with the old breed

Quote repository for 'With the Old Breed' by E. B. Sledge:

"What are you going to do after the war, Sledgehammer?" asked a buddy sitting across from me. He was an extremely intelligent and intellectually active man.
"I don't know, Oswalt. What are you planning to do?"
"I want to be a brain surgeon. The human brain is an incredible thing; it fascinates me," he replied.
But he didn't survive Peleliu to realize his ambition. (p. 57)

We moved ahead, watching the frightful spectacle. Huge geysers of water rose around the amtracs ahead of us as they approached the reef. The beach was now marked along its length by a continuous sheet of flame backed by a thick wall of smoke. It seemed as though a huge volcano had erupted from the sea, and rather than heading for an island, we were being drawn into the vortex of a flaming abyss. For many it was oblivion.
The lieutenant braced himself and pulled out a half-pint whiskey bottle.
"This is it, boys," he yelled.
Just like they do in the movies! It seemed unreal. (p. 64)

The corpsman was on his back, his abdominal cavity laid bare. I stared in horror, shocked at the glistening viscera bespecked with fine coral dust. This can't have been a human being, I agonized. It looked more like the guts of one of the many rabbits or squirrels I had cleaned on hunting trips as a boy. I felt sick as I stared at the corpses. (p. 70)

To be under the barrage of a prolonged shelling simply magnified all the terrible physical and emotional effects of one shell. To me, artillery was an invention of hell. The onrushing whistle and scream of the big steel package of destruction was the pinnacle of violent fury and the embodiment of pent-up evil. It was the essence of violence and of man's inhumanity to man. I developed a passionate hatred for shells. To be killed by a bullet seemed so clean and surgical. But shells would not only tear and rip the body, they tortured one's mind almost beyond the brink of sanity. After each shell I was wrung out, limp and exhausted. (p. 79)

We received the password as darkness settled in on us, and a drizzling rain began. We felt isolated listening to moisture dripping from the tress and splashing softly into the swamp. 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! (p. 108)

From our right, where the Japanese had gone into the company on our flank, came hideous, agonized, and prolonged screams that defied description. Those wild, primitive, brutish yellings unnerved me more than what was happening within my own field of vision. (p. 116)

Redifer and I lay prone on top of the bunker, just above the door. We knew we had to get the Japanese while they were bottled up, or they would come out at us with knives and bayonets, a thought none of us relished. Redifer and I were close enough to the door to place grenades down the opening and move back before they exploded. But the Japanese invariably tossed them back at us before the explosion. I had an irrepressible urge to do just that. Brief as our face-to-face meeting had been, I had quickly developed a feeling of strong personal hate for that machine gunner who had nearly blasted my head off my shoulders. My terror subsided into a cold, homicidal rage and a vengeful desire to get even. (p. 125)

The amtrac rattling toward us by this time was certainly a welcome sight. As it pulled into position, several more Japanese raced from the pillbox in a tight group. Some held their bayoneted rifles in both hands, but some of them carried their rifles in one hand and held up their pants with the other. I had overcome my initial surprise and joined the others and the amtrac machine gun in firing away at them. They tumbled onto the hot coral in a forlorn tangle of bare legs, falling rifles, and rolling helmets. We felt no pity for them but exulted over their fate. We had been shot at and shelled too much and had lost too many friends to have compassion for the enemy when we had him cornered. (p. 126)

Someone remarked that if fragments hadn't killed those inside, the concussion surely had. But even before the dust settled, I saw a Japanese soldier appear at the blasted opening. He was grim determination personified as he drew back his arm to throw a grenade at us.
My carbine was already up. When he appeared, I lined up my sights on his chest and began squeezing off shots. As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony. His knees buckled. The grenade slipped from his grasp. All the men near me, including the amtrac machine gunner, had seen him and began firing. The soldier collapsed in the fusillade, and the grenade went off at his feet.
Even in the midst of these fast-moving events, I looked down at my carbine with sober reflection. I had just killed a man at close range. That I had seen clearly the pain on his face when my bullets hit him came as a jolt. It suddenly made the war a very personal affair. The expression on that man's face filled me with shame and then disgust for the war and all the misery it was causing.
My combat experience thus far made me realize that such sentiments for an enemy soldier were maudlin meditations of a fool. Look at me, a member of the 5th Marine Regiment--one of the oldest, finest, and toughest regiments in the Marine Corps--feeling ashamed because I had shot a damned foe before he could throw a grenade at me! I felt like a fool and was thankful my buddies couldn't read my thoughts. (p. 127)

