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00:03Heroism doesn't wait for cameras and headlines.
00:10Too many times the greatest heroes perform their feats unseen and unsung.
00:16Honor now the forgotten, the overshadowed, the overlooked greatness of the unsung heroes.
00:34Eugene Sledge, US Marine Corps 534-559, never weighed above 145 pounds soaking wet.
00:43In battle, he never rose above private first class.
00:47He never won a medal for heroism.
00:50Perhaps because so many who witnessed his four months of the most horrendous arms-length fighting in any war never
00:57lived to write a report.
01:02But the man his buddies called Sledgehammer, years later wrote his own report from notes scribbled into the Bible he
01:09carried into battle.
01:10The book it became, with the old breed at Pelelu and Okinawa, has been hailed as the finest account of
01:18an enlisted man's war ever written.
01:24I remember one veteran's family reported they actually buried him with the book.
01:29And Dad would sometimes say, I feel almost like a priest, it's an eerie kind of sensation.
01:34But in a way he became a spokesman for the authentic experience of the front line infantry.
01:43There are two wars.
01:45The front lines and then everything behind it.
01:48Because people a hundred yards behind the front lines don't know what's going on.
01:54What was going on at Pelelu and Okinawa in 1944 and 45 was the unsung heroism of PFC Eugene Sledge
02:03and his dying friends in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division, the Old Breed.
02:13The battles that Eugene Sledge survived were fought over just six months.
02:18He would live as a teacher in pretty Montevallo, Alabama for more than half a century afterward.
02:24What his neighbors and students could never see was that for virtually all of his time among them,
02:30their gentle friend re-fought those terrible months every day and most dreadfully every night.
02:38Few of the students in his biology classes could ever imagine that this soft-spoken little man
02:43had watched nearly every close friend he had die in front of his eyes with utmost violence.
02:59How Eugene Sledge finally found a way to survive his long second fight
03:04is as heroic a story as any that happened on the bloody sands of World War II.
03:12It was this great sense of compassion. He was so sensitive that this made the aching memories
03:19haunt him so much longer, so much more intensely.
03:38Eugene Bondurant Sledge was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1923.
03:43He was the second son of a prominent physician, Dr. Edward Simmons Sledge and Mary Frank Sturtevant Sledge.
03:49Jane was a frail child. He was not hale and hearty like his older brother.
03:56He had malaria at one point, and he had rheumatic fever, which left him with a heart murmur.
04:04He had to spend a year in a wheelchair.
04:10Both parents encouraged him to sharpen his powers of observation
04:14and maintain a journal to set down life's lessons.
04:17He became captivated with probing all the glorious details of nature
04:22and grew to love the peace and beauty of the wild outdoors.
04:30Eugene was only 17 years old when far across the world from this idyllic backwater
04:35but there, a savage war overtook the United States.
04:43Eugene, then attending the Marion Military Institute, picked the Marines, enlisting in his senior year.
05:01By early 1944, Eugene Sledge had arrived in the Pacific as a well-trained mortar man
05:07and came to his permanent assignment, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment of the 1st Marine Division.
05:13Sledge wrote of this coming to the old breed.
05:17The 5th Marines and the 1st Marine Division carried not only the traditions of the Corps
05:22but had traditions and a heritage of their own, a link through time with the old Corps.
05:28I felt as though I had rolled the dice and won.
05:35The soul of Sledge's K Company was its commander, Captain Andrew Haldane, known as Akak.
05:41He had won the Silver Star repulsing five Japanese bayonet charges at Cape Gloucester.
05:47Sledge wrote,
05:48I felt that he was not a man born of woman, but that God had issued him to the Marine
05:53Corps.
05:53To us, he was the old breed and we loved him.
06:00On September 15th, 1944,
06:04Rifleman Sledge found himself approaching the forbidding beaches of the six-mile-long island of Pelelu,
06:09just inside the reef of the Palau Islands.
06:13It was supposed to be a short, hard, three-day battle.
