WEBVTT NOTE The Old Breed and the Costs of War 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.000 The title of my talk is such because the old breed was the name given to the 1st Marine Division in World War II. 2 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:27.000 I graduated from high school in 1942 and went to college in Marion Institute for one year and joined the Marine Corps while I was there. 3 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:39.000 I joined because I had read about the different services, talked to different people, and I came to the conclusion that the Marine Corps was the best. 4 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:54.000 Ironically, after all I went through, I still think that it had extremely high standards and it upheld them all the time. 5 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:04.680 Now, there are several places I could begin. I could begin by quoting someone very profound 6 00:01:04.680 --> 00:01:12.280 and so forth. But let me just give you one quote that our DI told us the first day in 7 00:01:12.280 --> 00:01:22.120 boot camp. He said, you people are stupid. The first thing he said to us, this was before 8 00:01:22.120 --> 00:01:37.120 He said, you people are stupid, and if any of you think you can tell me what to do, step outside and I'll whip your ass right now. 9 00:01:37.120 --> 00:01:48.120 So that was the reality of the Marine Corps that I entered, the reality descended upon you quickly. 10 00:01:48.120 --> 00:01:52.680 Early on in my boot camp training, I one day got out of step. 11 00:01:52.680 --> 00:01:58.400 I never have understood why, but I usually managed to keep up the cadence, and he walked 12 00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:05.720 up beside me in a very quiet voice and said, boy, you pick up the cadence or they're going 13 00:02:05.720 --> 00:02:11.120 to have to take us both to sick bay because it's going to take a major operation to get 14 00:02:11.120 --> 00:02:14.120 my foot out of your rear end. 15 00:02:14.120 --> 00:02:17.960 You know, I never lost the cadence after that, never. 16 00:02:17.960 --> 00:02:35.960 To press on, what I want to do today is to give you, in part of the time, the sort of life that the frontline infantryman, that Paul Thussell was, and that I was. 17 00:02:35.960 --> 00:02:39.960 I was in the Pacific, he was in Europe. 18 00:02:39.960 --> 00:02:44.920 But the kind of thing that he was subjected to every day, 19 00:02:44.920 --> 00:02:50.520 the kind of life that the frontline infantryman experienced, 20 00:02:50.520 --> 00:02:55.800 and what he thought about it, and how it affected him then, 21 00:02:55.800 --> 00:03:04.280 and then I would like to make some few remarks about what the aftermath was. 22 00:03:04.280 --> 00:03:14.500 Now, I will quote someone profound. Julius Caesar said that terror robs men of their 23 00:03:14.500 --> 00:03:24.040 power of reason and judgment and impairs their physical capacity. That is absolutely true 24 00:03:24.040 --> 00:03:33.560 because the primary emotion on a battlefield was sheer absolute terror, as Paul has indicated. 25 00:03:33.560 --> 00:03:41.840 Even the veterans, my gunnery sergeant, who didn't seem to have a nerve in his body, told 26 00:03:41.840 --> 00:03:46.560 me at the first reunion I went to in the 1st Marine Division after the war, he said, Sledgehammer, 27 00:03:46.560 --> 00:03:53.920 I was as scared as you were, but I just couldn't show it, and he said, you remember that patrol 28 00:03:53.920 --> 00:04:00.000 we went on on Peleliu into that swamp, the 40 of us, went on into this swamp to hold 29 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:05.000 He pulled up 1,500 Japs that were supposed to be on the other side of the swamp, 30 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:10.000 and we were supposed to hold them up long enough to get help. 31 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:15.000 He said, that was a suicide patrol. 32 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:17.000 And he said, I didn't tell anybody. 33 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:24.000 Well, when he told me then, I fell into the nearest chair 40-something years later. 