With The Old Breed Analysis

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Eugene Bondurant Sledge’s personal memoir With the Old Breed follows his combat experiences on the islands of Peleliu and Okinawa. On those islands unspeakable horrors would unfold, changing this young man's life forever. It would take several decades for Sledge, to finally decided on writing With the Old Breed about his experiences. The book was originally intended to be a private novel for his family, however despite its initial intentions this memoir has since been heralded as one of the finer works about the pacific theatre of war. In recent history E. B. Sledge’s work has gained such recognition that With the Old Breed along with other works been used as source material for the HBO mini series entitled The Pacific. Even though there are …show more content…

In doing so, the description is a vivid yet eerie, and almost dreamlike picture. With the Old Breed is full of descriptive passages that draw the audience in, even the simplest of things like the author describing what he was thinking about at the time. Such descriptions make it seem like the reader can see this man from a third person point of view lost in thought moments before his encounter with the enemy. Other events that the author experienced can only be described as horrific, seeing men, women, children, soldiers, and event the enemy maimed or killed due to negligence stuck with him for a very long time. Seeing the dead body of the enemy for the first time made Sledge remember a time when he would go hunting back home. Sledge writes, “The corpsman was on his back, his abdominal cavity laid bare. I stared in horror, shocked at the glistening viscera be-speckled with fine coral dust. This can’t have been a human being, I agonized. It looked more like the guts of one of the many rabbits or squirrels I had cleaned on hunting trips as a boy. I felt sick as I stared at the corpses.” (Sledge p. 70). With the amount of detail that is given, readers can see that Sledge's viewpoint on the war is a disheartened one, yet out of pride he continued to serve his country. Comparing the dead body of Japanese soldier to that of …show more content…

Readers are also given a biased view that shares the untold truths about war, this opinion is delivered in such a way that that stays true to the melancholy tone that war novels are known for, hence the message about war is easily understood by a broad audience and not only those that are interested in stories of combat. In conclusion Eugene Sledge humanizes the american soldier by taking the audience into the battle field, to experience would could only be deem as hell on earth. In doing so readers can understand the frustration with some superior officers not delegating the correct orders, the incorrect utilization of personnel, the complete disregard for human life both civilian and soldier, and the trauma that was experienced first hand by those who felt the need to

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