This is Jockel Podcast number 202 with Echo Charles and me, Jockel Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

On a bright and violent morning in the central Pacific, a dying marine with part of his face shot off saved my life.

He was perched to top the partially raised ramp of an LCVP. He was a big, solidly built man with a gaping gory hole where his eye should have been.

Blood streaming from the wound.

Moments earlier, he had been standing in the water beside me at the bottom of the ramp, waiting with the other wounded men for his turn to board another casualty in the battle for Bayceau Island.

I was dying.

I had been shot through the lower abdomen, hit as my unit waited toward the shore to assault the island.

Two men from my platoon hauled me back to the LCVP and struggled to lift me into the boat.

The marine with the ravaged face who had just boarded now saw that they were having trouble with me.

He reached down, grabbed me with one hand and pulled me up and over the top of the ramp.

Amazing.

And so I didn't die. That too was amazing.

But not really all that significant in the grand scheme of things.

That incident is just a small scene in a very big picture.

So an insignificant event like that. Can you imagine being gut shot in waste deep water under heavy machine gun fire, barely making it back to a landing craft, which is going to save you, being pulled into that landing craft by another wounded marine and surviving?

And can you imagine considering that, that series of events to be insignificant?

It's almost impossible to think that way.

But that excerpt is from a book called Faithful Warriors written by Lieutenant Colonel Dean Ladd, who served as an enlisted and officer in the Marine Corps in the Pacific campaign in World War II.

He participated in the battles for Guadalcanal, Tara, Sipan, and Tinian.

Battles where tens of thousands of Americans were wounded or killed as they fought against the fanatical Japanese Imperial War Machine.

And while it's impossible for us to understand what those men actually went through and what those battles were like, this book does an amazing job of giving us a glimpse into this savage part of war.

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