34 00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:34.000 I think it was Paul who said that the combat veteran has to live through the experience, 35 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:39.000 and then if he survives, he has to live with it the rest of his life. 36 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:47.000 And how you handle yourself and what you make of yourself 37 00:04:47.000 --> 00:04:53.000 It depends a great deal on, I suppose, your upbringing, your discipline, things of this sort. 38 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:04.000 I want to make one or two remarks about the people we fought, the Japanese soldiers. 39 00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:07.000 To us, they were Japs. 40 00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:16.000 Now, with Janet Reno in there, who might attack this building at any time as though we would... 41 00:05:17.000 --> 00:05:43.000 As though we were branch Davidians, because we might have weapons in here and there might be child abuse, you can't ever tell. 42 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:48.000 The Japanese soldier was dedicated to his cause. 43 00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:52.000 The American propaganda machine said he was fanatical. 44 00:05:52.000 --> 00:05:56.000 It wasn't that at all. He just simply fought to the death. 45 00:05:56.000 --> 00:05:59.000 Because that's the way he had been trained. 46 00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:03.000 He was loyal to the emperor. He believed in his cause. 47 00:06:03.000 --> 00:06:09.000 And when he was inducted into the Japanese army, he was brutalized. 48 00:06:09.000 --> 00:06:13.600 and brutality was institutionalized in the Japanese Army. 49 00:06:13.600 --> 00:06:19.000 There are documented cases of Japanese troops first few days in combat. 50 00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:21.800 In fact, it lasted the first year. 51 00:06:21.800 --> 00:06:26.400 If he even looked at his sergeant without the proper respect, 52 00:06:26.400 --> 00:06:29.300 you know, what they called silent contempt. 53 00:06:29.300 --> 00:06:33.000 I picked up on many a rotten coconut in base camp 54 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:37.700 because of silent contempt the way I looked at somebody. 55 00:06:37.700 --> 00:06:45.460 But the Japanese lieutenant would have his troops stand at attention, 56 00:06:45.460 --> 00:06:53.060 then take a hobnail shoe, field shoe, and stand there and beat them in the face until the face bled. 57 00:06:53.060 --> 00:07:01.700 And then, of course, when they got into combat, they didn't mind doing anything to their opponents. 58 00:07:01.700 --> 00:07:06.100 Compassion was something that was totally foreign to them. 59 00:07:06.100 --> 00:07:09.780 This is why they could rampage through Nanking China 60 00:07:09.780 --> 00:07:14.340 and rape and murder over a hundred thousand Chinese 61 00:07:14.340 --> 00:07:17.460 over a period of about three or four weeks. 62 00:07:17.460 --> 00:07:22.420 The best kept secret of World War II are the Japanese atrocities. 63 00:07:22.420 --> 00:07:25.380 There's not much even written about it. 64 00:07:25.380 --> 00:07:29.860 And don't worry about embarrassing the young Japanese by bringing it up, 65 00:07:29.860 --> 00:07:35.940 because the only thing they know about World War II is the U.S. bombed Japan. 66 00:07:35.940 --> 00:07:46.340 Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and as Paul Thussell says, anybody who thinks it was a bad idea, 67 00:07:46.340 --> 00:07:53.780 his life wasn't saved by it, because ours was. We were scheduled to invade Japan, and we literally 68 00:07:53.780 --> 00:08:01.780 would have had to kill every man, woman, and child, because they had a song that said, 69 00:08:01.780 --> 00:08:04.180 100,000 souls for the Emperor. 70 00:08:04.180 --> 00:08:11.780 All right, now, war to the infantrymen meant killing. 71 00:08:11.780 --> 00:08:17.080 And if you had any qualms about killing the enemy, you better get over it in a hurry. 