06:20We could see the 16-inch salvos fired from the battleships.
06:26It was just like a thunderclap.
06:28Every time one of those went off,
06:30and, of course, there were 40-millimeter guns that were just going bum, bum, bum, bum, constantly, you know.
06:38Planes were drawing overhead.
06:45And I was absolutely scared to death.
06:48The main thing that concerned me was I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.
06:53I looked at the island and all you could see, it just looked like a thin line on the horizon.
07:01It was just a sheet of flame.
07:04It was this huge black wall of smoke.
07:08And I thought, my God, none of us would ever get out of that place.
07:17You could look to the right and left and see Amtrak's that were hit, were burning.
07:22Poor guys, you could see guys just get blown right out of them.
07:29My heart was in my throat, I'll tell you.
07:37I can picture in my mind's eye a bunch of 18, 19-year-old kids clinging to each other in
07:47this machine,
07:48plowing ashore at 9, 10 knots, shells crashing all around.
07:57And they lurch up on the shore.
08:02And I can just picture him jumping over the side.
08:11And in the pelvic.
08:18I happened to look down and my right foot missed no more than by six inches.
08:23There was a Japanese mine that was in the form of a 500-pound bomb buried in the sand,
08:30and it had a metal pressure plate on the top of it.
08:33A little way down the beach I saw a boy step on one and he just, it just atomized him.
08:39He just disappeared.
08:52Eugene Sledge had barely arrived on the exploding beach at Pelelu, but he already felt the numbing exhaustion of somebody
09:00who had been fighting a hundred years.
09:03The order to move out sounded like a death sentence.
09:25What was supposed to be a quick, hard battle at Pelelu turned into a prolonged bloodbath.
09:36The hellish geography of the island lent itself to the intricate Japanese defenses.
09:45The temperature was around 115 degrees.
09:49Now 115 degrees with high humidity is insufferable to even sit and rest, but to be running around out there
09:57in the scorching sun carrying your load of ammunition and your weapon,
10:02trying to help carry wounded out. It was just absolutely exhausting.
10:11You could see Bloody Nose Ridge on the other side. That's the way we were going.
10:16Places as many as 200 feet high, the Japs had complete clear vision of everything we did.
10:30They had heavy artillery up there.
10:34The concussion from the Jap artillery shells was so loud and so constant that it was like as though the
10:42ground was swaying back and forth.
10:46And here you were up running through this.
10:49And you could hear the shrapnel go brrrrrr, and big pieces, you know, would come growling by you.
10:57You could see guys just falling all around us.
11:05That was one of the strangest ways to me that men fell when they were hit.
11:11I suppose it depended on what type of projectile or fragment hit them.
11:18But some of them just sagged down to the ground. It was almost pitiful, like they were just real tired.
11:24And they were dead.
11:27And other guys threw their arms out and fell over backwards.
11:31And some guys pitched forward.
11:35And some let out god-awful screams.
11:43To me, that was the worst part of all of it, seeing guys get hit.
11:47Maybe it didn't bother some people as bad as it did me.
11:50But, you know, every one of those guys was a damn good Marine and a buddy and some other son.
12:07I was shaking like a leaf.
12:10And I looked at one of the veterans, one of the Guadalcanal veterans, and he was shaking as bad as
12:18I was.
12:19And he said, that was a tough dude, Sledgehammer.
12:22He said, I'd hate the hell to have to do that every day.
12:35Marines were not allowed to keep a diary, particularly the infantry.
12:39You could get captured, the Japanese would have information, intelligence, fame.
12:43Sledge got around that by writing notes in the margins of his Bible.
12:46Every bad scene, every memorable occasion.
12:50And from that holy book, he took enough to write his entire book 30 years later.
13:14Even in the worst moments, the youthful Sledge could look up and reconnect to the world he had left so
13:20far behind.
13:21In the midst of battle, his love of birdwatching surfaced.
13:26He did it all his life.
