Flesh of My Flesh by Silverman Kaja;

Author:Silverman, Kaja;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

IN THE FIRST SCENE on the ship carrying Charlie Company to Guadalcanal, Tall thinks about what it has cost him to hold the darkness at bay. Rather than being open to a potentially transformative future, he relates to his own life according to the temporal logic of the “already over” and the thematic logic of “waste.” Tall once had gifts to give, but they were never bestowed. As the tortuous ascent of Charlie Company up the hill to the well-protected enemy will later make clear, Tall is not the only one who is forced to pay for his repudiation of mortality. His will-to-mastery in the face of death means mass destruction for his own soldiers as well as the enemy. Ironically, Tall already knows before the Battle of Guadalcanal even begins that whatever its outcome, his own internal war will be impossible to win. Far from neutralizing his fear of death, the exorbitant demands that he is about to make on his men are only likely to increase it. “Worked my ass off,” he muses bitterly. “ [B]rownnosed the generals, degraded myself—for them, my family, my home. . . . [A]ll they sacrificed for me—poured out like water on the ground. All I might have given for love’s sake. Too late. Dyin’ slow as a tree. The closer you are to Caesar, the greater the fear.”

But the most chilling dramatization of what happens to others when we refuse to face “the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of our existence” occurs after the storming of the bunker. An American soldier pulls two Japanese soldiers out of their hiding place at the top of the hill, shouts obscenities at them, beats them, kicks them, and kills one of them. As he makes painfully evident both to the Japanese soldiers and to us, he sees them as a radically different species from himself. In a closely adjacent scene, several members of Charlie Company gather their prisoners in a hut. One of them—Private First Class Don Doll (Dash Mihok)—spits at a prisoner and puts two cigarettes in his nostrils to block out the smell of Japanese corpses. Mortality, he thereby proclaims, is an alien and unwelcome odor.

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