72 00:08:17.080 --> 00:08:24.180 Because when either you made an attack or they made an attack, you killed them before they killed you. 73 00:08:24.180 --> 00:08:28.180 And the first one I saw, I must admit, I didn't pull the trigger on. 74 00:08:28.180 --> 00:08:30.980 and Snafu Shelton, our foxhole buddy, said, 75 00:08:30.980 --> 00:08:33.380 what the hell's the matter with you? 76 00:08:33.380 --> 00:08:35.540 Do you want them in the hole here with us? 77 00:08:35.540 --> 00:08:36.740 Talking about our foxhole. 78 00:08:36.740 --> 00:08:37.460 And I said, no. 79 00:08:39.300 --> 00:08:44.660 So then the next bunch that ran out of that pill box with their Bennett's fixed, 80 00:08:44.660 --> 00:08:46.820 I was firing at them before he was. 81 00:08:46.820 --> 00:08:48.580 Typical Japanese fashion. 82 00:08:48.580 --> 00:08:50.260 They came out of the pill box. 83 00:08:50.260 --> 00:08:52.260 This, again, is rarely written about. 84 00:08:52.260 --> 00:09:03.260 Benetted rifle, in the right hand, there are unbuttoned britches held up in the left hand. 85 00:09:03.260 --> 00:09:06.260 So when they got killed, they dropped the britches. 86 00:09:06.260 --> 00:09:11.260 There was something in their religion or the code of Bushido that said 87 00:09:11.260 --> 00:09:21.260 the lower abdomen was the place of manhood instead of the chest, the way it is to the West. 88 00:09:21.260 --> 00:09:31.020 We saw thousands of them on Okinawa lying out there with practically in their best day clothes, 89 00:09:31.020 --> 00:09:35.980 with their last ounce of strength, they had pulled their trousers down. 90 00:09:35.980 --> 00:09:49.020 Now, on the front lines, it's a place of passion, terror, hatred, and believe me, we hated their guts. 91 00:09:49.020 --> 00:09:54.140 Now, it's been said by many writers, and this is very trendy, 92 00:09:54.140 --> 00:09:56.740 that we hated them because they were racist. 93 00:09:56.740 --> 00:10:01.180 We are racist. They weren't. We are. We were. 94 00:10:01.180 --> 00:10:05.540 The Japanese were hated because they fought for the code of Bushido, 95 00:10:05.540 --> 00:10:09.900 which meant you had to kill, as I said, every last one of them 96 00:10:09.900 --> 00:10:12.820 before you could get the heck off the island. 97 00:10:12.820 --> 00:10:18.940 And when you had wounded buddies that were shot or wounded by shellfire, 98 00:10:18.940 --> 00:10:25.340 and try to carry them out you had to get them out as fast as you could or they got shot on the 99 00:10:25.340 --> 00:10:31.420 stretcher because the jack shot them on the stretcher then they tried to shoot the stretcher team down 100 00:10:32.220 --> 00:10:37.420 i had a good friend it was a corpsman it was working on a wounded marina on a ridge on okinawa one day 101 00:10:39.420 --> 00:10:45.740 doc just about got this boy fixed up then this nip sniper shot doc in the left leg up in the hip 102 00:10:45.740 --> 00:10:49.880 and while we were running up there with the two stretcher teams to get pull them 103 00:10:49.880 --> 00:10:55.380 down got dock up on the stretch and that son of a bitch shot him in the other hip 104 00:10:55.380 --> 00:11:00.340 just as we got him on the on the on the stretcher now why didn't he shoot him and 105 00:11:00.340 --> 00:11:05.340 kill him well he shot him two places to immobilize him where we'd have to carry 106 00:11:05.340 --> 00:11:12.180 then he started firing at us well we were outrun all the we outran all the 107 00:11:12.180 --> 00:11:19.180 The Olympic runners getting him down that ridge so all of us could get out of his way, and fortunately he didn't hit anybody. 108 00:11:19.180 --> 00:11:24.180 Wild excitement existed on the front line. 109 00:11:24.180 --> 00:11:32.180 I mean, when you're so close to a guy that you can throw a hand grenade at him, but you know you better not throw it, 110 00:11:32.180 --> 00:11:38.180 because he'll throw it back at you before it explodes, you've got a decision to make. 111 00:11:38.180 --> 00:11:47.180 The problem was, we probably needed Peter Jennings. 