HELMET FOR MY PILLOW; Robert Leckie's World War II Masterpiece

To all fans of HBO's The Pacific, do yourself a favor; get ye to a bookstore (or an online bookseller) and buy a copy of Robert Leckie's magnificent memoir Helmet For My Pillow. You will not regret it.

Leckie, who after World War II became a writer for the Associated Press, the Buffalo Courier- Express, the New York-Journal-American, the New York Daily News, and the Star-Ledger was a master of the English language, and a storyteller in an almost mythic sense. Tom Hanks referred to "Helmet" as a piece of prose that reads like an epic poem; and I cannot disagree. Imagine a memoir of the war in the Pacific as told by Joseph Campbell, and you'd get the the gist how this book reads. If you're looking for a scholarly history of the war, with names and dates, this is not your book. But if you want a verbal slideshow of war from the typewriter of a true wordsmith who painted abstract pictures of the surreal world he was thrust into at Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu, and on Parris Island, and in Melbourne, Pavavu, and of subsisting on bread and water in the brig, then make this memoir a gift to yourself.

Leckie doesn't use real names in his narrative, all names are nicknames or in some cases are descriptive of a characteristic of the individual. We have Lt. Commando, Loudmouth, Chicken,  The Artist, Liberal, and Souvenirs (he had a dentist's light and tooth extractors for yanking the gold out of dead Japanese soldiers mouths). And his buddies Runner, Chuckler, and Hoosier (respectively Wilbur "Bud" Conley, Lew Juergens,  and Bill Smith)  are a large part of the story, Staying with Leckie from the battle of the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal until all four were wounded and shipped out from Peleliu, we get a sense of the friendship that kept them going in the worst of times, and of the "not giving giving a damn" days and nights when they could break away from the war and let loose in Melbourne.

Some scenes from The Pacific involving Leckie were obviously the work of the series' writers; for example, the conversation Leckie had with Eugene Sledge on Pavuvu might not have happened - there is no indication that such a a talk took place in "Helmet". But then again, it could have; they were on Pavuvu at the same time awaiting the assault on Peleliu.. But most of the events that occurred in battle involving Leckie occurred as portrayed in the series, and are dealt with in greater depth in Leckie's book.

A drunk Leckie did relieve Chuckler while Chuckler had guard duty so he could go to the head, and Leckie did point his gun at "Lt Ivy League" (really Lt. Hugh Corrigan). It earned Leckie five days in the brig on bread and water. The treatment of military prisoners then and now are a stark contrast; smoking was forbidden in the bread and water cell, and in one instance the floor of the cell was hosed down so the prisoners would have to sleep on a wet floor.

And during an AWOL night on the town Leckie and his guys were pursued by MP's brandishing their M1 rifles; one man was shot in the leg trying to escape. Imagine a military policeman discharging his weapon in a residential area of a foreign ally in the present day! There would be a congressional investigation tomorrow.

Of course, Leckie depicted the horror of war, with all of its bloody revulsion, but he wrote of even the most horrific scenes in such an elegant manner  it was like poetry. Below, a passage from page 286 describing the Battle of Peleliu.  Leckie was in a crater, getting reading to get out and advance.

"I turned to go, and as I did, nearly stepped on someone's hand. 'Excuse me', I began to say, but then I saw it was an unattached hand, or rather a detached one. It lay there alone- open, palm upwards, clean, capable, solitary. I could not tear my eyes from it.The hand is the artisan of the soul. It is the second member of the human trinity of head and hand and heart. A man has no faculty more human than his hand, none more beautiful nor expressive or productive. To see this hand lying alone, as though contemptuously cast aside, no longer part of a man, no longer his help, was to see war in all of its wantonness; it was to see the especially brutal savagery of our own technique of rending, and it was to see men at their eternal worst, turning upon one another, tearing one another, clawing at their own innards with the maniacal  fury of the pride-possessed."   

Bob Leckie mentioned warriors of the Greek classics in "Helmet". He talks of Achilles, Hector, and Agamemnon, all figures in The Iliad and The Odyssey, and of the Roman god of war, Mars. He titles the fourth chapter of "Helmet" as Lotus-Eater- it details his adventures in Melbourne. In Greek mythology Lotus-Eaters lived on an island near North Africa where they ate the narcotic plant; it was a land where Odysseus visited with his crew, who did not want to return to their ships to leave for Ithaca.

