The Pacific’: Even HBO ups the drama

If you’ve been watching the HBO series “The Pacific,” you know that the 10-part series - eight of which have been broadcast so far - is based on four different books. I’ve read two of them and am familiar with a real-life character featured in a third.

The books that I’ve read are the memoirs “Helmet for My Pillow” by Robert Leckie and “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa” by E.B. Sledge. Sledge also wrote “China Marine,” and the fourth book is Chuck Tatum’s memoir “Red Blood, Black Sand.”

For the most part, the series sticks close to the facts. What’s interesting, though, is how little differences loom big. In the series, for example, Leckie has an awkward goodbye with his father. The elder Leckie, more concerned with his damaged car axle than in bidding his son farewell, ultimately settles for a firm, manly handshake. I thought, when seeing the scene, that’s exactly how men of that generation would act.

Then I read Leckie’s book: “”It had been a silent trip across the meadows and it was a wordless good-by in front of the bronze revolving doors at Ninety, Church Street. My father embraced me quickly, and just as quickly averted his face and left.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the use of the word “embraced” seems like more than a mere manly handshake.

Sledge’s story is dramatized in a different way. In the series, a big deal is made of Sledge’s father - a physician - diagnosing him with a heart murmur, which delays his entry into the war. In fact, Sledge makes no mention of a heart murmur and explains the delay, which kept him from participating (as Leckie did) in the Guadacanal campaign, by revealing that he had initially signed up for officer’s training. But impatient to go to the war of his generation, Sledge flunked out purposely and enlisted.

As for his parents, who in the series are portrayed as deeply concerned about their son’s fate, Sledge wrote, “Mother and Father were mildly distraught at the thought of me in the Marine Corps as an enlisted man - that is, ‘cannon fodder.’ ”

Finally, we come to the story of John Basilone (played in the miniseries by John Seda), the hero of Guadalcanal and a Medal of Honor recipient. In one segment, Basilone is shown doing the standard drill-instructor routine, screaming and yelling at the FNGs in his training unit.

Yet here’s how one of Basilone’s Marine buddies, William Douglas Lansford, described in the Los Angeles Times how Basilone acted as a D.I. trainer: “Serving with Basilone was a brief but golden period of the war for me. He never barked like the other gunnery sergeants but ruled like a wiser, older brother looking after his younger siblings, with humor and a style all his own.”

As for Basilone’s death, much has been written about it, most of it fanciful. In the miniseries, he gets stitched by machine gun fire and dies in the midst of battle, looking dreamily at the action around him and the sky overhead. Here, though, is what Lansford - who arrived on Iwo Jima in the wave behind Basilone - has to say: “Many men have said they saw John Basilone fall on the beach, which he did not. One said Basilone’s legs were blown off by a mine. Several claim they heard Basilone’s final words, and one said Basilone begged to be put out of his misery with his own pistol. It’s all fiction.

“The most credible eyewitness is Roy Elsner - the headquarters cook who had watched our machine-gun drills back in Pendleton and knew Basilone by sight. He said that when he and some buddies were hunting for their headquarters: ‘A few hundred yards from Motoyama Field No. 1 we heard an explosion, which caused us to look [toward the field]. We saw Basilone and the three guys who were with him fall.’ ”

As we all know, movies operate from their own sense of drama. And melodrama. HBO often does a better job at capturing reality than regular mainstream Hollywood adaptations (see Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” or John Woo’s “Windtalkers,” for a couple of prime examples). But it’s always good to take even that premium cable channel’s versions of real-life events with at least a couple of grams of salt.

Below : HBO’s “The Pacific.”