112 00:11:47.180 --> 00:11:51.180 He's eminently qualified, they tell us so. 113 00:11:51.180 --> 00:11:54.180 Of course, it might have meant that he would have had to wear a helmet, 114 00:11:54.180 --> 00:11:58.180 and that would have messed up his coiffured hair. 115 00:11:58.180 --> 00:12:03.180 I have very little left, but I've been tempted to wear a hairpiece, 116 00:12:03.180 --> 00:12:09.140 hairpiece, but before I retired, the students often confused me with Robert Redford. I'll 117 00:12:09.140 --> 00:12:19.380 just bring that up. During an attack, either on our part or the Japanese part, the bombardment 118 00:12:19.380 --> 00:12:27.860 preceding the attack, our attack or their attack, was so loud that it was thunderous. 119 00:12:27.860 --> 00:12:34.980 You couldn't even talk to the guy next to you, and at Okinawa, some of the Japanese 120 00:12:34.980 --> 00:12:43.700 artillery barrages went on for four and five days without stop. 121 00:12:43.700 --> 00:12:48.940 And when they would finally end, we were just all like that. 122 00:12:48.940 --> 00:12:56.120 You couldn't even hold your rifle steady because your nerves had just been so knocked about 123 00:12:56.120 --> 00:13:07.620 by all this terrific explosion and carrying wounded guys out, dead guys, we moved them to the rear if we could, sometimes you couldn't move them. 124 00:13:07.620 --> 00:13:11.120 The violence was just inconceivable. 125 00:13:11.120 --> 00:13:14.620 We hit it lucky at Okinawa with quotes around it. 126 00:13:14.620 --> 00:13:21.120 The Japanese had a full complement of artillery there, which to the infantrymen is one of the worst things you have to put up with, 127 00:13:21.120 --> 00:13:30.020 Except for machine guns, except for snipers, except for mortars, except for hand grenades and except for tanks. 128 00:13:30.020 --> 00:13:34.320 But other than that, artillery was one of the worst things. 129 00:13:34.320 --> 00:13:41.420 But they had additional artillery shipped to the Philippines. 130 00:13:41.420 --> 00:13:45.620 Before the ships got to the Philippines, they told them to turn around and go to Okinawa, 131 00:13:45.620 --> 00:13:47.720 because the Philippines was going to fall. 132 00:13:47.720 --> 00:13:53.720 So that meant that those of us who landed on Okinawa got a double dose of shelling. 133 00:13:53.720 --> 00:14:01.720 And if you don't think, when we get new second lieutenants in and full of bravado and all this kind of stuff they've learned at Quantico, 134 00:14:01.720 --> 00:14:06.720 one good shelling knocked it out of, whether they got hit or not. 135 00:14:06.720 --> 00:14:11.720 I mean, but poor guys, they didn't last but just a few days. 136 00:14:11.720 --> 00:14:19.040 Now, the machine gun fire was something at least you could get away from if you could get hunkered down in a hole, 137 00:14:19.040 --> 00:14:23.280 but if it caught you out in the open, it was tough. 138 00:14:23.280 --> 00:14:28.600 I ran across the, made an attack across the airfield at Peleliu, 139 00:14:28.600 --> 00:14:40.120 and the machine, I could see the traces coming by me, just like the railings on a ship or on a porch or something like that. 140 00:14:40.120 --> 00:14:48.120 And the shelves were just going off, just erupting to the point that you couldn't even yell to the guy next to you. 141 00:14:48.120 --> 00:14:54.120 After it was over with, I got across and a buddy of mine said, 142 00:14:54.120 --> 00:15:02.120 Sledgehammer, did you know that Billy cracked up back there on the airport and they had to actually drag him across here undercover? 143 00:15:02.120 --> 00:15:05.120 And I said, no, I didn't know that. What happened to him? 144 00:15:05.120 --> 00:15:09.120 He said, well, you remember Joe that we all went through boot camp together with. 145 00:15:09.120 --> 00:15:15.120 In other words, Joe got hit in the head and he splattered his brains all over Billy's face. 146 00:15:15.120 --> 00:15:22.120 And it was that kind of thing that happened, that was apt to happen at any time. 147 00:15:22.120 --> 00:15:29.120 Snipers were a, you developed a close, personal relationship with a sniper. 148 00:15:29.120 --> 00:15:32.120 Because you lay in your foxhole with your buddy. 149 00:15:32.120 --> 00:15:39.120 My buddy was Snafu Shelton, who was from the swamps of Louisiana. 150 00:15:39.120 --> 00:15:41.120 He still had the bark on. 151 00:15:41.120 --> 00:15:49.120 And we had a very fascinating juxtaposition, I suppose they would call it today, 152 00:15:49.120 --> 00:15:54.120 of the large prayer and the 23rd Psalm on my palm 153 00:15:54.120 --> 00:15:58.120 and goddamn you son of a bitch on Snafu's part. 154 00:15:58.120 --> 00:16:05.120 I mean, he could cuss a blue streak because you knew that sniper was after you personally. 155 00:16:05.120 --> 00:16:11.120 And so therefore you could case him personally, but the problem was he never could hear you. 156 00:16:11.120 --> 00:16:16.120 And Japanese snipers were crack shots. 157 00:16:16.120 --> 00:16:26.120 There are actual records of them hitting a Marine on Pella Louis at 600 yards. 158 00:16:26.120 --> 00:16:35.120 The volume of fire that came at us when the Japanese pulled an attack, 159 00:16:35.120 --> 00:16:41.120 when you think of the amount of steel and fragments and bullets that came at a man, 160 00:16:41.120 --> 00:16:47.120 my company had 64% casualties at Peleliu. I didn't get a scratch. 161 00:16:47.120 --> 00:16:53.120 It lasted 30 days and 30 nights because they fought us all night. 162 00:16:53.120 --> 00:17:00.440 But I recently got a letter from an Air Force man who had been stationed on Okinawa, and 163 00:17:00.440 --> 00:17:04.880 he said that on this particular ridge, he read my book, and he said on this particular 164 00:17:04.880 --> 00:17:12.740 ridge that we had been on, and the Japanese pulled this major, not bonsai, not the stupid 165 00:17:12.740 --> 00:17:19.520 kind that John Wayne mowed them down by the thousands, but a well-planned counter-attack 166 00:17:19.520 --> 00:17:26.660 at Okinawa, he just was curious as to the volume of fire that possibly maybe he could 167 00:17:26.660 --> 00:17:35.280 find some. He measured off a square foot and then he dug just below the surface and he 168 00:17:35.280 --> 00:17:44.080 wrote me that he found 30 pieces of shrapnel and or bullets. And when I was out there, 169 00:17:44.080 --> 00:17:49.640 Yeah, I thought I was going to catch every one of the 30 every time I took a step. 170 00:17:49.640 --> 00:17:56.920 Every man thought that he was the object of the whole and entire Japanese barrage. 171 00:17:56.920 --> 00:18:02.880 At night, the nights were sheer terror in the Pacific. 172 00:18:02.880 --> 00:18:09.740 The typical German soldier was a superb soldier from everything anybody writes or says about. 173 00:18:09.740 --> 00:18:14.700 He wanted to fight as honorably as he could and then get home to the family. 174 00:18:14.700 --> 00:18:20.940 The typical Japanese soldier wanted to fight honorably and die for the emperor. 175 00:18:20.940 --> 00:18:26.020 So that meant you had to kill him before you could get it over with. 176 00:18:26.020 --> 00:18:30.180 Because he made that difficult because he didn't want to die. 177 00:18:30.180 --> 00:18:32.400 And he wanted to carry you with him. 178 00:18:32.400 --> 00:18:37.180 So if you took a position and wounded a bunch of others and they were lying around in, because 179 00:18:37.180 --> 00:18:41.980 We had to feel strippin' for souvenirs. 180 00:18:41.980 --> 00:18:45.820 Somebody went around and shot each one of them in the head routinely. 181 00:18:45.820 --> 00:18:49.580 Some of the outfits called the guys the possum squad. 182 00:18:49.580 --> 00:18:56.960 And it was said later that they must have thought all those guys that took those positions 183 00:18:56.960 --> 00:19:01.620 were all crack shots because all the Japs had been shot in the head. 184 00:19:01.620 --> 00:19:10.180 But they would play dead, they would go to any kind of ruse to get help, such as slipping 185 00:19:10.180 --> 00:19:17.080 behind the lines at night and calling for a corpsman and begging for assistance. 186 00:19:17.080 --> 00:19:24.500 But fortunately I went into a veteran outfit as a replacement and you could understand 187 00:19:24.500 --> 00:19:28.300 the intonation of the voice, you could always recognize it. 188 00:19:28.300 --> 00:19:37.460 Now, the fatigue that a combat infantryman is exposed to and that he knows is there is 189 00:19:37.460 --> 00:19:41.540 absolutely nothing like it in civilian life. 190 00:19:41.540 --> 00:19:50.060 Sometimes I feel so sorry for these, I'm not much of a sports fan, but I'm a boy birdwatcher 191 00:19:50.060 --> 00:19:53.980 and that's what I spend most of my time outside doing. 192 00:19:53.980 --> 00:20:00.740 But sometimes on the news it shows these exhausted football players or exhausted basketball players 193 00:20:00.740 --> 00:20:05.460 and I weep so much I almost have to paddle out of the room in a canoe because they are 194 00:20:05.460 --> 00:20:07.740 so tired. 195 00:20:07.740 --> 00:20:16.820 But Paul can tell you that when you go for two weeks or 30 days at Okinawa it was one 196 00:20:16.820 --> 00:20:24.780 One week short of three months, and there were about ten of us out of my company that 197 00:20:24.780 --> 00:20:28.280 made it all the way through Okinawa and didn't get hit. 198 00:20:28.280 --> 00:20:32.040 And we were literally walking around like zombies. 199 00:20:32.040 --> 00:20:36.940 And I had weighed about 145 when I went into the campaign. 200 00:20:36.940 --> 00:20:46.180 When it was over, we got back, got up north, built a tent camp, I weighed about 125, 120. 201 00:20:46.180 --> 00:20:54.180 from just the sheer stress, you can't imagine bringing up ammunition in the mud. 202 00:20:54.180 --> 00:21:01.180 The 30 caliber ball, which was the standard ammo for the M1 rifle, 203 00:21:01.180 --> 00:21:09.180 the box weighed over 100 pounds, I guess, don't you, Paul? 204 00:21:09.180 --> 00:21:15.180 The genius who designed the box had two little handholds in the end of it. 205 00:21:15.180 --> 00:21:25.180 Put the tips of your fingers in there to lift up a box that weighed over a hundred pounds in the mud, and it had mud smeared all over it. 206 00:21:25.180 --> 00:21:32.180 And, of course, this just brought forth more creative casing on the part of the troops. 207 00:21:32.180 --> 00:21:40.180 But at night, the Japanese, as the historians say, the military historians, they tried to infiltrate the lines. 208 00:21:40.180 --> 00:21:47.180 At Peleliu, they had a whole battalion that was assigned to raid the lines. 209 00:21:47.180 --> 00:21:49.180 They weren't trying to infiltrate. 210 00:21:49.180 --> 00:21:55.180 They would slip up as close as they could to us, throw a grenade, and come in screaming, 211 00:21:55.180 --> 00:21:59.180 was either a saber or Bennett or something of this sort. 212 00:21:59.180 --> 00:22:04.180 Now, the idea of a saber in a modern war sounds ridiculous. 213 00:22:04.180 --> 00:22:12.180 I had a buddy that his right arm was amputated by a Jap officer who slipped up close and then jumped in his position. 214 00:22:12.180 --> 00:22:20.180 I had another buddy who lost two fingers that he was holding on to his rifle 215 00:22:20.180 --> 00:22:24.180 and the Jap came around with a saber like that and cut his two fingers off. 216 00:22:24.180 --> 00:22:30.180 And then he poleaxed the Jap just like he hit a baseball with the butt of his rifle and killed him. 217 00:22:30.180 --> 00:22:36.180 But they usually got killed in those night attacks, but we always had casualties. 218 00:22:36.180 --> 00:22:43.180 It has been shown that the longer combat went on, the worse the stress got, 219 00:22:43.180 --> 00:22:46.180 and the more exhausted the troops got, 220 00:22:46.180 --> 00:22:51.180 because the fight or flight syndrome physiologically takes over. 221 00:22:51.180 --> 00:22:54.180 You're all keyed up, the adrenaline's pumping, 222 00:22:54.180 --> 00:23:01.980 and believe me, when that goes on for almost three months, you don't have much reserve left. 223 00:23:01.980 --> 00:23:07.380 When buddies were killed or wounded, many of us just simply cried 224 00:23:07.380 --> 00:23:13.080 because we were very, very closely knit. 225 00:23:13.080 --> 00:23:16.580 Even the replacements came in that way, became that way. 226 00:23:16.580 --> 00:23:18.880 We had a great deal of respect for each other 227 00:23:18.880 --> 00:23:23.480 because in the Marine Corps, they can call it brainwashing, I don't care what they call it, 228 00:23:23.480 --> 00:23:29.560 But the greatest sin you could commit was to let a buddy down. 229 00:23:29.560 --> 00:23:35.080 And so you knew you could depend on any guy that had a marine uniform on, whether you knew his name or not. 230 00:23:35.080 --> 00:23:41.800 Now, at Okinawa, we went through a period of about 10 days of torrential rain. 231 00:23:41.800 --> 00:23:47.480 This meant the tanks couldn't move. It was right in front of Shuri, the main Japanese defense bastion. 