With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

by Eugene B. Sledge

As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He held a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Each time his pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle. My buddy tossed the coral chunks as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on some muddy road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action. The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief. I noticed gold teeth glistening brightly between the lips of several of the dead Japanese lying around us. Harvesting gold teeth was one facet of stripping enemy dead that I hadn’t practiced so far. But stopping beside a corpse with a particularly tempting number of shining crowns, I took out my kabar and bent over to make the extractions. A hand grasped me by the shoulder, and I straightened up to see who it was. “What are you gonna do, Sledgehammer?” asked Doc Caswell. His expression was a mix of sadness and reproach as he looked intently at me. “Just thought I’d collect some gold teeth,” I replied. “Don’t do it.” “Why not, Doc?” “You don’t want to do that sort of thing. What would your folks think if they knew?” “Well, my dad’s a doctor, and I bet he’d think it was kinda interesting,” I replied, bending down to resume my task. “No! The germs, Sledgehammer! You might get germs from them.” I stopped and looked inquiringly at Doc and said, “Germs? Gosh, I never thought...

This scene really stood out in “The Pacific” and I’m glad it came from his own account. Powerful