Happy Birthday Marines

3/2.

Fuck your green rope that shit was a carry over from WWII go earn it yourself!

Love you bro! Jais where in the world are you abouts?!

Likewise.

a_skeleton_03 said:

I wish The Pacific was better. I just didn't love it like BoB. I did love seeing some characters from Marine history but it wasn't done amazingly.

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Ya, BoB overall felt better, although The Pacific had a few standout episodes and I did like how they addressed the PTSD at the end. My grandfather was in the Marines during WW2 and was at Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, and Pelilu (he was wounded like 1st or 2nd day of Pelilu, then later when they tried to move him back so he could get more medical treatment, they came under mortar attack and he really got messed up/almost died. They took shelter in a crater and another mortar hit nearby and he was buried in dirt/sand. Someone saw his leg sticking out and was able to pull him out, but he was unconscious and had tons of shrapnel in his body, some of which remained throughout his life). He was a scout most of the time at the first 2, but also got flipped to MG duty at others. He passed away before The Pacific came out, so I had always been curious as to what his take of it all was since they covered all 3 of those battles in the mini-series. He never really liked to talk about what he personally did in terms of actual combat, although he would tell plenty of stories about close calls that he had. The only story he actually told me about shooting at someone didn't involve the person dying. He explained that he and some other Marines were on some type of patrol and they spotted a single Japanese soldier trying to wash some clothes in the ocean water across some bay. My grandfather climbed up in a tree and asked for someone to hand him a rifle, then he took a shot. He apparently grazed the Japanese solider, who understandably ran back into the jungle afterwards freaking out and the other Marines with him couldn't believe he had actually been able to make the shot. I think he was mostly proud of getting a fairly accurate shot at a long distance without a scope, but since no one died he was ok with sharing it. He was a good shot, though...I remember being a kid and there was a bat flying around his house and he shot it out of the air with some dart/airgun thing he had bought. He definitely had PTSD, though. Even into his 80s, he would have really bad nightmares and punch out/strike out in his sleep.

One of my grandfathers was a marine in the pacific theater. He didn't like to talk about it either, besides for he'd tell stories sometimes about protecting convoys.

I asked him point blank one time if he'd had to kill when he was over there. He just kind of snorted a little and said "well, maybe." He said he'd taken some shots while on patrol, and he'd taken some shots one night around his base. He said he was pretty sure that he'd killed a few, but he never saw the bodies. And that was really as much as he ever wanted to talk about it.