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?