Books and Magazines • Unpublished Rod Serling to be Published in the Strand

It's a WWII short story, written about many of the things he experienced in WWII combat.
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There's a reason Rod Serling is considered one of scripted television's most daring and incisive storytellers and much of it comes from his experiences in WWII. The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning creator of The Twilight Zone spent three years as a paratrooper during WWII. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery and a Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds he suffered to his wrist and knee.


Serling enlisted to fight the Nazis the day after he graduated from Binghamton Central High School in New York. Even though he was a slight 5'4, he completed his training as a paratrooper and was assigned to the 11th Airborne of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He was sent to the Philippines to fight the Japanese.

"He saw major combat in the Philippines on the islands of Leyte and Luzon," says Nicholas Parisi, author of a biography of Serling and president of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, "It scarred him for the rest of his life. He saw plenty of friends die. And it really became a defining chapter in his life."


Not long after he returned from the war in 1946, Serling attended Antioch College on the G.I. bill. There, in his early 20s, he penned "First Squad, First Platoon," a short story which is being published for the first time Thursday in The Strand. It was one of his earliest stories, starting a writing career that Serling once said helped him get the war "out of his gut."

"It was like an exercise for him to deal with the demons of war and fear," said his daughter, Jodi Serling. "And he sort of turned it into fiction, although there was a lot of truth to it."

Further down in the article, it talks about in the story how a fellow is killed by a crate drop of supplies... I was in a screenwriting class with a lady whose father saw the exact same thing happen when he was being liberated from a Japanese POW camp at the end of the war. In her reporting of her father's experience (which she was turning into a screenplay), some of the liberated prisoners had no idea of the size of what was being dropped, and that is how they wound up succuming to injuries under them.

statistics: Posted by Dr Acula — 3:14 PM - Today — Replies 2 — Views 180

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