The wait is over! We're finally at publication day for my newest book, Serling: A Journey Into The Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary. If you preordered the book, your copy should be available today. If you didn't preorder but want it, now is the time to head over to a virtual or physical bookstore to get one. Details here:
Alan Sepinwall
Last week, Rolling Stone ran an excerpt from one of the book's chapters about The Twilight Zone, where famous fans like Vince Gilligan, J.J. Abrams, and Rian Johnson talk about the brilliance of that show. Here, I'm giving you an entire chapter, from a period of Rod's life that is much less famous but arguably the most important in understanding how he wound up as the guy who took us into the Fifth Dimension every week.
So if you're still on the fence about ordering, or impatiently waiting for your copy to arrive, I hope you enjoy:
CHAPTER 2. FIRST SQUAD, FIRST PLATOON
In a college essay, Rod Serling described his time in the Army during World War II as “practically the sum and substance of my life—the most formulative, the most easily and vividly remembered, and probably the most important period of my entire life.”
This was not hyperbole. The war was the defining experience of Rod Serling’s life. It was where he made the harshest possible transition from childhood to adulthood, where he bore witness to senseless violence far darker than the scariest Twilight Zone or Night Gallery stories, where he developed various beliefs about the unfairness and preciousness of life that would be driving forces in all the work he did for the next thirty years.
Like many veterans, Serling was reluctant to open up verbally about his time in combat. It was the one subject for which this most loquacious of men simply didn’t have the words—at least not words he felt comfortable saying around all but the most select people.
His daughter Anne knew her father had served because he wore a paratrooper bracelet on his right wrist for the rest of his life, and because whenever he met a friend of hers, one of the first questions he would ask was whether their father had also been in the war. Most of what she gleaned when she was younger, though, had to come from snippets she overheard when one of her dad’s old Army buddies was visiting, or from times when he didn’t have full emotional control of himself. As she wrote in her memoir, As I Knew Him: My Father, Rod Serling, “Sometimes, I heard him scream in the middle of the night, and in the morning he tells me, ‘I dreamed the Japanese were coming at me.’”
But if Serling couldn’t bring himself to converse with his daughter or others about what he did, saw, and felt during his time in uniform, he could definitely write about it.
Many of his best scripts were inspired by his service as a paratrooper. Several of his fifties teleplays took events he either witnessed or heard about from fellow soldiers and transposed them into a Korean War context. Two different Twilight Zone episodes—Season One’s “The Purple Testament,” about a soldier who gets visions of the faces of men who are going to die soon; and Season Three’s “A Quality of Mercy,” about a bloodthirsty American officer who learns empathy when he’s placed into the shoes of a Japanese soldier—take place in and around the same parts of the Philippines where he went into combat, at roughly the same time he was there.
But the first time he wrote about his service, it was in the form of a short story, not a script. And he felt no need to couch it in fantasy trappings or metaphor, nor to shift it to another war, to provide some distance between his experience and what the audience would see.
That first time, he used his own name, and the names of several men he served with—in some cases, whose gruesome deaths he witnessed firsthand—and wrote about events that largely match up with what information is available about where and when he fought.
That first time, he wrote, “First Squad, First Platoon.”
“First Squad, First Platoon” is both one of the earliest works Rod Serling penned after he began to think of himself as a writer and, at the time of this writing, the last work of his to be made available to the public. It began as an assignment during his undergraduate days at Antioch College. For decades, it sat in boxes, first in Serling’s various homes, and eventually as part of the massive archive of his effects at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Anne quoted it in her memoir, and this eventually led to The Strand magazine publishing the full story in a 2024 issue.
“First Squad” is very much the work of a fledgling artist still trying to find his own voice, rather than echoing others. But the story’s dedication, aimed at his hypothetical future children, reads like the kind of thing he would write after he had spent years honing his craft. To his children, he acknowledges, “Doubtless you will be among the few who will ever read it.” Noting that war stories aren’t as popular since the war ended, he adds, “Human beings don’t like to remember unpleasant things. They gird themselves with the armor of wishful thinking, protect themselves with a shield of impenetrable optimism, and, with few exceptions, seem to accomplish their ‘forgetting’ quite admirably.”
