Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where "the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets." By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic.īased on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament,Ĭaptures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Sledge became part of the war's famous 1st Marine Division-3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Sledge's acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation.Īn Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, One of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific-the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary-into terms we mortals can grasp."-Tom Hanks "Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir,
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