During this lull the men stripped the packs and pockets of the enemy dead for souvenirs. This was a gruesome business, but Marines executed it in a most methodical manner. Helmet headbands were checked for flags, packs and pockets were emptied, and gold teeth were extracted. Sabers, pistols, and hari-kari knives were highly prized and carefully cared for until they could be sent to the folks back home or sold to some pilot or sailor for a fat price. Rifles and other larger weapons usually were rendered useless and thrown aside. They were too heavy in addition to our own equipment. They would be picked up by rear-echelon troops. The men in the rifle companies had a lot of fun joking about the hair-raising stories these people, who had never seen a live Japanese or been shot at, would probably tell after the war.
The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes. It was a brutal, ghastly, ritual the likes of which have occurred since ancient times on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed a profound mutual hatred. It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with that particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese. It wasn't simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.
While I was remove a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a Marine near me. He wasn't in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn't dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise we would have resisted to his last breath.
The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with his palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer's lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier's mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, "Put the man out of his misery." All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier's brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.
Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman's war. Our code of conduct toward the enemy differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP.
The struggle for survival went on day after weary day, night after terrifying night. One remembers vividly the landings and beachheads and the details of the first two or three days and nights of a campaign; after that, time lost all meaning. A lull of hours or days seemed but a fleeting instant of heaven-sent tranquility. Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.
To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines--service troops and civilians. (pp. 129, 131)

At first glance the dead gunner appeared about to fire his deadly weapon. He still sat bolt upright in the proper firing position behind the breech of his machine gun. Even in death his eyes stared widely along the gun sights. Despite the vacant look of his dilated pupils, I couldn't believe he was dead. It seemed as though he was looking through me into all eternity, that at any instant he would raise his hands--which rested in a relaxed manner on his thighs--grip the handles on the breech, and press the thumb trigger. The bright shiny brass slugs in the strip clip appeared as ready as the gunner, anxious to speed out, to kill, and to maim more of the "American devils." But he would rot, and they would corrode. Neither he nor his ammo could do any more for the emperor.
The crown of the gunner's skull had been blasted off, probably by one of our automatic weapons. His riddled steel helmet lay on the deck like a punctured tin can. The assistant gunner lay beside the gun. Apparently, he had just opened a small green wooden chest filled with strip clips of machine gun cartridges when he was killed. Several other Japanese soldiers ammo carriers, lay strung out at intervals behind the gun. (p. 133)

As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He had a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Each time his pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle. My buddy tossed the coral chunks as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on a muddy road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action. The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief. (p. 134)

Occasionally rains that fell on the hot coral merely evaporated like steam off hot pavement. The air hung heavy and muggy. Everywhere we went on the ridges the hot human air reeked with the stench of death. A strong wind was no relief; it simply brought the horrid odor from an adjacent area. Japanese corpses lay where they fell among the rocks and on the slopes. It was impossible to cover them, just the hard, jagged coral. The enemy dead simply rotted where they had fallen. They lay all over the place in grotesque positions with puffy faces and grinning buck-toothed expressions.
It is difficult to convey to anyone who has not experienced it the ghastly horror of having your sense of smell saturated constantly with the putrid odor of rotting human flesh day after day, night after night. This was something the men of an infantry battalion got a horrifying dose of during a long, protracted battle such as Peleliu. In the tropics the dead became bloated and gave off a terrific stench within a few hours after death. (p. 153)

There were certain areas we moved into and out of several times as a campaign dragged along its weary, bloody course. In many areas I became quite familiar with the sight of some particular enemy corpse, as if it were a landmark. It was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed, to bloated, to maggot-infested rotting, to partially exposed bones--like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time. On each occasion my company passed such a landmark we were fewer in number.
Each time we moved into a different position I could determine the areas occupied by each rifle company as we went into that sector of the line. Behind each company position lay a pile of ammo and supplies and the inevitable rows of dead under their ponchos. We could determine how bad that sector of the line was by the number of dead. To see them so filled me with anger at the war and the realization of the senseless waste. It depressed me far more than my own fear.
Added to the awful stench of the dead of both sides was the repulsive odor of human excrement everywhere. It was all but impossible to practice simple, elemental field sanitation on most areas of Peleliu because of the rocky surface. Field sanitation during maneuvers and company was the responsibility of each man. In short, under normal conditions, he covered his own waste with a scoop of soil. At night when he didn't dare venture out of his foxhole, he simply used an empty grenade canister or ration can, threw it out of his hole, and scooped dirt over it the next day if he wasn't under heavy enemy fire. (p. 154)

