One of the most memorable reads of 2023 for me was E.B. Sledge’s “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.” By no means a pleasant read, it was captivating for being so far from my daily lived experience, thought-provoking in its observations, and harrowing in its content, not for the sake of shock value but for grappling with reality, history, and what likely lies ahead.
A bit like reading “Moby Dick” or “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Sledge’s memoir is one devoid of female characters. Not entirely, of course, but men and boys live apart from the ordinary world, engaged in a lethal struggle of unknown benefit to the war at large. It’s incredibly grim, separated from the world of women and domestic normality.
That said, some of the most memorable moments occur when women appear. The scene in which Marines at rest watch a native of Okinawa nurse her infant is poignant. It is not her feeding the baby that is so memorable but rather when her toddler becomes such a pest that she squirts him with breast milk as chastisement, causing a company of Marines to erupt in laughter that she joins but does not fully understand. It’s such an unexpected moment of levity, with bodily humor worthy of Chaucer that transcends linguistic divides.
A more haunting scene comes when Sledge and his companions are pinned in trenches on some rocky precipice, trying to outlast an enemy sworn to fight to the death. Where Sledge is positioned, he can see the face of a deceased Marine he imagines to be mocking the living who continue to struggle. It is macabre.
Confronted with such hideous fear and destruction, Sledge is transported unexpectedly into the world of fairy stories. He writes:
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 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 a 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.
The images are grotesque. But it shows a powerful way that stories expand the inner life of the listener. Water babies provide a connection to the past and occupy the mind in the horrifying present for Sledge. The connection of such idyllic peacetime with the horrors of war is hard to understand but somehow consoling.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, we tend to think of stories for children exclusively as preparation for the best in life, when, in fact, stories give our children strength even for the worst challenges and disappointments that may be in store for them.
Stories offer examples of perseverance. They also furnish an interior life, giving children resources on which to draw in times of difficulty.
