It's an accepted Marine Corps tradition that a unit never leaves it's dead on the battlefield but some disturbing departures from that tenet are being discovered on Okinawa. As King Company 3/5 slowly advances southward against the Shuri defenses, they are encountering grisly remains of American and Japanese casualties practically every time they dig into the island's cloying mud. In one particularly horrible day during a pelting monsoon rain near the Wana Draw area, Sledge and his gunner Snafu Shelton were digging their 60mm mortar into a defilade position when their entrenching tools smashed right through the chest cavity of a dead Japanese trooper left to rot under a mudslide. If that wasn't distressing enough, the next day on his way to man an Observation Post near the top of the ridge, Sledge slid down slope and smashed into a decaying American Marine left rotting in the sludge. The overworked Corpsmen and graves registration people on Okinawa are doing their best but the nasty weather and oceans of mud make finding and recovering casualties a difficult job at best. It's depressing and with the war in its fourth brutal year, many of the veterans have developed a hard psychological shell that will be difficult to crack if they survive and return to civilian life. Sledge is among those combat vets who are becoming numb and fatalistic on Okinawa. After his experiences on Peleliu, Okinawa is testing his belief in a lot of things he's viewed as acceptable human behavior. Caught in the cross fires on Okinawa are large numbers of civilians, the first many Marines have encountered in Pacific campaigns. Scenes of women and children being used as human shields or suicide bombers by Japanese troops have been particularly disturbing. But this is Okinawa; the last bastion of Japanese tyranny in the western Pacific, and brutality on both sides seems to be commonplace. It's too late to be thoughtful or sensitive in combat with the invasion of mainland Japan looming on the horizon. We continue the attack. Semper Fidelis