After we got our gun emplaced, I collected some large scraps of cardboard from ration and ammo boxes and used them to cover the bottom of the pit as well as I could. Fat, lazy blowflies were reluctant to leave the blood-smeared rock.
I had long since become used to the sight of blood, but the idea of sitting in that bloodstained gun pit was a bit too much for me. It seemed almost like leaving our dead unburied to sit on the blood of a fellow Marine spilled out on the coral. I noticed that my buddy looked approvingly at my efforts as he came back from getting orders for our gun. Although we never discussed the subject, he apparently felt as I did. As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how "gallant" it is for a man to "shed blood for his country," and "to give his life's blood as a sacrifice," and so on. The words seemed ridiculous. Only the flies benefited. (pp. 157-158)

As we moved past the defilade, my buddy groaned, "Jesus!" I took a quick glance into the depression and recoiled in revulsion and pity at what I saw. The bodies were badly decomposed and nearly blacked by exposure. This was to be expected of the dead in the tropics, but these Marines had been mutilated hideously by the enemy. One man had been decapitated. His head lay on his chest; his hands had been severed from his wrists and also lay on his chest near his chin. In disbelief I stared at the faces as I realized that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine's penis and stuffed it in his mouth. The corpse next to him had been treated similarly. The third had been butchered, chopped up like a carcass torn by some predatory animal. (p. 160)

As I looked at the flotsam of battle scattered along that little path, I was struck with the utter incongruity of it all. There the Okinawans had tilled their soil with ancient and crude farming methods; but the war had come, bringing with it the latest and most refined technology for killing. It seems so insane, and I realized that the war was like some sort of disease afflicting man. From my experience at Peleliu I had unconsciously come to associate combat with stifling hot, fire-swept beaches, steaming mangrove-choked swamps, and harsh, jagged coral ridges. But there on Okinawa the disease was disrupting a place as pretty as a pastoral painting. I understood then what my grandmother had really meant when she told me as a boy that a blight had descended on the land when the South was invaded during the Civil War. (p. 217)

Mac was a decent, clean-cut man but one of those who apparently felt no restraints under the brutalizing influence of war--although he hardly had been in combat at that time. He had one ghoulish, obscene tendency that revolted even the most hardened and callous men I knew. When most men felt the urge to urinate, they simply went over to a bush or stopped wherever they happened to be and relieved themselves without ritual or fanfare. Not Mac. If he could, that "gentleman by the act of Congress" would locate a Japanese corpse, stand over it, and urinate in its mouth. It was the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war. I was ashamed that he was a Marine officer. (p. 219)

When the time came at the end of the April for us to leave our little horse, I removed the rope halter and gave him a lump of ration sugar. I stroked his soft muzzle as he switched flies with his tail. He turned, ambled across a grassy green meadow and began grazing. He looked up and back at me once. My eyes grew moist. However reluctant I was to leave him, it was for the best. He would be peaceful and safe on the slopes of that green, sunlit hill. Being civilized men, we were duty-bound to return soon to the chaotic netherworld of shells and bullets and suffering and death. (p. 221)

It was an appalling chaos. I was terribly afraid. Fear was obvious on the faces of my comrades, too, as we raced to the low slope and began to dig in rapidly. It was such a jolt to leave the quiet, beautiful countryside that morning and plunge into a thunderous, deadly storm of steel that afternoon. (p. 227)

Fear has many facets, and I do not minimize my fear and terror during
that day. But it was different. I was a combat veteran of Peleliu. With terror's first constriction over, I knew what to expect. I felt dreadful fear but not near-panic. Experience had taught me what to expect from the enemy guns. More important, I knew I could control my fear. The terrible dread that I might panic was gone. I knew that all anyone could do under shell fire was to hug the deck and pray--and curse the Japanese. (pp. 227-228)

There was a brassy, metallic twang of the small 50mm knee mortar shells as little puffs of dirty smoke appeared thickly around us. The 81mm and 90mm mortar shells crashed and banged all along the ridge. The whiz-bang of the high-velocity 47mm's shells (also an anti-tank gun), which was on us with its explosion almost as soon as we heard it whiz into the area, gave me the feeling that the Japanese were firing them at us like rifles. The slower screaming, whining sound of the 75mm artillery shells seemed the most abundant. Then there was the roar and rumble of the huge enemy 150mm howitzer shell, and the kaboom of its explosion. It was what the men called the big stuff. I didn't recall having recognized any of it in my confusion and fear at Peleliu. The bursting radius of these big shells was of awesome proportions. Added to all this noise was the swishing and fluttering overhead of our own supporting artillery fire. Our shells could be heard bursting out across the ridge over enemy positions. The noise of small-arms fire from both sides resulted in a chaotic bedlam of racket and confusion. (p. 228)

