A unique memoir chronicling a personal journey toward war as a Marine

Weston D. Eastman’s Scuttlebutt is one of a growing number of newly published war memoirs that were written during World War II.  As the war ended over 70 years ago, and there are few living veterans, many of these “during, or just after the event” memoirs are appearing as families remember and honor their hero parents and relatives.  Many of these memoirs had been stashed away in remote corners of drawers or attics,  forgotten or either unintentionally repressed from memory because they were painful reminders of what Molly Guptill Manning describes as “the horrors and unimaginable scenes of violence and destruction  for which no training could fully prepare them.”

The World War II memoir is itself a unique sub genre of the personal narrative. Adding to the more famous examples of WWII memoirs such as E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed and Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow, there is a plethora of self-published and newly discovered memoirs and journals appearing in print.

While Eastman’s falls into an autobiographical sub-genre of ‘fictionalized memoir’, it’s not entirely clear how much of the story is invented. Perhaps only the names of the characters were changed.  In any case, on many occasions over the course of his post-war life, Eastman referred to his memoir as his “novel”, hinting of a desire to see it someday published.

In his introduction to his Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing, Alex Vernon notes that “there is something of a tradition of dressing up memoirs as fiction in war narratives”, going on to list the many examples, from Robert Graves, Tim O’Brien, Elie Wiesel and many others.  While the reason for some of them was in part to remove the self from the psychic trauma of the actual event, it’s not clear that this is the case with Eastman.  It’s certainly possible that he simply wanted to protect the true identity of his characters.

Samuel Hynes’ The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War is generally regarded as one of the best at defining the modern personal war narrative.  Hynes points out that there are two kinds of records, and two reasons for writing them, based on “the need to report and the need to remember”.  Reporting appears through diaries and journals, mixing the mundane with the extraordinary. Remembering appears through the form of the memoir, which tend to be more reflective, perhaps more imagined, as they are constructed with the perspective of time looking back.

Eastman’s narrative actually seems to fall in between these two kinds.  His writing takes place during his basic training, but rather than organizing it into daily, dated entries, it is organized into chapters.  This alone makes his work unusual. It’s a kind of memoir written with immediacy, rather than from the distant perspective found in memoirs written looking back in time.  It falls into somewhere between simply recording events, from mundane to startling, to a meaningful, somewhat fictionalized and organized narrative. This in-between distinction provides the reader with an interesting insight into Eastman’s reflective mind as a soldier-in-training.  It also sheds light on how, and why he wanted to convey this experience.

Hynes wrote that soldier feels the need to remember because  “it will probably be the one time when their lives intersect with history.” As Eastman was writing during his training, he anticipated the momentousness of his military experience, in the context of both his own life and to a broader degree his country.  At 23 years old, he found his life’s purpose symbolized in the poster of Uncle Sam saying “We Want You”.  He began his military training with a belief in a higher cause.

On several occasions Eastman found himself amazed by the generosity of everyday civilians, for example at those who took in Marines to give them a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner.  These occasions undoubted further fueled his conviction in the morality of the War. He shared the belief in the War as a necessity to protect the American way of life.

While this adds some insight to his motivation for writing, it seems there are other reasons as well.  His dedication to “all Marines” is evidence of his fraternal pride and foreshadows his life-long identity as a Marine (also evident in his active post-war membership in Veteran civic associations).   However, though it is dedicated to the men who served in the war, it’s clear that Eastman’s intended audience was the general public.  Its a primer about the culture of the Marines, following “boot” Eastman as he voluntarily enlists and enters training camp. Whether he wanted to enlighten civilians, record his memories for posterity, or honor the life of the Marine remains unclear, but it’s more than likely a combination of all of these.

There is at times an innocence to Eastman’s writing, perhaps mirroring his state-of-mind during this formative period that stretched from enlisting to embarking for war. His reasons for voluntarily enlisting certainly originated from a sense of obligation to his country. But he also repeatedly mentions looking forward to when “people would sigh as I walked by in my blues” (The elusive appointment of his ‘blues’ punctuates nearly every chapter). A mix of intentional self-deprecating humor and assumed civic virtue, woven throughout the story, forebodes the looming combat that comes afterward.  One can’t help but appreciate Eastman’s sometimes joyful, sometimes begrudging identity as the everyman soldier, “doing his part”, and his faith that these values were shared among his fellow enlistees.

Scuttlebutt takes place squarely during Eastman’s training. At the end of the memoir, he literally sails off into the sunset as he is deployed into the Pacific. He was well aware of the dangers he was heading into, aware that possibly he, but certainly men that he was with, would not return home. But what came next is relative silence. Unlike during his training period, Eastman never wrote about his experience overseas. He survived some of the War’s bloodiest battles, including Bougainville and Iwo Jima, and ultimately, he survived the War, having earned a Purple Heart for his wounds.

World War II veterans were for the most part citizen-soldiers with no intention of  going to war until the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor. In the case of Weston D. Eastman, he was an Ivy League citizen-student who would be transformed into a grizzled combat soldier fighting in the South Pacific.