LUCK OF THE DRAW

A young GI confronts the capriciousness of death during the Battle of Okinawa in this harrowing saga.

Mike Jasas and his buddies Paul and Al sign up as Navy medics, figuring they’ll get a cushy berth in which to ride out World War II. Their reasoning backfires when they’re slated to go ashore with the Marines invading the Japanese island of Okinawa. Al, dying suddenly of a drug overdose, doesn’t even make it off the ship. The last great engagement of the war, Okinawa pitted American soldiers against 120,000 well-entrenched Japanese defenders ready to fight to the last man–but for Mike, savage combat alternates with periods of tranquility. Initially stationed in the mainly peaceful northern part of the island, Mike takes in the lush beauty of the landscape, bonds with Okinawan civilians and enjoys a passionate interlude with a lovely prostitute. Then he heads south for the assault on the main Japanese stronghold, which becomes a bloody stalemate that he witnesses from the front lines. As death hits closer to home, its randomness weighs on Mike–it sometimes takes the brave and sometimes the cautious, and returns long after the fighting seems over in the guise of a booby-trapped body or a lone shell. Young, an Okinawa veteran, paints a grimly engrossing portrait of the soldier’s ordeal–the chaos, boredom and rumor-ridden anxiety, the resentment men feel toward the callousness of the brass, the ghastliness and rot of the battlefield. But he also has an eye for the conflict’s dark visual poetry, for corpses strewn like “rag dolls dropped hap-hazardly from the sky,” and the gracefulness of a kamikaze plane as it “skimmed in low out of the sun, its wing tips delicately poised above the dark water.”

An unforgettable war story, lyrical and gritty.