I don't know the names of any of them.

Was it Basilone that cleared that pile of corpses? That had my dad and I cheering as much as the Terps near comeback.

That was just the first episode. To entice you to subcribe to HBO if you want to see subsequent episodes. I have to say it worked, at least for me.

I do know what Leckie looks like (Chase from 24)

I just couldn't remember if it was him who got burned or Basilone. I guess Basilone is the machine gunner right? If so then it makes sense that he would be the one who got burned. Leckie doesn't have a specific job like Basilone?

But, other than being the machine gunner, I guess I can't tell Basilone apart from anybody other than Leckie...so far. I remember it took a while for me to tell many of the people in Band of Brothers apart too.

I keep wanting to call Basilone 'Falsone' since that was the characer Jon Seda played on Homicide LOTS (and the only person I recognize on this except for the Colonel who also played the Colonel in Die Hard II).

One is named "Peaches"; the other one is named "Old Faithful".

Yes

I enjoyed the daytime scenes. But the nighttime battle didn't do anything for me. I couldn't see anything. Had no idea what was going on.

I just finished reading the Guadalcanal part of the Chesty Puller biography "Marine!" and this episode followed the book almost exactly with many of the lines of dialogue matching up perfectly. I would have had a hard time following along if I hadn't just read the book though as the night battles were just sheer chaos.

Now that somebody has said that Chase from 24 is Leckie I can answer your second question. Both units are in the 1st Marine Division, but Basilone's unit is in a different regiment than Leckie's. In the first episode Basilone's unit showed up a little late to Guadalcanal, and as they walked by Leckie's unit who had been there for a little while they asked why it took them so long to arrive. IIRC, Basilone said something like "don't worry, the 7th marines are here now." That is his regiment.

This link should help people put some names to the faces: http://www.hbo.com/#/the-pacific/cas...rew/index.html

Not to confuse you, but both Basilone and Leckie are machine gunners. In the first episode we saw Leckie "turkey shoot" the Japanese with his machine gun at Alligator Creek. The next day the Japanese soldier faked being injured and blew up a grenade next to the medic. Leckie was the machine gunner who took down the few Japanese soldiers who charged at the Marines after the grenade incident. When one Japanese solider was left standing and wanting to die, Leckie stood up from behind his machine gun and shot him with a pistol.

In episode two we saw Basilone do his work with his machine gun. He injured his arm when he couldn't find his glove to carry the gun.

Thanks for the clarification.

No offense, but what do you really need to see or know what's going on?

It's not really necessary to know what's going on. All you needed to know was that wave after wave of Japanese troops were advancing and the marines were just trying to kill as many as possible and stay alive. That's really all that happened.

Cool, I know what I am doing when I go to the Hotel tonight - on a business trip for a week. Thanks!

during the long gunfight did it seem like it was going from daytime to nightime to anyone else?

that was the result of the flares being shot into the sky so that the Marines could see where the Japs were coming from.

Famous painting of John Basilone inspired by the same events depicted in this episode:

I read With the Old Breed, and while it did not have a lot if action, the nastiness ad horrors it describes will be brutal and incredible in HD. I remember a pasage talking about the flies having so many corpses to feed on a being so bloated with blood they could not even fly.
And I agree the next episode does not look that great, I really prefer to see the soldiers in country, the raid, peaches and same mundane stuff in BoB were great.

Huh? Several episodes of BoB were over an hour. I don't care enough to dig out my DVDs, but Wiki and IMDB both list the total running time for all ten episodes at 705 minutes, so 70.5 minutes per episode average.

This show has been good but a little disappointing so far. It seems a little soap-operaish compared to BoB... more cable-TVish than a normal HBO show. I don't know if it's the writing or the acting, but I'm not buying into the characters yet.

One of the simple answers: The Navy gets to play with all the money first, and then spend it on Marines.

Also, the Army still does most of the ground-fighting. Now, with that in mind, try and imagine some of the internecine battles individual units in the Army have with one another over money, supplies, training time, etc.

They have added more characters to the cast and crew page on HBO's website.

Mainly because the sequence went on and on and on and on. As someone who didn't watch Band of Brothers and watched this only because everyone I work with rave about Band of Brothers so I assumed it was going to be classic. I'm sorry, but I'm not that into it at this point. I'm going to stick with it because I really like Tom Hanks' work. But, for me, who isn't a history buff I felt like I was going to miss something important and couldn't see anything or figure out who was doing what.

I enjoyed this one more than the first. At least they had a few scenes to give these marines a little personality. But I also agree the night scenes, especially in the jungle, were a confusing mess. I just read an account of that battle on Basilone's wiki page and I don't think the episode did it justice.

Not sure how they get that, but I watched BoB when it first aired on HBO, and no episode went past an hour.