00:03:57.920After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash oldbreed.
00:04:16.160All right, Henry Sledge, welcome to the show.
00:04:18.860Thank you. Great to be here, Brett. I appreciate that.
00:04:21.600So your father was Eugene Sledgehammer Sledge, who was a Marine infantryman who fought in the Pacific campaign of World War II.
00:04:30.740He's also the author of what many consider one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, and it's called With the Old Breed.
00:04:38.680I'm sure a lot of our listeners have read this.
00:04:41.080Why did your dad write the book originally? Was this something he had planned right after the war?
00:04:45.620There really was no orchestrated plan to write a book. I think it began as a cathartic process on his part to deal with some of the PTSD, the emotional trauma, just the trying to re-assimilate to civilian life as he began to put the war behind him.
00:05:06.760I think that was part of it. And the other component to it was, I think there was a desire
00:05:12.380on his part to have a written record of his experience for my brother and me. And, you know,
00:05:19.040I remember him telling me that. And the thing too, is he had extensive notes
00:05:23.320to write this thing. Where did those notes come from? How did he keep them when he was
00:05:27.580fighting? Well, so the Marines were not allowed to keep diaries for obvious security reasons.
00:05:35.560you know if you saw the Pacific miniseries did you see the Pacific I did yeah so you know Rami0.94
00:05:41.540Malek playing snafu has that classic line gives the Japs valuable intel they find it but that0.95
00:05:48.560really was the crooks of it I mean Marines were not supposed to keep diaries for for security0.90
00:05:53.520reasons and he began to keep surreptitious notes on little pieces of paper that he kept tucked into
00:06:00.460his pocket New Testament Bible that he carried in the breast pocket of his dungaree jacket.
00:06:06.580And he also wrote some cursory notes in the first few pages of that Bible, just on weather
00:06:13.000conditions and a basic outline of where they were and that kind of thing. But most of the note
00:06:19.740taking was going to be on pieces of paper that he kept tucked into the Bible. And then when he got
00:06:24.160home, he took those pieces of paper and wrote down on a piece of legal paper, an outline,
00:06:31.220fleshing everything out. And then from there began to write on his legal pads with his pencil.
00:06:38.640When he started to write, how long after did it take for him to finish it?
00:06:42.700He started writing, I would say early seventies. I mean, my earliest memories of it are just,
00:06:48.140you know, when I was just a few years old and that process, you know, and probably a few years
00:06:53.820after he began that he asked my mother to begin typing the manuscript so she started typing it
00:06:59.700he would write at night and then she would type you know in the days that followed i mean that
00:07:05.320went on through most of the mid to late 70s it probably wasn't until the late 70s that she talked
00:07:12.660him into you know like hey this is a pretty powerful story we should look at trying to get
00:07:18.100this published. And I think that process, and I remember it really well. I mean, I remember the
00:07:24.820day that we got the letter from Presidio saying that they would publish it. And that was around
00:07:29.7201980, you know, because it actually came out in 1981. So yeah, it was about a 10-year process.
00:07:36.540Yeah, it was. And you know, the thing is, Brad, I mean, he would work on it furiously
00:07:40.300for several days at a time at night, you know, and then he'd take a break and may not touch it
00:07:47.560for a month or two months and I mean you know as my brother and I got older and you know as a family
00:07:53.080we're doing things and just you know because at that time he's in his early 50s and or mid to late
00:07:59.96040s and and just you know life gets in the way of everything right so I mean he's being a husband
00:08:05.740being a dad he was very involved in our lives on a day-to-day basis we had a close relationship and
00:08:11.720so we would hit stretches where he wouldn't even work on it for months at a time and then pick it
00:08:16.820back up and dive back into it. Your dad's writing is really good. It's really compelling, but he
00:08:22.560wasn't a professional writer. He was a biology professor and his writing wasn't flowery. It was
00:08:28.380more matter of fact. How would you describe your dad's writing style? Yeah, I would agree. I mean,
00:08:34.880his writing, I would term it like this. You know, he was a scientist. He had PhD biology,
00:08:42.040biochemistry he wrote like a scientist no flowery elegant prose nothing pedantic i mean he just it
00:08:51.420was straight ahead unblinking factual yeah you can tell that he's got this scientific biological
00:08:58.540mind when he writes because the way he describes things it's almost like you're reading a field
00:09:03.480report from a field biologist i mean there was one here's a quote he's talking about he's seen
00:09:09.500uh just the dead bodies on pillow yeah he said this it was gruesome to see the stages of decay
00:09:16.620proceed from just killed to bloated to maggot infested rotting to partially exposed bones
00:09:22.740like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time passage of time yep and then he'd
00:09:28.720also just when he described dead bodies he would compare them like well it looks like the intestines
00:09:33.900of a squirrel that i would hunt as a boy yes that's exactly right and i'm like i literally
00:09:40.000turned as you were reading that i mean i i know that book so intimately well i i got pretty much
00:09:46.760right here to the part where you were were reading from but not only that you know like
00:09:51.760he talks about cans of c rations and k ration boxes open and unopened lay around our gun pit
00:09:56.880along with discarded grenade and mortar shell canister scattered about the area or discarded
00:10:46.540But at the same time, he brings his humanity to it.