13:28There was a little boy in Mobile, and even when he got to Peloton, he was thrilled to go through
13:32a mangrove swamp and look up and see man-of-war birds nesting overhead and exotic herons.
13:37And he'd be watching him, and one of his buddies would hiss, slash hammer.
13:41What are you doing looking at them birds? You've been looking for chaps, boy.
13:48The Japanese had what was called infiltration down to a fine art.
13:53It was at the most intense level that it had ever been in the Pacific War.
14:01So while we were attacking the caves all day, they were in a safe place, getting rest.
14:08I've known of cases where they even moved the dead and then infiltrated into the place where that corpse was
14:14in Lira.
14:16So you had to know exactly what everything looked like when you moved into an area before it got dark.
14:25They, on some occasions at Peleliu, actually went back and band-aided wounded.
14:29I know they band-aided some of my wounded buddies who were in a tent on the beach, getting ready
14:34to be evacuated.
14:34One of our lieutenants was killed that way.
14:39Everybody in the company, even the company commander, at one time or other, served as a stretcher carry.
14:50The Japs absolutely opened up on stretcher teams everything they had.
15:00The Japs were incredibly aggressive. They were incredibly brave.
15:13Every day of combat added more notes to the margins of Sledge's Bible.
15:18He wrote nothing of the strategic or tactical picture.
15:21He recorded only the glories and miseries of his front-line foot-slugging buddies.
15:30One of the things that the front-line infantrymen had to face was filth.
15:35Filth and fear went right together.
15:38And, of course, fear was the predominating emotion on the battlefield.
15:43The odor was just absolutely indescribable.
15:51I felt I would never get that stench of dead and rot and filth out of my nostrils.
15:59And at night, the land crabs would swarm up out of the swamps on Peleliu, up into the ridges where
16:05we were,
16:05and you could just hear them crawling all over the dead Japs.
16:15Then, of course, shells would come in and explode and very often blow chunks of them all over the place.
16:21He was just lucky if it didn't blow some of them all over you.
16:30As he would tell these stories, sometimes I would have my own nightmares at night, thinking about them,
16:38or just have difficulty assimilating that information.
16:49When the enemy began pounding the Marines with artillery from nearby Negazibus Island,
16:54Eugene Sledge was among those sent across the channel to hit them.
16:58It was almost his last fight, as he encountered a bunker that had supposedly been cleaned out.
17:07I peeped up over the thing, and as close as no more than three feet away, I looked a Japs
17:13machine gun right in the face.
17:16He had his machine gun up like this. It was a light machine gun.
17:19He had a flash hider on it, which was probably maybe an inch in diameter at the most,
17:24but it looked like it was two feet wide, you know.
17:28And my heart was in my throat, I jerked my head down, he squeezed the trigger,
17:34and a best of about eight rounds just plowed through that sand bank and threw sand all over me.
17:40And I jerked my head down so fast that my helmet went up and then bumped down on my head.
17:45And Begging said, did you see anything in Ashley J. Hammond?
17:48I just said, gulp. That's the only sound I could make.
17:54Despite absorbing three point-blank 75-millimeter shells, the bunker's defenders fought on.
18:00One wielding a grenade charged out straight at Sledge.
18:05He drew that thing back and was going to throw it at us.
18:07And I just happened to have my carbine up and my sights right on his chest.
18:12Well, I squeezed off around, and he just let the grenade go, and then everybody else opened up on me.
18:25But Sledge's humanity would not die with his enemy.
18:28He would write, I had just killed a man at close range,
18:32that I had clearly seen the pain in his face when the bullets hit him, came as a jolt.
18:37The expression on that man's face filled me with shame, and then disgust.
18:43Disgust for the war, all the misery it was causing.
18:46I was thankful my buddies couldn't read my thoughts.
18:51For Eugene Sledge, it was not the last of Pelelu's miserable moments.
19:05As Eugene Sledge's company fought through the grueling Pelelu campaign,
19:09they began to wonder if any of them would walk away.
