With the Old Breed

On May 15, while K/3/5 provides support to an attack by 2/5, the attack is so fierce that Company K is told to take cover and wait for instructions. Sledge then learns that “Doc” Caswell is hit and, forgetting about the intense shelling, Sledge suddenly feels sick and decides to run toward his friend. When Sledge sees the state Doc is in, he tells him that he will be OK, but is convinced that his friend is probably going to die. However, Sledge later discovers that Doc actually survived his ordeal and, since then, has remained one of his closest friends from the war.

For the next few days, the Marines are exposed to such constant heavy artillery fire that Sledge develops a deep headache. During that period, as Company K moves from fight to fight, Burgin is wounded, although he returns eighteen days later—to the Marines’ joy, as Sledge notes that Burgin is an excellent officer.

For ten days, the Marines are exposed to rain that turns everything to mud, to the point of making the section of the island they are in, Wana, seem like a lake. Because of this, it becomes difficult to carry the wounded or dead, to receive supplies, to stay in the same foxhole, and to sleep. The exposed cadavers cause flies and maggots to multiply, and dysentery breaks out. When Sledge looks around him, he feels as though he is in hell. The decay and destruction are overwhelming. In particular, the smell of the dead gives him no respite. To cope with these conditions, he tells himself that he is in the middle of a nightmare from which he will soon wake up. Sometimes, he wonders if he would prefer to simply die.

During this period, Company K’s commanding officer, the last officer who fought with them on Peleliu, needs to leave the war because of malaria. This severs the last tie the men had to their beloved officer Capt. Haldane, and Sledge recalls this as a demoralizing turning point on Okinawa. When this commanding officer is replaced by the infamous Shadow, everyone in Company K is outraged.

During a lull in an intense battle, Sledge chats with a Marine everyone calls “Kathy” because of the name of his lover. “Kathy” shows Sledge a picture of the girl, whom Sledge finds beautiful. Sledge tells Kathy that he is in a difficult situation, since Kathy is married but also having an affair with such a beautiful girl. Sledge then realizes that this scene is surreal: they are looking at a picture in the middle of utter destruction, mud, and the fat maggots covering Japanese corpses.

This episode leads Sledge to realize that he no longer fully believes in a world outside of war. He understands that his mind is becoming affected by his immersion in combat. He knows that what was once called “shell shock” in World War I is now known as “combat fatigue,” and that any fighter is likely to suffer from it. In that moment, however, he promises himself that he will not let the Japanese “crack [him] up.” This pledge gives him a sense of security, allowing him to hold onto this resolve in the moments when he feels his mind drift away, too deeply affected by the violence around him.

During the following attack, after Sledge’s conversation with Kathy, Marines shoot an already-wounded enemy soldier who is crawling in the mud. Uncharacteristically, a Marine shows compassion for this man and tells his comrades that the soldier is going to die anyway and that it is not necessary to keep on firing. However, another Marine yells back a him that he is “a goddamn Nip.” Reflecting on this situation, Sledge realizes that this foreign soldier’s family will be told that he “died gloriously on the field of honor for the emperor,” when he actually died on a death-infested, muddy slope for no truly honorable reason.

Sledge mentions that sliding down one of these muddy slopes could drive any Marine to vomit and, potentially, to complete insanity, because slopes are made of mud and the piled-up, rotting dead. At the bottom of the hill, Marines are likely to be covered in thick maggots, crawling in every possible crevice. Sledge notes that most Marines or writers tend not to mention such details, because it is too unbelievable to imagine men living in such conditions for days on end, but that this convinces Sledge that the war is nothing but pure insanity.