“My reaction was particularly painful because when I read the story, I was writing a memoir about my dad and reading the letters he wrote from training camp before he was sent to the Pacific,” she said. “He was just barely 18 when he enlisted and sounded like a kid at summer camp in his letters to his parents. He was asking for gum, candy, underwear (because he didn’t like the GI ones). Like all of the kids we send into the horror of war — he didn’t know what was waiting on the other side.”
Amy Boyle Johnston, author of the 2015 book Unknown Serling, found the story while looking through Serling’s papers at the University of Wisconsin. Serling, who died in 1975, had yet to start a family when he wrote First Squad, First Platoon. But he was already thinking about the next generation, including a dedication to his yet-unborn children urging them to remember “a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh” and “the hopeless emptiness of fatigue” were as much part of war as “uniforms and flags, honor and patriotism.”
Parasi says that First Squad, First Platoon was an early sign of Serling’s ironic touch. One soldier is shot dead as he admires a wooden statuette of Jesus, and another — a true story — is killed by a food relief package.