese because he would try to detonate a grenade. That's right. And kill your corpsman. You know, these are things that these guys had to live with on a daily basis. And they're trying to survive. You know, all they care about is surviving this horrific experience and getting back home. And so when you deal with that, and then you get to Okinawa, and you have this added layer of complexity because of all the civilians. Yeah, or Saipan, and you see what happens there.

1:06:44Right. You have, you know, Saipan, yes, absolutely, and then even more so at Okinawa. And you see that and how the Japanese, in some cases, treated their own people. and you read about okinawa through my dad's eyes read about that read read with the old breed and really absorb yourself in what was going on and i go into it quite a bit of my book too with his unpublished material and then imagine okinawa times a hundred thousand because that's what invading the japanese home islands would have been that's what my dad always told me he said we were told, and it is horrific to contemplate this, but he said, we were told, get used to killing women and children because you're going to have to.

1:07:35Wow. And he said, if we invaded the Japanese home islands, we were going to have to kill every last one of them because they would fight us to the death. And so when you put your head in that space and put yourself as a young man who survived more than he should have, and now you're thinking that, you know, at the end of Kenishi Ridge, Dan, at the end of Okinawa, they go up to the Motobu Peninsula to the tent camp. They don't know that the war is about to be over. They think that, okay, I've just survived my second campaign and I'm damn lucky to have survived it. Now we got to start training for the whole mountain to be invading Japan because we know that's next and we know they're not going to surrender.

1:08:24And so when you, when you think about it in that context, seeing the atomic bombs dropped makes sense. Well, first of all, it saves you from, you know, if we're talking about the trauma of your dad having to shoot that japanese soldier outside the pillbox on pelelu imagine if that's a women children situation instead i mean you just exponentially change the damage to the psyche and all that you know the number of veterans and this may we can blame this on propaganda we can blame it on anything you want but the number of second world war veterans including my stepfather who said about the atomic bomb and i'm not proselytizing here either because It is the most horrible weapon I can think of.

1:09:06It saved my life. It saved my life. I heard that so often. It saved my life. Whether or not that's true, the number of people who believed that. And then there's a great line from the guy, I think it was Groves, one of the main people in the atomic development program, who said. And again, this is the difference between hot blood and cold blood, right? When we're examining something in cold blood, whereas the people examining it in hot blood know that we're bombing, we're firebombing Japanese cities three times a week. Right. And so it's not like we're going from no killing to a lot of killing.

1:09:41We're going from a lot of killing to a lot of killing with a different weapon. And I think it was Groves who said, if we told the American people that we spent all this money, time and effort, which could have been spent somewhere else, obviously, opportunity costs on a weapon that we decided at the last minute not to use, they would hang us from the nearest lamppost. and that's the difference because of course you've got to remember what you're saying to them what you're saying to them is we're not going to use this on the enemy that attacked us sneakily at Pearl Harbor and your son might have to die to invade that island because we're not going to use it on them in hot blood several years into a war where we're not even taking prisoners on a lot of these islands when we're firebombing the it's just it's it's again context right right yeah I I mean, it's a troubling, it's all horribly troubling.

1:10:33And your father used to bring that up. That was his, I mean, when you listen to him, he sounded like a guy, like you said, who had a job to do that was ugly and horrible and brutal, but he understood that he had to do it. And, you know, I mean, and the stuff about, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but it is so much about what your dad, if he was just a gung-ho, I mean, there's a number of different, let's call them stereotypes of a second world war combat bet your dad doesn't fit any of them and i think that's what makes him so different is when you listen to him he comes off as the kind of guy who should be the spokesman for the people who fought in the pacific war and i think that's that's reflected in the popularity of his book and and the feeling a lot of us who never even met your dad have for him?

1:11:18Well, he, I think his preternatural decency showed through, you know, and I, again, I go into a lot of that in the reminiscing I did in my book, but I, you know, I just think that for him to have gotten it all down on paper, he just felt driven to do it, And it was not a pleasant task for him to do it. And I know that he felt that way because he said that in a letter that came to my attention that he had written to some of his comrades right around the time with the old breed was published. And I just remember seeing this letter. I think I saw an electronic image of it. And he said in that letter, you know, I've had to spend the last several years obsessing about the details to make sure I got them right.

