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[withtheoldbreed]

TRUTH IS, YOU'RE THE LUCKY ONE, SID.
you'll never have that nagging thought that you let your family, your friends, and your country down. because that's what I'm afraid of.

User Name/Nick: Gwen
User DW: betterdeadthanred
AIM/IM: girlwonder004 @ AIM
E-mail: isthereair@gmail.com
Other Characters: Bucky Barnes, Peter Parker, Elsa

Character Name: PFC Eugene Sledge
Series: The Pacific
Age: 20
From When?: 1x07: Peleliu Hills - After Ack Ack is shot and killed by a sniper.

Inmate/Warden: Warden. Sledge is a good man who's been forced into terrible situation after terrible situation, and while he's struggled with hanging onto his humanity, he's kept more than enough of it to be able to be a warden on the Barge.
Item: His Bible, which he's writing notes about his combat experience in.

Abilities/Powers: Sledge is a normal baseline human powers wise, with nothing supernatural about him. He's been trained by the United States Marine Corps to be an efficient, competent fighter with firearms, in hand to hand combat, and various other pieces of 1940's tech and weaponry. He was a mortarman, but also acted as a rifleman and a stretcher bearer, and while he's going to be coming aboard with a fair amount of sores and abrasions from the terrible conditions on Peleliu, he's otherwise pretty physically fit if a little underfed.

Personality: This is not the Eugene Sledge who badly wanted to ship out with his best buddy Sid Phillips right after Pearl Harbor.

Gene grew up idolizing heroes of the Civil War and reading stories like Kipling's Gunga Din, all of which painted war as a glamorous, honorable adventure. Obviously people got hurt, and obviously people died, but for the most part, in his mind, war was exactly that: an adventure. Almost fun. Add to that the fact that his family had a long history of military service, his older brother and best friend had already signed up to fight, and the fact that he was an eighteen year old kid when Pearl Harbor was attacked, it seems pretty obvious that he'd be as impatient and eager to enlist as anyone. He spent most of the early years of the war impatiently waiting for his chance to actually go. However, because of his ill health and his parent's worry, he wasn't allowed to enlist, and reacts pretty much like a little kid having a temper tantrum. He wants to do this, and he doesn't care if he has a heart murmur or isn't old enough in his parent's eyes to make this decision for himself. He wants to do it. He even says - more than once - that his best friend Sid is the lucky one.

There's probably a part of him that's frustrated that this is yet another aspect of his life that's been held back by his poor health. Being sick a lot as a kid meant he couldn't always go out and play with his friends and even set him back a couple years school wise, and now it's keeping him out of the Marine Corps. He struggles with feeling like the war might be over before he gets a chance to fight in it. As he writes to Sid, at least his friend won't be left with the nagging sensation that he let his friends, family and country down, whereas Gene feels like that's something he's always going to have to struggle with if the war ends before he can convince his parents to sign his enlistment papers.

In short, when we first meet Gene, he's naive, sheltered, impatient and very enamored with the idea of honor and serving your country without fully understanding the consequences his friends and countrymen are being forced to accept after signing up.

Two years later, and that has all been violently ripped out of him. His innocence, his naivete, the protection his sheltered early life had afforded him, all gone. He's never going to get it back. Ever. Something died in him at Peleliu, and he's never going to be the person he was if he hadn't been there no matter what else - good or bad - happens to him in his future.

This isn't to say that he's now ashamed to serve, or that he'd really change anything he's done to get him to this point - in fact, it's quite the opposite. He's proud to be a member of the Marine Corps, and he's proud of his company and knows that the war they're fighting needs to be fought, but he understands now that there's nothing glamorous or appealing about war itself. It's insane, it's violent, and he's getting pieces of his soul ripped out just as his father had worried he would. He knows that when the war's over if he makes it out alive (and that's a pretty big "if"), he isn't going to be staying in the service, although he also has no idea what he's supposed to do if or when he does go home.

