With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

by Eugene B. Sledge

Under that cap were the most ghastly skeletal remains I had ever seen—and I had already seen too many. Every time I looked over the edge of that foxhole down into that crater, that half-gone face leered up at me with a sardonic grin. It was as though he was mocking our pitiful efforts to hang on to life in the face of the constant violent death that had cut him down. Or maybe he was mocking the folly of the war itself: “I am the harvest of man’s stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can’t forget.” During the day I sometimes watched big raindrops splashing into the crater around that corpse and remembered how as a child I had been fascinated by raindrops splashing around a large green frog as he sat in a ditch near home. My grandmother had told me that elves made little splashes like that, and they were called water babies. So I sat in my foxhole and watched the water babies splashing around the green-dungaree-clad corpse. What an unlikely combination. The war had turned the water babies into little ghouls that danced around the dead instead of little elves dancing around a peaceful bullfrog. A man had little to occupy his mind at Shuri—just sit in muddy misery and fear, tremble through the shellings, and let his imagination go where it would.