WITH THE OLD BREED by E. B. SLEDGE

A book review by JC Sullivan

Although I read the book some time ago, it’s a curious note that I write this review Memorial Day weekend, 2013. I cannot share the writer’s life as a U.S. Marine but I can certainly tell you about this diary. It was unusual for an enlisted man to document his WWII training and combat experiences during that time, as if he somehow knew he would survive.

Like so many others who have experienced life-changing combat, E(ugene) B(ondurant) Sledge’s nightmares were a part of his post war life. “But time heals, and the nightmares no longer wake me in a cold sweat with a pounding heart and racing pulse.”

The story he’s documented focues on two Pacific campaigns, Peleliu and Okinawa and the role of  Company K, 3^rd Battalion, 5^th Marines, First Marine Division. In writing the story he said he fulfilled an obligation long felt for his comrades.  “None came out unscathed.”

Moviemaker Ken Burns wrote “A classic…in all the literature of the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir. This is the real deal, the real war;  unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality of false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war.”

Sledge returned home to Mobile, Alabama after the war to earn a Ph.D and became a Professor of Biology at the University of Montevallo there. There’s not much I can add about the book except to tell you about it - others have done so between its covers. I can only add that it’s a powerful telling of courage, carnage, brutality and redemption.