And in The Pacific, it is where Bob Leckie met the beautiful Greek Australian Stella. But the real Bob Leckie had no Stella; Stella was an homage to the classical Greek references found in "Helmet". In the series, Stella's mother left her Greek city in Anatolia (Asiatic Turkey) with little more than the clothes on her back, much like the refugees from Troy after it was destroyed by the Greeks. In The Aeniad, the refugees from Troy went on to found Rome (according to Virgil). Stella and her family followed a similar path, with Bob Leckie on his own own version of The Odyssey.

Bob did have a few brief romances in "Helmet"; he refers to one woman as "Molly", another as "Sheilah". Also, he met a woman early on he called "Gwen", and another only called "the drink waitress" with whom may have had a fling.

But Stella...she was fiction, but a nod to the classical references in Leckie's memoir.

The book for first published in 1957, and was said to been prompted when Leckie and his wife saw South Pacific. Bob Leckie wanted to tell the world that what went on in that theater of the war was not a Broadway musical.

And he succeeded in doing so, very well indeed.

THE PACIFIC; Episode Four

James Badge Dale as Robert Leckie in HBO's "The Pacific"

So the boss yelled at you at work, your kid is screaming for a new cell phone, your wife is still ticked off about the cheap anniversary present you got her, and its April 8 and you haven't done your taxes.

And you think you've had a bad day?

The fourth episode of The Pacific will put it all into perspective for you.

It opens with Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazello) in training as part of a Marine mortar team in December, 1943, and shifts to a troop transport with Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale) on its way to Cape Gloucester, New Britain to seize the island for its airstrip from the Japanese occupiers. This episode answered a question I always had about the men in the Pacific theater; how did they find the courage to keep on island hopping again, and again, and again. They had multiple D-Days, and when they landed in the Pacific they had two enemies- the Japanese and the savage tropical environment.

The answer to that question is that some just men just weren't emotionally capable to return to the hellish fighting and situation they were in. On New Britain the Marines wore the same clothes for months at a time, with mud up to their knees and an enemy trying to kill them in attacks that could happen at anytime. In this episode we saw fighting men descend into madness, with one Marine slowly manually strangling a wounded Japanese soldier and smiling about it, and another Marine taking his uniform off and blowing his brains out. At one point in a torrential storm Leckie cries out for someone to shoot him to end his misery.

Leckie contracts enuresis and his buddy "Runner" catches malaria. When both are shipped to the island of Pavuvu Runner asks Leckie to read his letters home to Vera. Leckie ends up in a hospital for his illness, but is sent to a psych ward because the regular hospital is overflowing. He questions his own sanity being in such a place after all he has endured, and sees some of the emotional damage done to other patients, among them his old platoon mate Gibson. Dr. Grant, a physician and psychiatrist, eventually gains Leckie's confidence. After a few days in the hospital Leckie decides he needs to return to his friends....he "bribes" Grant to sign his release papers by giving him a Japanese pistol he acquired in New Britain.

The final scene shows Bob Leckie leaving the relative normalcy of the hospital and the area behind the lines to join his company as they prepare for the bloody assault of Peleliu.

Some may see this episode as one where little happened....but I think this was an important bridge to the middle of the story, when in the summer of 1944 the Americans began a chain of successes on their way to the Japanese home islands, but with heavy costs. And as bad as Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester was, its going to get much, much worse as these Marines move on to Peleliu, then Iwo Jima, and finally Okinawa. The hostile environment is a constant, but the ferocity of the Japanese defense will be amped up to a level no American fighting man had ever seen before or since. And that's why this episode was as important as it was....the Bob Leckies might have been wounded, ill, or both but they managed to get back and do it again. This episode gave a glimpse of the stuff these children of the Great Depression were made out of, a toughness and resolve that just may have served them in that theater. But that is not to say there weren't heavy casualties, not just dead or wounded physically, but those scarred emotionally. There probably lots of Gibsons and "Captain Midnights" who were never truly able to cope again, during and after the war.

