Issue 80 - Survival

Welcome to Issue 80 of Deep Life Reflections, where I share five things I’ve been enjoying and thinking about over the past week.

I’m now back in Dubai after two and a half enjoyable weeks in Spain. I hope you enjoyed the three-part ‘Look Back’ series while I was traveling. This week, we return to our usual format with a thematic focus on survival. We begin with E. B. Sledge’s 1981 memoir With The Old Breed, which details his harrowing experiences as a U.S. Marine during World War II. From there, we explore one of the greatest survival stories of the twentieth century in the new documentary Apollo 13: Survival. Both stories illustrate how survival hinges on trust, teamwork, and a shared belief in something greater—qualities that are perhaps more vital than ever in today’s increasingly fragmented and distrusting world.

Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.

1. What I’m Reading

With The Old Breed. By E. B. Sledge.

“Of all the books about the ground war in the Pacific, [This] is the closest to a masterpiece.” – The New York Review of Books

In Issue 76, ‘Duality,’ I reflected on watching HBO’s 2010 mini-series The Pacific, which shows the brutal reality of U.S. soldiers fighting in World War II. The series drew partly from Private E. B. Sledge’s memoir, With The Old Breed. After finishing the show, I wanted to explore Sledge’s story further and started reading his 1981 memoir, which recounts the raging horrors of the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa.

Perhaps, like me, when a subject captures your interest, you feel compelled to explore it more deeply. Eugene Bondurant Sledge, born in Mobile, Alabama, was just 19 when he volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942. During his time in the Pacific, Sledge kept notes in his pocket-sized New Testament. After the war, he compiled these notes into his memoir, written nearly forty years later.

What struck me most was the quality of Sledge’s writing. His ability to recall and articulate both the events and his emotions is exceptional. It’s brutally honest, realistic, and haunting—there’s no false patriotism, only the actual reality of what it was like to be in that war. Sledge is the voice of the common soldier, dropped into a zone of terror where a thick blanket of destruction and death lies. Men prayed for the ‘million-dollar wound’—an injury that would end their war but let them live. Few were so lucky.

In ordinary life, compassion is one of our most vital human traits—yet in war, it becomes a heavy burden for those who feel it. Sledge was a compassionate man, and through his writing, we see how he struggled to maintain his humanity in the face of relentless violence. He reflects on how war debases us, citing Wilfred Owen’s First World War poem Insensibility, which captures the cost of empathy in combat: “Those who feel most for others suffer most in war.”

On September 15, 1944, Sledge joined the U.S. Marines’ assault on Peleliu, a small island 500 miles east of the Philippines. The battle, often called “The Forgotten Hell,” was one of the war’s most vicious.

“Something in me died at Peleliu,” Sledge recalls. “Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians who do not have to endure war’s savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it. But I also learned important things. A man’s ability to depend on his comrades and immediate leadership is absolutely necessary.”

For Sledge, survival came down to trust in those around him and good leadership. Yet even with these, there were many moments when he simply waited to die, the shelling and carnage around him too overwhelming to think otherwise. That he survived, he recognised as pure luck. And even for those who lived, the war changed them forever.

2. What I’m Watching

Apollo 13: Survival. Directed by Peter Middleton.

We all know the famous words: “Houston, we have a problem.” Spoken by command module pilot Jack Swigert after an explosion onboard Apollo 13 en route to the Moon—except, that’s not quite what was said. Swigert actually told Mission Control, “Okay, Houston…we’ve had a problem here.” When asked to repeat his words by the capsule communicator, mission commander Jim Lovell confirmed: “Ah, Houston, we’ve had a problem.” All this is to say how important details can be, and the new documentary Apollo 13: Survival, currently on Netflix, is meticulous in telling the story exactly as it happened through archival material.

The story of how three NASA astronauts bound for the moon on Apollo 13 survived a near-fatal explosion 210,000 miles from Earth captivated the world in April 1970. After an oxygen tank exploded and tore through one side of their spacecraft, the crew—Fred Haise, Jack Swigert, and Jim Lovell—were left with severely limited oxygen, electrical power, and heat. They endured four harrowing, ice-cold, near-suffocating days in a lunar module built for just two people, with less power than a basic digital watch. That they survived at all is a miracle.

Filmmaker Peter Middleton adopts an archival, visual approach to retelling one of the greatest survival stories of the twentieth century. This in-the-moment style allows the footage to speak for itself, whether it’s spacecraft imagery, lunar shots, or grainy news broadcasts—all supplemented by reflective off-camera voices, including Jim Lovell, his wife Marilyn, Jack Swigert, and NASA flight controller Gene Kranz. The NASA Mission Control scenes are fascinating for how unfazed and pragmatic each engineer remains. Every focus is on finding a solution—or perhaps more aptly, as economist Thomas Sowell puts it, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs,” reflecting the ingenuity and resilience of the NASA team when facing challenges never before tested.

Apollo 13: Survival takes a rather clinical approach, devoid of sentimentality and fanfare—and for me, that restraint works. It’s more in line with how NASA actually operated, focused on saving the astronauts with precision and calm pragmatism. By contrast, Ron Howard’s 1995 film, Apollo 13, has a much more emotional tone, as you’d expect from a Hollywood blockbuster (and it’s a great movie in its own right—Tom Hanks is a great Jim Lovell).

The Apollo 13 mission remains a rare and magnificent story of survival, ingenuity, and unity. As Jack Swigert reflects over footage of front-page news from around the world, “Apollo 13 did something that’s never happened before in the history of man—that for a brief moment in time, the whole world was together.”

3. What I’m Contemplating

Both featured works this week share a clear theme of survival—one amid the horrors of war, the other in the almost unimaginable situation of being stranded 200,000 miles from Earth without enough oxygen to return home. For E. B. Sledge, survival was a lottery, but he found hope and a sense of humanity in the men beside him and strong leadership. For the astronauts of Apollo 13, survival also hinged on their reliance on each other, but they needed the ingenuity, skill, and calm pragmatism of NASA’s Mission Control to safely bring them home.

Reflecting on this theme, it occurs to me that if an event like Apollo 13 were to happen today, Jack Swigert’s belief that the mission brought the world together—even briefly—might not hold. In the 50 years since, our world has become fragmented by acute political divisiveness, conspiratorial thinking, widespread distrust in government, and a tsunami of misinformation.

In such an environment, a modern day version of Apollo 13 might not unite us in collective support of the astronauts’ safe return, but rather be met with skepticism and division, creating polarised camps—some doubting the mission’s true purpose, others questioning whether the spacecraft and astronauts themselves even exist. The 2021 film Don’t Look Up explores this idea, where even an imminent, observable disaster is met with disbelief and denial.

And yet, as both works this week show, survival often depends on more than just the self. It relies on those around us—on trust, cooperation, and a shared belief in something bigger than ourselves. And perhaps that’s the real key to survival—whether in war, in space, or, for the vast majority of us, in our daily lives—it’s our ability to trust and work together that ultimately decides our fate.

4. A Quote to note

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”

- Sun Tzu

5. A Question for you

Which people or resources have been key in helping you overcome obstacles, and how can you deepen those connections?

Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.

James

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