Heavy Artillery

This is the 1957 memoir by the US Marine Crops machine gunner/scout Robert Leckie, who many of you will remember as "that fuck up with way too many sex scenes from The Pacific."

The memoir is one of the three tent poles the series is based on, and the one written closest to the war. As opposed to Burgin's book, which came out after the tv show went to air, Leckie's was started in 1951 and is meant as a work of creative non-fiction. That is, it's not just a war record, or setting the record straight (though apparently it started because he was grumpy with the musical South Pacific), but is meant to actually be a book people want to read, as written by a professional author, not a soldier with a helper-writer.

Having read a lot of the soldier/helper writer books that came out after the series (Winters x2, Guarnere/Heffron, Malarkey, and Burgin, plus Chester Nez), I will say that the professional author angle was a nice change. The prose in this is snappy, funny, full of life and character. It's very much what you'd expect from someone who did sports reporting in the 1950s. You get a lot more life and personality out of descriptions, and there's an actual narrative structure to the thing. That said, it also felt over studied in places, and I wondered if even during the events he was trying to find a way to put the war into words, and contextualise his experience through language. Some of it feels like he's worked on phrases so much they don't feel real any more, but like an image of what he thinks the feeling should be. And there were times I missed the more stripped down simple storytelling of a soldier as told to...

The book strictly covers the war, from Leckie signing up after Pearl Harbour to the Japanese surrender, including training, Guadalcanal, Melbourne, Cape Gloucester, Pavuvu, Paleliu, and various military hospitals along the way. No real names are used, and I enjoyed all the silly nick names he gave people. He is a lot more open and frank about the ups and downs of military life, the cruelties and the crimes, the stolen joys, the imperfections than a lot of the other authors. I vaguely feel like he and Burgin may have been in different wars.

On the whole, if you want a war memoir that's actually a pleasure to read on its own grounds, I'd pick this one of the bunch I've read so far, so long as you don't mind vaguely pretentious my classical allusions let me show them to you, etc.

In terms of successful adaptions, there are a couple things that I'm glad they changed from the book, and a couple things I wish they'd kept their hands off.

In terms of positive changes: I think keeping Leckie with his group of friends throughout, and making him get injured while trying to find help for Runner, worked really well. Having him stay a scout would have meant including a whole new set of people, and the show had too many people anyway, so simplifying Leckie's career was a good choice. I also liked that they gave him a few moments where he stands up against the casual cruelty of the other Marines. It's maybe a bit sanctimonious, but I think it helped show his more thoughtful and compassionate side, which comes through in his writing, but would be hard to show in the show without that. Adding the letters to Vera was also good, and the bits with Vera at the end.

I wish they hadn't given him the silly romance in Melbourne. In the book he was casually seeing a number of women, and all of them were a lot more interesting than the made up story we got on screen. I'm also kind of baffled why they decided he needed to lose his faith. Granted he was an irreligious type in actions by his own admission, but the whole speech to Sledge in the library and not praying at the end felt like an odd addition to someone who maintained his Catholicism throughout all the horrors of war, and never seems to have doubted it. It feels like a rather shallow story about religion: that all cynics must also be atheists.

I'm curious to watch the show again now that I've read this (and hopefully recognise Hoosier at least once), but I think overall it didn't really add a lot to my appreciation of Show!Leckie, who I'd rather liked from the get go, and probably still like mildly more than the guy presenting himself in the book.

Blatantly copying Tec, here is what R.V. Burgin has to say about Ack-Ack and Hillbilly. There are spoilers for the show.

( R.V. Burgin on Captain Andrew Allison Haldane, a.k.a. “Ack-Ack”, Company Commander of K/3/5: )

( R.V. Burgin on 1st Lieutenant Edward A. Jones, a.k.a. “Hillbilly”, Leader of K/3/5’s Machine-Gun Platoon: )