Like Dr, Grant said in the episode, his job was not to cure, but to access....and move on.

Thanks for waiting for this latest installment, several days late....I'll try to be more current with the posts now that my life is back in a more normal rhythm again.

THE PACIFIC, Episode Three- The Saviors of Guadalcanal

James Badge Dale (center in teeshirt) as Robert Leckie

Spoiler Alert...if you haven't seen Episode Three of THE PACIFIC, advance at your own risk!

Part Three of HBO's The Pacific shows an abrupt departure from the storytelling style of its companion piece Band of Brothers. In BOB the audience received little information about the personal lives of the men in Easy Company. We knew where some of them came from through conversations with other characters; we knew some were married, others not, and we got a smattering of personal history. BOB was about the story of one unit, Easy Company, and how their wartime experience in Europe spanned most of the significant events from Normandy to the occupation of a conquered Germany. Most episodes of BOB dealt with an action in which Easy Company participated, as we saw some characters we got to know a little cut down and replaced by new ones, and old stalwarts marching on to VE Day.

The Pacific's story is told mainly through the eyes and experiences of John Basilone (Jon Seda), Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), and Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazello), as well as several secondary characters. Consequently we learn more about these characters in three episodes of The Pacific then we do in ten hours of BOB. And since it deals with individuals rather than a particular military unit, the action does and will move from location to location more readily than BOB, and some characters may not appear at all in certain episodes- Eugene Sledge is no where to be found in the third episode The Pacific- Saviors of Guadalcanal.

After being evacuated from Guadalcanal in January, 1943, the Marines are shipped to Melbourne in the Southern part of Australia for some R&R. Its summer in Melbourne, and when the transport docks they are greeted by throngs of thousands of Australians waving flags, carrying signs and banners greeting them, cheering them to the music of John Phillip Souza....Australians regard the American Marines as saviors of their country, and are treated as heroes by the populace.

Many of Australia's fighting men are serving in North Africa, and there is a shortage of young men in the country, and many beautiful, young, single women. The Marines are billeted at a cricket ground, but MP's look the other way when many of Marines go AWOL....it was time for a break, featuring booze and babes, after their ordeal in the Solomon Islands.

Leckie is partying with his buddies when he meets Stella (Claire Van Der Boom, pictured left), a beautiful Australian of Greek ancestry. He gets her address, and comes by her house the next day. Stella is the only child of loving and warm parents from the old country, who take an immediate liking to the young American. Over the next few weeks Leckie and Stella fall in love, and he becomes regarded almost as a new member of the family by Stella's mother and father. One day while siting in the back garden eating roast lamb provided by Leckie, Stella's father reads that Stella's friend from childhood, Alexi, was killed in combat. That triggers something in Stella- she realizes that the odds of Bob Leckie making it through the war unscathed may be long. She decides to break up with Bob Leckie- losing him in battle would be too much for her to take, and it would be even more devastating to her parents- particularly her mother- who had grown to love Leckie as their own.

Bob Leckie goes on a drunken bender after the breakup with Stella. He had lived through hellish months on Guadalcanal before attaining several weeks of heaven with a beautiful woman and her wonderful family, only to see it slip away through no fault of his own. He gets into a profane and violent confrontation with Lt. Corrigan. He ends up in the brig overnight- the next day he finds that he is being shipped out.

Meanwhile Sid Phillips (Ashton Holmes) has struck up a romance with a lovely young woman named Gwen, who is constantly under the watchful eye of her protective grandfather. Sid finally "touches the merchandise" shortly before he receives his orders to ship out. You get the feeling it was the first time for both.

During his stay in Melbourne Basilone and JP Morgan get into a a small brawl with an Australian soldier who mocked their toast to dead buddy Manny Rodriguez in a pub. Basilone and Morgan continue to drink it up and party hard. The next day a hung over Basilone is told by Lt Col Chesty Puller that he has to pull it together and be a better example to his men; Basilone was being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Several days later, after the medal ceremony, Puller tells Basilone that his next assignment was to rotate back to the United States- he was needed to sell war bonds, to put a human face on the war effort. Basilone says goodbye to old friend Morgan; in the final scene of the episode Basilone is looking out the window of a plane flying over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Watching the ending of this episode I thought about Basilone, being a sort of hero surprised by his celebrity much like the flag raisers of Iwo Jima, and how both were used to sell war bonds on tours conducted nationwide. And I remember hearing stories of the old timers who lived in those days, the ones who manned the home front. You bought war bonds, because you were expected to do so. You had gasoline, meat, and butter rationed, as with many other things. There was a sense of unity in the country, and of common purpose.

Maybe that was an America of which we may never see the likes of again.

Update- For Those Who Want To Know...."Did Bob Leckie Get Back With Stella And Marry Her?"

I was just looking at some of the queries to this blog....and the most popular one was "Leckie-Stella". A lot of people, myself included, wanted to know if Bob and Stella had a reunion and a happy ending.

Well....I'm not going to tell you. That would be one spoiler too many. But If you want to know more about Bob and his family after the war, check this article at NorthJersey.com, and this video at HBO.com for the answer....did Bob Leckie marry Stella?

Update May 19, 2010

For those who are still curious about the identity of "Stella" and what happened to her, I included the answer to your question in the bottom of the blog entry for Episode 10; Home & Beyond. You might be surprised.

The Pacific Episode 2; Guadalcanal

After a delay of several days, its time for my overdue take on this Sunday's episode of HBO's The Pacific. I did get a bit sidetracked by all the other news going on, and I wanted to get a chance to see the the second episode one more time. Though it deals with a period of only a few days of the Battle of Guadalcanal, I wanted to see it again to get a better feel for just what the Marines of the First Division were up against at Guadalcanal. A second viewing helps to grasp the enormity of the task at hand, what they did, and of the heroism of the First.

By October, 1942 the US Marines at Guadalcanal were cut off- the Navy had to move out after being repelled by a Japanese attack. They were alone, short of food and ammunition, suffering from the brutal tropical heat and humidity, insects, malaria and digestive tract infections- and were being harassed by Japanese attacks around the clock. After Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale) and his fellow Marines survive a Japanese assault, John Basilone (Jon Seda) and his men are sent by LT.Col.Chesty Puller to defend the perimeter around Henderson Field to keep it from falling back into Japanese hands. They are also ordered, if they are defeated, to go into the jungle and continue to fight as guerrillas, if need be.

On the night of October 24-25, 1942. Basilone and his men of C Company were vastly outnumbered, yet held their positions and repelled the Japanese attack. Basilone manned machine guns in the attacks, then repaired jammed guns, and went back through the jungle to get more ammo. He killed several Japanese in hand to hand combat and with his side arm, and returned to his men. One of his hands was badly burned when he touched the hot barrel of the Machine gun, but he fought on.

Below, his his citation, from the Arlington National Cemetery Website.

For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry in action against enemy Japanese forces, above and beyond the call of duty, while serving with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division in the Lunga Area. Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, on 24 and 25 October 1942. While the enemy was hammering at the Marines' defensive positions, Sgt. Basilone, in charge of 2 sections of heavy machineguns, fought valiantly to check the savage and determined assault. In a fierce frontal attack with the Japanese blasting his guns with grenades and mortar fire, one of Sgt. Basilone's sections, with its guncrews, was put out of action, leaving only 2 men able to carry on. Moving an extra gun into position, he placed it in action, then, under continual fire, repaired another and personally manned it, gallantly holding his line until replacements arrived. A little later, with ammunition critically low and the supply lines cut off, Sgt. Basilone, at great risk of his life and in the face of continued enemy attack, battled his way through hostile lines with urgently needed shells for his gunners, thereby contributing in large measure to the virtual annihilation of a Japanese regiment. His great personal valor and courageous initiative were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.

One source claims that Basilone killed 38 Japanese in that battle, another says the number was close to 100. While watching this sequence I noticed the battle, which lasted all night, was condensed into roughly eight minutes. Still, the portrayal of Basilone's action was accurate given the constraints of time. The next morning Basilone is told by Puller that he would be putting Basilone in for a medal. Basilone goes looking for his friend Manny Rodriguez, who stayed behind as a runner for Puller. Manny's body is found, laying dead in the jungle by Basilone.

