good essay worth reading

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15005

The New York Review of Books
December 20, 2001
The Hardest War
By John Gregory Dunne


" [...] In the softening of retrospect, the European theater is the war of
that treacly concoction, "the Greatest Generation," while the Pacific is
seen to have fast-forwarded from December 7, 1941, to the Japanese
surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri four years later in Tokyo Bay;
Pearl Harbor is remembered, but what is a Ulithi or an Ie Shima or a
Ngesebus? The Greatest Gen lends itself to the sentimental claptrap of
Peggy Noonan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech, celebrating the fortieth
anniversary of Omaha Beach, an address written by a speechwriter for a
president who spent his years in uniform making propaganda movies in Los
Angeles. "They knew some things were worth dying for," Noonan wrote. "They
knew...that one's country is worth dying for and that democracy is worth
dying for because it is the most deeply honorable form of government ever
devised by man." At Normandy in 1984, Ronald Reagan knocked the speech out
of the park. One is reminded, however, of Sledge as he contemplated rows of
dead Marines on Peleliu waiting for graves registration to identify and tag
them. "I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen
about how 'gallant' it is for a man to 'shed his blood for his country' and
'to give his life's blood as a sacrifice,'" he wrote wear-ily. "The words
seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited."

These are thoughts to hold when the country is once again unexpectedly at
war. The campaign in the Pacific is the model to keep in mind. It was a war
of hate as this will be. The kamikazes were the primitive precursors of
those more technically sophisticated suicide pilots who crashed into the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more people in half an hour
than the Divine Wind did when it sank and damaged over four hundred ships
off Okinawa. Patriotism is abroad in the land; in print and on the
airwaves, men who were not inclined to serve as PFCs or platoon leaders in
Vietnam talk about "taking out" not only Osama bin Laden but any number of
foreign leaders. Those who preen about "taking out" have all the bravado of
the K/3/5 lieutenant who peed in the mouths of Japanese corpses.

At a memorial service ten days after the WTC tragedy, I ran into a friend,
another old Marine who had enlisted after Pearl Harbor and served in the
Pacific. Many of the mourners were wearing lapel flags or red, white, and
blue ribbons. "You know," he said, "patriotism is easy. It's war that's
hard." If there is anything we can take away from these three remarkable
books by E.B. Sledge, Samuel Hynes, and George Feifer, it is exactly how
hard war is. "