Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean War’s Greatest Untold Story - The Epic Stand of the Marines of George Company
By: Patrick K. O’Donnell / Narrated By: Lloyd James
Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
Intense, searing, sorrowful…
I’d set four options for possible Memorial Day Listens whenst listing out the Tell Me What’s Next round prior to this; each covering different facets of war and all its possible experiences. While ALL of them received a plethora of votes, I gotta tell ya, as the four-way tie started looming, I kept kinda giving little mental nudges towards Give Me Tomorrow. As my Big Sis and I discussed the upcoming Listens, we both gazed at the audiobook’s cover, completely overtaken with emotion and sorrow. So young, that Marine looks; so tired and bewildered, his eyes seeing something entirely other than the frozen can of food in his bundled hands, his face begrimed and bloodied. He’d just been asked for what he’d have if he could get a wish. Just one more tomorrow, “Give me tomorrow.”
Did he make it? And if so, what were his Tomorrows like after what he’d experienced?
This book is of George Company’s struggles, its smallest of victories as juxtaposed against its horrific losses. It’s of Marines fighting for Chesty Puller, wondering at MacArthur’s “logic” and his “demands”, and it’s of fighting for each other, their fighting brothers.
At first, while I wasn’t engaged that much and found myself groaning because all my knowledge was in 20/20 Hindsight, I did indeed find myself enraged as well. Oh what we ask our fighting men to do, to endure. It opens with a reunion years later when a beloved First Sergeant Rocco Zullo comes back from the dead. No, the old veterans shout: I SAW him die; he’s dead. No, I carried his body to the morgue. No, those imagines have haunted me for years, coming to me in the night, each night.
But he’s alive, and Give Me Tomorrow is a grand accounting of how this First Sergeant organized, inspired, led the way for barely-trained men who quite quickly became seasoned and battle-hardened; for young boys, so very green, with the barest of 30-day training sent to replace the multitude of dead and wounded. Leading by example, Zullo was a man they all looked to, gladly followed. While Chesty Puller may’ve been the leader who made them march a bit smarter, even in their utter weariness, even with so many friends slaughtered? Zullo was the man who made them feel like they could do it, fight till their deaths as they were thrown into suicidal missions against vastly strong Chinese, Chinese who fought without care for their own fallen, who fought based upon their own overwhelming numbers.
There are scenes that author Patrick K. O’Donnell writes that are brutal. While I didn’t feel much, if any emotion, for his work, The Unknowns, here I felt each grinding halt as convoys were ambushed, sitting ducks after finding roadblocks of boulders placed to block off moving forward, finding boulders placed to block off moving back to safer routes. And George Company did not retreat; they fought in a different direction. O’Donnell captures their terror, their resignation, their utter determination to just move forward, backward, away, towards. Just fighting the whole way, blood seeping and spilling on ice and snow.
I spent the just over 6 hours of Give Me Tomorrow rolling through my knowledge of narrators trying to figure out just which American narrator could’ve done better justice to this. Because, you see, Lloyd James (Whom, it turns out, I’m becoming 50-50 on, having liked a performance, having disliked a performance…) just does NOT deliver. The only one I could come up with was Kirby Heyborne, remembering his performance in Four-Four-Two. There, I’d noted that when the battles heated up, Heyborne kicked his delivery up notches in accordance. Plus, he just sounds young, which would’ve been entirely appropriate to capture the youth of members of George Company. Lloyd James? When O’Donnell writes a: BOOM! or a WHOOOOSH! James does a bored …boom… whoosh… and his dialogue for the young men does NOT capture the intensity of their experiences. Rather, he came off with an even-keeled, casual delivery, almost as tho’ this was a self/professional development work.
But jeez! the writing, the imagery is sooo intense, that I’m telling you, these images of helpless, stuck, fighting fighting ever fighting young men, the trapped convoys, the biting Siberian winds that left frostbite and gangrene as just par for the course? They are forever seared in my mind (And in later years, it’d be simply assumed that Korean War veterans, notably of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, each would have had some issues with frostbite and gangrene). No, the narration left a lot to be desired, but man! the writing sure as heck did NOT.
My dad signed up to serve in the Korean War, but he was vastly disappointed that his skills were deemed necessary to be utilized stateside. I’ve not listened to much on the Korean War (To my disappointment and great shame), but I’ve heard enough that I’m sooo thankful that that complicated man didn’t go. Because the end is of friends visiting the graves of friends they saw die.
Till the end, ever haunted, ever faithful…
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