'Fugitives From the Law of Averages'

Eugene Sledge was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1923 and enlisted in the Marine Corps in December 1942. He served in the Pacific Theater as a mortarman, a stretcher bearer and, like all Marines, a rifleman. In postwar civilian life, Sledge earned a doctorate in biology from the University of Florida in 1960 and for thirty years taught at Alabama College. 

Sledge’s wife suggested he write an account of his combat experience during the war and encouraged him to submit it to a publisher. Sledge never thought of himself as an “author.” With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, was originally published by Presidio Press in 1981. With an introduction by Paul Fussell, the book was republished by Oxford University Press in 1990. Fussell writes:

 

“The book is devoid of the literary expediencies and suavities that may occasion skepticism or disgust in more artistically self-conscious war memoirs. Sledge is so little an author in the pejorative sense that his eye seems never to wander from his subject to contemplate the literary effect he’s creating. His style is like windowglass: you don’t pause to notice it—you look through it to the actuality it discloses. It is this honesty, simplicity, and modesty that give Sledge’s book its extraordinary power.”

 

With the Old Breed is the finest memoir I’ve read to come out of World War II. Sledge’s innate humility and his reverence for the men he served with lend the book an utterly convincing objectivity. He never tries too hard. There’s no grandstanding, no phony rah-rah patriotism. His loyalty is to his fellow Marines. His final chapter is titled “End of the Agony,” in which he writes:

 

“If this were a novel about war, or if I were a dramatic storyteller, I would find a romantic way to end this account while looking at that fine sunset off the cliffs at the southern end of Okinawa. But that wasn’t the reality of what we faced. Company K had one more nasty job to do.”

 

After the eighty-two-day Okinawa campaign, the men were ordered to bury the Japanese dead. They argued and defied orders but Sledge persuaded them to complete the burial detail. More than 7,600 men in the 1^st Marine Division were killed, wounded or went missing on Okinawa, plus more casualties among their replacements. The fighting on Peleliu had resulted in more than 6,500 casualties. “The few men like me,” Sledge writes, “who never got hit can claim with justification that we survived the abyss of war as fugitives from the law of averages.”

 

Today is the 250^th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps.