Rarely seen Rod Serling story, 'First Squad, First Platoon,' draws upon his World War II service |

FILE – Writer Rod Serling holds the Emmy for best writing of a drama series for his work on “The Twilight Zone,” at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on May 16, 1961. In a famous “Twilight Zone” episode from the early 1960s, a bloodthirsty World War II 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.

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 ofwhich 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.

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.

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