Nearby our regimental Protestant chaplain had set up a little altar made out of a box from which he was administering Holy Communion to a small group of dirty Marines. I glanced at the face of a Marine opposite me as the file halted. He was filthy like all of us, but even through a thickly mud-caked dark beard I could see he had fine features. His eyes were bloodshot and weary. He slowly lowered his light machine gun from his shoulder, set the handle on his toe to keep it off the mud, and steadied the barrel with his hand. He watched the chaplain with an expression of skepticism that seemed to ask, "What's the use with all that? Is it gonna keep them guys from gettin' hit?" That face was so weary but so expressive that I knew he, like all of us, couldn't help but have doubts about his God in the presence of constant shock and suffering. Why did it go on and on? The machine gunner's buddy held the gun's tripod on his shoulder, glanced at the muddy little communion service, and then stared blankly off toward a clump of pines to our rear--as though he hoped to see home back there somewhere. (pp. 261-262)

The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn't a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire; flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment--utter desolation. (pp. 272-273)

I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around the Umurbrogol Pocket on Peleliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool. (p. 273)

The scene was so unreal I could barely believe it: two tired, frightened young men sitting in a hole beside a machine gun in the rain on a ridge, surrounded with mud--nothing but stinking mud, with so much decaying human flesh buried or half buried in it that there were big patches of wriggling fat maggots marking the spots where Japanese corpses lay--looking at the picture of a beautiful seminude girl. She was a pearl in a mudhole.
Viewing that picture made me realize with a shock that I had gradually come to doubt that there really was a place in the world where there were no explosions and people weren't bleeding, suffering, dying, or rotting in the mud. I felt a sense of desperation that my mind was being affected by what we were experiencing. Men cracked up frequently in such places as that. I had seen it happen many times by then. In World War I they had called it shell shock, or more technically, neurasthenia. In World War II the term used was combat fatigue. (pp. 277-278)

The situation was bad enough, but when enemy artillery shells exploded in the area, the eruptions of soil and mud uncovered previously buried Japanese dead and scattered chunks of corpses. Like the area around our gun pits, the ridge was a stinking compost pile.
If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging laces, and the like. Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade.
We didn't talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for the hardest veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much of it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity. (p. 281-282)

Some of the concussion cases could walk and were helped and led (some seemed to have no sense of direction) to the rear like men walking in their sleep. Some wore wild-eyed expressions of shock and fear. Others whom I knew well, though could barely recognize, wore expressions of idiots or simpletons knocked too witless to be afraid anymore. The blast of a shell had literally jolted them into a different state of awareness from the rest of us. Some of those who didn't return probably never recovered but were doomed to remain in mental limbo and spend their futures in a veteran's hospital as "living dead." (p. 287)

It was also common throughout the campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf. They never "belonged" to the company or made any friends before they got hit. (p. 291)

I imagined Marine dead had risen up and were moving silently about the area. I suppose these were nightmares, and I must have been more asleep than awake, or just dumbfounded by fatigue. Possibly they were hallucinations, but they were strange and horrible. The pattern was always the same. The dead got up slowly out of their waterlogged craters or off the mud and, with stooped shoulders and dragging feet, wandered around aimlessly, their lips moving as though trying to tell me something. I struggled to hear what they were saying. They seemed agonized by pain and despair. I felt they were asking me for help. The most horrible thing was that I felt unable to aid them.
At that point I invariably became wide awake and felt sick and half-crazed by the horror of my dream. I would gaze out intently to see if the silent figures were still there, but saw nothing. When a flare lit up, all was stillness and desolation, each corpse in its usual place. (p. 293)

Next to the base of the ridge, almost directly below me, was a partially flooded crater about three feet in diameter and probably three feet deep. In this crater was the body of a Marine whose grisly visage has remained disturbingly clear in my memory. If I close my eyes, he is as vivid as though I had seen him only yesterday.
The pathetic figure sat with his back toward the enemy and leaned against the south edge of the crater. His head was cocked, and his helmet rested against the side of the crater so that his face, or what remained of it, looked straight up at me. His knees were flexed and spread apart. Across his thighs, still clutched in his skeletal hands, was his rusting BAR. Canvas leggings were laced neatly along the sides of his calves and over his boondockers. His ankles were covered with muddy water, but the toes of his boondockers were visible above the surface. His dungarees, helmet, cover, and 782 gear appeared new. They were neither mud-spattered nor faded.
I was confident that he had been a new replacement. Every aspect of that big man looked much like a Marine "taking ten" on maneuvers before the order to move out again. He apparently had been killed early in the attacks against the Half Moon, before the rains began. Beneath his helmet brim I could see the visor of a green cotton fatigue cap. Under that cap were the most ghastly skeletal remains I had ever seen--and I had already seen too many.
Every time I looked over the edge of that foxhole down into that crater, 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. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget."
During the day I sometimes watched big raindrops splashing into the crater around that corpse and remembered how as a child I had been fascinated by raindrops splashing around a large green frog as he sat in a ditch near home. My grandmother had told me that elves made little splashes like that, and they were called water babies. So I sat in my foxhole and watched the water babies splashing around the green-dungaree-clad corpse. What an unlikely combination. The war had turned the water babies into little ghouls that danced around the dead instead of little elves dancing around the peaceful bullfrog. A man had little to occupy his mind at Shuri--just sit in muddy misery and fear, tremble through the shellings, and let his imagination go where it would. (pp. 294-295)

Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed, and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.
"You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart."
In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket buried in the mud--and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shovel skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels. (pp. 301-302)

While searching a small hut, I came across an old Okinawan woman seated on the floor just inside the doorway. Taking no chances, I held my Thompson ready and motioned to her to get up and come out. She remained on the floor but bowed her old gray head and held her gnarled hand toward me, palms down, to show the tattoos on the backs of her hands indicating that she was Okinawan.
"No Nippon," she said slowly, shaking her head as she looked up at me with a weary expression that bespoke of much physical pain. She then opened her ragged blue kimono and pointed to a wound in the lower left side of her abdomen. It was an old wound, probably caused by a shell or bomb fragments. It was an awful sight. A large area around the scabbed-over gash was discolored and terribly infected with gangrene. I gasped in dismay. I guessed that such a severe infection in the abdominal region was surely fatal.
The old woman closed her kimono. She reached up gently, took the muzzle of my Tommy, and slowly moved it so as to direct it between her eyes. She then released the weapon's barrel and motioned vigorously for me to pull the trigger. Oh no, I thought, this old soul is in such agony she actually wants me to put her out of her misery. I lifted my Tommy, slung it over my shoulder, shook me head, and said "no" to her. Then I stepped back and yelled for a corpsman. (pp. 313-314)

We passed through an embankment for a railroad track and entered the outskirts of a town. All buildings were badly damaged, but some were still standing. We stopped briefly to explore a quaint little store. Displayed in its window were various cosmetics. In the street in front of the store lay a corpse clad in a blue kimono. Someone had placed a broken door over the pathetic body. We speculated he had been the proprietor of the little shop. (p. 318)

The weather turned dry and warm as we moved south. The farther we proceeded, the louder the sound of firing became; the bumping of artillery, the thudding of mortars, the incessant rattle of machine guns, the popping of rifles. It was a familiar combination of noise that engendered the old feelings of dread about one's own chances as well as the horrible images of the wounded, the shocked, and the dead--the inevitable harvest. (pp. 320-321)

A couple of us went down to look at the bridge before dark. We walked down to the stream on a trail leading form the road. The water was crystal clear and made a peaceful gurgling sound over a clean pebbly bottom. Ferns grew from the overhanging mossy banks and between rocks on both sides. I had the urge to look for salamanders and crayfish. It was a beautiful place, cool and peaceful, so out of context with the screaming hell close above. (p. 322)

The man next to me was a rifleman and a fine Peleliu veteran whom I knew well. he had become unusually quiet and moody during the past hour, but I just assumed he was as tired and as weary with fear and fatigue as I was. Suddenly he began babbling incoherently, grabbed his rifle, and shouted, "Those slant-eyed yellow bastards, they've killed enougha my buddies. I'm going after 'em." He jumped up and started for the crest of the ridge.
"Stop!" I yelled and grabbed his trouser leg. he pulled away.
A sergeant next to him yelled, "Stop, you fool!" The sergeant also grabbed for the frantic man's legs, but his hand slipped. He managed to clutch the toe of one boondocker, however, and gave a jerk. That threw the man off balance, and he sprawled on his back, sobbing like a baby. The front of his trousers was darkened where he had urinated when he lost control of himself. The sergeant and I tried to calm him but also made sure he couldn't get back onto his feet. "Take it easy, Cobber. We'll get you outa here," the NCO said.
We called a corpsman who took the sobbing, trembling man out of the meat grinder to an aid station.
"He's a damn good Marine, Sledgehammer. I'll lower the boom on anybody says he ain't. But he's just had all he can take. That's it. He's just had all he can take."
The sergeant's voice trailed away sadly. We had just seen a brave man crack up completely and lose all control of himself, even to the point of losing his desire to live. (p. 328)

We passed a large muddy area in the road cut. In it lay the body of a dead Japanese soldier in full uniform and equipment. It was a bizarre sight. he had been mashed down into the mud by tank treads and looked like a giant squashed insect. (p. 331)