But he doesn’t want his kids to forget: “I want you to feel, no matter how vicariously, a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh; the crippling, numbing sensation of fear; the hopeless emptiness of fatigue. All these things are complementary in the prov-ince of war and friction, and they should be taught in classrooms along with the more heroic aspects of uniforms and flags, honor and patriotism.”
What follows that intro is a series of vignettes inspired by Serling’s time in the Pacific theater of combat, about a six-man squad in the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, or PIR. Some are very close to what little the historical record can confirm about specific events from Serling’s service. Some are verifiably fictionalized. And some exist in a Twilight Zone fog, where the border between reality and fantasy is too blurry to make out. But if “First Squad, First Platoon” doesn’t convey exactly what Serling and his friends went through, it clearly captures what being over there felt like to Serling, who was lucky enough to make it home mostly intact, if irrevocably changed.
“Dad said Rod was different coming back,” says his brother Bob Serling’s son Jeff. “He knew that part of the joy, the young person, the innocent, got left behind, and I don’t think ever truly came back."
Rod graduated from Central High School in Binghamton, NY on January 15, 1943. He enlisted in the Army the next day, and would spend nearly three years in uniform. And he knew that he specifically wanted to wear the uniform of a paratrooper—a largely untested, incredibly dangerous specialty, adding enemy fire to the inherent risks of jumping out of a plane. And almost from the moment Rod learned of the existence of airborne infantry, he became obsessed with joining it.
Shortly before they each wound up in the military, Rod and his childhood friend Vernon Hartung were at the movies when they saw a newsreel about Operation Torch, an Allied landing in French North Africa in November 1942. It was the U.S. Army’s first deployment of airborne soldiers, with members of the 11th Airborne Division’s 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment jumping to capture an Algerian airfield. Never mind that the 509th didn’t succeed at their objective (the airfield was later taken by other parts of the invasion force); the thought of doing such a new and daring job lodged itself in Rod’s brain and wouldn’t leave.
“All I know is that when Roddy and I got out of that theater, he was kind of chanting to himself, ‘I want to be a paratrooper, I want to be a paratrooper,’” said Hartung.
It was a goal that stunned his friends and family, even if they should have understood by then how Rod was wired.
“There was always some kind of compulsion in him to do something that nobody else—the ordinary kid—[would] do,” said Bob Serling. “And this included joining the paratroops in World War II. He was a damn fool to do it.”
After the war, Serling admitted that this assessment was correct. “Any incentive, any motive or desire for enlisting in the Army Paratroopers,” he wrote, “can easily be correlated with my own peculiar personality as I finished high school. I wanted excitement, the usual limelight, and I wanted to be different than anyone else. So with no other consideration other than the knowledge that what I was doing was dramatic and differ-ent, with no understanding of the scope of my decision, and with bright eyes and empty head, I signed up for the ‘expendables’—the so-called ‘exclusive fraternity of men who jump into battle.’”
As an adult, Serling was generally listed at five foot five and 137 pounds, and weighed at least 20 pounds less when he enlisted. This would eventually make him, as he put it, “the third smallest man in a regiment of almost two thousand,” and generated some wariness from the officer who had to sign off on the results of his physical. In a letter to his parents, Sam and Esther Serling, Rod explained that the man looked at his weight and said, “‘I’m afraid you are just a little too light and small.’ Well, Mom, I was so damned anxious to get in I went through a regular Bob routine. I begged, I pleaded, I beseeched—and it worked with the help of my Corporal who put in a good word for me. He erased the original rejection and put down ‘O.K.’ My Corporal said I was the littlest damn paratrooper he ever saw. Later on he told me that the Major and the Captain who forced the final review board here remarked about my ‘guts’ and said I should do O.K.”
Serling had cleared the first bar. He would at least get a chance to train as a paratrooper, though there was no guarantee that he would have jump wings pinned to his uniform by the time the Army shipped him overseas. He was exactly where he wanted to be. As he put it later, “I was possessed with a singular, and ever-present desire to ‘go out and murder the bastards.’ I wanted excitement, I wanted novelty and I had no regard for fear. I was just green enough, and young enough not to understand the emotion.”
