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Leandros -> RE: Historical novel needed (3/10/2015 3:12:48 PM)
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Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead. Should be ideal for the clientele here. I read it when I was about 15. A few years later I had this Deja Vu experience -
it was during the last days of my first stint in the army. We had just been chased out of a quite leisurely established squad position on a steep hillside by
some fiery Samis of the local National (Home) Guard. This exercise was on a large island outside the North Norwegian coast. Yes, the summers can be intensely
hot there and these islands have a very special vegetation and terrain. The Samis put their honor in chasing us army southerners out of their homeland (yes, there
were reindeers, too). Our position was much too close to the densely foliaged forest in front of us so, as the "enemy" bursted forth between the trees, we only
barely managed to disassemble our 1919 Browning machine guns for carrying, throw them up on the shoulders and sprint up the hill, stopping every couple of hundred
meters to let off a few blanks to keep them off. Soon we had lost them.
Well, this wasn't what generated the Deja Vu, that was a little later when we passed down the other side of the little mountain and came down in a valley with a
narrow, snaking creek in the bottom. We were trying to catch up with the rest of the platoon and walked silently in single file. It was hot, the valley sides were
green and not a sound to hear but the creaking sounds of our equipment dangling about and the shifting of the machine guns or tripods from shoulder to shoulder.
(Later, when we served an OP on a hilltop, we were blasted by a Norwegian F-104 playing ground-attack - that was not silent). Maybe it wasn't that strange, a feeble,
young mind, only a few years after I had read this book which made a deep impression on me. We were carrying US uniforms and equipment,
Garands, BAR's, Browning machine guns. We were RED and his soldier mates walking through that valley on Guadalcanal. Or was it Okinawa?
In my later years I've been thinking: What in the world was that book doing in my grandmother's bookshelf?
Fred
P. S.: Nobody's mentioned James Bond. That's a sort of war, too....or his brother, Peter. Wrote some books.
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