At first glance, Gene doesn't really seem to fit the mold of the sort of person who would really, really want to be a marine. He's quiet and kind of an observer, not a gung-ho, athletic, borderline obnoxious or bossy sort. He's always been very interested in nature and exploring the great outdoors, and one of the things that helps keep him sane during combat is keeping a small combat diary of what he's witnessing, scribbled into the margins of the Bible he carries in his breast pocket. He was raised in a fairly traditional, wealthy Southern family, so he's been polite and quiet long before the Marines drilled saying "sir" and "ma'am" into him.

Once you get to know him, he does seem more like a normal young guy who's just as capable of a snarky comment or obnoxious joke as the rest of his friends, but it takes a bit to get that out. His default is quiet, polite and a bit of a watcher, preferring to take a step back and assess a situation before barreling into it. In general, he's a little reactive - if something happens, he'll do something about it - but he's also content to watch and wait for orders. This isn't to say he won't speak up if something's really, really wrong and needs to get dealt with right away, but he's just sort of a quiet person who doesn't always put his cards out on the table for everyone else to see, or try to mask his real feelings with bravado and sex jokes. He's sensitive and notices details about people and their surroundings, and still possesses an enthusiasm for nature and interest in learning.

Gene is calm under fire. Although often visibly scared, he doesn't cry, shake or panic when things get rough. He actually seems to almost shut down, like he's sort of watching it all happen from a distance, and just does what he has to do without hesitating or worrying over it. He's very highly motivated to keep up with his buddies and do the job he needs to do so that they're all safe. This will probably translate well to how he acts in a crisis on the Barge, although because he'll be a little more out of his element and the ship is a lot more disorganized than what he's used to (which is saying something), there is some possibility that he also might freeze up and not be sure of what to do without someone giving him orders or at least pointing him in the right direction. Gene's not really a leader - he's not a mindless follower either, but he's in no rush to be the one always running out into enemy fire if he doesn't have to be. He can direct people and give instructions if need be and does actually seem to take this job very seriously with the new replacements to the mortar squad on Okinawa, but true leadership roles are not things he seeks with particular enthusiasm.

He would, however, be a good teacher. Even while stressed out, frustrated, and utterly unwilling to be involved in this shitty fucking situation any longer, he can calmly pass along instructions and information. Sure, he might snap or not so gently correct, but that's because they're in a combat zone, and he'll be a lot more gentle once he's pulled out of it.

And despite not being an actual Captain America or John Basilone, Gene is certainly capable of doing stupidly brave things, especially if the safety of one of his friends is involved. Before he's even really especially close to Snafu (at this point, Snaf has been a creepy weirdo, thrown up on him, yelled at him for trying to take his boots off, swapped food with him and then casually committed a war crime which does not exactly a best friendship make), when Gene realizes the other marine's been knocked over during their assault on the airfield, he turns around to help him back to his feet and get him running again, a gesture that could have gotten him killed. Later, Gene tries to calm and then shelter Bill Leyden after he gets sprayed in the face with shrapnel from a Japanese grenade, and when Bill is injured again on Okinawa (after Gene's pull point, but still relevant), Gene throws himself at him to try and pull Bill back to safety, and has to be restrained by Hamm and Snafu so he doesn't get hit, too. Even when Peck - a guy Gene's not especially fond of or close to - effectively tries to commit suicide on Okinawa, Gene runs after him to try and pull him away from enemy fire until Snafu grabs Gene to pull him back to safety.

His friends are really the things that are helping and will help him get through this whole experience, and are the one thing he really considers fully worthwhile about his time at war. He does believe that their cause is just, but it helps to have people looking out for you and feeling some sense of intense community with the people who are watching your back. You could never get through this on your own, and Gene's aware of and intensely grateful for that.