While Rod went through basic training and then specialized training for the airborne, he kept up a running correspondence with Sam and Esther. The letters that went back and forth from Binghamton to Camp Mackall, Camp Toccoa, and the other stops along the way read less like ones involving a man preparing to go to war than a lonely kid writing to his parents from summer camp.
Two and a half weeks after his service began, he asked them for a shoeshine kit, a sewing kit, a pen and pencil set, a money belt, pipe cleaners, and underwear, explaining, “I don’t like the GI kind.” A few weeks later, Sam asked, “Would you like some more nuts, cookies or the like?” In another letter, Rod wrote, “Mom when you told me about seeing me if possible this summer, it boosted my spirits right up. I’m so damn homesick, the very thought that I’ll see you—even if months from now is something I can look forward to and think about.”
As Rod began approaching the end of his first year in uniform, the letters turned more serious, as if parents and child both recognized that there were things they needed to tell one another now, just in case Rod never came home. Sam and Esther had lavished attention, praise, and other emotional and material gifts on their younger son, and now Sam began to worry that this had done Rod a disservice.
“Perhaps we were too devoted parents in our constant efforts to shield you from disappointments so your training in this direction is somewhat lacking,” Sam wrote. “Rod, I want you to know that no father was more fond of a son than I am—always have been—and always will be of you.”
“All my life you’ve given me everything I’ve wanted,” Rod replied, trying to ease both his father’s guilt and his parents’ fears. “I never so much as gave it a thought that you might find it tough to keep supply-ing me with every whim and the idea of repaying you never entered my head…So Dad—when that future Christmas when we’re together again rolls around—you can put aside all thoughts of making up for the past—it’ll be for me to start showing that twenty years of your slaving away and worrying just for my benefit wasn’t thrown away on a selfish and thoughtless kid. Sure I’ve had it pretty tough at times—I’ve had my share of being wet and cold and hungry. I’ve dodged plenty of lead and faced the Japs but it’s made a man out of me Dad—it made me realize that I had to put out for myself because I didn’t have a self-sacrificing Dad around to look out for me. It’s done some good, I guess Dad…Be assured that my every thought, and hope and prayer is of our eventual reunion—that’s something worth fighting for—right there.”
In between learning the basics of soldiering, Rod picked up a new and perilous hobby: boxing.
The 511th was full of athletes. The regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Orin D. “Hard Rock” Haugen, wanted his men to be at the peak of physical fitness, and to have a fighter’s instinct at all times. When the 511th arrived at Camp Toccoa in Georgia, Haugen not only had them make frequent runs up and down nearby Mount Currahee, but ordered boxing gloves for them to use as part of their extracurricular activities.
Even after the rigors of basic training, Rod still weighed only 118 pounds, was still short, and still had a modest reach. But just as he had insisted on joining the airborne to begin with, he couldn’t resist getting into the ring as another way to prove himself. He fought in a weight class referred to back then as “catchweight,” and acquitted himself well—for a while, anyway. He would eventually joke, “I’m the only fighter in history who had to be carried both into and out of the ring,” but he nonetheless won his first seventeen bouts.
“I’d been trained in the Army by an ex-pro who had had sixty-eight fights of his own,” he wrote, “and I had a reasonably good working knowledge of some of the ins and outs of the profession.”
Eventually, Rod’s size and relative lack of skill caught up with him, and he got pummeled by a larger, more experienced fighter. His nose had already been broken in a previous fight that he won, and it got busted again in his eighteenth fight, forever altering his appearance and making him look more weathered than he had when he was graduating high school only months before. At the end of that one, Vernon Hartung, who hadn’t seen his old friend from Binghamton in several months, went into the ring to check on him. “I took the sponge away from the handler and dabbed him in the face,” Hartung said. “He looked at me and said, ‘You goddamned bastard. Where’ve you been?’ He had a real need for recognition. He didn’t care whether he got his brains knocked out or not.”