The second Japanese officer lay dead on his back next to the wheel of the 37mm gun. He was in full-dress uniform with white gloves, shiny leather leggings, Sam Browne belt, and campaign ribbons on his chest. Nothing remained of his head from the nose up--just a mass of crushed skull, brains, and bloody pulp. A grimy Marine with a dazed expression stood over the Japanese. With a foot planted firmly on the ground on each side of the enemy officer's body, the marine held his rifle by the forestock with both hands and slowly mechanically moved it up and down like a plunger. I winced each time it came down with a sickening sound into the gory mass. Brains and blood were splattered all over the Marine's rifle, boondockers, and canvas leggings, as well as the wheel of the 37mm gun.
The Marine was obviously in a complete state of shock. We gently took him by the arms. One of his uninjured buddies set aside the gore-smeared rifle. "Let's get you outa here, Cobber."
The poor guy responded like a sleepwalker as he was led off with the wounded, who were by then on stretchers. The man who had lost his finger clutched the Japanese saber in his other hand. "I'm gonna keep this bastard for a souvenir."
We dragged the battered enemy officer to the edge of the gun emplacement and rolled him down the hill. Replete with violence, shock, blood, gore, and suffering, this was the type of incident that should be witnessed by anyone who has any delusions about the glory of war. It was as savage and as brutal as though the enemy and we were primitive barbarians rather than civilized men. (pp. 336-337)

A quote from James Jones' WWII:

What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japan's home islands, hardly bears thinking about. (page unknown)

software to think

I work for UoP. It's a for profit educational model. Surely some can find value in that. I know the shareholders of the stock ticker for UoP do.

A student recently sent me a message apologizing for not getting her title page right. I told her not to worry too much about it. She mentioned a word or a name saying she's going to get it. I asked her about that. She said it was formatting software that her academic advisor suggested that she get.

That's the for profit model.

Knowledge shouldn't be displaced into another piece of software. I don't understand how someone thinks that she is learning by buying a product. That's the shame of it. Even the discipline required to think is being displaced into products that are doing the thinking for us.

But how could this happen? How does someone actually believe that she needs to buy a product to learn something in order to learn it herself? Well, the for-profit model does make the academic advisor into a salesperson.

social networking

What is social networking? Do we really need to tag our content and format our messages in order to broadcast our communication to select strata of our friends lists?

What is a friends list? Is it a standing reserve of opportunities for fun, meeting up, getting to know you, getting to know me, staying in touch, maintaining friendship?

Aristotle saw friendship as the highest form that human relations could attain. In friendship one could achieve virtue. I suspect that much of what these social networking sites do is to reduce friends to a list, a stacking list, a standing reserve.

The potential for scripted, tagged, and formatted conversations are quite rife in the vast architecture of a social network. That's not virtue. That's an engineering fix for a problem that he's defined from the outset, a problem of how to relate with as many people as possible.

That sounds like marketing to me.

And that's probably all that it is in the end.

I read that social networking technologies enabled grassroots democracy uprisings like what occurred in Egypt. They also enabled a presidential hopeful reach millions of young and enfranchised Americans. He was elected, and it was the biggest advertising, branding, and marketing campaign the world has seen.

Welcome to the future.

We've left Aristotle's views on friendship in the dustbin of the history of ideas. We've replaced that with the marketing savvy companion. The person who you think looks better when she's wearing name brand shoes. A connection like that requires psychoanalysis, and I'll cut to the chase.

Over years of having advertising messages drilled into your head, you've come to believe that you're experiencing the fleeting feelings conveyed in the flash-bang media spreads for fashion items. Now that you're older, your response to seeing these shoes is almost Pavlovian. You drool at the site of that stack of french fries. The smell alone conjures up the moments of fun in the sun you had with your mother, when she still smiled, before the cancer stole her from you. Now you take your child to the same restaurant and recreate the same event.

Now that we've had advertising messages grafted onto our very being, we're ready to do the advertising for the company. Social networking is an authentication vehicle for product marketing. If it isn't happening yet, oh it will. Twitter reduces conversation to soundbites. Facebook turns our online identity into a homepage with interface points, walls, for marking, and tools for saying hello. As we stack our friend list high and take to the game of networking socially like an addict takes to his drug, we're poised to market not only ourselves and our lifestyles, but the very products, which enable it.

There is no Aristotelian virtue in my friends list. It's merely an opportunity to exploit that network of friends as a resource, a resource who we confusingly believe that we've shared an experience with. No, we've only authored that experience by applying standard nomenclature, a narrative genre, and a mark-up language for broadcasting this story to that list.

In Schindler's time the list was a tool of bureaucracy to expedite the mass slaughter of an ethnic group, keep it orderly, and measure progress. Now the list is a standing reserve of potential opportunities for contact. The social network is an interpellation mechanism. After all, how persuasive is it to get an automated message letting you know that your friends have joined, and why don't you?

There is no virtue in exploiting humans as a resource. There is no virtue in the standing reserve, just potential, potential energy. How will this potential energy get tapped? Probably to further ensconce us in technical relations, and little more.

