Rarely seen Rod Serling story draws upon his war service

In a famous “Twilight Zone” episode from the early 1960s, a bloodthirsty Second World commander stationed in the Philippines finds himself transported into the body of a Japanese lieutenant and, to his horror, expected to help kill an entrapped and wounded American platoon.

“What you do to those men in the cave, will it shorten the war by a week, by a day, by an hour?” he pleads to a Japanese officer. ”How many must die before (we) are satisfied?”

For the show’s host and writer, Rod Serling, the Second World War was a trauma he would reimagine often.

Serling, born 100 years ago this December, served in the 11th Airborne Division in the Philippines and received a Bronze Star for bravery and a Purple Heart for being wounded. He left the war with lasting physical and emotional scars and, like such fellow veterans as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, with a will to find words for what had happened. He wrote war-related scripts for “Playhouse 90” and other early television drama series and for at least two other “Twilight Zone” stories, including one in which an Army lieutenant can predict who will die next by looking into his soldiers’ faces.

Serling’s “First Squad, First Platoon,” a fictionalized take on the war that he worked on and set aside while attending Antioch College, has now been published for the first time. It appears this week in the new edition of The Strand Magazine, which has unearthed pieces by Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and many others. “First Squad, First Platoon” is broken into five vignettes, each dedicated to a fallen peer.

“Serling wrote this story in his early twenties, yet it carries a maturity beyond his years,” Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli writes. “It’s a powerful, unvarnished look at war in all its brutality — an unforgettable study of ordinary people in an extraordinarily hellish situation.”

Nicholas Parisi, author of the 2018 biography “Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination,” helped edit the story. Daughters Jodi Serling and Anne Serling each contributed brief forewords. Jodi Serling wrote that the war “opened up dark horizons of terror” for her father and left him “gut-wrenching memories” that influenced his writing and awakened him at night, “sweating and screaming inconsolably.”

Amy Boyle Johnston, author of the 2015 book “Unknown Serling,” found the story while looking through Serling’s papers at the University of Wisconsin. Serling, who died in 1975, had yet to start a family when he wrote “First Squad, First Platoon.” But he was already thinking about the next generation, including a dedication to his yet-unborn children urging them to remember “a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh” and “the hopeless emptiness of fatigue” were as much part of war as “uniforms and flags, honor and patriotism.”