I recently read the analog to this book, "With the Old Breed" by Eugene Sledge, about many of the same Marine engagements in the South Pacific during WWII. I thought "HFMP" would be a rehash of the same, but its told by a different kind of writer: While Sledge is thoughtful, simple in his prose, and sees most things through a moral lens, Robert Leckie is profane, writes brilliantly, and celebrates situational morality: he and his fellow jarheads carouse callously in Melbourne; steal from each other in combat; display no sensitivity to death; fake illness to be removed from combat; and bitterly hate both the enemy and their own officers.

Nevertheless, both are truly powerful. The myth of the "greatest generation" has been flogged ad nauseum and I've partaken in it (my own father flew B-24s in the Palaus), but after these two fine books, I see these men more as they truly were: young scared soldiers who were asked to do the most terrible things mankind is capable of (sometimes wilfully, sadly), and they were necessarily scarred thereby. Sledge went on to a quiet life as a college biology professor; Leckie became a prolific novelist (40 or more). Both survived into their 80s and both, from what I've gathered, were fine, upstanding men after the War.

But only Sledge's weaknesses were not hardened by the War. He entered the Marines an honest, good boy, experienced horror, rejected it as best he could, and left it behind when the War was over. He "never put the uniform on again."

From Leckie's book, I wonder: Was he able to do the same? Unless his book is full of hyperbole (which I doubt; he and "Sledgehammer" were in the same conflict on Peleliu), his casual acceptance of the brutality in which they engaged HAD to have devastating longterm consequences for his own life.

There is no GOOD war, from the soldier-on-the-ground's perspective; the only good war is a short war where you survive and Robert Leckie suffered through the entire, endless Pacific campaign. My heart goes out to his suffering, privations, and the inevitable damage he suffered; indeed, Leckie himself wonders in the book who was hurt more: those who died or those who lived. Yet his own moral failings (which undoubtedly preceded the War) reveal his lack of true understanding of the conflict: the book's epilogue is a meditation about the wrongfulness of the atom bomb, yet Leckie had to know the projected American casualty rates had we invaded Japan itself -- Leckie might have been one of the men on those beaches facing tens of thousands of fanatical emperor-worshipers. His lack of comprehension that the atom bomb saved untold American AND Japanese lives betrays a moral blindness that is the root cause of his many smaller moral failings he so eagerly and definitively recounts in the book.

In addition, HFMP was published more than ten years after the end of WWII and the horror of the atom bomb had kept the peace until then. It still keeps the peace today; our conflicts are sporadic and small. There are no wars anymore where 7000 men die in a fortnight.

True, war still exists and probably always will. I don't believe in the "perfectablility" of man and therefore have little hope he will improve drastically in my lifetime. Leckie and Sledge saw the proof of this in dramatic, unforgettable terms and both lived to tell about it. Both men exhibited courage and honor, but only Sledge proved that War doesn't always bring out the worst in a man as well.

Nevertheless, this book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for the serious student of WWII, or any war for that matter.