Points Summer Book Club

That a young man is dying before their eyes, and some of them are thinking about the fate of his fine English boots, shows what war drives men to. This passage made me think about a part of E.B. Sledge's gruesome WW2 memoir "With the Old Breed," in which Sledge, a Marine, described the way American GIs would pry the gold out of the fillings of the mouths of the Japanese dead. Sledge saw one US soldier take his knife and slit the cheeks of a dying (but not yet dead) Japanese soldier all the way to each ear, to make it easier for the soldier to get to the man's teeth and pry them out. Sledge said that the doctor traveling with his Marine unit warned him (Sledge) not to do that because the Japanese were believed to be carrying some dread disease. Sledge said later, on reflection, he realized that the doctor was being untruthful, but was trying to keep Sledge from descending into utter barbarianism.