Meanwhile back in Alabama, young Eugene Sledge( Joe Mazello) is told by his physician father that he no longer has a heart murmur. Gene tells his father that he will be enlisting, though his father has concerns about what war will do to his son.

By January 1943 the Japanese evacuate Guadalcanal, and some of the Marines are transported off of the island. The episode ends with Leckie and his friends finding out while drinking coffee in the galley of the transport that the Marines of the First Division at Guadalcanal were considered heroes back in the United States.

This morning while reading the print edition of The Star-Ledger I checked out letters to TV critic Alan Sepinwall, and one talked about the scope of The Pacific, and how it neglected the role the Army played in the theater. And it is a valid criticism- the series won't deal with the war in New Guinea or the Philippines, or in China, Burma, or many of the other fronts. Nor will it talk about the role of the Army Air Corps, and the Naval aviators or naval battles- the scope of the Pacific war was just too enormous and cost prohibitive to reproduce in a limited TV series. Much like Band of Brothers concentrated on one group in a series of battles in the European war, it was not the whole story of victory in Europe. "Brothers" didn't deal with the campaigns in North Africa or Italy, and of course, the first turning point in Europe was the German defeat in the Eastern Front by the Soviets.

And The Pacific does limit its story to the three main characters, Basilone, Leckie, and Sledge, and the war waged by Marines island hopping in tiny specs in the ocean, all the way to the Japanese home islands. What this series does is open the door to people who were too young to feel the direct impact of the war, and gives them a start in a search for the history of the war in the Pacific, in all its vast scope, tragedy, and triumph. For a more comprehensive view of World War II, I suggest Ken Burns' The War, shown on PBS several years ago and available on DVD.

Episode Three is coming up Sunday night, with Basilone getting the Congressional Medal of Honor and national celebrity status.

THE PACIFIC, Episode One- Some Notes

I wanted to get into a discussion of the first episode of HBO's The Pacific yesterday, but there was the small problem of starting the cleanup after the nor'easter that battered the mid-Atlantic over the weekend. Actually it was better to sit back and view it a second time,and collect my thoughts about the episode, its historical significance, and maybe even a different spin on the episode and the commentary of others.

I posted several comments on Alan Sepinwall's What's Alan Watching? blog about my take on Episode One, and found some of the comments there quite interesting- but I'll get back to that shortly.

The first episode introduced us to the main characters; Marine Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone (Jon Seda), new Marine enlistee Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), and young Alabaman Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazello). Sledge wants to join the military and be part of the war effort, but his physician father told him after an examination that he still has a heart murmur, that would disqualify him from service. His best friend Sid Phillips (Ashton Holmes) joined the Marines about the same time Leckie did, and Leckie and Phillips end up in the same company headed to the Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal in August, 1942.

Basilone, who did a stint in the Army before re-enlisting as a Marine, and his buddies Manny Rodriguez (Jon Bernthal) and JP Morgan (Joshua Bitton) had been told previously in a briefing by Lt.Col. Chesty Puller that they too were on their way to Guadalcanal.

Leckie, Phillips and their company are part of the early assault on Guadalcanal. When they hit the beach they find no resistance at all, only other Marines who were there first. The Japanese were building an airfield on the island, but it was captured by the first wave of Marines as the Japanese retreated into the jungle. The field became known as Henderson Field, and the Marines had to secure it and Guadalcanal from the Japanese who surely would try to retake the airstrip.

Leckie's company starts a long march in silence across the fields and jungles of the island, but did not engage the enemy. They did come upon bodies of dead and mutilated Marines along the march. While hunkering down for the night in torrential rain one of their own is shot and killed by a fellow Marine when the man was looking for a place to urinate.

The company finds themselves cutoff from the US naval fleet when they are repelled by the enemy and forced back to sea. Soon the company is attacked by swarms of Japanese in a night time attack, with dozens of Japanese soldiers running into entrenched Marine machine gun fire. The fight lasts all night; the next day dozens of dead Japanese soldiers lie on the beach and in the water. The Marines are horrified by the amount of death around them. One Japanese started to motion that he is wounded and needed help; when two medics approach him, he pulls the pin from a grenade, blowing all three of them up.