232 00:23:47.480 --> 00:23:51.800 We couldn't move without the tanks because the Japs would have mowed us all down. 233 00:23:51.800 --> 00:23:58.840 We, as it was, we could move in behind the tanks and the tank gun could be firing at 75. 234 00:23:58.840 --> 00:24:06.440 The outfit that had tried to take this particular ridge I was on before us had heavy casualties. 235 00:24:06.440 --> 00:24:10.680 Almost every shell hole there had a dead marine in it. They couldn't get them out. 236 00:24:10.680 --> 00:24:18.120 The maggots were in them. The rain was washing the maggots off the dead over the top of the soil 237 00:24:18.120 --> 00:24:31.120 If you go into your foxhole, the foxhole that Snafu and I dug, we had to put boards in the bottom of it and then dig a sump hole in the end of it and bail it out with an old helmet that occasionally had left. 238 00:24:31.120 --> 00:24:39.120 If we hadn't, it was just like a colander immersed in water. Water came over the edges of it and water came through the soil. 239 00:24:39.120 --> 00:24:43.120 It spouts just like turning on a spigot. It was raining so hard. 240 00:24:43.120 --> 00:24:45.620 The Japs were attacking every night. 241 00:24:45.620 --> 00:24:48.120 We were killing them in the lines every night. 242 00:24:48.120 --> 00:24:51.120 You tried to throw mud on them with your entrenching tool. 243 00:24:51.120 --> 00:24:53.620 Then the next day or the next few days, 244 00:24:53.620 --> 00:24:58.120 usually in the tropics they got pretty ripe in a day, 245 00:24:58.120 --> 00:25:00.620 shells would come in and blow them all apart. 246 00:25:00.620 --> 00:25:03.620 So their body parts just lying all over the place. 247 00:25:03.620 --> 00:25:06.120 The guys called it maggot ridge. 248 00:25:06.120 --> 00:25:08.620 And if you went down the ridge and slipped and fell, 249 00:25:08.620 --> 00:25:11.620 when you slid down to the bottom, when you came up, 250 00:25:11.620 --> 00:25:17.420 The maggots were falling all out of your dungaree pockets, all out of your cartridge belt and everything else. 251 00:25:17.420 --> 00:25:22.180 The personal filth that the instrument had to go through is inconceivable. 252 00:25:22.180 --> 00:25:29.460 Three months without a bath, living in the mud, your mouth felt like it was full of mud, 253 00:25:29.460 --> 00:25:35.380 you had no way to brush your teeth, but you had to stay awake, 254 00:25:35.380 --> 00:25:41.300 you had to be attuned to every tiny sound at night. 255 00:25:41.300 --> 00:25:45.500 Because they slipped around at night, and they were experts at it. 256 00:25:48.700 --> 00:25:52.700 Of course, you can imagine the odor of the dead. 257 00:25:54.540 --> 00:25:58.140 The only way we could eat anything, your stomach was tied in knots, 258 00:25:58.140 --> 00:26:01.860 they gave us a little tripod-like thing, you put a sternotablet on it, 259 00:26:01.860 --> 00:26:06.100 before a dog, because you'd draw sniper fire if you didn't. 260 00:26:07.340 --> 00:26:10.180 And then try to heat up a can of beans or something, 261 00:26:10.180 --> 00:26:36.620 When you were out there and the stuff hit the fan, and it was a matter of life and death, 262 00:26:36.620 --> 00:26:42.820 Sure, we were all fighting for the Constitution, but basically you were fighting for your buddy, 263 00:26:42.820 --> 00:26:47.200 and he was fighting for you, because that was the elemental level. 264 00:26:47.200 --> 00:26:52.040 Because there wasn't anything between us and the Japs but space, and sometime at night 265 00:26:52.040 --> 00:26:59.180 that space was no more than here to that chalkboard there, and if it got in your foxhole, it was 266 00:26:59.180 --> 00:27:02.180 a hell of a lot closer than that. 267 00:27:02.180 --> 00:27:08.980 The aftermath of all of this, as Paul said, there were widows, there were authors, orphans. 