Book Report: China Marine

I read this book.

This was the “follow up” to With the Old Breed, which is the greatest first-person account of war I’m aware of. It was written by the same guy, Eugene Sledge. Unfortunately, it turns out that 100 pages of musings about sitting around in China after the war isn’t quite as gripping as actual war narrative.

This is going to be a short post.

• They should have taken the last 20 pages of China Marine, when Sledge actually gets to go home, and put it at the end of With the Old Breed.
• And then the rest of it they could have posted on his website or whatever.

The last 20 pages or so were very cool and brought satisfying closure to the overall story that began with With the Old Breed. Just that the China that filled the first 80 pages was pretty bland. A lot of discussion of how it was annoying to still be in some amount of danger even though the war was over as well as talking about food and walking around Beijing.

Endut.

bkd