Who has seen "The Pacific" on HBO? It's produced by the same producing team (Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg) that brought us the now-classic and beloved "Band of Brothers."

"The Pacific" is no "Band of Brothers." Yet.

I'm not saying that new series is creatively or entertainingly sub-par. It's actually very, very good. It's just that by this time (by the start of Episode 3) in "Band of Brothers," we had started to saddle up with affinity to characters like Winters, and Malarky, and Luz. Those guys were common kids thrown together to rise to an elite level (the parachute infantry) in order to go on a great crusade: leap into the darkest night over Nazi-occupied Europe to liberate the continent.

The Marines in the "Pacific" are different. Like the real theater of operations they served in, this was not so much a great crusade as it was a struggle for survival. Their crusade was to battle not only the enemy, but the jungle, and diseases like malaria and colera. It was a grittier, dirtier, sweatier war. The show reflects that, and for some reason, this makes our point of connecting with the characters very different than with those of "Band of Brothers."

The acting is first rate, and I think it's just going to take a while to warm up to these guys. We'll see what the next episodes bring, as at some point, these marines will comb the entire Pacific, landing in now-legenadry places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Those names are familiar to me because I had to study them during my own brief stint in the United States Marine Corps.

Yup. That's right. I joined in 1979, and that's a whole different topic for a whole different blog. Let's just say when it gets really hot in the sumer, I still instinctively regress back to the memories of what we used to call "black flag" days in Quantico, Va. My days at OCS (Officer Candidate School). There was such opressing heat on the shores of the Potomac, that the sweat became an actual WEIGHT on your body. Someday I'll tell you about my time at Charlie Five...

On a different topic, my NCAA bracket picks were money until last night, when Syracuse lost! That's one of my Fianl Four picks going down the tubes. Argh.

Semper Fi!

RP