00:10:49.880and he talks about the moral and spiritual damage that it's doing to the men who are in these
00:10:57.340battles. Yeah, always. There was always that angle of it to him because, I mean, look, you know,
00:11:02.820that was one of the extraordinary things about the kind of guy that my father was. I mean,
00:11:07.740honestly, he was a very peaceable guy who wanted to enjoy his life and go to college and do the
00:11:15.160things that a young man would be doing and fighting on some war-torn island in the in the middle of
00:11:19.880the pacific was not what he wanted to be doing but he wanted to enlist in the marine corps he wanted
00:11:24.980to be a part of that he knew that everybody was going to have to go fight somewhere and he wanted
00:11:29.560to be with what he thought was the finest outfit out there which was the marines and all of those
00:11:35.300things just are that bear testimony to his character yeah and as you said the process of
00:11:41.480writing this book, it seemed like it helped him process that trauma that a lot of soldiers came
00:11:49.100home with. I do think it was a cathartic process for him. I really do. I remember when With the
00:11:56.200Old Breed came out and we got our first copies and I remember reading it. Of course, I had read
00:12:01.920some of the typewritten pages that my mother had typed in the years leading up to its publication,
00:12:07.300But I remember, you know, really well, I remember reading where in the introduction, I think it was in the introduction or some of the early parts of it, he said, you know, the nightmares no longer wake me in the middle of the night with a pounding heart and in a cold sweat.
00:12:22.400But I will tell you this, I recall very well when my brother and I were young, my mother sat us down and she said, listen, if you boys need us in the middle of the night, come to my side of the bed.
00:12:35.400don't go to your father's side of the bed and whatever you do don't touch him
00:12:38.900yeah because he's still dealing with it yeah i mean he was still dealing with it i mean look man
00:12:43.760that's that's heavy stuff you know i mean this is a guy we're talking in the mid 1970s here this is
00:12:50.760a guy who's in his 50s at this point you know with a couple of boys and being a husband and a dad and
00:12:56.380trying to put all this behind him and his war experience had happened in his early 20s yeah
00:13:01.420Well, I mean, he was 20 years old in Peleliu.
00:13:03.440He turned 21 on Peleliu, and he was 22 in Okinawa.
00:13:07.380Yeah, there was another antidote you put in your book about your experience with your dad's dealing with that trauma, that PTSD of the war.
00:13:15.340I think you were a kid, and you got like a toy Tommy gun.
00:13:21.280You know, growing up in the 70s, my brother and I would go down to the dime store, and we'd get the little, you know, the little plastic army helmets.
00:13:29.300I was fascinated by the Thompson submachine gun.
00:13:33.020I just loved that weapon as a kid when I would see it on movies and things like that.
00:13:37.780And I remember buying one, just the cheap little plastic Tommy gun,
00:16:34.880to assimilate back into civilian life.
00:16:36.900One thing I felt like they did not, the war was excellent by Ken Burns, but my mother and I talked about it afterward.
