Fifth Post: The Good War (Cont.)

In today's episode, I will focus my attention towards the Stud's Terkel interviews of Peggy Terry and E.B. (Sledghammer) Sledge.  To start off, I just want to illustrate the fact that these two people lived completely different lives.  Terry's life was of a typical southern woman of Paducah, Kentucky, who lived in a factory constructing shells to send off to war.  Sledge's life was of a rifleman in the front line in the Guadalcanal in the Pacific.  In the lives of the women of the factory, they worked long hours in this factory building shells for a war they didn't even know existed.  Terry said, "You won't believe how incredibly ignorant I was.  I knew vaguelythat a war had started, but I had no idea what it meant" (Terkel 190)  She then went on to explain that the only thing she ever worried about, from day to day, was her social life. "The only thing we worried about was other women thinking we had dyed our hair.  Back then, it was a disgrace if you dyed your hair" (Terkel 191).  Where she lived, people didn't even think of the war as something that was 'directly important' to the country.  No one seemed to feel threatened at all.  On the other hand, Sledge explained how lives of the frontline rifleman was lived hoping to stay alive for another day.  He explained how the lives of the men were not at all "macho" as people percieved it and still do today.  He said that "over 80% of the men in the Guadalcanal were under the age of 21" (Terkel 197). He explained how their life was to kill the Japanese and there was no surrender.  War was their life, while the people at home didn't even know what was going on?

Fourth Post: The Good War

The most significant thing that I had read throughout these two passages was the fact that the soldiers were not necessarily attached to wanting their families or their housing or even going back home; the soldiers in Japan and the soldiers in Germany/Europe were in desperate need of food.  They explained how they would stop wishing to God how they wanted to to see their families again and how they wanted to be home.  They became simple only praying for food.  "Food. Fear. Comradeship." (165 Terkel).  These were the three things that were most important to the men.  Rifleman Bob Rasmus explains how when he was a boy, he was so excited to be in the war and never even thought about the possible consequences of being sent to the first lines.  He then goes on to say that he entered the army and was ultimately placed as a rifleman in the middle of the war.  After being placed in this infantry group, he then realized that there was a high possibility that he would be killed.  He then explained how they had a great time when they had their time off, but when it came time for battle, everyone "sobered up" and got their heads in the game.  To me, this was extremely significant being an athlete.  I sometimes have a hard time getting myself ready after fooling around with my teammates before the game.  Obviously the situations have their differences but at the same time, they have their similarities.  When I saw the title of this section I became confused; after reading this section, I still do not really understand why any "war" could ever be even somewhat "good"?

Third Post: Jane Yoder, Tom Yoder, Peggy Terry, and Mary Owsley

"I knew one family there in Oklahoma city, a man and a woman and seven children lived in a hole in the ground.  You'd be suprised how nice it was , how nice they kept it.  They had chairs and tables and beds back in that hole.  And they had the dirt all braced up there, just like a cave" (Terkel 138).

Just think about that... If you had to take your family, who had lived in a nice home your entire life, and you had to go out west and live between walls of dirt filled with who-knows-what. Just imagine someone taking away everything that you once had and having to essentially live in a dump.  Even worse, imagine living the way that you live right now but without enough money for any luxuries. Jane Yoder, for example, had to go to school in one of the ugliest winters jackets anyone had ever seen, but it was the only one she had and it kept her warm.  It is almost just as depressing hearing about these stories as the depression itself was.  I can't imagine living like that.

To go off on a tangent, I had dinner with my grandfather tonight.  He was born in 1930 and I started to ask him about life back in the day.  He explained to me about how in his neighborhood, they hadn't really been hit that hard by the depression, but they obviously still felt it.  When he was a really young boy, he worked in a factory putting washing machines together after school and was paid weekly for his hours.  He also explained to me that everyone in his neighborhood was relatively democratic and they all thought that FDR was "God".  People worshipped him, and at the time, they convinced themselves that he was, and always will be, the greatest president that America had ever/will ever have.  After watching a few episodes of "The Century: featuring Peter Jennings" I think that I am starting to understand this whole situation, along with WWII even better.

However, going back to the point of the post, the ultimate question here is, "If the depression hit you so bad, just as it hit Peggy and her family, what would you have done?"