Then a small group of Japanese soldiers attack the company and all but one are cut down. After the Marines saw two of their own blown up by a wounded Japanese they decide no prisoners- they start using the Japanese soldier for target practice. The soldier throws down his weapon, but seems hysterical and not about to surrender. While the Marines are trying to wound the soldier as often as they could, Leckie takes out his sidearm, and kills the soldier.

Leckie later goes through personal belongs of the man he killed. He finds a small black and white photo of the man with a woman in a book he is carrying...he also finds a tiny homemade doll of a woman in traditional Japanese dress. Leckie threw the photograph into the Marine's campfire.

The next day reinforcements arrive, led by Chesty Puller. Among them are Basilone, Rodriguez, and Morgan. The episode ends with a reading of aloud of a letter from Sledge to his friend Phillips. When it was revealed that it was Phillips birthday, the Marines sang a scatological version of "Happy Birthday" to Phillips as the picture faded to black.

Some commented on other forums about the first episode's lack drama, and there were periods of silence where nothing was seemingly happening. And maybe that was one way the writers wanted to make clear that the Pacific theater was a different kind of war than that fought in Europe and North Africa. The Japanese were there first; they knew the terrain, and the Americans had to slowly get the feel of where they were and what was in front of them. The Japanese used the jungles and the night to their advantage- the war in Europe was usually fought in daylight (with exceptions) while the Pacific war raged 24 hours a day.

You can't talk about the war in the Pacific without talking about the role race played in it. The Japanese believed they were "spirit warriors" superior to others, who served a living god, their emperor. The code of Bushido was used by the Japanese war party in much the same way as the myth of Aryan superiority was incorporated by the Nazis; the chivalry of ancient Japanese knighthood was corrupted into a belief of showing no quarter to your enemy, and asking none for yourself. There could be no surrender for the Japanese spirit warrior, because it was dishonorable. And those the spirit warrior vanquished weren't deserving of mercy; In the Japanese conquest of China entire civilian populations were slaughtered, men, women, and children...the "Rape of Nanking" in which 300,000 Chinese were murdered during a six week period (December 1937- Jan 1938) is regarded as the worst single atrocity of World War II by many historians. The Japanese warlords regarded Americans as a mongrel nation because of its different cultures, and cowardly...surely they would surrender quickly to the "spirit warriors".

The shock of Pearl Harbor and the fear of an imminent invasion from Japan caused the United States government to strip thousands of Japanese Americans of their basic rights as US citizens and sent them to interment camps throughout the United States. This was without precedent in American history, and few Americans of German or Italian decent were subject to similar extreme treatment.

Early in the 20th century the Japanese were well regarded in the United States, as they were seen by many as trying to Westernize and be more like Americans and western Europeans, while Chinese, Koreans, Indo-Chinese, and other Asians were regarded as primitive. In his book The Imperial Cruise author James Bradley tells of President Theodore Roosevelt's affection and enthusiasm for the Japanese, regarding them (in Bradley's words) as "honorary Aryans". Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to broker a peace agreement between Japan and Russia to end the Russo-Japanese War at Portsmouth, NH in 1905; the Russians didn't know of TR's friendship with the Japanese ambassador, nor of TR's secret plan to set up a "Japanese Monroe Doctrine" in Asia, where the Japanese would be the primary power in Asia and Oceania, getting the European powers to keep "hands off Asia". With an unofficial partner in this concept with the United States, both emerging Pacific powers would dominate the region.....but in effect, it set the two budding military giants on a collision course to war 35 years later.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked and the American fleet destroyed, the "honorary Aryans" became "Yellow Monkeys", or buck toothed sub-humans with Coke Bottle glasses. The caricatures were widely distributed by the press, and done with the consent of the United States government. The hatred ran deep for the Japanese, much more so than for the Germans in the European war.

In the European theater the war was a series of attacks, counter attacks, retreats, and advances...and repeat. In most cases, when a combatant surrendered they were taken to a POW camp. There were atrocities involving POW's, but in Europe that was the exception, not the rule.

