a kid in the hell of the Pacific

He wanted to see the war up close. The young Norman Mailer, born in Brooklyn in 1923, was 18 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and his country entered the war against the Axis of Evil. Having just finished his aeronautical engineering studies at Harvard (already having a taste for rockets that we found at the end of the 1960s in his reports on the Apollo mission, which became a book, Bivouac on the Moon), he enlisted as a simple soldier. After his classes, he embarked on the Pacific adventure, within General MacArthur's army.

Mailer joins the 112^e armored regiment from San Antonio and, too far from the action in his eyes, was transferred to a reconnaissance section where he would spend a few days behind Japanese lines in Leyte, Philippines. At the same time, in the same area, James Jones fought in the 25^e infantry division, and Herman Wouk is a destroyer officer. The first will publish, like Mailer three years earlier, his first novel, As long as he…