CHARACTER
Grenadeby Alan Gratz

Ray Majors

Ray Majors

Quick Facts

  • Name: Ray Majors
  • Role: Eighteen-year-old Marine private; co-protagonist offering the American perspective on Okinawa
  • First appearance: The U.S. beach landing on Okinawa
  • Hometown: Norfolk, Nebraska
  • Foil: Hideki Kaneshiro
  • Key relationships: Big John Barboza (foxhole buddy), Sergeant Meredith (squad leader), Ray’s father (offstage but formative)

Who They Are

Bold, boyish, and painfully new to combat, Ray Majors embodies the loss of innocence in war. With a round, freckled face, close-cropped sandy hair, and short legs swallowed by gear, he looks so young his squad considers “Babyface.” His helmet slides over his eyes as if the uniform itself doesn’t fit—a visual shorthand for a kid still growing into a role that demands more than muscle: moral resolve amid chaos. Ray starts with scripted phrases and clear boundaries—soldiers versus civilians, rules versus atrocities—but Okinawa smashes those lines. As a foil to Hideki, Ray’s arc reveals how fear, training, and survival can eclipse intention; his desperate attempts to humanize the enemy push against the tide of Propaganda and the Perception of the Enemy, even as the battlefield corrals him into split-second, dehumanizing choices.

Personality & Traits

Ray is a tender conscience placed in an unforgiving machine. He wants to do good in a world that punishes hesitation, and the friction between his empathy and his orders creates his central conflict. Each time he tries to retain humanity, the war asks for more hardness; each time he hardens, he fears he’s becoming his father.

  • Idealistic and naive: Arriving with a brochure of Japanese phrases, he rehearses “Come out. You will not be hurt,” convinced words can save lives. That faith collides with a battlefield where civilians hide in tombs and illusions of “clean” war vanish.
  • Compassionate and empathetic: After his first kill, he begins collecting photographs from enemy dead—a ritual to name and remember faces the war erases. His push to spare civilians and his revulsion at casual brutality foreground The Horrors and Dehumanization of War.
  • Fearful yet dutiful: Terrified on the beach landing—nearly losing control of his bladder—he still runs forward. He keeps following orders even as fear gnaws at him, embodying the tension at the heart of The Nature of Courage and Fear.
  • Haunted by the past: His father’s WWI trauma curdled into violence; Ray carries those scars and dreads inheriting the same monstrous hardness. Combat forces him to see how easily pain becomes legacy.
  • Eager to please: Desperate to belong, he volunteers to slaughter a pig despite traumatic memories, earning the nickname “Barbecue.” The moment shows how peer approval can override personal comfort and ethics.

Character Journey

Ray’s arc is a compressed, brutal education. He lands on Okinawa with rules and phrases, only to watch them dissolve in smoke and shrapnel. Veterans like Big John jolt him awake: a sniper is executed; tombs might conceal families—or attackers. When a frag grenade kills civilians, Ray pleads for smoke instead—his first act of moral agency within the squad. The coping ritual of collecting photographs follows his first kill, a fragile safeguard against numbness as Sergeant Meredith warns that survival demands a “hard skin.” At Kakazu Ridge, the war’s logic becomes unbearable: civilians used as human bombs, a woman carrying a baby advancing under fire. Ray freezes; his refusal to shoot marks both a moral line and a fatal liability. The ensuing carnage—lost squadmates, a growing belief he’s a jinx, the collapse of leadership when Meredith is evacuated—unravels him. Fleeing in terror, he collides with Hideki; training and panic compress into a single instant—rifle and grenade, simultaneous deaths—exposing how fear and conditioning can eclipse intention, and how two boys on opposite sides share the same terror.

Key Relationships

Big John Barboza Ray’s foxhole buddy is a hardened counterpoint to his idealism. Big John’s cynicism (“They’re here to kill me”) reframes the war as personal survival, yet his rough mentorship—comforting Ray after his first kill, stepping up when Meredith is wounded—creates a protective, brotherly bond. Their dynamic shows how intimacy in combat coexists with moral abrasion.

Sergeant Meredith Meredith recognizes Ray’s conscience and protects it where he can: ordering smoke grenades for tombs, even banning the use of “Majors” as a last name to avoid drawing fire. His empathy offers Ray a humane model of leadership. When Meredith is injured and evacuated, that stabilizing presence disappears, accelerating Ray’s psychological unraveling.

Ray’s Father An unseen but omnipresent force, his father’s WWI trauma shapes Ray’s self-understanding. As Okinawa grinds on, Ray reads his father’s violence not as simple cruelty but as brokenness—and fears he’s being remade in the same mold. The war reframes their relationship from resentment to tragic recognition.

Defining Moments

These scenes don’t just move the plot; they strip, test, and ultimately remake Ray.

  • The first kill: Ambushed on guard duty, Ray shoots a Japanese soldier and collapses in tears. Why it matters: It inaugurates his coping ritual of collecting photographs, a fragile barrier against becoming numb.
  • Arguing for smoke grenades: After a frag kills civilians in a tomb, Ray confronts superiors and wins a shift to smoke. Why it matters: He asserts moral agency within the machinery of war, proving conscience can alter tactics—at least briefly.
  • Kakazu Ridge: Faced with civilians used as human bombs, Ray freezes rather than shoot a woman holding a baby. Why it matters: His empathy collides with survival logic; the choice both affirms his humanity and cracks his composure, precipitating his breakdown.
  • The collapse of the squad: Meredith’s evacuation and the mounting deaths convince Ray he’s a jinx. Why it matters: Survivor’s guilt and magical thinking fuse into terror, pushing him past the limits of endurance.
  • Collision with Hideki: Fleeing the front, Ray crashes into Hideki; rifle fire and grenade meet in a single heartbeat. Why it matters: Two terrified boys enact their training, underscoring the futility and symmetry of war that turns children into killers.

Essential Quotes

“DEY-tey ko-ee,” he sounded out now. Come out. “hee-DOY koat-o wa shee ma-SEN.” You will not be hurt.

  • Ray’s rehearsed phrases capture his early faith in rules and language as shields against chaos. The line is heartbreaking because it collides with a battlefield where intent can’t prevent tragedy—and often cannot even be heard.

“God help me, I’m getting used to it, Ray thought. Just like Big John had said. But Ray didn’t want to get used to it. That was how you became heartless like Big John, or stared off into the distance like the Old Man. Or like Ray’s father. Ray didn’t ever want sights like this to sit easy with him.”

  • The fear here isn’t only of death; it’s of moral erosion. Ray names the cost of survival—“getting used to it”—and defines his central struggle: retain feeling without breaking.

“I know why they’re here,” Big John said. “They’re here to kill me.”

  • Big John’s credo reframes war as hyper-personal. For Ray, this brutally simple logic is both clarifying and corrupting, tempting him away from empathy toward a narrow, self-preserving focus.

“He had to run. He had to keep going. Stay low. Don’t bunch up. Run like hell.”

  • Training crowds out reflection as panic spikes. The clipped imperatives show how battlefield survival becomes mechanical—an autopilot that carries Ray forward even as his psyche fractures.

“A sudden thought struck Ray: Was this why his Pa had argued so strongly against him enlisting? Had his father actually been trying to protect Ray from becoming the monster he had become?”

  • Ray reinterprets his father’s violence through the lens of his own trauma. The question recognizes the cyclical nature of wartime damage: a father’s monstrosity as the residue of survival, and the son’s dread of inheriting it.