19:15The first regiment under kind of Chesty Puller had lost terribly,
19:19because their first assignment was the ridges,
19:21and he just kept them attacking the ridges, and we were tied in with them.
19:27I knew a lot of those guys had gone through boot camp with them, or infantry training,
19:31and some of them were telling me, you know,
19:33hell, Sledgehammer, he's going to get us all killed.
19:35We are attacking ridges with bayonets.
19:38We can't even see where the fire is coming from.
19:47The death of K Company's Popular Company commander, Captain Andrew Akak Haldane,
19:53devastated Sledge.
19:55He remembered it in his book years later.
19:57The skipper is dead.
20:00Akak has been killed.
20:02I was stunned and sickened.
20:04I turned away from the others, sat on my helmet, and sobbed quietly.
20:08I assumed Akak was immortal.
20:10He was the finest marine officer I ever knew.
20:13The loss of our company commander at Pelelu was like losing a parent we depended on for security.
20:19Some of the men threw their gear violently to the deck.
20:23Everybody was cursing and rubbing his eyes.
20:30It was the worst grief I endured during the entire war.
20:34The intervening years have not lessened it any.
20:38After 74 days, the battle on Pelelu was over, but the damage was devastating to Sledge and his friends.
20:46This battle ended, but its cost would last forever.
20:52Company K, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, went into Pelelu with approximately 250 men.
21:00It suffered 64% casualties.
21:04Of its original seven officers, two remained.
21:14Sledge would write in a quiet moment,
21:16Something inside me died at Pelelu.
21:22Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good.
21:34Something horrible happened there.
21:37That's where my father became a man.
21:44More than once they called him in and said,
21:46We think you would make a good officer.
21:48Would you like to apply for a commission?
21:52And he said, no.
21:54I said, why not?
21:54Number one, I could never order my men into what I went through.
22:01And number two, I'm not going to leave my buddies.
22:04I'm not going to leave my buddies in K Company.
22:15Barely five months later,
22:17Rifleman Sledge was in an amphibious assault fleet steaming into an island battle
22:22that would prove even longer and deadlier than Pelelu.
22:26Well, the night before D-Day at Okinawa,
22:28they sent the word around and said that we could probably expect 80 to 85%
22:33casualties in the infantry unit on the beach.
22:36And of course, that was certainly not something that was conducive to sound sleep.
22:43Sledge later wrote,
22:45A pre-dawn reveille ushered in Easter Sunday, April Fool's Day, 1945.
22:50We had chow of steak and eggs, the usual feast before the slaughter.
23:00Eerily, the Japanese barely opposed the landing on Okinawa.
23:04But Sledge and the veteran old breed knew that this only meant that they were concentrating
23:09a special kind of hell on ground of their own choosing.
23:21Sledge would write,
23:23Pine trees grew everywhere.
23:25I had forgotten what a delicious odor the needles gave off.
23:28We also saw Easter lilies blooming.
23:34But Sledge was under no illusions about where he was going.
23:39At night, you could see the flashes of the artillery down there.
23:44And you hear the booming of the guns.
23:45It almost sounded like thunderstorms.
23:47And you tried to make yourself believe it was, but you knew it wasn't.
23:53The Japs had twice as much artillery as they typically would have.
24:00The troops on the line got a double dose of heavy artillery.
24:06Being fired at by artillery was the closest thing to hell I ever experienced.
24:11I thought, oh my God, here we go again, right into this meat grinder again,
24:15and how the hell is anybody going to get out of it?
24:21But there was one different factor in my own mind, and that was, as terrified as I was, I knew
24:29I wasn't going to panic.
24:31Because I had survived Peleliu and learned, no matter how bad my fear was, I had learned I could control
24:37it.
24:40We ran forward into these positions and they were firing at us.
24:44And it was just one eruption of explosions after the other in that concentrated area that we had to move
24:50into.
24:51And I don't know how many soldiers I saw get killed as they tried to move out.
24:57Into this deluge of artillery fire came the old breed marines to relieve a shot up army division being pulled
25:04out of the line.