00:16:43.720And one thing that they didn't do there, and they didn't do it in the Pacific either because there just wasn't time, they really didn't convey the point adequately that, okay, yeah, he struggled when he came home, but he struggled successfully.
00:16:56.700And so I feel like I can bear testimony to the fact that he was a classic all-American father.
00:17:03.740He would never forget the Marines he served with.
00:17:06.720he would never forget his time in the Marine Corps. He would never forget his pride in the
00:17:11.700Marine Corps or his pride in our country for that matter. But at the same time, he deplored the idea
00:17:17.120of sending young men into combat. But he waged whatever struggles he had internally. He waged
00:17:23.740them successfully because, I mean, look, he and my mother had, they were married almost 50 years
00:17:28.700by the time he passed away. And they had a fantastic marriage, not to say that it was
00:17:32.880perfect. No marriage is. But they had a very strong, we had a great family life. It wasn't
00:17:38.160perfect. Nothing is. But I never felt like, well, I'll say it like this. My father did a great job
00:17:45.800of compartmentalizing the angst, and he was determined to be a productive, cheerful member
00:17:51.620of society, and he was. I got to know many of his students in later years, some of whom were
00:17:57.560young Marines and soldiers coming home from Vietnam. And I mean, his students called him
00:18:02.500Uncle Eugene. I mean, so he was a very light, he had a fantastic sense of humor, a very lively
00:18:08.540sense of humor. And he was very highly thought of professionally, very highly thought of in
00:18:13.660Montevallo in our town growing up where I grew up. And so, yeah, Sledgehammer may have had his
00:18:19.040struggles, but he did it right. Well, let's talk more about your dad and his history and how he0.99
00:18:26.240ended up as a Marine. So your dad's family had a military tradition. His father served in World
00:18:32.480war one when the war broke out your father was at a military school military institute was it
00:18:39.280marion military institute marion marion military institute yes and so i mean he was on track he
00:18:45.100could have you know been an officer his family was nudging him to be an officer but your dad
00:18:50.120decided not to do that can you tell us the story of why he chose to intentionally flunk out of the
00:18:55.560officer candidate program and enlist as a private in the marines yeah i mean i can answer the
00:19:00.740question very easily, youthful impetuosity, the impetuousness of youth. He, in a very large
00:19:06.860portion of the detachment and his officer training in the V-12 program that he was enrolled in at
00:19:12.040Georgia Tech after the war broke out, they were scared that the war was going to be over before
00:19:16.940they got into it. And he didn't want to live with that feeling of, I almost got there, but I just
00:19:23.700didn't quite get there and do what I was meant to do. And it bears pointing out, I mean, this is a
00:19:29.820really powerful thing. I think it's a very significant thing about when you talk about
00:19:34.400Eugene Sledge and the kind of guy that he was. I mean, look, my grandfather was a very influential
00:19:40.020man in Mobile back in the 1930s. He was very well thought of, and he had a certain amount of
00:19:46.020influence. And other Marines that my dad served with pointed this out to me. I mean, a lot of
00:19:51.040these guys came from hardscrabble backgrounds. They came from, I mean, I'm just going to say
00:19:57.460dirt poor backgrounds, lacking a lot of formal education. I mean, that was a fact with a lot of
00:20:04.560those guys back then, you know, and that wasn't the case with my father. I mean, he actually had
00:20:09.900some college behind him and he came from a family that you could say in certain ways was well to do
00:20:15.460and to absolutely purposefully insert himself into the world he inserted himself in enlist in
00:20:23.680the Marine Corps, I think it's a powerful thing.
00:20:27.000And I mean, one of his fellow Marines told me, I went to visit this guy, uh, years ago
00:20:31.820and he said, that was one thing I always admired about your dad.
