Haunted by disturbing dreams that evoke the bloody days of his youth, William Manchester decided to confront his memories directly. Retracing his steps in the Pacific War, returning again to the jungle-covered rocks wherin he suffered, and where so many of his brother Marines perished long before their time. Goodbye, Darkness is his memoir of that trek, combining history, personal memoir, and brooding travel ruminations. Or…..that’s what it’s written as, anyway: what eighth grade me didn’t know reading this for the first time back in ’98 or ’99 is that Manchester’s boots didn’t hit the ground until Okinawa, so much of this history is….borrowed or perhaps invented, making this a curious mix of history, memoir, and fiction. And I do mean curious: the chapter on Tarawa features Manchester talking about “our” experience in the botched landings, the intense resistance from the Japanese, etc, and even has himself in place arguing with an officer that a frontal assault on a particular objective is suicide until the flanking squads have finished their work; a section later, he notes that his ’78 visit was his first time visiting the island itself. The result is a fascinating if sometimes conflicting work.

Whatever its nonfiction versus fiction status, it is absorbing: as with re-reading Sam Stavisky’s Marine Combat Correspondent, I found myself surprised at the sheer amount of phrases and descriptions from this book that have sunk their way deep into my head, so deep that I didn’t even remember their origin until I saw them here. Many scenes described here have etched themselves into my head, be they fictional or nay – – like Manchester bursting into a hut and making his first kill, then going into shock, soiling himself as he wept. Manchester gets into personal details here, and not just about the war: he documents his attempts to ‘get laid’ before he ships out, not wanting to die a virgin, and — well, much awkwardness ensues, as it does when a psychologically traumatized Manchester begins having delusions of a rotting Japanese seductress trying to tempt him into enemy lines so they can couple. Psychological drama is pervasive here, not surprising given the impetus for Manchester’s “trip”: he’s constantly ruminating on who he was going to war, who he became during the war, what he was fighting for, and the way the world has gone. Manchester, a man who came of age in the early forties, is not impressed by student protestors and the like, and while respecting his former adversaries resents the way Japanese commercial interests have expanded into places where their military forebears had been repulsed at great cost. His feelings about the sites he visits vary widely: in some places, the war’s scars remain in the form of old pillboxes and rotting tanks, whereas he’s absolutely dismayed to arrive at Okinawa and find it covered in neon and asphalt.

Although I soured on Manchester as an historian after Frances and Joseph Gies’ medieval histories throughly destroyed his notion of the Middle Ages, I must say I enjoy him as a writer: even after realizing that this wasn’t a straight memoir, but a mix composed by a man who admits to receiving multiple head wounds and having a memory that’s rather hazy, I was pulled totally into his story. It helps, I think, that I read Manchester at a formative age and don’t find his annoyance and discomfort with the postwar (especially post-Vietnam) world as bothersome as a lot of modern readers. This book is full of visceral details that made the Pacific War come alive when I was reading it in middle school, and I still find it compelling reading despite knowing it’s not Manchester’s experience in full.