A story of the second world war by Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, will be published in the US on Thursday after lying among his papers for nearly 70 years.
“I was writing a memoir, called As I Knew Him, My Dad, Rod Serling,” Anne Serling, one of two daughters, told the Guardian. “And another writer, Amy Boyle Johnston, who had been doing a lot of researching of my dad’s early work and wrote a book called Unknown Serling, sent me the story. She’d found it in the archives in Wisconsin,” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That was 10 years or so ago. Now, the story is published by the Strand Magazine, whose editor, Andrew Gulli, is both a Twilight Zone connoisseur and an old hand when it comes to finding unknown work by great writers. Stories by Truman Capote and James M Cain are among those Gulli has published.
Serling’s story, First Squad, First Platoon, concerns the experiences of American paratroopers in the Philippines towards the end of the war. Serling fought the Japanese there with the 511th Airborne, surviving, as Gulli says in his editorial, “some of the most intense combat of the entire conflict”.
First Squad, First Platoon has five chapters, one each for five soldiers. The description of the death of Melvin Levy is shattering. Amid a long-awaited rations drop, Levy performs a comic monologue for his overjoyed men. After the drop, as Serling describes it, Sgt Edward Etherson “climbed slowly out of his hole, wiping mud from his eyes and grinning broadly. He noticed Levy lying face down a few feet away.
“‘OK, Mel, you can come up for air,’ he said. ‘OK, Mel, start singin’ – they quit droppin’ … Hey Mel … Mel … Levy!”
“He stopped short and noticed that one end of a ration crate sticking up crazily was a lot redder than the Leyte mud. And Levy’s head rested a few feet from the rest of his body.”
The passage is all the more shattering when the reader realises it is true.
Serling, who appears in his own story, died in 1975, aged just 50. Anne Serling and her sister, Jodi Serling, say that like many men of his generation, he did not talk much about his wartime experiences – though he did explain, sometimes, why he screamed in the night.
Jodi Serling said: “I think when you read the story, you have to have the mindset to deal with the tragedy that’s in it. It’s pretty powerful. The first time I read it, I kind of didn’t let it sink in. And now, reading it again, it makes me want to go and hug them. Because my father entered the war right after high school, because that’s where the guys were enlisting. And it’s just amazing that he did what he did and came back somewhat whole.
“While he was over there, his father died at 52. And he was not allowed to return home for the funeral. And I think that was incredibly traumatising, to come home to an empty home, where his dad was gone. So it wasn’t just what he saw in the war.”
Rod Serling wrote First Squad, First Platoon in his early 20s, in the years after the war when he attended Antioch College. Gulli sees “a maturity beyond his years”.
“In terse prose, he delivers the immediacy, sense of place and cutting dialogue you’d expect from Hemingway, Crane or Dos Passos … a powerful, unvarnished look at war in all its brutality – an unforgettable story of ordinary people in extraordinarily hellish situations.”
Anne and Jodi Serling said elements of First Squad, First Platoon surfaced in Serling’s later work, in TV and film. The story would not have been published, however, without the cooperation of Serling’s estate and Nicholas Parisi, a biographer who provided transcription and edits.
Remarkably, the story includes an introduction, entitled To My Children, in which Serling addresses Anne and Jodi – not that he knew then he would be a father of daughters.
Lamenting his misfortune to have been led by politicians who promised “peace in our time” before the world plunged into war, Serling tells his unborn children: “I don’t want you to be among those who choose to forget. I want you to read my war stories and a lot of others like them. I want you to fill your heads with Remarque and Tolstoy and [the US war correspondent] Ernie Pyle. I want you to know what shrapnel, and ‘88s’, and mortar shells, and mustard gas mean.”
The story that follows is published amid hellish war in Ukraine and on the brink of an Israeli invasion of Rafah – to say nothing of other conflicts round the world.
For the Strand, Anne and Jodi Serling provide introductions of their own.
“It’s amazing what my dad went through,” Jodi Serling said. “I was 21 or so when he died. I didn’t really appreciate the impact of what my father was about because I wanted to be my own self. He encouraged me to be independent but I was young, and I would say dumb, not willing to appreciate what my father was offering the world.
“And he’s been gone so long now, 50 years, that I missed out on so much. So I’m learning a lot more about my dad.”
Both sisters hope their father’s story will be widely read, particularly by those who may only know him through The Twilight Zone, its reruns, remakes and reboots.
Anne Serling said: “I think a lot of people still have a lot of respect for my dad. And I think with everything that’s going on in the world, and has gone on in the world, where people are more realistic about war and how dreadful it is, I think the story will be well received. I think people can relate to it. And, you know, he was so young when he wrote it.”