00:20:35.440You know, we all knew he probably could have escaped the path that he chose, but there
00:20:40.960he was shoulder to shoulder with us.0.97
00:23:33.700A lot of the Marines, I mean, they carped about it, but he realized, no, part of the
00:23:38.360reason why I'm still alive. Well, I mean, luck's a big part of it, but the training was also a big
00:23:43.760part. Yeah. And I mean, he writes that very articulately and, you know, no small wonder
00:23:49.560that the Marine Corps views his book with such high regard. Let's talk about your dad's combat
00:23:55.700experience in the Pacific. His first assignment, we've been talking about this, was to help secure
00:24:00.300the island of Peleliu. I imagine a lot of people listening right now have probably never heard of
00:24:05.800this island. You know, they might've heard about Iwo Jima, Midway. Why is Peleliu often overlooked
00:24:11.480by Americans? Well, Peleliu was a tiny, tiny little atoll, two miles by six miles on the
00:24:19.480western edge of the Pacific. And the short answer to your question, why is it overlooked,
00:24:24.520is because it could have been bypassed. And at the time, you know, MacArthur was proceeding along
00:24:32.060a southwesterly axis to get back to the Philippines. And then Chester Nimitz and the U.S. Navy and
00:24:38.160Marines were driving through the Central Pacific. So we kind of had this two-tiered approach in
00:24:43.780subjugating Japanese forces. It was determined originally that Peleliu was needed to neutralize
00:24:50.900the airfield there so that Japanese air assets, Japanese air power could not threaten MacArthur's
00:24:56.960right flank as he proceeded towards the Philippines. As it turned out, they didn't need to do that
00:25:03.540because all Japanese air power had been knocked out by U.S. Navy carrier task force raids in early
00:25:09.8801944, and Peleliu wasn't invaded until September 1944. Now, Admiral Halsey had a foretelling of
00:25:18.320this because as his task force pilots are coming back, as those Hellcat pilots are coming back
00:25:24.040from their strikes throughout the Palau Islands, his pilots are telling him, look, we're not
00:25:28.880encountering any aerial opposition. It's all been done away with. And we're destroying a lot of
00:25:33.900airplanes on the ground. And so he sat down and thought about it. He met with other officers and
00:25:40.020he went to Nimitz and said, I fear another Tarawa. I don't think that we need to hit Peleliu. My guys
00:25:45.780are not seeing any aerial resistance. And I think this is going to be a lot worse than we think it
00:25:50.860could be. Chester Nimitz, for reasons he never really disclosed because he passed away in 1965,
00:25:56.520chose to not stop the invasion of Armada and to proceed with invading Peleliu. But the short
00:26:02.660answer to your question, why is it overlooked, is because it could have been bypassed. And that
00:26:07.420was such a tragedy because going into it, General Rupertus, who was the 1st Marine Division
00:26:12.400commander, had this inexplicably optimistic view of the coming battle that, look, it's going to be
00:26:18.720rough, but fast. It's going to be like Tarawa, you know, three days, maybe four, it might only take
00:26:23.740two. And every time I think about that, it just makes my blood run cold because you realize what
00:26:31.160they got into with the challenging topography, not to mention the heat and humidity. I mean,
00:26:37.360that was going to be part of every battle in the Pacific, but the absolute meat grinder that it
00:26:42.160turned into that they did not originally think it would be. I mean, a lot of the news correspondents
00:26:47.940didn't even go ashore at Peleliu because they thought, well, there's no point. I mean,
00:26:51.800it's going to be over in like a day and a half or two days or three, you know, and so you only
00:26:56.660had a handful of correspondents who actually went ashore. So, you know, it was an amalgamation of
00:27:02.320several things as to why Peleliu wasn't so well known. I mean, and that was, you know, that caused
00:27:06.980a lot of bitterness for my father and a lot of the guys who were there and lost good buddies there.
00:27:11.100I remember in the 1970s, Peleliu was frequently referred to as the forgotten battle. I will say
00:27:16.380you this, I don't think Peleliu is quite so forgotten anymore. Yeah. So I think thanks to
00:27:21.940movies like Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, I think a lot of people are familiar with what
00:27:27.440fighting was like in Europe. All war is brutal. We've had Alex Kershaw on the podcast, the World
00:27:33.080War II historian. Yeah, absolutely. He says the battles in Europe, the war in Europe, it was
00:27:38.160brutal, but there's a certain romanticism about it because, you know, soldiers are fighting amongst
00:27:41.860these old cathedrals and rural European farms with stone fences. Fighting the Pacific was not
00:27:48.800like that at all. And your father did an excellent job capturing the hellishness of war fighting the
00:27:55.160Pacific. What was Peleliu like? Give us a look into what it was like fighting there.0.98
00:28:00.660Well, Peleliu, the northern part of the island was called the Umer Brogel, known colloquially
00:28:06.080to the Marines who had to fight there is Bloody Nose Ridge.