That earlier success accomplished the job of making his parents proud, though. “I wish you could see Dad’s grin when he read that you won the fight,” Esther wrote, quoting Sam as saying, “That little devil. Can you imagine him fighting and winning?”
Actor Jack Warden, who worked with Serling multiple times in the fifties and sixties, trained at Camp Toccoa as a member of the 503rd PIR. “Toccoa was a hellhole,” he said. “You’d get up every morning at five o’clock and run the hill in full field pack. The hill was about seven miles, almost a 45-degree angle. And the ones that fell out were sent back to the infantry.” By the time the 511th left the shadow of Mount Currahee, only 2,176 men remained of the roughly 12,000 who had enlisted in the regiment. Improbably, Rod Serling was one of them. He had done everything Hard Rock Haugen and the rest of the chain of command had asked of him.
Almost.
At some point during his training, he was assigned to a demolitions unit—colloquially referred to by most soldiers as “the suicide squad.” “Rod screwed up somewhere,” said his sergeant, Frank Lewis. “He got on someone’s nerves.” Or as 511th historian Jeremy C. Holm put it in his book, When Angels Fall, “Rumor has it Serling told a regimental officer exactly what he could do with an assigned task,” which led to this treacherous new role.
“Serling was a very confident young man on many levels,” says Amy Boyle Johnston, author of the excellent Unknown Serling: An Episodic History Vol. 1, which goes into his military service. “I don’t want to say arrogant, no one’s ever called him arrogant. But he knew he was smart, he knew he was good-looking, and he loved to entertain. He was the life of the party, but he did the work.” A colorful character within the regiment, he developed a reputation for getting into the odd fight even outside the boxing ring.
For most of their training, the members of the 511th didn’t know whether they’d be assigned to the European theater of combat or the Pacific. There was no doubt which one Rod preferred. But when the regiment departed Camp Polk in Louisiana, their train traveled west, toward California, which everyone knew meant they were headed to confront the Japanese.
"As a Jew, I signed up for the Army to fight the Nazis,” Serling said. “But they sent me to the Philippines instead of Europe.”
After a two-week Pacific voyage aboard SS Sea Pike, the 511th settled in for a six-month stay in New Guinea, continuing their training while waiting for a combat assignment. Rod’s experience as a class clown and part-time performer came in handy on multiple occasions during this tedious period. One day, as a transport plane prepared to land with some important military officials on board, Serling began doing a play-by-play in fake German and then Japanese dialects. Richard Loughrin, who would remain friends with Serling in civilian life, observed this and immediately decided that Serling was “one of the funniest guys I ever heard. I thought, ‘I’d like to know this guy. He’s got a real sense of humor.’” During a quiet fireside chat while the regiment was still waiting to get going, Rod told Loughrin, “Do you realize the millions of words that are used every day in radio? Somebody has to write those words. And that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be a radio writer.”
In November, they boarded ships that took them to Leyte, an island in the Philippines that General Douglas MacArthur felt was key to the Pacific campaign, as well as a chance for redemption. MacArthur had been forced to abandon his post in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded in 1942, and he felt a moral obligation to liberate the country. Some officials high up in military intelligence believed that Leyte was relatively undefended.
This would prove to be wildly off the mark.
As a surviving member of the 511th would put it decades later, “After Leyte, Hell was a vacation.”
Leyte is about 110 miles long and 40 miles wide. The 511th spent thirty-three days trekking from the east coast to the west coast. Along the way, they battled starvation, leeches, disease, snipers, and frequent banzai attacks from a much larger and more committed Japanese force than they had been expecting. Serling’s demolition unit was tasked with blowing up Japanese pillboxes and blockhouses, manned by Japanese marines who were dug in and prepared to fight to the death.
As the 511th moved through the jungles and hills of Leyte, Rod was hit with one of several bouts of malaria he dealt with during the war. “This guy helped save him,” says his older daughter, Jodi Serling, “because they were going to leave him behind, because he couldn’t walk in the jungle. He was too weak, and this guy carried him through.” That guy was his friend Melvin Levy, who was, like Rod, both Jewish and a comedian by nature.
