Inside With the Old Breed — A Conversation With Eugene Sledge’s Son

About this episode

Henry Sledge discusses his father's war memoir and the impact of combat on his life.

With the Old Breed is widely considered one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Penned by Eugene Sledge, a Marine who fought with the 1st Division — the old breed — in the Pacific campaigns of Peleliu and Okinawa, the book is unflinching, deeply human, and so vividly written that you can practically feel the heat, mud, exhaustion, and terror coming off the page. But Sledge wasn't a professional writer. He was a biology professor who started jotting notes on scraps of paper tucked inside the New Testament he carried in his breast pocket. He wrote the book decades later, partly to process his own trauma, partly to leave a record for his sons. One of those sons is my guest today. Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father's legacy forward, and he's written his own book — The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed — that pairs his father's combat experience with previously unpublished material and his own perspective as Eugene's son. Today on the show, Henry and I talk about why his dad wrote With the Old Breed , what made fighting in the Pacific uniquely hellish, and how Eugene managed to come home and live a full, honorable life despite carrying the war with him for the…

People in this episode

Host: The Art of Manliness

Guest: Henry Sledge

Topics covered

• war memoirs
• Pacific campaigns
• father-son legacy
• combat experience
• trauma processing

Keywords

• Eugene Sledge
• Henry Sledge
• With the Old Breed
• Pacific War
• trauma
• memoir
• combat

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: HBO, Ken Burns' The War

Books & works: With the Old Breed, The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed

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