The Pacific war was different. It was more like a small war involving a small piece of turf in the middle of an ocean....surrender was not an option. The heat, humidity, insects and disease was as much an enemy as the guys you were shooting at. There were few jubilant civilians to cheer you for liberating them, and no 48 hour passes to Paris or Amsterdam. And after you job was done, you got to do it again on another island.

The European war was like getting heavy dose of hell. The Pacific war was like opening the gate to hell and having it locked behind you with no way out.

I commented on Alan's blog about one or two of the posters who talked about "potty mouthed" Marines....and the very thought made me laugh out loud. Some people obviously never got the memo that this is the way guys (and some women) talk in the service. Though a movie like FULL METAL JACKET was over the top (Pyle blowing away his DI in boot camp), the language directed at and the treatment of men in boot camp (or basic training) was closer to the mark than the silly cartoonish stuff in STRIPES, for example (a funny movie....but a realistic depiction of life in the military...no way!).

In closing....I watched the first episode of THE PACIFIC with my Dad, who'll be 83 in about three weeks, and a veteran of the Pacific theater.

Dad is having some memory problems....often he can't remember what he had for lunch, or which doctor he has his appointment with on a given day.

But when the scene came in Episode One where the Marines were about to land on Guadalcanal, he turned to me and said...."After Pearl Harbor, we only had three aircraft carriers left".

Sixty-eight years later, and the old vet could still remember that fact.

Jersey War Hero JOHN BASILONE- His Story To Be Told in HBO's THE PACIFIC

When you read of the World War II exploits of United States Marine Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone it seems like something as impossible as a scene from a RAMBO film....one man leading two other survivors of a squad that was wiped out, fighting off and all but annihilating about 3,000 enemy Japanese in the Battle of Guadalcanal over October 24 and 25th, 1942.

He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroics. Basilone went on a successful bond tour to raise money for the war effort. He was initially denied his requests to be sent back into combat, and was offered an officer's commission...which he refused.

John Basilone rejoined the Marines for the assault of Iwo Jima....it was time for some additional acts of heroism from "Manila John"

On Sunday night,March 14th at 9:00PM HBO will debut the story of Basilone in The Pacific, a 10 part mini-series. Jon Seda, (left) who formerly starred in the crime drama Homicide; Life on the Street as well as many other television and film roles, plays John Basilone. I won't go into details about what happens to Basilone at Iwo Jima....if you are of a certain age or live in Central New Jersey, you know the outcome (Buffalo native Basilone was raised in Raritan, New Jersey). For more information on Basilone, it can be found at the John Basilone Parade website.

The Pacific also has two other main characters- Robert Leckie, Philadelphia born but also New Jersey raised, who became a reporter and author after the war; and Alabama native Eugene Sledge, who went on to be an author and a professor of sciences at various universities in a long and distinguished career. The memoirs of Leckie and Sledge, Helmet For My Pillow and With The Old Breed, respectively, formed the source material for much of The Pacific. James Badge Dale plays Leckie, and Joe Mazello portrays Eugene Sledge in the series.

Star-Ledger television columnist Alan Sepinwall has written a very positive review of the series, and it does seem like it is indeed, a must see, like its companion piece, 2001's Band Of Brothers. The series is executive produced by Steven Spielberg, Gary Goetzman and Tom Hanks, and co-executive produced and directed by Tony To.

I'm looking forward to seeing the series- I've always had a special place in my heart for the Greatest Generation in general, but also for those who served in the Pacific theater- my Dad was one of those who was there, on the USS Mt. McKinley as the war was winding down. And, like many families, we lost someone there; I had a cousin who died at Iwo Jima; I was years away from birth.

When I put on the news and I see self proclaimed "patriots" protesting perceived socialism, taxes, or the legitimacy of the current President of the United States, I always have this thought...they have no clue.

Men like Basilone, Leckie, and Sledge were patriots...their country called and they did their jobs. And they went back for more.

When the job was completed, those who came back ushered us into a modern age of a new America. They were raised during a depression and fought in the most destructive war in history. And they went on with their lives....brave men and women who sacrificed more of themselves than anyone in subsequent generations can imagine.

Maybe a history lesson on Sunday nights is in order for a large segment of our population.

I'll be watching.