25:06The advantage of the 6mm mortars was that we could be right with the riflemen and we could drop the
25:13shells no more than, say, 25 to 30 yards ahead of them.
25:18My mortar section never had a short round. We never caused a casualty. We were always proud of that.
25:27Even in the business of dealing death, there were craftsmen.
25:31And a lot of Eugene Sledge's buddies got back alive because he cared enough to make himself one of the
25:37best.
25:38He was only 20 years old.
25:52The Okinawa battle added new torments for Eugene Sledge and the old breed.
26:00The dry choking dust of the last campaign was replaced by drenching downpours and seas of mud.
26:08A wet numbing cold that went straight through the men supplanted the blow torch heat of the equatorial sun.
26:18And with rain and 50 degree temperature for anybody is miserable, but for men who had been in the Pacific
26:24tropics previously for about two years, it was just, we just shivered until our teeth rattled.
26:33But no matter how debilitating the day's battle, Sledge's old habit of making diary notes in the margins of his
26:40Bible never faded.
26:41He might have begun to sense his future mission.
26:48As at Pelelu, Japanese nighttime infiltrators turned desperately needed sleep into a half awake nightmare of terrified readiness.
26:57Sleeping on hair trigger alert would never be unlearned.
27:03One time Sledge was visited by an old K Company buddy who warned his wife, Jean, don't ever shake him
27:12to wake him up.
27:14Because if you shook him, he'd be back in a foxhole and would be a Japanese coming in with a
27:19knife and he'd come at you.
27:20And she'd say, well, if I've got to wake him up, what should I do?
27:23And he had told me that the way they woke each other up in their foxholes, they would lean over
27:30and put their lips against your ear and whisper your name.
27:37And so I thought I would try that one time.
27:41And I leaned over when he was sleeping and said very quietly, Sledgehammer.
27:48And he was immediately wide awake.
27:56You never know when you're drawing your last breath.
28:08You lived in total uncertainty on the brink of oblivion.
28:15I mean, you can imagine the stress of having to go day after day after day under this kind of
28:21stress.
28:30What kept you going was the fact that you just felt like to live up to the demands of your
28:38unit and the buddies that were depending on you.
28:41Because any man who was evacuated, that made it harder on the ones that were left.
28:47Fear was ignored but never conquered.
28:49As he wrote, with each step toward the distant rattle and rumble of that hellish region where fear and horror
28:55tortured us like a cat tormenting a mouse, I experienced greater and greater dread.
29:00And it wasn't just dread of death or pain.
29:03I felt the sickening dread of fear itself and the revulsion at the ghastly scenes of pain and suffering among
29:10comrades that survivors must witness.
29:14Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading, I believed we had been flung into hell's own
29:21cesspool.
29:23Every crater was half full of water and many of them held a marine corpse.
29:28The bodies lay pathetically just as they had been killed, half submerged in muck and water.
29:35I had heard and read that combat troops in many wars became hardened and insensitive to the sight of their
29:42own dead.
29:43I didn't find that to be the case at all with my comrades.
29:47The sight of dead Japanese didn't bother us in the least.
29:52But the sight of marine dead brought forth regret, never indifference.
30:09I sat on my helmet in the mud and read a letter from my parents.
30:13It brought news that Deacon, my beloved spaniel, had been hit by an automobile, had dragged himself home and had
30:21died in my father's arms.
30:24There, with the sound of heavy firing up ahead and the sufferings and death of thousands of men going on
30:30nearby,
30:31big tears rolled down my cheeks because Deacon was dead.
30:42I used to think a lot about my parents and how devastating it would be to them if I didn't
30:47come back
30:47because my brother had already been wounded three times in Europe with just the two of us.
30:53But I think more than anything else what kept us going was just simply loyalty to each other, to our
30:59buddies.
31:07Germany surrendered on May the 8th and we got the news on a tank radio
31:11because we were preparing on Okinawa for a big push on May the 9th.
