According to Wikipedia Leckie decided to write this book after walking out of a performance of South Pacific, declaring that he needed to write a book to show people that the war was not a musical. I decided to pick it up after watching HBO's The Pacific. One of my main problems with the mini-series (which I otherwise enjoyed quite a bit) was that we didn't really get to know the characters as people. I thought that reading Leckie's own account of the war might fill in some gaps for me.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, although I found that some parts dragged a little. Leckie gives a great account of life in boot camp, which was something that I was hoping for. His accounts of the various battles are visceral, and don't leave any illusions as to whether or not war was like a musical. He also does a good job of mixing in the periods between battles and keeping it interesting for the most part, throwing in the moments of humour that he experienced alongside the moments of horror.
I did have a few problems with the book. He tended to introduce people without terribly much background information. I realize that this is a war memoir and not a novel, but there were points where I was trying to figure out who exactly was who, and where they fit into the unit or command structure (part of this came from his tendency to use nicknames for virtually everyone). Another minor problem I found was that Leckie almost invariably portrayed himself in a positive light. His various escapades in Australia and on Pavuvu were never his fault, they always seemed to be explained away by him being a loveable "brig-rat" (to use his term). This wouldn't be a huge problem, except it made me start to think that if he glossed over things in those parts of the book, were there other parts that he wasn't totally honest about as well?
Regardless of those problems, it was an excellent book and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in a first-hand account of the life of a marine in the Pacific.
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