The battle of Peleliu was where one of my wife’s relatives earned the Silver Star, and we’re going to purchase the book to read about that campaign. (He won’t discuss it except in the most vague terms.)

If you read Sledge’s book you will understand why.

The Pacific is being done by the same people who did Band of Brothers, which I thought was excellent, but I am wondering about them possibly “softening” things. The Pacific campaign was horrific. Unlike Europe, much of it was fought on islands uninhabited or lightly inhabited by civilians, so it was total war. (Not that civilians were spared. There were mass suicides of civilians on Okinawa, a Japanese “home” island, because they had been brainwashed to think the Americans were going to torture and kill everyone.) The Japanese had a long history of atrocities from the very beginning of the war, and too often the Americans responded in kind. The Japanese military saw themselves as members of a master race, and the Americans saw the Japanese as “monkeys” or “yellow Nips.” As I said before, it had elements of a race war.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi.....d_1944.gif

A thousand words as they say…

It’s inevitable to make comparisons in any case, and I prefer reading the book first.

I have been thinking about rereading it in advance of the HBO series. I’m not a huge military history buff, but it is a damn good book. Sledge joined the Marines in December 1942 at age 19 and saw combat on Peleliu and Okinawa. He kept handwritten notes in a Bible that he carried with him, then worked on the book on and off for years before it was published.

But I had a conversation with some older relatives last week—one a former peacetime Marine and the other a Korean war veteran—who complained matter-of-factly that people were making a big deal out of how we treat detainees when during WW2 it wasn’t uncommon simply to kill enemy troops rather than take them as prisoners (at least in the Asian theater, according to another relative who earned a Silver Star for his actions in the Pacific).

Horrible things happen in wartime, but that they happen doesn’t make them okay. And it certainly doesn’t make it okay to extrapolate them from a conventional, “declared” war to a gray area that probably should be treated not as a war but as a criminal law enforcement issue with some military aspects. The “war on terror”—WTF does that even mean? As long as there is one crazy person anywhere who is willing to throw a bomb in aid of his cause, the war is not over. Good times. Compare and contrast with, say, how various European governments dealt with the bomb-throwing radicals of the ‘70s.

In many ways the Pacific campaign in World War II was a race war, with both sides seeing the other as subhuman. It was extremely brutal. I highly recommend E.B. Sledge’s memoir With the Old Breed (1981) as an eloquent, chilling account of infantry combat in the Pacific. It is one of the source documents for the upcoming HBO miniseries The Pacific.

But I’m concerned that the people who have authorized and are attempting to legitimize the wrongful treatment of detainees (and even torture) are going to end up destroying at least some of the ideals upon which America was founded.

But that is how we can make it a pivotal moment; if we can create a groundswell of opposing thought. And I think we are.

At some point, a focus will be reached and we can set our (the voter’s) natural will in motion. Because there’s no question that the Senate is thwarting the will of the majority of voters. So it doesn’t matter that the Senate was designed that way. It’s been doing it way too much lately.

Time for some separation of powers.

Shorter Huge Assclown Hewitt:
I’m standing on the very ground where the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest was fought between the Romans and the Germanic tribes in 9AD. This makes me practically a Centurion and an expert on all military matters.

My relatives live in wealthy East-coast suburbs. They are intelligent, thoughtful people. They are not the stereotypical “teabagger” or “redneck” types. But they are almost reflexively incapable of looking at things even somewhat objectively, without the “American exceptionalism” blinders that have so distorted our world view.

I understand that sometimes people have to take horrible action in order to prevent or oppose even greater evil. But I’m concerned that the people who have authorized and are attempting to legitimize the wrongful treatment of detainees (and even torture) are going to end up destroying at least some of the ideals upon which America was founded. Once you say that torture is not only acceptable, but appropriate if it might save innocent lives, there’s really no intellectually honest reason not to use the same techniques in law enforcement against criminal suspects.

I know, it’s surreal and highly ironic! These are the times we are apparently in.