Not often seen Rod Serling story, “First Squad, First Platoon,” attracts upon his World Conflict II service
NEW YORK — In a well-known “Twilight Zone” episode from the early Sixties, a bloodthirsty World Conflict II commander stationed within the Philippines finds himself transported into the physique of a Japanese lieutenant and, to his horror, anticipated to assist kill an entrapped and wounded American platoon.
“What you do to these males within the cave, will it shorten the struggle by every week, by a day, by an hour?” he pleads to a Japanese officer. ”What number of should die earlier than (we) are happy?”
For the present’s host and author, Rod Serling, World Conflict II was a trauma he would re-imagine typically.
Serling, born 100 years in the past this December, served within the eleventh Airborne Division within the Philippines and acquired a Bronze Star for bravery and a Purple Coronary heart for being wounded. He left the struggle with lasting bodily and emotional scars and, like such fellow veterans as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, with a will to search out phrases for what had occurred. He wrote war-related scripts for “Playhouse 90” and different early tv drama collection and for a minimum of two different “Twilight Zone” tales, together with one wherein an Military lieutenant can predict who will die subsequent by wanting into his troopers’ faces.
Serling’s “First Squad, First Platoon,” a fictionalized tackle the struggle that he labored on and put aside whereas attending Antioch Faculty, has now been revealed for the primary time. It seems this week within the new version of The Strand Journal, which has unearthed items by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and lots of others. “First Squad, First Platoon” is damaged into 5 vignettes, every devoted to a fallen peer.
“Serling wrote this story in his early twenties, but it carries a maturity past his years,” Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli writes. “It’s a strong, unvarnished take a look at struggle in all its brutality — an unforgettable research of unusual folks in an awfully hellish scenario.”
Nicholas Parisi, creator of the 2018 biography “Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Creativeness,” helped edit the story. Daughters Jodi Serling and Anne Serling every contributed temporary forewords. Jodi Serling wrote that the struggle “opened up darkish horizons of terror” for her father and left him “gut-wrenching reminiscences” that influenced his writing and woke up him at night time, “sweating and screaming inconsolably.” Anne Serling instructed The Related Press that “First Squad, First Platoon” reminded her of his innocence when he joined the navy.
“My response was significantly painful as a result of once I learn the story, I used to be writing a memoir about my dad and studying the letters he wrote from coaching camp earlier than he was despatched to the Pacific,” she mentioned. “He was simply barely 18 when he enlisted and gave the impression of a child at summer time camp in his letters to his dad and mom. He was asking for gum, sweet, underwear (as a result of he didn’t just like the GI ones). Like the entire children we ship into the horror of struggle — he didn’t know what was ready on the opposite aspect.”
Amy Boyle Johnston, creator of the 2015 e-book “Unknown Serling,” discovered the story whereas wanting by way of Serling’s papers on the College of Wisconsin. Serling, who died in 1975, had but to start out a household when he wrote “First Squad, First Platoon.” However he was already occupied with the following technology, together with a dedication to his yet-unborn youngsters urging them to recollect “a semblance of the sensation of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh” and “the hopeless vacancy of fatigue” had been as a lot a part of struggle as “uniforms and flags, honor and patriotism.”
Parasi says that “First Squad, First Platoon” was an early signal of Serling’s ironic contact. One soldier is shot useless as he admires a picket statuette of Jesus, and one other — a real story — is killed by a meals aid bundle.
Within the opening part of “First Squad,” Cpl. Melvin Levy is launched because the squad’s resident comic, whose common barrage of jokes had been silenced by the continued hunger that threatened to kill all of them. However as Levy slept weakly within the mud, dreaming of pastrami and different treats again house, he’s startled by the sound of motors — airplanes clearly marked as American. Levy shouts with delight as greater than 100 heavy bins of Ok-rations fall from on excessive, fatally unaware that one will land proper on him.
“The heavy crates had been smashing into the earth near their holes. Males began shouting in alarm,” Serling writes. “Levy simply stood the place he was, waving his arms and shouting. Sergeant Etherson pulled at him from behind, attempting to get him down in a gap. However Levy was oblivious to throughout him besides the meals which poured down.”
“’It’s raining chow, boys . . . it’s raining chow,’” his shrill voice pierced the air.”
