*Robert Leckie, who enlisted the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and served as a machinegunner and an intelligence scout. He wrote incisive letters back home to a neighbor girl named Vera.

*Eugene Sledge, the unlikeliest-looking guy to be nicknamed Sledgehammer of all time. He was overprivileged, cursed with a heart murmur, and too impatient to finish officers' training school.

*John Basilone, who was in Guadalcanal with a 15-member unit that was reduced to two men. For 48 hours straight, he held off 3,000 Japanese soldiers with a machine gun, repairing it when necessary and running for ammunition when it was low. The Japanese were annihilated. When Basilone learned he'd been awarded the Medal of Honor, he happened to be hung over - and promptly threw up.

"The Pacific" is based partly on books by Leckie and Sledge, which is why I suppose they're so articulate even in the midst of exploding Hades.

Unlike "Band of Brothers," I didn't recognize many of the actors of "The Pacific." (Personally, I found it difficult to focus on war strategy when the love lobe of my brain was screeching, "That's Ron Livingston!")

These actors are just . . . real. My favorite was James Badge Dale, who played Leckie. He'd had a role in Scorsese's "The Departed," but he will be remembered for embodying a poet who never shied away from the truth. "There are things that men can do to each other that are sobering to the soul," he wrote in one letter. In musing on the role of God in the proceedings, he concluded that either we were chumps and God was a sadist, and either way, he wasn't much interested. "I believe in ammunition," he said.

Dale's face - by turns idealistic and suicidal -- could serve as the face of every Unknown Soldier.

In other interesting casting notes, Eugene Sledge is played by Joe Mazzello - one of the kid actors from Spielberg's "Jurassic Park." I recognized William Sadler ("The Shawshank Redemption") as the gentlemanly Lt. Col. Lewis "Chesty" Puller, and the actor Rami Malek, because he played the Egyptian prince in "Night at the Museum" -- which I have seen 30 times.

If you commit to all 10 parts of "The Pacific," you know what kind of brutality you're in for. You will walk with these poor saps step by miserable step, wondering, "How on earth do you train for THIS?"

Men are reduced to meat early on. Tim Van Patten of "The Sopranos" directed the Okinawa episode, so you've been warned. And while the Hans Zimmer music is sublime, maybe it would be more effective to realize that, in real life, the godless carnage was NOT accompanied by a soaring score.

Many of the battle scenes took place at night against an invisible enemy. Just chaos. But even during daylight skirmishes, I couldn't be sure who was supposed to be shooting where. I imagine some of the soldiers had the same questions.

For me, the most memorable parts were little details - like when it would rain, the men would run out of their tents, strip down and soap up in lieu of a shower. Spielberg and Hanks (and Hanks's Playtone partner, Gary Goetzman) promised to give us an "under the helmet" look at the Pacific theater, and it's a fair claim. There's a profound moment when the broken-down Guadalcanal survivors are told that they're heroes back home.

So we see them as men, as meat, as heroes, as cowards, as geniuses and fools. Sometimes they epitomize the highest honor of man; sometimes they finish off a wounded Jap just for a kick.

Their heroic and painful stories are worth passing down. But for me, "The Pacific" was a grounding reminder that they were all just guys. Guys who sometimes walked around with cigarettes up their noses.