31:17And granted that we were all glad for the troops in Europe and glad for the civilians who had suffered
31:22so much.
31:23But as far as we were concerned, the general remark that I heard was, so what?
31:29Because the next day we had to make this push and my company got all shot up.
31:34So, you know, Nazi Germany might as well have been on the moon as far as we were concerned
31:39because we had our hands full of all kinds of trouble where we were.
31:46The combat at Okinawa was in a sense worse than Peleliu because it went on for three months.
31:53And when it was over, we were just so utterly exhausted.
31:57It's indescribable.
31:59I was convinced that if I had had to invade Japan, I would have never survived because my luck had
32:04run out.
32:08Sledge was one of less than a dozen survivors of some 250 Marines
32:12who had originally filled the ranks of K Company before the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa.
32:19The buddies that Eugene Sledge had left behind on Okinawa and Peleliu slept in quiet graves.
32:25But those who came back could not end the battles that raged through their minds.
32:31Sledge's war would have to be fought to its end at home.
32:41The war was over. The American fighting men came flooding back home.
32:45The nation poured out to them its joy, relief and gratitude.
32:58But Eugene Sledge was not there for the months of celebration and salutation
33:03that might have brought some bomb to his scarring memories.
33:08He had been sent straight off to China with the 1st Marine Division to serve with the occupation force
33:14entrusted with the disarming and repatriation of Japanese armies.
33:18He would be there six months.
33:24He came back to a Mobile, Alabama that had put away its welcoming flags and confetti
33:30and entered upon forgetting frightful events.
33:36He spun his wheels for several years.
33:39He went to Auburn to register in the School of Business.
33:42And the registrar said,
33:43Well, what skills did you learn in the military that we could give you credit for?
33:48Were you a mechanic? Did you teach courses?
33:52He said, None. I was an infantryman.
33:54What skills did they teach you?
33:56Did the Marine Corps teach you anything?
33:59He said, Lady, they taught me how to kill Japs.
34:04And she said, There's no credit for that.
34:10He said, I came home with the emotional equivalent of a sliver of shrapnel lodged in my heart.
34:22As the fighting 40s turned into the mellow good times of the 1950s,
34:26America worked on forgetting the terrors of war.
34:34But Eugene Sledge was not finding peace like the others.
34:39His days and nights were haunted by death,
34:41and there seemed no freedom from his hidden torment.
34:46Until one day, he found himself in a friend's wedding party
34:50and met the woman who would begin his rescue.
34:53She was beautiful, fun-loving Jean Arsenault.
34:57His best friend was marrying my best friend,
35:00and we were the only unmarried people in the wedding party.
35:05So they set us up to meet each other and to have a date.
35:10The two fell rapidly, completely in love.
35:14Sledge had found the first solid foothold on the long road back from his personal hell.
35:21And Jean always said after that, that for him it was love at first sight.
35:28That he knew that he had met the one.
35:34I'm not sure how I would explain my part in it, except that I thought he was the cutest thing
35:40I had ever seen.
35:44Eugene Sledge and Jean Arsenault were married in 1952.
35:49She would remain the bedrock of his renewal for all of the 49 happy years of their marriage.
36:01He needed a complete change from what he'd experienced in these two battles.
36:07He went to Auburn to get a master's degree in plant pathology so he could open his own nursery.
36:14But Auburn in graduate school opened the doors for him.
36:16He saw the bigger world of all of biology, and that's why he pursued it to get his PhD in
36:22Florida.
36:25The opportunity to become a scientist, to study nature, to teach nature to youngsters,
36:32was the complete opposite of all the death and destruction he'd experienced overseas.
36:38There was an opening at the small University of Montevallo in central Alabama.
36:43He fell in love with it.
36:46And in this town he raised his children, built a life, and tried vainly to forget where he had been.
37:03His nightmares were not the screaming and kicking kind.
37:05He would gradually wake up and he would be soaked with sweat and trembling, shaking.
