NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler a historian a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific--the terror the camaraderie the banal and the extraordinary--into terms we mortals can grasp. --Tom Hanks In The Wall Street Journal Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill edify and inspire a new generation. An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war s famous 1st Marine Division--3rd Battalion 5th Marines. Even after intense training he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu where the world was a nightmare of flashes explosions and snapping bullets. By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa he was a combat vet still filled with fear but no longer with panic. Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved threatened and changed his life. Here too is the story of how he learned to hate and kill--and came to love--his fellow man. In all the literature on the Second World War there is not a more honest realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge s. This is the real deal the real war: unvarnished brutal without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals safe accounts of--not the good war --but the worst war ever. --Ken Burns