00:28:10.120And in fact, it was a series of ridges.
00:28:12.620The coral high ground was obfuscated by vegetation before it had all been blasted off by our
00:28:19.420pre-landing naval and aerial bombardment.
00:28:22.520But it was very topographically challenging terrain.
00:28:26.940You had a complex system of ridges and ravines and box canyons and blind canyons.
00:28:35.140And all of that was pockmarked with caves. I mean, I've seen the number of, you know, 500 caves that pockmarked like Swiss cheese. You know, the Japanese were absolute masters of using every aspect of their terrain to their advantage as a force multiplier, if you will.
00:28:54.920And Peleliu offered some tragic opportunities for that, but the parts of the island that weren't just complete coral were, you know, jungle scrub growth, but it was terribly hot, seven degrees off the equator.0.98
00:29:09.700On D-Day, it was 115 degrees in the shade, and so you had that aspect of it.
00:29:17.280I want to talk about the coral, because I think a lot of people think, oh, Pacific Islands,
00:29:21.640it's going to be like Tahiti with these Edenic beaches, but these beaches were just mostly
00:33:00.180I mean, he talked about how at night you could just hear the land crabs crawling around in the undergrowth.0.91
00:33:04.960And, of course, it sounded like Japanese soldiers crawling around, which they did.0.82
00:33:09.220They infiltrated their lines at night to great effect.0.99
00:33:12.900They did it every night, and they were really good at it.
00:33:15.920And, of course, in addition to everything that you just said, you deal with the fact of a lack of clean drinking water and the inability to get a good night's sleep.0.95
00:33:25.500because the Japanese were infiltrating every night to purposefully keep the Marines awake0.84
00:33:30.900and the soldiers, because the Army was there too, of course, to purposefully keep these guys awake
00:33:36.060to keep them from getting any sleep. And of course, that just compounds everything to an
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00:41:51.060And so you have this human conflict that is just the absolute depths of human savagery.
00:41:57.780and it just was an absolute war of bitter hatred and my father spoke of it he thought of it he
00:42:07.940wrote of it because to him it was just such such a component of what they were dealing with
00:42:14.880yeah i mean let's talk about that i mean what sorts of savagery did your father
00:42:19.580see and write about well i mean so he saw many cases where the japanese had defiled marine
00:42:27.260corpses. And I won't say how, you know, I don't want to put the listeners through the grotesque
00:42:32.920descriptions that you can read it in his book. There was a good bit of that. And so, of course,
00:42:37.680Marines always tried to remove their dead because they knew the Japanese would just do terrible0.80
00:42:41.700things to the bodies, and even worse to a man if they captured him. They knew that to be captured0.94
00:42:46.700was absolutely not an option. On Guadalcanal, you had an incident called the Get Gi Patrol,
00:42:52.340which is where a couple of Japanese were taken prisoner by the Marines in the early stages of
00:42:59.720the battle. And these guys said that some of their buddies were down the river and wanted to
00:43:06.220surrender, and that if the Marines would go out and send out a rescue party, they would surrender.
00:43:11.200And so our intelligence officers always wanted to pick up surrendered Japanese if that was an
00:43:16.820option, because it was a source of intel, right? It was a source of knowledge and factual data.
00:43:20.860And so the Marines sent out a patrol under the command of Colonel Frank Getge to bring these guys in, and they ended up being ambushed and killed to the last minute.
00:47:58.180it could cause significant spiritual and emotional damage to these guys.
00:48:04.920It causes this complete degradation and breakdown of decency.
