I spend my days with self-absorbed morons who parade their stupidity across the TV screen and call it “reality.”
So take it from me, it will make you proud again to be American if you take the time to watch HBO’s brilliant, 10-part miniseries, “The Pacific.”
No, this isn’t Broadway musical revival.
It is the Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg-produced epic that intertwines the brutal and brutally real story of three US Marines who fought in the Pacific during WWII: Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda).
The series is based on books written by Leckie (“Helmet for My Pillow”) and Sledge (“With the Old Breed”) as well as the actual story of Basilone, who took out an entire company of Japanese soldiers, outnumbered something like 100-to-three, to become a reluctant Medal of Honor winner.
The series unfolds intimately behind the soldiers’ individual stories — but works broadly, showing us the scope of the war in that other part of the world that few Americans could find on a map.
The conditions in the Pacific were so wretched and the Marines — always the first ones in — were so poorly equipped, trained and sheltered that their annihilation of the better-fed, better-equipped enemy was and remains unimaginable.
The series begins when the first raw Marines, many of whom had enlisted out of patriotism right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, land on Guadalcanal. (It’s an island, not a canal.)
The series follows them through the Pacific to the doorstep of Japan — three years of non-stop fighting.
What’s both good and bad about “The Pacific” is that the filmmakers wanted to capture the horror of what these men saw and felt. But that means that many battle scenes were filmed at night without tricky lighting, so it’s tough to make out what is going on.
From Guadalcanal, we follow them through the endless rain on the island of Cape Gloucester, to the Japanese fortress on Peleliu (the costliest battle of the war, in terms of Marine lives) and on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
But as important as those set battles scenes are to the series, they are blended beautifully with the bravery, frailties, strength and weaknesses of the actual people involved.
Among the most memorable characters is Sledge (later nicknamed “Sledgehammer”), a wealthy Alabama doctor’s son rejected from service because of a heart murmur who convinces his dad to fudge his medicals so he can enlist.
Once in the thick of battle, he realizes the horror of what men can do to each other — and can’t reconcile the randomness of why some of his comrades die and others live.
Leckie, a budding writer and journalist, enlists in the Marines to serve his country and after unending months of disease, rain, death, mud and decay, collapses — mentally and physically — and has to be hospitalized. But gets up to fight again.
Basilone, meantime, ships out to Guadalcanal, where, as the fighting wears on, he and the other Marines are forced to subsist on crackers and what little water they can scavenge. When the time comes, he doesn’t think twice about going up against an entire company of charging, fully-loaded enemy soldiers. Incredible.
From the vantage point of our day — the age of instant communication — it’s a shock to realize that the Marines are so isolated and out of touch that they have no idea they have become heroes back in the States.
Basilone can’t figure out why he’s been given any sort of medal, let alone the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Every baby boomer’s father (like mine) talked about the war, sure. But “The Pacific” is the stories most of them never told.
All they seemed to recall years later were the pranks they pulled on each other and the jokes they told.
Now I know why.