1:12:16Like the role of honor of somebody who got killed, making sure you got the details right. And he said, it has not been a pleasant task. And I'm ready to lay down my pen and get on the rest of my life. And, you know, Dan, honestly, I don't know that I'm really addressing exactly or speaking exactly to what you just said, but I do think it serves the general purpose of illustrating that this whole business, it was not something to be glorified. You know, to him, warfare was the most horrible human condition imaginable. And I think his book, With the Old Breed, it's an interesting dichotomy in a way, because a Marine reads that book and they feel fiercely proud of being a Marine, as well they should.

1:13:11Because my dad was fiercely proud of being a Marine. and yet the book at its core is a very powerful anti-war statement and I talk in my book about because my mom passed away sadly she did not live long enough to see my book get published even though she was the inspiration for me to write it but she and I talked a little bit about when she was still healthy enough to have these conversations. She and I talked about his feelings about the Vietnam War because I asked her about that. Because if you remember, Dan, toward the end, I make some reference to that. That's what made me think about it, yeah.

1:13:57And she, exactly. And she said, yeah, Henry, I think your dad was so upset by the Vietnam War because, this is what my mom said, I remember him saying to me, I thought that what my buddies and I did at Peleliu and Okinawa and everywhere else, you know, every other, this is me as a subtext here, everywhere else in World War II, by every other World War II veteran, back to my dad, him saying to my mom, I thought what we went through there was so that we would never have to go through this again. and yet sitting there watching the news as I and I remember when it just came to me at three o 'clock in the morning that I needed to write that memory down in my book of him sitting there with our dog Holly in his lap and seeing you know the grainy footage of of marines in Vietnam and soldiers of Vietnam those Huey choppers and you know wounded guys getting helped to aboard these choppers and And, you know, you hear Walter Cronkite Marines taking heavy casualties in Vietnam today.

1:15:06And, you know, I just remember my dad just tensing up and getting so angry, you know, and now I understand why. Because in his mind, it's like, look, this 20 years ago, I was going through the same damn thing. You know, or 25 years ago, it would have been really. Why are we doing it again? You know, and that's not a sophisticated, you know, like that's not getting into the geopolitical analytics of it. And he certainly was the guy who was smart enough to do that. That's just a veteran sitting there, seeing these images and speaking in the moment after being at work all day. And, oh, here it is here.

1:15:45Oh, they're out there in Vietnam today. Now we're seeing guys getting shot up. I mean, you know, and some of these guys were like literally very close to soon being students of his. You know, it's one of those things, too, where he can instantly tap into the things that we civilians wouldn't think about. You mentioned it earlier. We're thinking of the guns and the bombs, and that's all well and good. But he's thinking also of the tiredness, of the grief of seeing a friend hurt him. He's tapped into the whole Experience 360 when he's watching that grainy footage. Let me ask you an impossible speculative question here that just occurred to me.

1:16:22You know, this is such a crucible in your dad's life and in the lives of so many combat veterans listening even now from a bunch of different wars. And I'd wondered the same thing about then. But what do you think the difference in your dad would have been given his upbringing, his temperament, you know, his parents and all that if he'd never gone to war? If that war didn't happen during his lifetime and he never had to go through this. I mean, to say it changes him is obvious, but can you imagine how?

1:16:53Yeah, I mean, that is a very speculative question, but it's an interesting concept. I mean, when you think about— He's going to still hunt, right? He's going to still hunt. There's going to be things that wouldn't have changed, right? Sure. I mean, so there I would go to the kind of man that my grandfather was and my grandmother in the way that they raised their two sons, my uncle and my dad. You know, my grandfather was a guy who demanded academic excellence. He demanded a high code of conduct in his two boys. He was a man who was a loving father, but didn't put up with a lot of crap from his children.

1:17:32And, you know, I literally, Dan, I mean, I'm describing my dad. And so had my father not been forged in the crucible of his World War II experience, how would he have turned out? I mean, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I think Ed, his quarry would have been the same strict but loving father. But yeah, there would have been so many things that he just wouldn't have had that perspective on. like me sitting at the breakfast table and complaining about my toast not being exactly right. And then him sitting down and going, did I ever tell you about how we couldn't find a piece of bread on Okinawa that didn't have weevils in it?

1:18:15Did I ever tell you about that?

