War and MemoryIn battle, “Semper Fidelis” is not a meaningless slogan. War is indeed, as Thucydides said, a “rough master.†Those who have experienced it are never the same as they were before. In the HBO series The Pacific, the father of future Marine Eugene Sledge, a genteel Southern physician who served in World War I, tells his son that “the worst thing about treating those combat boys from the Great War was not that their flesh had been torn, but that their souls had been torn out.†One who has seen a comrade die, or who has looked into...