'Those Who Entered the Meat Grinder'

The U.S. Marine Corps has periodically issued Commandant’s Professional Reading Lists, oddly eclectic assortments of history, memoirs, self-help books, inspirational tracts, and fiction good and bad. Tolstoy once made it but so did Robert Heinlein. If I had to recommend only one book from one of the lists to Marines and civilian readers alike, it would be With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981) by Eugene B. Sledge (1923-2001). Sledge was born in Alabama, enlisted in the Marine Corps one year after Pearl Harbor, and saw combat in the Pacific Theater. He describes the savagery of the fighting with the Japanese and the esprit de corps among his fellow Marines. Sledge writes: 

“To the non-combatants 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 had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”

 

My son Michael Ellington Kurp graduated on Friday from the U.S. Naval Academy with a B.S. in computer engineering and a minor in Russian, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.