His ability to shut down in the face of serious danger and life threatening situations definitely isn't to say that he doesn't feel things, because he absolutely does. He's just gotten very good at compartmentalizing and not dwelling on the harder things in life out of necessity. "You can't dwell on it, you can't dwell on any of it," is the advice Ack Ack gives him after an especially bad day, and Gene has does his best to cling onto that advice as hard as he can without completely shutting off what makes him a person. Gene is very sensitive and very deeply affected by the violence he's been exposed to, and he struggles a lot with knowing how much to shut himself down to just get through it, and how much he can continue being human in a completely inhumane situation. The longer he's in the war, the harder it is to maintain any feelings of sympathy or empathy for the enemy, and it starts getting more difficult to put himself out there and make friends with the new guys, too. There are times when Gene finds himself slipping - a few days after his pull point, he almost desecrates an enemy soldier's corpse, and only stops because Snafu tells him not to do it. At the moment, Gene's more angry than anything else, but later on he realizes that his friend is looking out for him so that Sledge walks away from this with a little more of his humanity preserved, even if it's already too late for Snaf and a lot of the other guys.

Despite all the violence, personal loss and emotional trauma, Gene is and always was a very compassionate person. One of the reasons being exposed to all this violence is so hard on him is because he's a really sensitive, empathetic person, and he starts needing to trample that part of himself down a little bit so he can survive. It still exists, though - we see Gene reaching out to new replacements on Okinawa and guiding them through high stress situations with a calm urgency instead of flipping out at them. When his friend Jay breaks down on Peleliu, Gene pulls him into a hug and lets him cry on him basically until he wears himself out. Even when it seems like he's utterly lost his humanity on Okinawa, we see that that desensitized, violent person isn't who he truly is - although earlier he had expressed a desire to kill every Japanese person left on the island and shouts at Mac that they came here to kill Japs, so what difference does it make if he uses a sidearm or not, when he and Snafu find a baby screaming in the arms of his dead mother in a wrecked house, the old Sledge begins to come back. After Mac takes the baby away and Snafu leaves, he finds a mortally wounded old woman who asks him to shoot her. Instead, Gene holds and comforts her as she dies, and then yells at another Marine who shoots an unarmed Japanese soldier, demanding to know if the other marine feels good about himself for killing a kid, and reacting with shocked horror as his own words from earlier - we were sent here to kill Japs, weren't we? - get thrown back in his face.

Even though the war has aged him considerably, in some ways, Gene still kind of is just a kid. He's scared a lot, or unsure, or homesick, and he looks up to the older, more experienced guys in his company even as they start to crumple, too. There's definitely a large part of Gene that idolized Ack Ack the same way you'd look up to a parent, or an older sibling, and losing him hit him (and everyone else in K Company) really, really hard. It's another loss that never really goes away or stops haunting him, even if it wasn't like they were best friends or especially close, but Ack Ack went above and beyond to get to know and look after the guys he led, and Gene misses him a lot.

Gene wanted to go to war, but he isn't the sort of person who really ever fully walks away from it, even if he makes it out alive and physically unhurt. His acceptance of the war's brutality is short lived and mostly a survival tactic, and even then you can see how much the violence and misery is chipping away at him. Being removed from the situation will help him recover a little, but he's never really going to be a fully healthy person ever again, and will always be haunted by the things he's seen and done.

Barge Reactions: Being on the Barge will take some adjustment for Sledge. Aside from most people being fairly far removed from the 1940's time period and technology wise, Sledge has been in horribly brutal combat for about a month without having a break, and that has left some serious scars. He'll do his best to interact positively with other people and will probably do a decent enough job of it, but he's going to be struggling with pretty severe PTSD for a long time, and thanks to canon updates, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Because he comes from a time and place where people are really only just starting to be genuinely understanding of things like mental health and illness, Gene will have a hard time talking with people about what exactly is wrong with him because he kind of lacks the vocabulary for it, he still thinks of it as having a bit of a stigma, and because he assumes that most of the people here just won't fully understand what he's been through.

