You'll be sor-ree - Sid Phillips

Of the quickly diminishing Greatest Generation, the story and legend of one WWII Veteran is growing by the day. He is Sid Phillips and "You'll Be Sor-ree!" is his intimate, first-hand memoir of his service as a 17-year-old Marine in the WWII island battles against the Japanese. Hollywood has celebrated Sid Phillips' fantastic life story in more ways than one. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg made Sid the central character of their gritty $200-million-dollar HBO mini-series, The Pacific. Sid also became a household name as a star of Ken Burns' PBS documentary, The War. Now, with legions of fans asking, "Will you ever write your war memoirs?" Sid rewards them with this book. In "You'll Be Sor-ree!" Sid speaks in his humble, candid voice as he reveals memories of the Pacific, from enduring a siege by battleships on Guadalcanal, to battling monsoons on Cape Gloucester, to the romance and rebellion of R&R in wartime Australia. Though a lowly Marine PFC, Sid's military career is considered among the most remarkable of WWII. In this true story, Sid describes serving in the same heavy weapons company as machine gunner Robert Leckie, who later wrote the epic, "Helmet for My Pillow." Sid relates encounters with his boyhood friend, Eugene B. Sledge, who followed Sid into the Marines and later wrote "With the Old Breed", one of the top ten war books ever. Sid even describes his run-ins with famous figures of his time, like Eleanor Roosevelt, Marine legend Chesty Puller, and General A A Vandergrift. This is the story of how humour and good old American nonsense helped Sid and his comrades cope with the brutality they experienced and how they discovered in one another, the faith needed to survive World War II in the Pacific.