1:18:19That's just the combat veteran version of we used to have to walk uphill in the snow both ways to school. Right, right, right. Right. Yeah. But, you know, that I mean, so. Maybe some of that context he had, like and there was some great stuff that got edited out of With the Old Breed that I was really blessed to be able to use in my book. where he talked about buddies of theirs who rotated home and would write letters back to them when they were, you know, stalled out in front of Shuri, you know, sitting in the, you know, flung into hell's own cesspool, as my dad described it so horribly beautifully.

1:19:01um and you know he that that that context of these guys you know we came home and hear people complaining about having to wait in a line or getting coffee that isn't hot enough you know how do you complain about that when you can't imagine getting a drink of water that's filled with rust and diesel fuel you know which is what they had on Peleliu at first because they hadn't steam cleaned the drums properly on Puvuvu, you know, or you complain about something and my dad would just look at you and go, I'm just happy I have dry socks. I remember that line. Listen, you mentioned the Shuri situation.

1:19:46I have a quote from your book right here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is from Henry's book, and his dad remembers sitting in front of Shuri and how the situation descended into a morass of horror. This is a quote from his dad, quote, The longer we stayed in that terrible place and we stayed there over a week, in almost incessant cold rain, our environment congealed more and more into a ghastly nightmare of mud, murderous shelling, casualties, rotting bodies, and maggots. The place was enough to drive a strong man insane, And some did become emotionally shattered because of it. I never saw more pathetic, wounded and killed than we lost each day here.

1:20:29End quote. I mean, that's the kind of stuff it is. You're right. That's both something to be proud of as a Marine and at the same time, a ferocious anti-war statement. Yeah. Well, and to carry that even further, Dan, and thank you for reading that, because that, I mean, I just, the opportunity to find this unpublished material from my dad's book was just such an incredible thing. But you just you just have to try to imagine that, you know, all of it was this dehumanizing experience, you know, that he just wanted to survive and forget about. And then to have to relive it all to write what he wrote, you know, that was an amazing thing to have accomplished.

1:21:24Henry, did he write it to be published originally, or did he write it more for you guys? He wrote it for the family. And I do remember talking to him about that. And as I talked about in my thing there, Dan, I mean, my mom is the one, because she started typing it. He asked her to type the manuscript. And I remember not long before she passed away, she told me her memory of that. she said, I didn't want to type it. You know, he was writing it all by hand on yellow legal pads and pencil. And he asked me, my mom said, he asked me to type it. And she said, I didn't want to at first. And he said, well, if you don't, I'm going to have to pay somebody to do it.

1:22:10And so she relented and she did. And my mother was an incredibly smart and prescient lady. And as she typed it, as she began to go down into the abyss with him and experience through his writing of what he experienced, she realized what a powerful story it was. And she was the one who said, we need to try to get this published. And he, of course, descended. He disagreed. But no, originally it was to be for my brother and me, for the family to just have some understanding of what he had gone through. And part of what motivated him to do that, I mean, obviously a lot of it was to tell the story of his buddies, because I say that in my book.

1:22:59But the other thing that I don't think I go into was the fact that we had ancestors in the Civil War who had written letters back home. And my dad had been able to read some of those letters. And it was so fascinating to him to read what, you know, I mean, imagine reading a letter of what an ancestor went through at Island Number 10 or Chickamauga, you know, or Vicksburg or Gettysburg or, you know, which I didn't have any ancestors at Gettysburg. But, you know, imagine reading a letter where they're describing what they're seeing. I mean, that's maybe not everybody finds that interesting. I do.

1:23:41And my dad did. And I think he realized, you know, maybe I need to record my experience. Maybe I need to write it down so that the family will just have some, you know, some idea of what we did and what we saw. And also at the heart of it, Dan, is like any veteran would say this. I mean, he's thinking of his buddies who got killed and he didn't want them to die for nothing. Let's talk about that for a minute, because, you know, there have been some interesting things written over the years about the difference in the American military of that time period and the American military today. The difference in the kind of troops you get in a professional volunteer military versus the kind that sweeps from a larger segment of the population, maybe, including people that don't want to be there.

1:24:33It strikes me reading about your dad's situation and hearing about all his buddies that, you know, you get such a wide range of different people from different economic levels, from different backgrounds, from different parts of the country. And then you go back home maybe after the war. And the only thing that really connects you to each other, and it's a huge thing, is what you experienced. Did your dad stay close to the people? I mean, snafu comes to mind, but there's a lot of it. Did your dad stay close to the buddies? And if so, was there more to it than than their shared experience? Or I mean, talk to me a little about that, because it would seem to me that there's very few people that you could have a real deep, psychologically cleansing conversation about these sorts of things with than the people who experienced them with you.

1:25:19Certainly not on that visceral level, you know, where they could understand each other. Yeah, he did stay in touch with his buddies because he he wrote letters with him. And he had phone calls with them as he was riding with the Orbury because he wanted to make sure that he got it right. He wanted to make sure that he got the details right, that he was accurate, that he was not putting something into print that a fellow Marine would not approve of. because I can tell you, and probably any veteran would say this, you know, it was one thing to see a positive review of his book by, you know, a literary professional, but the opinions that mattered to him the most, and I think I saw where he said this in a letter somewhere, the opinions that mattered to him the most were the opinions of his fellow Marines.

1:26:18and and so you know he he the guys like like jay delo and stumpy stanley and snafu and you know bill laden he and bill became really close um you know many times he had late night phone calls with those guys and and i guess i'm sure that they had conversations with each other i know they did at reunions um where they talked about some tough things and reminisced about lives lost but what i remember from the phone calls the late night phone calls back when i was a kid and he was writing with the old breed uh it's a happy memory you know and i think i describe it as such and and the old breed the complete story revealed um because you know he'd get in there and the he'd go in there and close the door and if it was Bill Layden, Hey Billy, how you doing?

1:27:13And, you know, and they, and of course Bill Layden was this jolly avuncular New York guy. Oh, Joe Eugene is so good to hear you. How you doing? You know? And, um, and I, you know, I could just hear my dad guffawing for hours. I mean, they, cause they'd be reminiscing about more pleasant memories, you know? and so yeah I mean that was that was a positive aspect to it but I think at the reunions when he actually saw those guys and he did start going to reunions once his book came out I think that you know there were some hard conversations I'm sure some hard late night I mean I didn't personally see that but I know that they were there as they would be with any group of veterans yeah

1:28:08my thanks to henry sledge for coming on the program for writing the book the old breed the complete story revealed available now by the way uh if you're a fan of his dad you're going to want that book anyway if you're interested in the war at all and you haven't read his dad's book read that then read this i mean there's a you know in order to go in but he's one of the fabulously interesting people on the american side from that conflict and um one of the best representatives you're going to find of these three-dimensional figures who so often in our history books uh in our writings especially in the immediate post-war period come off as like comic book characters and they're much more deep and reflective and um impacted by their service than that and those sorts of nuances are part of why so many of us have been interested in military history for so long something that's not understood often by people outside of the interest is the multi onion like layers that go into something like this and i've never seen a better representative of those things than eugene sledge so my thanks to big shot henry sledge for coming on the program today.

1:29:20Go out and get the book. You'll love it. And as usual, thanks a ton for listening, everyone.

1:29:30If you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it. Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. So who says we don't take requests? I don't do a lot of live events, but I've started doing a few here and there. And they tend to be sort of either nearby or places I'm going to anyway. And they just get added to the list if I say, well, I'm going to be here. Can we do something? So I get requests to come to cities that I haven't been to yet. And so we're filling some of those requests. Now, to show you what a genius I am, I'm going to the South in August.

1:30:05That's right, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to do what I'm calling internally anyway here, the Southern fried unicorn tour because we always say there's no rainbows and unicorns in this program there may be no happy ending um but you know it's hardcore history it's not soft core history if you'd like to see one of the live events and generally we have a person who goes on there with me who sort of acts as a prompter or what have you sort of runs the the show and every one of those people at every event we've done has been different and because of that you get a very different kind of event every time they've all been very different from one another and then And usually, sometimes we haven't been able to do this.

1:30:39Usually we get questions asked from the audience, and then that turns it into a unique event every time. I always run long, so if you want to get your money's worth, you want to go to one of these shows. If you have a problem with a babysitter who needs to be home at a certain time, all I can say is maybe pay her some overtime. In any case, I'll be in Atlanta August 1st, Raleigh, North Carolina August 2nd, Austin on August 15th, and Houston on August 16th. I'd love to see you out there. and listen, you asked for it, we responded. How about that? The Southern Fried Unicorn Tour coming to a theater near you if you happen to live in one of those cities.

1:31:17Go to dancarlin.com. We have places where you can get the tickets right off the front page of the website. And by the way, going back to what is sort of becoming home base for us here, the Drowned Unicorn Tour, going back to Portland in September, those tickets available on the website as well. Thank you.