And again thanks to the time period he's wandering in from, it's likely that Gene will carry at least one prejudice that a modern person might find distasteful, and that is that he's really, really starting to hate the Japanese to the point of where he doesn't quite see them as human anymore. At this point, he isn't quite as far gone as he will be upon being canon updated - he's still obviously horrified when he makes his first close range kill - but after Ack Ack's death and the constant horrible conditions and violence he's subjected to, he starts tipping over the edge a little. Now, obviously he won't be trying to hurt anyone of Japanese ancestry on the Barge because he knows the difference between a combatant and a civilian, and a person from a completely different time and place than where he's coming from, but it's likely that his language will offend some people. Specifically, he does frequently refer to the Japanese as "Japs" or "Nips", and will probably have a hard time dealing with people telling him that's offensive or not politically correct anymore, because you haven't been where he's been so you don't get to tell him how to act or react.

As a warden, Gene will do his best to be patient and understanding with his inmate, although he probably won't do well with someone who's genuinely an unrepentantly awful person. He'll try to come up with ways to keep them busy and want to come up with some sort of schedule for them, because down time is a great way to get into mischief or think too much about things that are better left alone. He'll likely do especially well with a younger or less experienced inmate, as he'll be able to guide and teach them a little more naturally than if he's supposed to be mentoring a cranky set in their ways fifty year old, but honestly? He can probably make just about any partnership work so long as the inmate's at least somewhat sorry for what they've done and hasn't committed utterly unforgivable acts. There's a possibility he might get cranky and hands off with an inmate who doesn't take him seriously because of his age, and he'll have a hard time dealing with anyone (warden, inmate, Admiral) who tries to dismiss what he's been through or turn things into a pissing contest of who's suffered the worst in their life. He might seek help or advice from older, more experienced wardens, but will take responsibility for disciplining and controlling his inmate if they get into trouble because this is a job, and he's here to do it right.

In a sharp contrast to certain other people on my roster, Gene will get very weird and cranky if people try to pressure him into passing along some of the stuff he's learned during his time with the Marine Corps. He still might do it in a crisis situation, but he's absolutely not interested in joining, forming or leading boot camp or drilling people in hand to hand or other survival methods. He'll struggle a lot between wanting to never have to pick up a rifle again now that he's outside of the war and knowing that the Barge is still a dangerous place you can't fully let your guard down in, and have a lot of guilt over the fact that he's here and has access to clean water and hot food when his friends are still stuck on Peleliu. He'll also have a hard time dealing with the fact that he still has to go back there, even if he doesn't want to convince the Admiral to just drop him off back home when this is over, either.

Basically, Gene is a mess and will try very hard to help someone be less of a mess with hopefully relative amounts of success.

Path to Redemption: N/A

Deal: Sledge will have been convinced to join as a warden with the promise that upon graduating an inmate, Captain Andrew Haldane won't be killed by the sniper on Peleliu and will survive the war.

History: Eugene Sledge on The Pacific Wikia

Sample Journal Entry:
[Gene isn't really one for making lengthy public network posts. He uses it, but he's not usually one of the people waxing poetic about why they're here, or what this all is supposed to mean, or how fucked up all of this really is.

Not that he doesn't think about any of those things, but usually, those thoughts he's not sure he really wants or needs to share with anyone. He's more than happy to discuss things with other people when they're in the mood to talk, but initiating the whole thing? Not something he has a lot of enthusiasm for.

Tonight's different.

It's late when he makes the post - late, like maybe three in the morning, and when he clicks on the video feed, it's clear he's tired. He's got raccoon eyes and a thousand yard stare, and holds up a book to show the camera.]

I found this in the library. [And that wouldn't be a big deal, because there are hundreds of books about the war in here, except:] I wrote it.

[Or some version of him, anyway, some other E. B. Sledge who fought on Peleliu and Okinawa with the Marines, and somehow, in this moment, it feels a hell of a lot worse than finding out he was in some movie everyone else has seen.

He looks more hollowed out than anything else, maybe a little violated, and his hand clenches around the paperback book, but doesn't shake.]

What're we supposed to do with stuff like this? How am I supposed to go home knowing what's gonna happen to me? Even if I didn't read it, as soon as I got here, people told me the war was over because we dropped some bomb that wiped out an entire city, that we're going to war in Vietnam and the Middle East, and what am I supposed to do with that?

