Saturdays have always been my favorite day of the week. It is the week’s equivalent of the year’s Christmas. As kids growing up in suburban Los Angeles, we woke up really early on Saturday so we wouldn’t miss the cartoons. Sometimes we would get up so early the farm report was still on. I guess that was the time we shoveled down our cereal and waited for the familiar music in the opening titles of our favorite show.

Every year in the fall, each TV network would unveil their new Saturday morning cartoon line-up. We would be so excited to catch the first glimpse of the new weekend fare. It was so cool to go to the store and find lunch boxes portraying our TV heroes to take to the first day of school. I loved the way those brand-new Aladdin lunch boxes smelled when first opened. The thermos was a cool thing, too. It kept our milk luke-warm until we swished our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches down with it before whisking off to play dodge ball or marbles, awaiting the dreaded recess bell to ring, calling us back into the classroom.

When we were kids, we didn’t look for quality in our cartoons, we just wanted to laugh and be transported into the two-dimensional world that beamed into to our living rooms. Looking back now at the cartoons of the 60’s and early 70’s, I am amazed how quickly they must have pushed those things out of the production line. The backgrounds were looped so you could always count to 5 and the same background scene with Barney and Fred running was repeated. We were gullible, but we loved our cartoons. I guess the ritual would last from 7AM till 10 AM when mom or dad would kick us out of the house to go play or do chores.

When I sit down to look at cartoons today I am bored in seconds. For goodness sake, they have full-time cartoon networks nowadays where kids don’t have to wait until Saturday to see them. They are always on. I remember when I started to get into my pre-teens, Sid & Marty Croft produced live-action kid shows like The Bugaloos, Lidsville and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Also a favorite from another production company was H.R. Pufnstuff with Freddie the Flute and Jimmy. I loved the water that Jimmy would swim up in during the show’s intro segment; I always wanted to go there and live on that island. I remember my desire to watch cartoons faded right before Land of the Lost became popular because I don’t think I ever watched it.

Things have changed drastically in 40 years. I sit here at the computer with a bit of melancholy for the days gone by. I can still see, in my mind’s eye, three boys, shaved heads, in their PJ’s looking intently into the TV, transfixed by moving drawings on a screen. Those days have gone but are precious memories, none the less.

I have been watching The Pacific on HBO. The episodes have been recorded onto my DirecTV hard disc so I can pick the right time to view them later each week. There are 10 installments of the series and I completed #9 yesterday afternoon. The shows portray such brutality that I have to be careful when I watch them so I don’t carry the visions of carnage with me to my daily responsibilities. Actually, I have been unable to successfully dodge the terrible images in my mind . The plight of the 1st Marine Division soldier’s experiences during the horrid Pacific Theater of Operations of WWII in such battles as Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, Okinawa and Iwo Jima are breathtaking. One of the real-life characters from the movie is the now 85 year old Sidney Phillips from Mobile, Alabama.

Sid came back home to South Alabama after the war. He had decided while at Cape Gloucester to become a physician and settled in Mobile to practice medicine. Eventually, many years later, he became a friend and doctor to my wife’s family. Brenda grew up with Sid’s son, Sidney, teaching her at Greystone Christian School and later we became personal friends and fellow church congregants with his youngest son and daughter-in-law, Charles and Sue Phillips. When one meets Dr. Phillips, there is an air of “old southern gentleman” that surrounds him. To realize that for years he and his sons ran an antiques business makes that so much more understandable. Dr. Phillip’s place is filled with history and the furnishings that followed lives to just short of their eternal destinations. This all seems so mild when seeing the horrible experiences that Sid lived on Tenaru, Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester. Sid and his older sister, Catherine, were also featured on Ken Burn’s, The War, in 2007.

My father, Tom Harvill, also served in WWII. He is just a day shy of being 2 years younger than Sid Phillips. He was a latecomer to the war, not by desire, but by age. Although stationed stateside as a Navy Corpsman, he witnessed the carnage that was brought back home. Corpsmen were the medical caregivers that fought right alongside the Marines portrayed in The Pacific. My dad saw victims of the battles and helped with surgeries in military hospitals. In fact, my dad served in the Korean War as well. I am so proud of him and that my lineage includes veterans from almost every war since the Revolution. When I visited my dad last month in North Carolina, he gave me something I have seen around my childhood home since I can remember: his Navy Corpsman’s field box. It contains all the battlefield surgical supplies that one could carry to battle. When I see the Corpsmen helping the Marines in the movie, I think of the medicine box my dad gave me. I love you, Pop!

I would recommend The Pacific to those who are not faint of heart. The battle scenes are recreated with, even as the veterans testify, brutal realism. The language is as crude as you would imagine a group of terrified, just-out-of-high-school boys would be. The adult scenes in the movie are unnecessary, in my opinion, as they didn’t help propel the heart of the story (with the categorical exception of Basilone). I realize that this is HBO. All in all, this movie is brilliant. I hope it helps our contemporaries understand the blood shed, the anguish and the bravery that pushed the troops ahead, against all odds, to take the enemy’s ground, inch by inch, into victory.

To all the armed forces, past and present, I humbly thank you.

My mom & dad, Tom & Betty Harvill, 1952