The higher the 511th climbed in the mountains, the harder it became for new supplies to be dropped in. Eventually, the men just ran out of food, and had to turn to other things to at least feed their oral fixations, if not their rumbling bellies.
“They didn’t have food for weeks, and they were starving,” said Jodi. “My dad was in his nineties”—as in pounds—“and all they had were cigarettes. You know, the mouth addiction. So that’s where he started smoking.”
“During the war, they gave us all free cigarettes and almost everyone smoked,” Rod said toward the end of his life. “We did not think of it as an addictive drug. When you see your buddies being killed and mutilated almost every day, cigarettes are the last thing you think about.”
This brings us to “First Squad, First Platoon,” which begins with the 511th penned in by the elements, desperate for supplies, and struggling to reach other parts of the invasion force over the radio.
“They were tired, hungry men with dirty bearded faces lined with crevices of fatigue,” Serling wrote. “When they had first fought their way up the mountain they had been spirited, alert fighting men, tempered perhaps by the realization of fear and danger, but still protected by the peculiar human defense mechanism known as humor. But now they had no humor. They were trapped in a clearing surrounded by jungle and Japanese, out of contact with everyone, out of touch with all possible aid reinforcements, out of food and short of ammunition. They were men whose minds and bodies had been attacked by two formidable opponents. One was hunger which gnawed at their stomachs. The other was fear that gnawed at their morale.”
The story is a collection of vignettes about a squad, led by Sergeant Edward Etherson, with Serling and Melvin Levy joined by soldiers Emery “Deacon” Sloane, Horace “Red” Regan, and Warren Hibbard. Each sequence is named for one of Serling’s comrades, and each ends with that man’s death in combat, followed by their full name, rank, and serial number, as well as the location and date of their deaths.
The first to go—and in the ugliest, most avoidable manner—is Serling’s close pal Levy, whose famous sense of humor has deserted him during this period without food. But when the weather finally clears up enough for supplies to be dropped from passing airplanes, Levy runs into a clearing and begins doing a running commentary on this blessed event. “Chow call, boys!” he announces. “Ham and eggs by air-mail!” As the crates begin to drop, Levy keeps cracking jokes: “Make it Kosher, even if yuh have to drop a Rabbi.”
“But suddenly,” Serling wrote, "the new danger was recognized. The heavy crates were smashing into the earth close to their holes. Men started shouting in alarm.” While an officer scrambles to order all the men to take cover, Levy keeps standing where he is, calling out, “It’s raining chow, boys!” Another crate lands right by the squad’s position, and when Sergeant Etherson emerges to see what happened, he “stopped short and noticed all at once that Levy’s head rested a few feet from the rest of his body, and that one end of the ration crate sticking up crazily was a lot redder than Leyte mud.”
While some other incidents in the story are exaggerated, tweaked in their chronology, or outright invented—the real Red, Horace Cole “Red” Riggan, lived until 2011(*)—Levy’s death unfortunately played out just as Serling described it. Afterward, Rod fashioned a crude Star of David out of twigs and placed it over the makeshift grave the squad had dug for his friend.
(*) Big credit to Nicholas Parisi, the definitive historian of Serling's writing, who discovered this while researching the short story. His book on Rod's work was one of the single most valuable resources I had on this project. Having Nick ready and willing to reply to emails was another.
Each of the deaths that follow over the rest of the 511th’s campaign (most of them on the large Philippine island of Luzon) are similarly pointless or ironic. Deacon Sloane, who was a few weeks away from being ordained as a minister when the war started, is shot in a church. A U.S. artillery barrage is off the mark and hits the position where Red Regan is working as a spotter. Hibbard is shot on a patrol after declaring that it will be his last one, and his death is overshadowed by the news that President Roosevelt has died. And while wrestling with a Japanese soldier, Etherson is fatally stabbed by an ill-prepared replacement soldier aiming for Etherson’s opponent.
Serling was wounded several times during the campaign, receiving the Purple Heart for injuries suffered on December 13, 1944. In one incident, an exploding mortar sent shrapnel into his wrist and knee, the latter of which would plague him for the rest of his life.
