Chinese Civil War Eugene Bondurant Sledge (November 4, 1923 – March 3, 2001) was a United States Marine, university professor, and author.

His older brother, Edward Simmons Sledge II, was born on September 10, 1920, and was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army after graduating as a cadet from The Citadel.

Eugene was a sickly child and lost two years of schooling due to rheumatic fever which left him with a heart murmur.

He was placed in the V-12 officer training program and was sent to the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he and half of his detachment "flunked out" so they would be allowed to serve their time as enlistees and not "miss the war".

[8] After the war ended, Sledge attended Auburn University (then known as Alabama Polytechnic Institute),[9] where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

Sledge started to assist the conservation department in its banding study efforts,[13] the origin of his well-known passion for the science of ornithology.

[citation needed] When he enrolled at Auburn University, the clerk at the Registrar's office asked him if the Marine Corps had taught him anything useful.

In 1981, he published With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, a memoir of his World War II service with the United States Marine Corps.

[21] In April 2007, it was announced that With the Old Breed, along with Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow, would form the basis for the HBO series The Pacific.

Its initial hardbound edition, with a foreword by Stephen E. Ambrose, was published without a subtitle on May 10, 2002, by the University of Alabama Press.

The book discussed his postwar service in Peking (now known as Beijing), his return to Mobile, and his recovery from the psychological trauma of warfare.