Only in a context of vast separation and a diurnal rhythm dictated by a 'schedule' where everyone has their own personal contact interface with a vast database of media, fame, friends, funny, facts, and the like would we need to use such a social networking tool. As a sign of the times in which we live, the pragmatic use of this tool is clear. It's hard too coordinate meeting, and maintaining contact when we need each other so little.

How sad that the challenge of living doesn't require so much of our partner. Love and attraction once weren't calculated by psychological algorithms. They were incidental to a relationship of necessity. We need each other to raise a family, feed the chickens, and harvest the crops. The farming community was a great ribbon of cooperation that emerged out of absolute necessity. With machines running on energy tapped from millions of years of the sun's rays, we let the robots substitute for the necessary contacts we once maintained. They help us to deal with the increasing complexity of our society. As an organism we are being flung apart at the speed of combustion. We compensate for this rapid pace by speaking at a faster pace, the speed of electrical conduction. That approaches the speed of light.

Here we are, under the ceilings of theoretical limits, relating via machines with others. Rarely do we consider them other than the number of common interests we share with them. Rarely do we consider them other than the pictures they post.

There is no virtue in this social network of ours. Its artifice cheats us of serendipity, chance encounters, chance meetings, chance itself.

In chance's stead we now have random. Random emerges in interface design as shuffle. And we purposely shuffle our list of friends according to some criteria dictated by the tags that we choose. Some friends hear about our sports. Others hear about our socialization habits.

In the face of complexity, the rapidly growing stack of friends, we let the machine do the thinking for us. Shuffle.

The irony? Here I am using a blog intended to be shared with no one. I'm using one of a sundry collection of social networking tools to journal, no more. I have no list other than that represented by my phone contacts. I've yet to use the function that allows me to send texts to more than one at a time. I fear dipping into that deep stream. It may wash me away .

Being ignored

I go to the bar where my friend works.

'ur babys here' his text states.

Tom is razzing my about my confession that I'm 'in like' with one of his bar's servers. She's sitting with her new boyfriend who is also a server. I say hello. We chat a little. Then Mason, the boyfriend, gets close to her. She turns to him, puts her hand in his pocket; they speak to each other in a hushed voice only they can make out.

I get warm, take off my coat, and move to the opposite end of the bar. I drink my beer, gain some courage, get another, and return to that end of the bar. I make my presence known through more small talk and sit at a table near the entrance. I talk briefly with another guy named Drew who was hanging out with the new couple. I give her a few looks. Her back is to me. Damn, she looks good. I can't stop staring, but I do.

The night wears on and the bar closes. I make eye contact a few times with Amber, the reference in 'ur baby.' It means nothing I'm sure. She's got one of those suburban mom hair cuts. Her hair is dark; it's cut short; and I've gathered from a previous conversation that she's spent a lot of time to give it body. It poofs out on the crown of her head. I saw a woman in my mother's neighborhood with an identical cut. I don't know. Perhaps I'm just chasing after what's near, but hasn't that been the situation for so many thousands of years?

The bar closes. Mason is drunk. Sitting in a booth across the main path that runs the length of the bar I tell Amber to take his keys. It's something of a playful gesture. Mason's being a goof, and Amber is perhaps mildly bothered by it. She's driving though, so it doesn't matter. They take their leave. I say goodbye. Mason turns and says goodbye. She doesn't. It's like I'm not there.

I was ignored.

Being ignored is nothing new. That's perhaps the least meaningful of my instances of being ignored. The times I'm ignored that bother me happen earlier that night.

'Partying or remodeling?'

I write a text to my neighbor. The guy who lives with this girlfriend above me. No answer. He has no need to respond. He's throwing a small party with Chris, a mutual friend. They're watching a movie, using my neighbor's projector. The noises and the dialogue leaking through my floor indicate this much. No answer. No response. I leave. I head to the bar to be ignored by another woman.

Friday night, the day prior to this event, I get a knock at my door. I peek out of the shades. It's my neighbor Anna. I made a pass at her many, many months ago. She's still upset. She gives me one of those distant stares that she's honed over the months. Deadpan, she tells me that she and my neighbor, Bryan, will be starting a fire in the backyard. She indicates that they will be outside shortly. She tells me she has to change. Her voice leaks an intolerant, spiteful attitude toward me. It hurts. I roll with it, and say nothing to support this impression. I look at her briefly.

'You're not in your bonfire clothes?'

She's wearing some elastic pants, high boots, and a long coat. She slides out of view to enter her apartment to the right of me as I stand in my doorway.

'You look nice.'

It's all I could muster. But given the situation, given her practiced frown, given her practiced indifference to me, given its absolute departure from our prior amicable relationship, I immediately feel again like the creep.

I'm not.

God damn it.

