Your late father in law sounds like he stepped from the pages of E. B. Sledge's, "With the Old Breed : At Peleliu and Okinawa," one of the best books ever written on an infantryman's experience of war and combat.
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My late father in law, one of the most honorable, gentle, and decent men I have ever known -- and utterly respectful to women -- was a Marine in World War II. He'd volunteered before the war for the same reason that kids volunteer now, because he was poor and the service was a job. His unit was the first posted to Pearl Harbor aftyer the attack. He fought through some of the worst battles of the Pacific, and never talked about it. I have no doubt that he saw and maybe did things that were unspeakable; he had nighmares about the war until he died a few years ago. I have never known anyone who hated war more than he did, and he wasn't a pacifist either. But he was always proud, for all that, to have been a Marine -- prouder of that than to have been the first in his family to go to college or to have been one of the first Jews at Princeton -- the Marines sent him there. Assholes? Sadistic temperments? I've seen lots of those in university professorships and big law firms. Don't talk to me about the Marines.