“Brains and blood were splattered all over the Marine’s rifle, boondockers, and canvas leggings.”Ĭomrades of the shell-shocked Marine took his arms and led him away to an aid station.
“I winced each time it came down with a sickening sound into the gory mass,” Sledge later wrote in his memoir of the war. A fellow Marine with a dazed look on his face approached one of the corpses and repeatedly plunged his rifle into the dead man’s head. Two Japanese soldiers with samurai swords had attacked his unit’s position on Okinawa in June 1945 but had been killed before they could cause harm. Marine Private Eugene Sledge watched in stunned horror.
