Word: platoonic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Guests in Charge. Next day the fat of international friendship was in the fire. With more anger than accuracy, some newspapers charged that a platoon of U.S. paratroopers was maltreating Mexicans on Mexican soil. Mexican reporters said they had been menaced by "machine guns and large combat weapons." Powerful Excelsior said the newsmen had been mistreated "simply because they were Mexicans...
...characters of The Naked and the Dead are the members of a platoon, six of them survivors of a rubber-boat disaster at Motome, wearied, embittered, haunted by a premonition of death, snarling about the newcomers and (occasionally) feeling a grudging responsibility for them, nervous, profane, lecherous. Their conversation is recorded with the fidelity of a recording machine. Indeed, it is almost too exact and too tough to be quite accurate...
...have a faint sense of pride in the platoon, not so much in the sense of liking the members of it, as of respect for what it has gone through. They have a mild pride in (partly fear of) a good officer, and a hesitant, partly exasperated approval of the democratic process that has placed them, Jews and anti-Semites, intellectuals and illiterates, in the same unearthly, uncomfortable place. They fight shy of any speechmaking about any of these things. Democracy is not a faith they fight for; it is a sort of punishment they take for not having believed...
Nightmare in a Wonderland. In an atmosphere of uncomprehending misery, the platoon is ordered on a reconnaissance patrol on the far side of the island, over the vast peaks of the Watamai Mountains. It is in itself an incident in the war superior to most war fiction, the patrol through a wonderland of grass growing higher than the heads of the men, spiders, and endless spider webs, gnats, buzzing silence, rain and sunlight, golden sand and indigo trees-a nightmare in which one after another is killed. What deepens the irony is that the campaign is successful without the benefit...
...Author. Norman Mailer attended public schools in Brooklyn, at Harvard studied engineering, shortly after graduation married Beatrice Silverman (later a lieutenant in the WAVES). During the war he served in Leyte, Luzon and Japan, as a clerk, an aerial photograph expert, a rifleman in a reconnaissance platoon, a cook, a baker. Discharged in 1946, he wrote The Naked and the Dead in a year and a half...