His wife Carol Serling said that he got additional compensation for disability that helped get him through college. “He could have had disability all his life, because the knee was always going out on him. He’d be going down the stairs and all of a sudden it would ‘snap.’ I’d hear a bong-bong-bong and I’d think, Oh God, he’s fallen down the stairs again. But he lived with it.” Sometimes, a knee brace would help stabilize it, but it was never right and would spontaneously bleed. Anne Serling has a picture of her father resting on a hammock at the family cottage on Lake Cayuga, and blood is clearly visible through the leg of his pants.
On Christmas Eve 1944, he found himself in a trench with fellow paratrooper Dean White. They were convinced they were surrounded. “Do you think we [are] going to get out of here?” Rod asked Dean. “I don’t think so,” Dean replied.
Instead, the 511th got the best possible Christmas gift the next day: They were ordered to head down the mountain toward safety. There would be more combat to come, but for the moment, they had been relieved. For a 1963 anthology book called My Most Memorable Christmas, Serling described the day, with the kind of purple prose that had become his trademark, as “a gray morning carved out of a gray clay and shadowed by fog. It was not just a time—it was a mood—the kind of mood that is part of the province of combat and never conveyed vicar-iously to the human being who has not lived physically with the ten-sion, the violence, the anguish of protracted war.” When one of the soldiers passes word down the line about the holiday, “A scratchy, discordant, monotone voice way up front started to sing, ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful.’ Somebody else picked it up and then we all sang. We sang as we walked through the mud. We sang as we led the wounded by the hand and carried the litters and looked back on the row of handmade crosses left behind. We sang, ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful.’ It had come, indeed—the Holy Day. The day of all days. It was Christmas.”
And it was Rod Serling's twentieth birthday.
While Leyte was the worst experience of the war for most of the 511th, it was far from the end of their fighting. On February 3, 1945, the men put their paratrooper training to use, jumping into Tagaytay Ridge, south of Manila on the island of Luzon.
In the jungles of Luzon, Serling came close to death, running into a Japanese soldier who had his weapon pointed right at him. Rod wasn’t a master of the quick draw like the gunslingers he would later write in the 1958 Western Saddle the Wind. All he could do was stand and wait for his enemy’s bullet to end his life. He heard a gunshot, but it was coming from behind him, as another paratrooper fired over his shoulder to kill the Japanese man and save Rod.
“I survived through no dint of my own courage,” Serling later said. “It was just somebody up there.”
As a seven-year-old, Anne Serling overheard her dad talking with his old Army friend Richard about how Richard saved him that day. “I have never been so God damn scared in my life,” her dad said.
On another day, the 511th fought with Japanese forces inside Rizal Memorial Baseball Stadium. This time, Rod was the one firing his weapon.
“Killing someone is something you never, ever get over,” says Russell Schwen, a soldier who befriended Serling in the final months of Rod’s time in the Pacific. “You make light of it, forget about it, what-ever. But Rod said, ‘Where I shot this guy would have been third base. He was trying to steal home.’ Which was kind of the way his mind worked. The things that were horrible to him, he would try to transfer them to something humorous.”
Sergeant Frank Lewis was skeptical at times of his diminutive charge’s ability in combat situations, but he was also witness to a notable act of heroism on Luzon. The men were being entertained by a group of Filipino performers near the Parañaque River when they came under attack. According to Lewis, Serling exposed himself to enemy fire to carry a wounded female performer to safety. “He cradled her like a baby,” he said. “That took guts.”
Half of the men in the 511th who jumped into Luzon didn’t survive the hellacious combat there, and roughly a third of all the men in the 511th didn’t make it to the end of the Pacific campaign. Rod watched a lot of his friends die.
In March 1945, Rod was transferred to a service company and sent back to New Guinea to recuperate from his various wounds. In late August of that year, he returned to the 11th Airborne right as it became the first Allied division to land on Japan. This was weeks after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—an event that would influence much of Serling’s writing, and rhetoric, about the threat of nuclear annihilation—and the war was clearly winding down. Japan officially surrendered on September 2, 1945.
