“They taught me how to kill Japs … and I got pretty damn good at it!”
Joseph Mazzelo as “Sledge“ in HBO’s The Pacific
I’m tired of reading reviews that start off: “This is no Band of Brothers …”. The Pacific wasn’t supposed to be and never intended to be BOB. Multiple scenes in the finalé make this painfully apparent, with veterans from the European theater point blank apologizing for the harsh conditions the soldiers in the Pacific front endured.
“Sure Europe was hard, but I got leave in Paris and London, all you guys got was jungle rot … I’m not taking your money”
-PFC. Leckie’s Cabbie when dropping him off at home and refusing his fare money.
There’s a fundamental aspect of TV writing that I feel some people over compensate for: the desire for their characters to be liked or loved. This is understandable, as a writer you’re spending a lot of time in these peoples lives. It doesn’t matter if its fiction or truth - you’re engaged at a very high level - of course you’d want their lives and arcs to have meaning. But perhaps this bet is off when we’re watching people at war. Perhaps this doesn’t apply and we shouldn’t like them - because innately we shouldn’t like what war does to humans.
For whatever reason - The Pacific has gotten a less than stellar rap by a great deal of critics, but in my opinion its a fine piece of work from a not so fine period in our Nation’s and the World’s history.
