NEW YORK — In a famous “Twilight Zone” episode from the early 1960s, a bloodthirsty World War II commander stationed in the Philippines is transported into the body of a Japanese lieutenant and, to his horror, expected to help kill a trapped American platoon. and injured.
“Will what you do with those men in the cave shorten the war by a week, by a day, by an hour?” he pleads with a Japanese officer. “How many must die before (we) are satisfied?”
For the show’s host and writer Rod Serling, World War II was a trauma he often reimagined.
Serling, born 100 years ago this December, served with the 11th Airborne Division in the Philippines and received a Bronze Star for bravery and a Purple Heart for being wounded. He left the war with lasting physical and emotional scars and, like fellow veterans like Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, with a desire to find words for what had happened. He wrote war-related scripts for “Playhouse 90” and other television drama series and for at least two other “Twilight Zone” stories, including one in which an Army lieutenant can predict who will die next by looking at the faces of your soldiers.
Serling’s “First Squad, First Platoon,” a fictionalized version of the war he worked on and set aside while studying at Antioch College, has been published for the first time. It appears this week in the new issue of The Strand Magazine, which has unearthed articles by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and many others. “First Squadron, First Platoon” is divided into five vignettes, each dedicated to a fallen colleague.
“Serling wrote this story in her early twenties, but she carries a maturity beyond her years,” writes Strand editor-in-chief Andrew Gulli. “It is a powerful, raw vision of war in all its brutality – an unforgettable study of ordinary people in an extraordinarily hellish situation.”
Nicholas Parisi, author of the 2018 biography “Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination,” helped edit the story. Daughters Jodi Serling and Anne Serling each contributed brief forewords. Jodi Serling wrote that the war “opened dark horizons of terror” for her father and left him “harrowing memories” that influenced her writing and woke him at night, “sweating and screaming inconsolably.” Anne Serling told the Associated Press that “First Squad, First Platoon” reminded her of her innocence when she enlisted in the army.
“My reaction was particularly hurtful because when I read the story, I was writing a memoir about my father and reading the letters he wrote in boot camp before he was sent to the Pacific,” she said. “He was only 18 when he enlisted and sounded like a kid at summer camp in his letters to his parents. He asked for gum, candy, underwear (because he didn’t like GI). Like all the children we send into the horror of war – he didn’t know what awaited him on the other side.”
Amy Boyle Johnston, author of the 2015 book “Unknown Serling,” discovered the story while looking through Serling’s papers at the University of Wisconsin. Serling, who died in 1975, had not yet started a family when he wrote “First Squad, First Platoon.” But he was already thinking about the next generation, including a dedication to his unborn children urging them to remember “a semblance of sensation of a torn limb, a piece of burnt flesh” and “the despairing emptiness of fatigue” were so much of the war as “uniforms and flags, honor and patriotism”.
Parasi says “First Squad, First Platoon” was an early sign of Serling’s ironic touch. One soldier is shot dead while admiring a wooden figurine of Jesus, and another – a true story – is killed over a food aid package.
In the opening section of “First Squadron,” Cpl. Melvin Levy is introduced as the squad’s resident comedian, whose usual barrage of jokes was muted by the ongoing hunger that threatened to kill them all. But as Levy sleeps weakly in the mud, dreaming of pastrami and other treats at home, he is startled by the sound of engines – planes clearly marked American. Levy screams with joy as over 100 heavy boxes of K-rations fall from above, unaware that one will fall straight on him.
“The heavy boxes were falling to the earth near their holes. The men began to scream in alarm,” writes Serling. “Levy stayed where he was, waving his arms and screaming. Sergeant Etherson pulled him from behind, trying to get him into a hole. But Levy was oblivious to everything around him except the falling food.”
“’It’s raining food, boys. . . it’s raining food,’” his shrill voice pierced the air.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
