Battle tested

Late in HBO’s World War II miniseries “The Pacific,” there’s a scene in a muddy, devastated Okinawa village in which Pvt. Eugene B. Sledge ( Joseph Mazzello) enters a hut to find a mortally wounded Japanese woman who, with trembling hands, reaches for the muzzle of his automatic weapon, begging him to finish her off. Instead, he lays his gun down in the straw and gathers her in his arms, gently stroking her face until she finally slips away.

“His humanity comes back to him in that moment,” says Mazzello of the battle-hardened young Marine he plays in the series. “He realizes the service he can offer, greater than putting her out of her misery, is to give her comfort. That was the most important scene for me in the whole show. I loved being a part of that.”

The millions of viewers who tuned in for the 10-parter, executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks as a counterpart to “Band of Brothers,” their 2001 miniseries that chronicled the fighting in Europe, are likely still reeling from the effects of its searing battle scenes and moving real-life drama. Imagine how transformative it was for the young men called upon to depict the three main characters. They include Jon Seda, who played Sgt. John Basilone, the legendary machine gunner and war hero, and James Badge Dale, who portrayed Pvt. Robert Leckie, the complex, brooding writer whose war memoir “A Helmet for My Pillow” became one of the two main source texts (the other was Sledge’s memoir “With the Old Breed”).

For all the young actors portraying Marines, the experience began with a 10-day boot camp in the rain forests of Australia, where the entire $200-million production was shot. Supervising producer Tim Van Patten, who directed three episodes, says the transformation started there. “The night before, we all went out [drinking] and hit it hard, and they had the long hair, the goatees, the cigarettes, the attitudes. About 10 days later, [the producers] took this journey into the jungle where they were bivouacked. And we saw them lined up in formation. You could not tell one from the other. They had become Marines. They’d become a body of men.”

Mazzello describes the boot camp as “the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” “It was 110 degrees in the daytime and 40 degrees at night, and we were digging ditches and climbing though the jungle with 50 pounds of equipment and sleeping three hours a night. I lost 12 pounds in 10 days.”

It was just the beginning of an intense journey that lasted 10 months on location and bonded the actors as if they truly were brothers in arms. Each of the real-life main characters has a compelling arc — Leckie, a newspaper reporter before he enlists, is a questioning and cynical soul who chafes against authority. Still, he becomes a tough and deadly Marine before he reaches the edge of collapse in a combat mental hospital.

Basilone, after being awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic stand at Guadalcanal, is sent home to sell war bonds and train recruits. Shortly after getting married, he insists on returning to fight at Iwo Jima, where he is killed in combat. For Seda, the challenge was to cut through the myth-making surrounding the iconic Marine. He chose to portray Basilone as a warrior with the heart of an innocent. “There are so many stories about him being this unstoppable force, a one-man fighting machine,” says the actor, who, like Basilone, is a New Jersey native and a former boxer. “But for me, the real guy is the one you see when he’s out joking with his buddies at the bar, or when he’s falling in love and he’s willing to show his heart.”

Sledge, who enlists against his doctor father’s wishes, transforms from a tender-hearted youth into a hard-as-nails leader and a sometimes relentless killer. But upon returning home, he refuses to use a weapon ever again — not even to hunt doves with his father. “It’s probably the clearest arc and the most heart-breaking of the stories,” says Van Patten. “You get a real sense of his home life, and you see him become so desensitized, and then find himself again.”

Mazzello, who appeared in Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” as a child actor, felt a personal connection to the material: His grandfather was a WWII combat veteran of the Pacific who earned a Purple Heart for service in the Philippines. He died during the filming but not before sharing some of his wartime experiences with his grandson. “He was extremely moved by this project, the idea that we were going to honor people like him,” Mazzello says.

“I’m fully aware that very few things will ever live up to this — to its quality and to how much it meant to all of us — and that’s OK with me,” Mazzello adds. “I don’t how you top it, but I’ll try. I’ll spend my whole life trying.”

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