The day before that, Rod’s parents were driving from Schenectady to Syracuse. Sam wasn’t feeling well. He pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car, and dropped dead of a heart attack. He was only fifty-two. His own father had died at a relatively young age of heart trouble, and Sam had tempted fate even more with excessive smoking.
Rod was despondent when the news reached him in Japan. “I met him coming down the hall in our central headquarters building,” says Russell Schwen, “and he was screaming, ‘Dad! Dad!’”
To make matters worse, it took so long for the Red Cross to tell Rod about his father’s death that he missed Sam’s funeral. The military was using a complex points system—based on duration of service, number of campaigns fought, medals earned, dependent children, and so on—to determine when each soldier would be sent home. Rod was still a bit shy of the requisite points total, and even this family tragedy wasn’t enough to sway the military bureaucracy. He would have to stay in Japan until he had enough points to leave.
“He was completely shattered by this,” says Schwen. “He wanted to go that night. He was ready to move with the minute, and the fact that he was going to miss being with his family at this time was hugely frustrating.”
Rod had left Binghamton a boy, eager to serve his country and make his family proud, but also desperate to come back alive to see his par-ents. He survived, but the father he worshipped had not.
“I think he literally grew up in the Pacific, in the sense that he lost his childhood,” says Amy Boyle Johnston. “He faced brutality, and then his father died, and he wasn’t allowed to go home for the funeral. He comes home forever changed, and he never sees his father again.”
Serling’s military career was admirable, but he would have been the first to tell you he was no legend. “I was only a passably good soldier,” he wrote later, acknowledging not only his lack of physical gifts relative to his peers but also how much effort it took to repress his ego so he could consistently follow orders. By the end of his service, he had achieved the rank of technician fifth grade—the equivalent of corporal, but without any real authority over lower-ranked soldiers—“not in recognition of ability,” he wrote, “but through succession and length of service.” He got the Purple Heart, but so did countless other men who were wounded. He received the Bronze Star, but so did every other combat soldier of the war. He had no interest in praise he didn’t feel he’d earned. After doing a publicity stunt with the 82nd Airborne near the height of his celebrity, he complained to Richard Loughrin that the Army’s press releases included some “highly flavorful accounts of how I had singlehandedly won the war on my own.”
But he served. He fought. He was there for the other men in the 511th. He witnessed terrible things. And he made it home with an entirely new perspective on life.
“It only shaped every part [of him] that matters,” says Amy Boyle Johnston. “It only shaped all of his parts about questioning, ‘What is my role in society? What does the individual do?’ I think it changed his outlook a lot.”
“One of the things that I think came out of Rod’s war experience was trying to make things right and just,” says his friend and protege Mark Olshaker (author of Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit). “For the first time in his life, he realized how capricious life could be.”
Jim Houghton, whose father, Buck, produced the first three Twilight Zone seasons, recalled, “Rod had seen some awful things in the Pacific during WWII. Dad once said he thought Rod was looking for some way to regain his affection for the human race. He wanted to warn people of the dangers of hubris and selfishness, of not caring about the things that really matter.”
Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water, Frankenstein) is an enormous Serling fan who wishes he could have met him and asked him questions about his life and career.
“I wanted to talk to him about his experience as a parachutist in World War II,” del Toro says. “I think the war, and what he saw, was a big diagonal push for him into, ‘How can I talk about what I cannot talk about?’ I think that most of us deal with trauma through fiction, unless you’re going to therapy. I would have loved to talk to him about that. People cope in different ways. You have [comics legend] Jack Kirby, who coped by becoming a two-fisted mythmaker on the grandest scale. And you have Rod Serling, who prefers to stay from the sidewalk point of view, with the ‘regular man.’ When I think of Rod Serling, no matter how hedonistic he gets, no matter how tan, no matter how well dressed, no matter how much time he spends on his hair, he is a haunted man. And that is what makes him so irresistible for me.”
