I think for the rest of the month I'm going to write a

few dailies on WW2.

The two Marines I mentioned yesterday have been kind to me by making me privvy to a lot of the emails that are being passed on between WW2 vets, in their case Pacific Marines.

One thing I notice is that it appears that these men are still trying to figure out exactly what in the hell happened during these campaigns. The emails I have read have come from a couple of Pacific Marines, but I'm sure many veterans of the European campaign are doing the same thing.

The fighting in the Pacific was brutal, totally savage and the rules the Japanese played by were something Americans had never experienced before.

I've studied the subject a bit and I have come to the conclusioon that it was totally chaotic, in many cases one squad didn''t have a clue as to where or what the other squad was up to.

A rifle squad is broken down into three teams and I'd just bet that a lot of time one TEAM didn't know what the other two were up to at any given time.

Communication at the time was primitive, unlike today. The radio sets were big, clumsy affairs and there were not too many of them and the usual form of communication was probably plain and simple shouting.

These men were pretty much on their own for a lot of the time.

One of Napoleons soldiers was once asked what he saw in Russia. He responded that all he saw was the pack of the man in front of him. I'm sure it applies here. For the three or four men on a fire team, they were just too damned busy accomplishing their own objectives to even have a second to think about what the other guys were doing.

Once, while waiting to get a haircut, another old Marine and I were shooting the bull about the Guadalcanal campaign, here he served. He spoke of his experiences as a private, and I mentioned a few things that I had read about regarding the campaign. He looked at me and asked how I seemed to know so much and I told him I had read a couple of books about the campaign.

"Yeah, but I was there," he replied.

"Right," I said back, "You were a private, bottom of the heap, packing a rifle. All you really saw was the Japanese soldier that was trying to kill you or the sides of the hole you had ducked into to stay alive. You had a worm's eye view. The guys that wrote the books I read were a little further up the chain and saw things from a different point of view."

He started to look offended, so I headed it off. "Don't be offended. You were probably a damned good Marine," I said. "You did your job."

I then went on to remind him that a general officer is looking at a huge objective, while a battalion commander islooking at a smaller objective and a company commander has a smaller objective yet. It works its way on down the line. The guy with a rifle has only a worm's eye view.

"Huh." he said, looking at me with a curious look. "You're right. I never looked at it that way. I think I'll go to the library and read up on it. I'd love to know what was going on in headquarters because for the life of me I have never been able to figure out why we did things the way we did!"

The emails I have been made privvy to tell me that there were a lot of guys with a worms eye view that to this day are trying to figure out what in the hell went on during the combat they saw. Sixty years later they are trying to figure out things that happened to them when they were in their late teens or early twenties.

I'm humbled to be let into their world and it's fascinating.