00:48:08.580And that was something that my father wanted to make people understand
00:48:13.360is that you know the guys doing this these are nice young these are nice kids yeah and they were
00:48:18.900kids some of them were like literally kids they were 17 years old 17 18 these are nice kids but
00:48:23.880they have been dehumanized and if i can find it brett this is if i can i mean there's such a
00:48:30.440powerful passage basically it's it's a paragraph where he just really kind of sums up the awfulness
00:48:37.740of an experience like Peleliu in the last line in that, that paragraph, he says, Peleliu eroded
00:48:44.460the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. Yeah. And that is such a powerful line right0.65
00:48:52.460there. Yeah. And your dad just did a great job describing that. While on Peleliu, I mean,
00:48:59.560just complete brutality, harsh fighting conditions, but your dad and a lot of the
00:49:06.080other Marines lost a mentor, Captain Akak Haldane on Peleliu. And this really hit your dad hard.
00:49:13.800And it was sort of a turning point for him in his world experience. How did Akak die? And how did
00:49:21.720his loss of leadership change the way your father viewed the rest of the war? Well, yeah, Captain
00:49:27.800Haldane, his code name Akak, they called him Akak. He was such a well thought of officer. He was their
00:49:34.600company commander. He was K company's commander. He was killed on October 7th, 1944 by a sniper
00:49:39.960on Hill 140 on Peleliu. And my father said it was the worst grief I suffered during the entire war.
00:49:48.120You know, ACAC, Captain Haldane represented stability and security in a world gone mad.
00:49:54.820I mean, that's exactly the way he says it, because, you know, even though Captain Haldane
00:49:59.020was like 27 years old, he had been at Guala Canal. He'd been at Cape Gloucester. He was
00:50:03.740incredibly well thought of and just a very cool headed excellent company commander and his men
00:50:09.900loved him and would have done anything for him and the thought of him that he would be killed
00:50:15.500like that my father wrote about how that never occurred to us that we could lose him and it
00:50:21.060enraged them all that he was killed by a sniper but that is how he died and you know yeah captain
00:50:27.300was just so well thought of and and to lose him you know it just was he he represented like i said
00:50:35.080stability and security and they they never conceived that he would be killed did it change
00:50:41.480what your dad thought his like chances of survival were it's like well if this guy
00:50:46.900could go i could go just as easily absolutely i mean certainly by the time they get to okinawa
00:50:53.360He's seen so many good Marines get hit or killed.
00:50:57.480And he said, you know, the chance, the arithmetic of chance.
00:51:03.380I mean, you felt like every day you were running out of even more luck if you had any left at all.
00:51:09.960So even though the brass thought Peleliu could be taken in a few days, the 1st Marine Division fought on the island for about a month, a little over a month.
00:51:19.260they suffered over 6,500 casualties including 1,000 deaths and as you mentioned Peleliu could
00:51:28.080have been bypassed which your father had some bitterness about after Peleliu he fought on
00:51:33.180Okinawa for 82 days on and off the front lines mostly on the front lines and Okinawa had its
00:51:39.300own nightmarish conditions constant rain mud maggots everything was moldering he called it
00:51:45.880Hell's Own Cesspool. Sledge, despite being in the thick of two of the worst battles in history,
00:51:52.480never received a high-level valor award like the Silver Star. Why is that, and what was the culture
00:51:59.100in his battalion regarding medals? Well, I remember him telling me about a conversation that he had
00:52:04.880with Captain Stanley many years after, because he and Stumpy got to know each other well and
00:52:10.120had many conversations when he was writing with the Old Breed in the late 70s or before it got
00:52:15.060published in 1981 and he asked stumpy that he asked captain stanley that he's like why is it
00:52:21.200that you never recommended anybody for a valor award you know bronze star silver star you know
00:52:25.900and and he said that stumpy told him he said because sledgehammer i didn't want to pick one
00:52:29.600guy out and recommend him for a bronze star or silver star or medal of honor because i felt like
00:52:34.160every one of you guys deserved something yeah and then your dad recounts a story where he had a
00:52:40.860fellow Marine, just tell him, Hey, you know what Sledge you did. Okay. And that to him,
00:52:45.140like represented the highest honor that he could get. Yeah. That, so that was when it's after
00:52:49.960Peleliu, they've gotten back to Pavuvu, which is where they were in the, in the Russell islands,
00:52:54.880where the first Marine division rested, refitted and trained and staged out for both Peleliu and
00:53:02.000later Okinawa. And he describes a scene where it's late one afternoon, kind of twilight. And
00:53:08.620And he and his bunk mates, he and his tent mates, I should say, are in their tent.