[There's quiet desperation there now, and despair. All of this is stuff he shouldn't know, things he should just watch play out, and he's not sure if he's relieved he survives the war or upset because he knows he's never really going to be okay again.

Gene lets out a shaky breath, and asks his next question with a sort of exhausted resignation.]

Have any of you read it?

Sample RP:
Gene's been through a lot in the last few weeks. More since coming to the Barge, and while he's not stupid enough to think he's been through everything - not by a long shot - he'd thought maybe, he'd know how to cope with most of what the ship had to throw at him.

But he's never been hunted before. Not outside of his dreams, and this? This is a whole new level of terrifying.

He's back in the visitor's center, crouched behind some metal cabinets in the kitchen, covered in mud, sweat and not a little blood. Most of it's not his, most of it belongs to- Right after the raptor had-

An involuntary shudder rips through him as he remembers the scream, the spray of arterial blood across his face as he'd stumbled and ran, nothing he hasn't seen or heard or felt before, but that doesn't stop it from being terrifying, and he'd heard the Skipper's voice echoing in his head - you can't dwell on it, you can't dwell on any of it - after he'd collapsed, panting, hopefully far away from the creature and its scythe-like claws.

Gene had thrown up, swallowed down a scream, and kept moving. That's what you have to do to survive, and he's not quite ready to just lay down and die.

He'd known this place was bad news as soon as he'd stepped off the ship and realized how humid it was. It's like Pavuvu - damp and miserable and sticking, with that heady sickly sweet smell of decay permeating the air - and he'd wanted to turn right back around even before he'd realized what was going on here. Before they'd stumbled upon the overgrown ruins of the visitor center, before people had started getting attacked, before they'd realized there was no food.

It's hours later, and he's still not safe. Not really hurt, either beyond a few scrapes and bruises, but that doesn't change the fact that there's blood on him, and the raptors will be able to smell it. They can probably smell fear, too, and God knows he's afraid. Maybe more afraid than he's ever been before, including when he'd first hit the beach, because now he's alone, he doesn't have the other members of K/3/5 around him, or Navy planes rocketing overhead or ships off shore. No Snaf, no Burgie, no Ack Ack, and no one from the Barge, either, as best he can tell. He's had the 23rd Psalm on repeat in his head since he found his way back to the abandoned visitor's center, and it hasn't been much of a comfort, especially when there'd come that rustling that means he's not alone. Gene had scrambled into the abandoned kitchen - he needs a weapon, a knife, anything, his fingers itch for his carbine and a cigarette worse than ever before - and realized again that he wasn't alone.

They found him. Or something did.

Gene hadn't thought to bar the door, and now there's the gentle click, click, click of that terrible claw rapping against the tile. Snuffling, too, and that horrible shrieky bark they used to communicate. They're trying to figure out the best way to gang up on him and rip him to shreds.

Except then someone calls out from the dining room - "Hello?" - and Gene can almost hear the creatures snapping to attention. They're smart, though, they don't just rush out. Gene can hear their claws - click, click, click - tapping slowly as they slink back out, and Gene wants to call out, wants to warn whoever it is, but he can't without exposing himself, and then they're both dead, anyway. He needs something else, he needs something bigger, he needs-

His scrambling right hand finds a knife and his fingers wrap around the hilt easily. It's not his KA-BAR, and it feels wrong, somehow, but it's better than being unarmed. He still can't warn them, and the dinosaurs are almost as big as he is, but fuck, if he's going to die, he'd rather not do it cowering in some rusted, beaten up kitchen.

Of course, he'd rather not die at all, but he's been a fugitive from the law of averages for a long time. His luck was bound to run out eventually.

Special Notes: I know I talk a lot about things that happened on Okinawa despite his pull point being from well before that, but I think it still covers a lot of territory that's relevant to this Sledge and what he's been through thus far/how he'll be coping on the Barge, so hopefully it's okay and not super confusing. :|b

Also here's more proof that I kinda know what I'm doing with this kiddo.