Throughout his writing career, Serling would not only write scripts inspired by his war experience, but would name characters after men with whom he fought. (In both produced and unproduced scripts, you find lots of Sloanes and Sloans—including the one in “Walking Distance” who got the chance, denied to Rod, for one last conversation with his late father.)
“You cannot possibly appreciate all the suffering and death you see unless you are there,” he later said. “And all that misery still haunts me, and it gave me the ideas for the scripts that I wrote later for TV and movies.”
By the time “First Squad, First Platoon” ends, all the other original members of the squad are dead. Serling, previously a minor figure in his own story, becomes the central character of the epilogue, which finds him aboard a ship that will begin his long journey back across the Pacific, toward a home that feels incredibly distant.
“Corporal Serling looked at the decorations and wondered why they seemed so hollow and incongruous,” he wrote. “He was going home, he kept telling himself. Going home. How many times during the past three years had he pictured this scene? How many hopes and dreams and plans had he conjured in his mind? Now it had come, and like so many long-sought goals, it was a small, unexciting thing in comparison to its anticipation.”
He tries and fails to push the painful memories of Levy, Etherson, and his other fallen comrades out of his head.
A sailor said, “This way, soldier, down these steps. What’s a matter? You don’t look happy.”
Serling forced a wide grin and said, “Happy? Hell, I’m the happiest goddamn guy aboard.”
The sailor laughed. “I doubt that.”
And as Serling lugged his duffle bag down the narrow steps to the hold, he said under his breath, “I doubt it, too.” And little, formless ghosts inside his mind echoed his words, “I doubt it…I doubt it, too.”
Alan Sepinwall
Citations
If a quote isn't attributed below, it came from an interview I conducted personally.
“practically the sum and substance”: Rod Serling, “Life Aims” essay, Antioch College, date unknown.
“All I know is that”: Gordon Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of TV’s Last Angry Man.
“There was always some kind of ”: Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1981.
“Any incentive, any motive”: Serling, “Life Aims” essay.
“the third smallest man”: Serling, “Life Aims” essay.
“I’m afraid you are just”: Anne Serling, As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling.
“I was possessed with a singular”: Serling, “Life Aims” essay.
“Mom when you told me about”: Anne Serling, As I Knew Him.
“Perhaps we were too devoted”: Anne Serling, As I Knew Him.
“All my life you’ve given me”: Anne Serling, As I Knew Him.
“I’m the only fighter in history”: United Press International, September 1, 1963.
“I’d been trained in the Army”: Rod Serling, Patterns: Four Television Plays.
“I took the sponge away”: Joel Engel, Last Stop, The Twilight Zone: The Biography of Rod Serling.
“I wish you could see Dad’s grin”: Anne Serling, As I Knew Him.
“Toccoa was a hellhole”: National WWII Museum website, September 15, 2020.
“Rod screwed up somewhere”: Gordon Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of TV’s Last Angry Man.
“As a Jew, I signed up”: Len Lear, Chestnut Hill Local (Philadelphia), June 13, 2024.
“one of the funniest guys”: Engel, Last Stop, The Twilight Zone.
“After Leyte”: Jeremy C. Holm, When Angels Fall: From Toccoa to Tokyo; The 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment in World War II, MacArthur’s Secret Weapon & Heroes of Los Baños.
“During the war, they gave us”: Lear, Chestnut Hill Local, June 13, 2024.
While some other incidents: Nicholas Parisi, Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination.
“He could have had disability”: Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1987.
“Do you think we”: Amy Boyle Johnston, Unknown Serling: An Episodic History Vol. 1.
“I survived through no dint”: Linda Brevelle, The 1976 Writer’s Yearbook.
“I have never been so God damn scared”: Anne Serling, As I Knew Him.
“He cradled her like a baby”: Sander, Serling.
“I was only a passably good soldier”: Rod Serling, Antioch College application, 1946.
“highly flavorful accounts”: Wisconsin Historical Society archive, August 24, 1964.
“Rod had seen some”: Stewart T. Stanyard, Dimensions Behind The Twilight Zone: A Backstage Tribute to Television’s Groundbreaking Series.
“You cannot possibly appreciate”: Lear, Chestnut Hill Local, June 13, 2024.