00:53:13.140One guy's over in the corner and on his rack snoozing away very softly.
00:53:16.960You can hear him snoozing after the day's training.
00:53:19.240And my dad's lying there in the twilight and he's starting to get sleepy and he's resting his head on his arm, you know, on the pillow of his rack.
00:53:26.760And then he hears the other Marines say, you know something, Sledgehammer?
00:53:31.060And he says, I really had my eye on you coming into the unit before Peleliu.
00:53:36.220You know, I had my doubts about you being a doctor's kid and kind of, you know, coming from a rich family and having been to college and all that.
00:53:44.220And he said, I got to tell you, man, I kept my eye on you on Peleliu and you did OK.
00:54:50.320He dealt with, I remember asking him when I was a kid, I said, you know, Dad, when you came home from World War II, what, you know, after surviving that,
00:54:58.680I would think you would have just felt like you could conquer anything.
00:55:01.820And he said, to be honest with you, I did a lot of sitting around staring at the wall,
00:55:06.920just trying to mentally put my head back together.
00:55:10.880My grandfather was, and I write about this in my forthcoming second book, I talk about
00:55:16.180my grandfather a little bit and what an intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful man that he was.
00:55:21.380And my father credited my grandfather with really being a bridge back to sanity because
00:55:28.600he said, you know, Pop, that was what everybody in the family called my grandfather.
00:55:31.940He said, Pop was an incredibly well thought of, one of the finest physicians in the state
00:55:37.620of Alabama, and professionally very well thought of and accomplished, but he just understood
00:55:42.940because he had treated shell shock victims in World War I, and he understood what these
00:55:48.340young men had been through, and he was a shield for my dad because my grandmother didn't
00:55:54.780They show this in the last episode of The Pacific.
00:55:57.620They show it really well when they show the kid playing my dad sitting under a tree and the lady playing my grandmother comes out and says, oh, Eugene, you look like a gangster with those glasses on.
00:56:07.320And she hands him a glass of iced tea and then starts talking about, you know, Eugene, you have to get a plan for the future.
00:56:15.160And they film that scene exactly the way we told them those conversations went.
00:56:19.780And my father said in those instances to my grandmother, my plan is to do nothing for a while.
00:56:24.500And then my grandfather would come out and just like he did in the Pacific, you know, in that last episode, he comes out and he says, Mary Frank, what are you doing? Leave the boy alone. You have no idea what men like him have been through. Go on, leave him alone. And that is exactly the way that happened.
00:56:39.220And I remember us talking to the producers about that and how my grandfather would do that and shoo her away.
00:56:44.820And she'd start grumbling and mumbling and muttering and walk away in a huff, you know.
00:56:49.420And then my grandfather would just tell my father, you know, you have nothing to prove to anybody in this world.
00:56:55.720When someone reads your dad's book, what lessons do you hope they walk away with when they're finished?
00:57:02.500You know, they learn something about what it really means to send young men into combat.
00:57:09.220I mean, look, I've always said this, Brett. I mean, I am passionate about World War II history. And so I enjoy reading about everything concerning every battle across the Pacific and not only that, but in Europe as well. And I enjoy reading about the tanks, the weapons, the airplanes, all of those things, you know, the hardware, the logistics, all of it, the strategic planning, all of those things interest me greatly.
00:57:29.940But to really understand what it's all about, you have to go beneath the rim of the helmet and you have to understand what goes through a young man's head when he is under heavy fire and experiencing prolonged close combat and the emotional toll that that takes on a human being.
00:57:47.720And with the Ulbree, my father's book helps you understand that.
00:57:51.600It helps you understand that beneath the rim of the helmet perspective.
00:57:55.300And I mean, my book explores that as well, you know, I mean, because it has not only
00:58:01.120my perspective of seeing how as a father, you know, and of course I was born in 1965,
00:58:08.160so I'm growing up in the 1970s and 80s, you know, how his Marine experience, how his World
00:58:15.100War II experience informed the choices he made as a husband to my mom and then as a