He smashes through the second door expecting to be killed in his tracks, except the sniper is tangled in his gun harness. Another door awaits within, and he realizes that the sniper now knows he is coming. 45 and rushes up the hill, boots in the door, and finds an empty room. He has one opportunity to rush the fisherman’s shack where the sniper is hidden. If he remains in his foxhole, the sniper will eventually kill him, of that he is certain. A man diametrically opposed to violence all his life who suffered greatly at the hands of bullies, Manchester finds himself pinned down by this enemy. Manchester begins with the first man he killed in war, a Japanese sniper, who was shooting down Marines and G.I.s alike.

I finished it on Veterans’ Day, and I do not think I fully understood that holiday until I read this book.

Part history, part recollection of a Marine’s life in the Pacific, the book reads like a novel. Goodbye, Darkness is simply the most poetic memoir I have ever read. I have since found almost every thing the man wrote, most of it, unfortunately out of print. I purchased it, and thus began a mania for Manchester. Years later, while combing through someone’s junk at a garage sale, I found a perfectly good cloth first edition of that book. When I was in high school, we were required to read Manchester’s excellent narrative history of the United States, The Glory and the Dream, a history book like none I had ever read in school. You felt sure that all lands, given our democracy and our know-how, could shine as radiantly as we did.”ĭo we long for those days of absolute evil on our doorstep? No, we long for that fortitude, lost forever to the ages. “To fight World War II,” he writes, “you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s Depression by a struggle for survival…And you had to know that your whole generation, unlike the Vietnam generation, was in this together…You needed nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous, in which nothing was insuperable, whose ingenuity could solve anything by inventing something. Late in William Manchester’s superb memoir of soldiering in the Pacific during World War II, he clarifies why no other generation since could do what they did. Little, Brown/Back Bay Books $16.95, paper Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester