Another note on sources.
I get why people like With the Old Breed--it's solid, thorough, there's a weight to the way that Sledge reconstructs his experiences of the war and the campaigns he fought. And it has the appeal of being constructed from notes, the religious echoes in the marginalia of a bible, the corresponding oral history of Studs Terkel. It proceeds in an orderly fashion, leaving out very little, building a structure around the war and turning it into something both horrifying and recognizable.
It is, as many have said, a book that brings the war into focus. It is All Quiet on the Western Front, a generation later and considerably less fictionalized. There are moments of it that are deeply felt, but all of them are composed through the haze of hindsight, even the ones that come directly from contemporaneous notes. I respect Sledge, and I appreciate his text, but I do not love it. I do not take pieces of it with me, run through them in an effort to understand what holds them together. Everything Sledge wants to say is right there, clear on the surface.
For those of us who came to The Pacific from Band of Brothers, it is, perhaps, the war memoir we wish that Richard Winters had written. Something close to it. And Helmet for My Pillow is the version we would have gotten from Lewis Nixon.
Leckie writes of carrying books with him, sent from home and shared around (sometimes unwillingly) with fellow Marines. If there is a list somewhere of those titles, I am sure it includes volumes written by the soldier-poets of the First World War. He has read those poems, internalized them, and used them to build a narrative of another conflict, in some ways harsher and even more catastrophically ironic. It feels like sitting in on a conversation with Robert Graves--the original, not the rewritten Goodbye to All That.
I vastly prefer Helmet for My Pillow. It comes down, again, to narrative. I suspect that Leckie, already a writer before he enlisted, lay awake staring up at the dark and sliding words together in his head, tasting them and trying out phrases and using the results to distract himself from reality. The ones that worked, he kept. He used them later, having worn the paragraphs smooth in the decade between the living and the writing.
Leckie doesn't care so much about accuracy, he doesn't care about being fair to the men he describes (if anything, he is painfully, hilariously UNFAIR, and that he renames many of his fellow Marines is evidence of the knowledge--at least on the part of his publishers--that such unfairness was potentially actionable), he doesn't care about whether readers will come away from his account with a deep, satisfying understanding of How It Was.
Leckie cares about language. He cares about getting the words on the page, the right ones, the ones that turn the images and sounds and emotions of a disaster into lines and sentences. If Sledge is telling us the story of the PTO, Leckie is performing an act of translation.
It does not always make sense. Things do not always follow from each other, and this unevenness is itself part of the point.
From Leckie, we get paragraphs like this:
A man says of the eruption of battle: "All hell broke loose." The first time he says it, it is true--wonderfully descriptive. The millionth time it is said, it has been worn into meaninglessness: it has gone the way of all good phrasing, it has become cliché.
But within five minutes of that first machine gun burst, of the appearance of that first enemy flare that suffused the battlefield in unearthly greenish light--and by its dying accentuated the reenveloping night--within five minutes of this, all hell broke loose. Everyone was firing, every weapon was sounding voice; but this was no orchestration, no terribly beautiful symphony of death, as decadent rear-echelon observers write. Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness; here was the absence of rhythm, the loss of limit, for everyone fires what, when, and where he chooses; here was booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell.
Pay attention to what Leckie is doing. He has this vast weight of war literature behind him, both the originality of it and the way that, after a while, the same things are used to describe experiences until they no longer sound like anything at all. And yet those first statements continue to be true, to bind together violent experiences over decades and continents. War IS hell, and Leckie is trying to make that come back into focus. He succeeds, sometimes, and fails in equal measure.
It's that effort that makes me love this book. It's the poetry--awful, bloody, terrible poetry--that makes it into more than a memoir. That makes it literature.
It is, as many have said, a book that brings the war into focus. It is All Quiet on the Western Front, a generation later and considerably less fictionalized. There are moments of it that are deeply felt, but all of them are composed through the haze of hindsight, even the ones that come directly from contemporaneous notes. I respect Sledge, and I appreciate his text, but I do not love it. I do not take pieces of it with me, run through them in an effort to understand what holds them together. Everything Sledge wants to say is right there, clear on the surface.
For those of us who came to The Pacific from Band of Brothers, it is, perhaps, the war memoir we wish that Richard Winters had written. Something close to it. And Helmet for My Pillow is the version we would have gotten from Lewis Nixon.
Leckie writes of carrying books with him, sent from home and shared around (sometimes unwillingly) with fellow Marines. If there is a list somewhere of those titles, I am sure it includes volumes written by the soldier-poets of the First World War. He has read those poems, internalized them, and used them to build a narrative of another conflict, in some ways harsher and even more catastrophically ironic. It feels like sitting in on a conversation with Robert Graves--the original, not the rewritten Goodbye to All That.
I vastly prefer Helmet for My Pillow. It comes down, again, to narrative. I suspect that Leckie, already a writer before he enlisted, lay awake staring up at the dark and sliding words together in his head, tasting them and trying out phrases and using the results to distract himself from reality. The ones that worked, he kept. He used them later, having worn the paragraphs smooth in the decade between the living and the writing.
Leckie doesn't care so much about accuracy, he doesn't care about being fair to the men he describes (if anything, he is painfully, hilariously UNFAIR, and that he renames many of his fellow Marines is evidence of the knowledge--at least on the part of his publishers--that such unfairness was potentially actionable), he doesn't care about whether readers will come away from his account with a deep, satisfying understanding of How It Was.
Leckie cares about language. He cares about getting the words on the page, the right ones, the ones that turn the images and sounds and emotions of a disaster into lines and sentences. If Sledge is telling us the story of the PTO, Leckie is performing an act of translation.
It does not always make sense. Things do not always follow from each other, and this unevenness is itself part of the point.
From Leckie, we get paragraphs like this:
A man says of the eruption of battle: "All hell broke loose." The first time he says it, it is true--wonderfully descriptive. The millionth time it is said, it has been worn into meaninglessness: it has gone the way of all good phrasing, it has become cliché.
But within five minutes of that first machine gun burst, of the appearance of that first enemy flare that suffused the battlefield in unearthly greenish light--and by its dying accentuated the reenveloping night--within five minutes of this, all hell broke loose. Everyone was firing, every weapon was sounding voice; but this was no orchestration, no terribly beautiful symphony of death, as decadent rear-echelon observers write. Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness; here was the absence of rhythm, the loss of limit, for everyone fires what, when, and where he chooses; here was booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell.
Pay attention to what Leckie is doing. He has this vast weight of war literature behind him, both the originality of it and the way that, after a while, the same things are used to describe experiences until they no longer sound like anything at all. And yet those first statements continue to be true, to bind together violent experiences over decades and continents. War IS hell, and Leckie is trying to make that come back into focus. He succeeds, sometimes, and fails in equal measure.
It's that effort that makes me love this book. It's the poetry--awful, bloody, terrible poetry--that makes it into more than a memoir. That makes it literature.