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Direct download links available PRETITLE Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] POSTTITLE from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link (40 reviews) Author: ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDFSgt. Steve Maharidge, like many of his generation, hardly ever talked about the war. The only sign he'd served in it was a single black and white photograph of himself and another soldier tacked to the wall of his basement workshop.
After Steve Maharidge's death, his son Dale, now an adult, began a 12-year quest to understand his father's preoccupation with the photo. What had happened during the battle for Okinawa, and why had his father remained silent about his experiences and the man in the picture, Herman Mulligan? In his search for answers, Maharidge sought out the survivors of Love Company, many of whom had never before spoken so openly and emotionally about what they saw and experienced on Okinawa.
In Bringing Mulligan Home, Maharidge delivers an affecting narrative of war and its aftermath, of fathers and sons, with lessons for the children whose parents are returning from war today.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 9 hours and 44 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: HighBridge Company
- Audible.com Release Date: March 12, 2013
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00BAXI328
Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War PDF
We've all seen references in books about WW2 of servicemen who were said to have had a "good war". The term seems to imply those soldiers - mostly officers - who spent their war years in either London or Washington, staying out of the line-of-fire and having a good time while doing so. Those are not the men who returned to their families carrying horrific images of friends being blown to pieces on beaches, the cold-blooded murder of civilians - including women and children - and bearing other traumas of war duty. These men, who suffered from what we later called "PTSD", were sent home with little or no psychological help. These are the men - and families - who Dale Maharidge looks at in his new book, "Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War".
In examining these soldiers, Maharidge begins with his own father. Steve Maharidge, from an immigrant Russian family living in Cleveland, joined the Marines at 19 and after training at Parris Island, was sent to fight in the Pacific Theater. Specifically, on Guam, Guadalcanal, and, most importantly, Okinawa. He was one of the Marines sent in the invasion force on the Japanese island in the late Spring of 1945. Once on the island, as a part of "Love Company", Maharidge and his men were sent to move north on the long, skinny island, fighting Japanese soldiers for every mile. And along the battle lines were native Okinawans, civilians who were forced to leave their homes and hide in caves and hills, often being fatally displaced by Japanese soldiers. The plan was to use Okinawa as a "staging area" for the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands, scheduled to begin on November 1, 1945.
Steve Maharidge was injured by a blast in a local tomb building.
This book may not make you feel good but it will make you feel. It will make you feel the love felt for a father; love expressed in the unrelenting quest to exorcise the demons that possessed his father's mind since the day on Okinawa when a friend, Mulligan, died. It will make you feel the fear, the anguish, the despair and helplessness of young marines fighting for their lives and blindly following the orders of leaders not fully qualified to lead. And the guilt or psychotic lack of remorse for deeds committed because there seemed to be no alternatives. You will almost hear the tapping as the enemy soldiers arm their grenades and the twang as an empty clip is ejected from an M-1 Garand. It will make you feel the emotions of old men who were once the young marines stripped of innocence on far off Pacific islands. You will almost feel their memories emerge after being dulled by alcohol, dementia, obsessive emersion in career or, all too seldom, the over-riding love of family. It will make you feel the brutality of war and make you a believer in the adage that the only good war is one that is over.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Dale Maharidge has written a masterpiece. With his pen, he has pierced a festering wound and released a torrent of puss and blood and maggots. In the first part, he recounts memories of his father, memories of explosive rage mixed with camping trips, the rumble of metal working tools and pleasant times. Always in the background was a picture tacked on the wall of his father's shop of he and a marine friend taken long ago.
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