If you spend any time on Reddit, you might know about the Q and A’s called “Ask Me Anything” (AMA). A recent AMA included Joss Whedon of Avenger’s fame, and other assorted entertainment, gaming, scientific, and internet celebrities have appeared. Reddit bills itself as the front page of the internet, and it is famous among with a younger generation for its prolific charting of memes, and the content there is managed generally by readers in an upvote/down vote system.
With the Memorial Day weekend in full swing here in the US, marine veteran Sterling Mace, author of Battleground Pacific: A Marine Rifleman’s Combat Odyssey In K/3/5, recently completed an AMA, and while it did contain questions like “did you ever kill anyone?”, several areas of interest emerged, among them Eugene Sledge. His response to begin is not promising.
Sledge. I get this question all the time. See, Sledge was a good marine like all the others, and yes we were both in K/3/5, but Sledge was in the mortars and I was a rifleman. In combat those mortars are around 100-75 yards behind us riflemen, otherwise they would be out of effective range with their mortars.
It seems I remember the kid a couple of times on Pavuvu, but he was such a quite country boy…not like our New York crowd.
Years later Sledge contacted me and a few other riflemen to help him with his book. You’ll find my name in the acknowledgements of his book.
There has been talk over the year whether or not Sledge took some of what happened to us and made them his own.
Maybe he did. But as far as I can tell, he was a good marine.A low fatality rate in those mortar squads.
Not a fan, I gather. Sledge came up later in the AMA:
Sledge was in the mortars about 100-75 yards behind us riflemen. So anything he saw was after the fact for the most part. He was a good marine. I barely remember him as a quiet kid on Pavuvu, but he wasn’t anywhere close to us during combat so he was not a consideration. When Sledge was writing his book he consulted a few of us riflemen, and you will find my name in the acknowledgements of his book. Whether he took stories from riflemen and made them his own is up for debate. Some riflemen sure thought so. But he’s a dead guy. God bless him and his family. Now the rifleman’s story can be told.
Here Mace is making the distinction clear. If you were not ENTIRELY up front, then how can you really tell the story?
Other highlights:
- When asked about downtime in combat: “On Okinawa the only happy memory I have is talking about babies one day in a crap-ass foxhole. I don’t know why we brought it up, but we talked about how sweet babies were. A few minutes later all hell broke loose.”
- On near death experiences: “The most amazing thing I witnessed? Probably the Japanese shell that landed a just a few feet from me and didn’t kill me.”
- On war video games: “I think these war video games are just like when I was a kid going to the move palace and watching the Tom Mix films. Kids will be kids. We walked out of those movies playing shoot ‘em up. It’s the same thing. The times may change, but people don’t.”
The full AMA is here. There are currently 981 comments and the AMA sits at #1281.
One Comment
Bryan,
My name is Sterling Mace. I am the one who wrote these words and signed my name to them. Let’s be a little clearer, though, about exactly what we’re talking about here, because, despite all the points I brought up in a very nice question and answer session on reddits, the ones you seem to focus on the most regard Gene Sledge. I’m not sure that the agenda is here; nevertheless, I’ll tell you what mine is, based upon facts.
no.1, I wrote my book to give voice to the lost rifleman’s side of the equation in the Pacific, because heretofore the only real voices of the Pacific War has some from 3 mortarmen (Sledge, RV Burgin and Syd Phillips), 2 machine gunner (Robert Leckie and Chuck Tatum), a few officers, including William Manchester, who spent most of his time at his company CP.
no.2, I wrote to honor those who we lost for good in the war.
no.3, I wrote to honor a lost New York, which is very much lost to the times now.
no.4, While not a new topic, I wrote for readers to understand how The Great Depression equipped my generation to fight a war such as the one we engaged in.
no.5, I wrote to dispel certain myths and fantasies associated with the Pacific War, at the same time highlighting what every marine knows who has ever joined The Corps, i.e. that every job in the Marine Corps exists to support the rifleman…and without the rifleman’s side of the story you can imagine the picture would slightly skewed.
Fact: I didn’t know Gene Sledge all that well. Fact: While in combat on Peleliu, Ngesebus and Okinawa, I never had the occasion to see Sledge nor any other mortarmen, simply because they were not where we were. They could have been fighting somewhere else. I don’t know. Yet, they were not at what we thought to be the “front of the line” because that’s where they told us we were.