37:12He would get up and go and write out an episode,
37:16and he said later that it was as though the book were dictated to him,
37:22that it would start rolling in his mind.
37:26And he couldn't get it out of his mind until he went in and sat down and wrote that particular
37:32episode.
37:39And then he was free of that memory.
37:46I can remember as he was writing the book, writing the story,
37:51seeing stacks of legal pads around the house.
37:55And when my brother and I were younger, he would sit up late at night by the fire
38:00and write these notes down from a sparse outline that he had kept in his Bible.
38:06As it began to become a quite large handwritten manuscript,
38:12he asked me if I would mind typing it for him.
38:18So I agreed that I would and I began typing.
38:23And I was typing as fast as my fingers could fly
38:26because I wanted to see how this particular episode would turn out.
38:31And the boys were over my shoulders saying,
38:34type faster, Mom, type faster.
38:38At one point, my mother suggested this is extraordinary.
38:42You should really consider having this published.
38:48And published it was in 1981, with Sledge in his mid-50s,
38:5336 years after he had fought his last battle.
38:56It was immediately acclaimed as a battle classic.
38:59One great historian calling it,
39:01the best account of battle by an enlisted man ever written.
39:05The book, with the old breed at Peleliu in Okinawa,
39:09was like a breath of fresh air.
39:12Here is the book of the war.
39:14This is the Red Badge of Courage.
39:16This is the All Quiet on the Western Front.
39:18Here is World War II's book.
39:21Sledge would immediately get letters from Army troops,
39:25Army veterans, who said,
39:26thanks for telling our story.
39:28He would get letters from the children and grandchildren
39:32of former Marines who had fought in other battles,
39:35and saying, I never knew why my dad or my granddad
39:38couldn't speak about the war, but I've read your book,
39:41and I know now why he couldn't.
39:45His new recognition left Eugene unchanged,
39:48the same gracious man his students and friends had always known.
39:53He was as much a friend also as he was a teacher.
39:57He was very intelligent, widely read.
40:00He was also a compassionate man.
40:03He was always a gentleman, had a good sense of humor.
40:07He was legendary in so far as his sense of humor.
40:10I think it was that wit which enabled him, perhaps,
40:15to persevere under the pressure of the incredible memories
40:21that he had brought with him of military combat in early years.
40:30After many years of peace and contentment in Montevallo
40:34as one of the most respected and beloved teachers at the college,
40:38Eugene Sledge was diagnosed with cancer.
40:41He fought it as fiercely and gracefully as he had fought all his battles.
40:45But this time, he would lose.
40:52Former Corporal Eugene Bondurant Sledge died on March 3rd, 2001 in his 77th year.
41:01As he never forgot his comrades, they now remembered him.
41:06By that night, I must have had 25 calls from all over the country.
41:10From former Marines, from soldiers, from military historians.
41:13Is it true what I heard?
41:15Yeah, it's true.
41:16He died. He died at home.
41:18He died a brave man the same way he lived his life.
41:24Eugene Sledge always believed he had been spared the fate of so many of his comrades,
41:29solely for the mission of telling the world their heroic story.
41:34He cared, not just for his own survival.
41:36He cared for all his buddies and Marines he didn't know.
41:39He cared for everybody who died in those battles.
41:41Everybody who got shot, everybody who lost his mind.
41:44He cared.
41:46He cared.
41:49Writing this, I'm fulfilling an obligation I have long felt to my comrades in the 1st Marine Division.
41:56All of them have suffered so much for our country.
42:00None came out unscathed.
42:03Many gave their lives.
42:05Many their health and some their sanity.
42:09All who survived will long remember the horror they would like to forget.
42:14But they suffered and did their duties so that a sheltered people could enjoy that life, liberty and pursuit of
42:21happiness, which is a privilege.
42:23We owe those Marines a profound debt of gratitude.
42:27Living and dead, the old breed returns Gene Sledge's salute.
42:40To be continued...
42:49To be continued...
42:51To be continued...
43:07To be continued...
43:32To be continued...
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