With the Old Breed: Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

At a period when most of Peleliu is under American control except for the central ridges, Sledge’s battalion is sent to relieve the 7th Marines, who are experiencing casualty figures almost as high as the 1st Marines. Sledge and his companions find themselves focused exclusively on day-to-day survival, as any greater notion of time or purpose vanishes under the grim realities of every new day of combat. Although it is nearly impossible to picture one’s own death, most men become fatalistic about being wounded. They all hope for the battle to end soon or to be sent home with a million-dollar wound.

Sledge describes taking part in an attack on a rugged hill, the Five Sisters, and having to work as a stretcher bearer, a nearly impossible task in such difficult terrain, exposed to enemy fire. He notes that the wounded always seem peaceful and confident, in large part, he believes, because of the deep trust that exists among all Marines. In addition, leaving a wounded Marine behind would involve condemning him to being tortured to death by the Japanese.

Sledge also describes the agonizing nights in which the Marines have to fight against Japanese infiltrators, whose recklessness is met with the Marines’ alertness and discipline. Sledge recalls an episode in which his friend Jay stepped on a hiding Japanese soldier while going to relieve himself during the night. When Jay tried to shoot the man, he discovered that his firing pin was broken. He began to run away from the soldier, calling out to his fellow Marines to shoot him, and felt a grenade thrown against his back—although, surprisingly, the grenade did not explode. Finally, he ran toward a Marine with an automatic rifle. Instead of shooting the Japanese soldier directly, the man let him come close, so that when he shot him, he could cut his body in half with the bullets—a decision that rightfully enrages Jay. Jay, in the meantime, was so terrified that he had diarrhea in his pants.

Sledge and two companions fight for a few days in a mortar squad separate from the rest of Company K. After they are told to regroup with their company, they run into Johnny Marmet, who has a distraught look on his face. Sledge feels sick when he hears the news: “Ack Ack” Haldane is dead. Sledge describes this moment as the worst grief he felt during the war. Haldane’s death signifies the disappearance of a figure of stability and strength in the company, similar to a parent in his capacity to provide physical as well as mental security. As the men all around Sledge cry, Sledge feels as though their world has fallen apart.

During this period, fighting comes in sudden spurts. The Japanese on the island know that they are condemned, and have no more hope in regaining territory or receiving reinforcements. Therefore, they begin to kill for the simple purpose of killing. Around this time, the heat also proves unbearable, and brings out the smells of rotting corpses all around. Although Marines always try to remove their own dead from sight, the intense heat makes the bodies smell and rot within a few hours. Sledge describes the horror of being constantly surrounded by the smell of decaying corpses and human excrement, as the coral rock surface on Peleliu keeps men from digging into the ground and adopting adequate sanity practices. As a consequence, huge flies abound, and Sledge finds it nearly impossible to dislodge them from their positions, even when they fall in his own food.

One night, as Company K is relieving certain troops, Sledge learns that a Japanese infiltrator recently killed two Marines in the gun pit he is going to sleep in. Unable to bear the idea of sleeping in an area covered with blood, Sledge places cardboard around the sides of the pit. As he does so, Sledge recalls some politicians’ words glorifying the idea of war and patriotic sacrifice, and finds these ideas absurd. He concludes that flies are the only ones that benefit from such carnage.

Observing the landscape around him, made muddy by rain and gray and forlorn by the destruction of war, Sledge realizes that the strange outline of Peleliu’s coral ridges seem surreal, as though they belonged to another planet. Affected by constant stress, lack of sleep, and exhaustion, Sledge finds that he is barely coping with each new horror.

One day, Sledge and a friend come across three dead Marines lying on stretchers, left there after the stretcher bearers had to escape. Although such sights usually disturb Sledge, this one is all the more shocking because the Japanese enemy has deliberately mutilated these bodies, decapitating one man and placing another one’s severed penis in his mouth. In that moment, Sledge feels blind rage run through him. He concludes that he will never feel compassion for the enemy again. Although he knows that Marines can occasionally prove brutal and do take souvenirs from the dead, he has never witnessed such horrific treatment of the enemy, and concludes that the Japanese are “mean as hell.”

On October 15, three days after learning about Haldane’s death, Company K is relieved by army troops. Sledge and his comrades are exultant. They move to a northern defense zone overlooking the sea where they are in charge of stopping any Japanese counter-landing. The Marines are able to relax during the day but must remain alert at night. One day, a buddy shows Sledge a souvenir he has kept wrapped up in waxed paper: the hand of a Japanese enemy. Sledge tells him that he has gone “Asiatic” and cannot keep this. The man insists, but other Marines intervene, convincing him to leave it here. Sledge concludes that the war has turned him into “a twentieth-century savage,” without any emotional sensitivity. Sledge shudders at the thought of what this man might do if the war continued.

At the end of October, Company K moves to a quiet section of the island where they are told to shave and clean up. The day before they leave the island, Sledge is sleeping in a hammock when he hears machine-gun bullets zip by underneath his hammock. Sledge determines that the machine-gun is far away and must be shooting at army lines, but he knows that he can be killed by a stray bullet in the same way that he can die from a bullet meant for him, so he crawls out of his hammock and sleeps on the ground.

On October 30, the men finally board the ship that will take them away from Peleliu. Too accustomed to seeing death and destruction, Sledge cannot convince himself that they are actually leaving, and expects to be killed or wounded at any time. As they move away from Peleliu, Sledge asks Sgt. Haney, whose experience of war dates back to World War I, what he thinks about their experience there. Sledge expects Haney to put what they have experienced in perspective and deemphasize its horror, but, to Sledge’s surprise, Haney replies that it was terrible, that he never experienced anything of the sort before, and that he is now ready to return to the U.S.

Sledge concludes that none of the men involved in this battle would ever be the same again. They have lost their innocence and their faith in the goodness of humanity, as well as in politicians whose job should be to protect them from savagery. At the same time, Sledge draws comfort from the fact that the effective training and the amazing discipline and esprit de corps among Marines played a crucial role—along with pure luck—in their survival. In light of the Japanese’s impressive military skill and devotion, he concludes that only Marines equally devoted to combat and to defending their country could have possibly defeated them. Looking back, he realizes that his drill instructor at boot camp was not mean, but insisted on severe discipline because he knew that perfectionism could make the difference between life and death.