It’s a simple fact: the “Order of Battle” was that the riflemen went in first, followed closely by the machine gunners (which I saw frequently), then the 60mm mortars, flamethrowers, bazooka men, etc. Then you had the 81mm mortars come in and then finally the artillery. That’s the structure, because it worked. We made it work because every team had to, in order to assure victory. We were victorious because every marine did his job, from the clerk sitting at the CP, to the guy delivering the mail from home, to the marine taking a bullet in the chest, to the guy from G&R who buried him.
Fact: “Every Marine is a Rifleman first,” but at no time on Peleliu, Ngesebus or Okinawa did the K Company rifle squads become so depleted that the brass were forced to call in any other support troops, be they ammo carriers, runners, radiomen, artillery men, mortars and the like. In some battles, I understand, like Saipan, the cooks and surgeons had to do some fighting. That might have happened on Peleliu and Okinawa, too, but I didn’t see it. Let’s be clear, though, just because I didn’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The truth is I knew what was about 50 yards to any side of me, sometimes even less, the whole time I was on Peleliu and Okinawa, so there is no omnipotence in me.
Fact: From what I knew of Gene Sledge, he was a very nice, very polite, very quiet man—nearly a saint, who I’m sure had the Marine Corp’s best interest in his heart when he wrote his fantastic book. He and I spoke a few times and corresponded by mail when he was writing his book. It was not something I really wanted to speak about at the time, but he was a marine, he paid his dues in combat, and he had such a nice southern way about him that he put you at ease when you were talking to him.
The other side of the truth is, after Sledge’s book came out, there were many riflemen who grumbled and accused Sledge of cribbing their stories. I don’t think that’s the case, though. I think a very close inspection of Sledge’s book reveals that it is not merely a personal combat memoir, but instead it is a deftly written work that is really an amalgamation of part memoir, part order of battle and part accumulated knowledge of K/3/5, so that not everything he describes he witnessed firsthand.
On the other hand, that anybody would put Sledge, Haldane, that kid Snafu, or even me on a pedestal, because we wrote books, or because we come off as authorities, or because we were “so well loved” by our men, is doing not only us a great injustice, but also a great disservice to the real men who should be magnified in that war: those guys who never made it back, regardless of rank or stature. That Gene Sledge is some sort of infallible poster boy for the 1940’s era Marine Corps is not only laughable, but I also believe it is something that Sledge would not have wanted (if I read his character right). After all, at Sledge’s own admission, he claimed that he would not have wanted to be a rifleman. Hell, I would have given my right eye to be in the mortars! See, that’s the thing though: every marine thinks the next guy has it better than him. It’s human nature. It’s what you experience in your job every day. To wit, if you’re a riflemen, you wish you were a machine gunner. If you’re a machine gunner you wish you were in the mortars. If you were a mortarman, you’d wish you were a radioman, or whatever. Do you get the point? Especially when you’re young and don’t know anything.
In fact, one the things that sets my book apart from all the others, besides my job as a rifleman, is that we took great pains to write this book as if I were still 20 and 21 years old, not an 88 year old man looking back, having the layers of his past sway the material. Memory can be a funny thing, and it was a real trick to jog my memory is such a way that I wasn’t giving insight into combat during the 1940s, seen through 68 years of filters and accumulated opinions. That’s the only way the book would work…and I think we pulled it off. Believe me, whole passages and pages were re-written because I started to come back into the present, when I needed to be fully immersed in the language, thoughts and feelings that I had as a young man.
So, I think my agenda is clear. If somebody says, “That Mace is a swell guy,” it’s only because someone took a bullet for me and I’m here to be “swell” in their place. If you think I’m looking crossways at the mortars, or Sledge, or any other marine, you’re wrong. I had an opinion of them all as a young man, sure; and that opinion might not match up to what I feel today, so you might get a couple of different opinions that might seem at war with one another…but that’s okay. The kid I was and the man I became are two different animals. Am I tired of hearing about the mortars? Sure, I am! I would expect some mortarman to jump up and say, “What about me?” if the world was filled with nothing but riflemen stories. The world’s not, though. So I speak for those who no longer have a voice, after I was silent for many, many years, keeping it all inside.
I’m not keeping it inside any longer, however. Therefore, if you don’t like what I have to say? Semper Fi.
,
Sterling G Mace
Post a Comment