I'm not a creep. I care. I loved her. She said as much to me, and I made a scared stab at touching her. My gesture pushed her away. After that first night when I crossed the invisible boundary separating us, the one that would force her to pull the ripcord on what relationship we had, she gave me a concerned stare. It said everything. No words were spoken. I felt that I had done the damage. But damn, I was infatuated. I couldn't give up yet.

I didn't.

She pulled the ripcord.

I am being ignored.

Leaving the house to find some kind of affirming look, even a smile, I'm ignored.

When you spend your days inside your apartment, days punctuated by the traffic of a few once-close friends, being ignored hurts so bad.

I don't like being ignored.

I don't want to be ignored.

I hate being ignored.

I can't ignore the feelings that being ignored causes me to have. It's the worst sort of pain, a pain issuing from an existential lack.

I can't ignore me, but if only someone would pay attention to me I would have an opportunity to think of something else.

That ain't happening.

I'm being ignored.

I hate this so much.

I hurt so much.

I can't take this much longer.

Ok Cupid is a dating site that I joined the week earlier. I've been working on my profile and my unimpressive collection of pictures. I have messaged four women. None have returned a message in kind. I just noticed an indicator telling me if this person is a frequent responder. I am unsure if I'm just picking infrequent responders. The last one wasn't.

This shouldn't bother me. It still tugs at the dangling scar tissue of my soul. It's not a soul really. I call a host of neurons that I've cultivated since my earliest days of being ignored my soul. It's that 'poor me' attitude that I created as a mere three-year-old when my mother would scream 'fuck' as I followed her into the basement. She wanted some privacy to smoke weed. I still remember what I did. Sitting on the landing with three final steps descending into the basement, I dropped my Oreo cookie. I did it to enhance the pain I already felt. It was the gesture of a three-year-old, a three-year-old trying to place some control on this feeling I was having being ignored. No, I only tried to up the ante, to outdo any pain that the world could cause me. Now I'm stuck with that feeling. I misplaced it once or twice in my life, but it always returns.

That pain, that abject loneliness won't ignore me. If it weren't for this recurring pain of rejection and loneliness I would be completely alone. It's status as an entity seems solidified. It's been thirty years since that first Oreo incident. I've substituted my Oreo for unrealistic targets for my affection: an unhappy woman thoroughly ensconced in a relationship, a woman grooming herself for suburban housewife status, a series of online entities that can easily not respond as not come to the website and check their messages.

I performed my separation from the Oreo. Perhaps my attitude and participation in my current situation is a continuation of this Oreo refusal behavior.

I don't want to be ignored anymore.

I want to be ignorant.

Aesthetics/Politics

Hi gentlemen,

Perhaps my affliction is one that befalls a man with too much time to think and no gutters in which to channel his thinking.

I do watch my share of documentaries. Two come to mind that bear upon the topic mentioned in the subject line. I will provide a brief overview of the two and their connections, and see if you have any insight or opinion on this topic.

According to Adam Curtis’ documentary ‘The Power of Nightmares’ Leo Strauss was influenced by the American Westerns. From them he determined that the U.S. needed an enemy in order to effectively keep a coherent identity. In remaining vigilant against outside enemies it would produce this sense of self. Otherwise it would lose its sense of mission.

More directly to the topic, the documentary, ‘The Architecture of Doom’ explains how Hitler was so moved by seeing one of Wagner's operas that he set about arranging a nation in the vision that this opera provided. As the opera culminates in a battle at the capital, Hitler began building the sets and designing the costumes for what would translate from the dramatic stage to the world stage in Nazism.

Hitler’s work as an architect and his concern for symbolism and aesthetics influenced the Nazi ideology that he helped to create. The stuff was there, he merely put the pieces together into a coherent national identity and political agenda. The heroic profile of the pure German was one piece of it. Large installations that celebrated the enormous grandeur of Nazism were required. They must also decay much like Greek/Roman/Egyptian architecture--slowly over time. They must have ‘ruin value.’

These ideas demonstrate that art, as a broad conceptualization of feeling, form, attitude, and aesthetic sensibility could be the vehicle for giving big ideas, ideas beyond and before words, coherence. And it could mobilize them not only in the regulation of attitudes concerning what is taken as the proper art for a people but the proper people for an art, the proper architecture for a state, the proper destiny for man, and so on.

So the Neocon representative anecdote is summed up in the white-hatted cowboy facing down the black-hatted villain: it culminates in the image of a beige-hatted Bush clearing brush juxtaposed against a turbaned bin Laden hiding in brush.

The Nazi representative anecdote is in this grafting of the Gesamtkuntswerkt (total art) to the administration of a state from every stitch of its uniform to every stone in its buildings and treating the people who populate this ‘scene’ as so many actors and props to be administered according to a formal vision.