268 00:27:08.980 --> 00:27:15.380 Many of our guys were not married, but some of them were. Some of them had children. 269 00:27:15.380 --> 00:27:21.180 The one thing that we were all left with was nightmares. I had them for 25 years. 270 00:27:21.180 --> 00:27:28.680 I'd wake up in a cold sweat, screaming, having gone through something in a dream 271 00:27:28.680 --> 00:27:36.280 When it was just as realistic as when it happened, in a cold sweat, some nights, I was afraid 272 00:27:36.280 --> 00:27:41.660 I would have nightmares and was afraid to go to sleep. So I'd stay up late reading poetry 273 00:27:41.660 --> 00:27:52.520 or biology or something like that, hoping they didn't come. Now, the casualties, the 274 00:27:52.520 --> 00:27:57.620 dead, we mourn them because, like I say, if he was a Marine, he was sorry the guy got 275 00:27:57.620 --> 00:28:17.620 I have a buddy named John Hubel. He lives up in Virginia. He's one of the finest men I ever knew. 276 00:28:17.620 --> 00:28:23.620 At Okinawa, Hubel's hip was terribly damaged. 277 00:28:23.620 --> 00:28:28.620 At Okinawa, Huber's hip was terribly damaged by a Jap grenade. 278 00:28:28.620 --> 00:28:35.620 Here, 50 years later, he's had to have one of numerous surgical operations 279 00:28:35.620 --> 00:28:40.620 because his hip had to be replaced. 280 00:28:40.620 --> 00:28:45.620 It's thrown his spine out of line, then it threw his right ankle out of line. 281 00:28:45.620 --> 00:28:49.620 He's never complained because he's alive. 282 00:28:49.620 --> 00:28:55.620 and to Huber to complain would be ridiculous. 283 00:28:55.620 --> 00:28:58.620 I had another friend named Jim, Jim Cronizel, 284 00:28:58.620 --> 00:29:02.620 whose family lived in Nebraska on the big wheat farm. 285 00:29:02.620 --> 00:29:09.620 It was his ambition, his dream to get back and farm that wheat farm. 286 00:29:09.620 --> 00:29:14.620 One day I was standing right in front of a little ridge 287 00:29:14.620 --> 00:29:18.620 with one of these deep-japped standing foxholes right in front of me 288 00:29:18.620 --> 00:29:24.360 in front of me, watching through the binoculars, because we'd been pulled off the line, we'd 289 00:29:24.360 --> 00:29:28.820 made a push the day before and lost a heck of a bunch of guys out of my company, so they 290 00:29:28.820 --> 00:29:34.560 pulled us off the line for a few days, and I saw these mortar shells coming towards us. 291 00:29:34.560 --> 00:29:39.140 So I got the binoculars and was looking and I said, the guys were incidentally at an ammo 292 00:29:39.140 --> 00:29:44.460 box behind me, six or eight of them, playing pinnacle, and I said, you guys better look 293 00:29:44.460 --> 00:29:48.460 I looked out, that nip gunner is walking them right down this little valley. 294 00:29:48.460 --> 00:29:52.460 Well, I got what a guy usually got in a case like that. 295 00:29:52.460 --> 00:29:55.460 Oh, hell sledgehammer, you're just nervous in the service. 296 00:29:55.460 --> 00:29:58.460 So I said, okay, I'm telling you, you better look out. 297 00:29:58.460 --> 00:30:01.460 Just about that time, there was this terrific crash 298 00:30:01.460 --> 00:30:07.460 as a shell exploded right in front of me down at ground level. 299 00:30:07.460 --> 00:30:09.460 And I was on this little hillock. 300 00:30:09.460 --> 00:30:11.460 It was no higher, really, than that blackboard. 301 00:30:11.460 --> 00:30:17.460 The concussion knocked me off my feet and just down into the foxhole, standing up. 302 00:30:17.460 --> 00:30:19.460 It wounded five men. 303 00:30:19.460 --> 00:30:23.460 How in God's name? I didn't get my head blown off, I'll never know. 304 00:30:23.460 --> 00:30:28.460 But poor Cronizel got a bad tracheal wound in the head. 305 00:30:28.460 --> 00:30:31.460 And then I had a seizure and I fell off the tractor. 306 00:30:31.460 --> 00:30:36.460 And he said when I fell, I luckily kicked it in neutral so it didn't run over me. 307 00:30:36.460 --> 00:30:38.460 I went to my doctor and he said, 308 00:30:38.460 --> 00:30:42.460 He said, son, you're going to have these all the rest of your life because of that head wound. 309 00:30:42.460 --> 00:30:44.460 Get off that farm. 310 00:30:44.460 --> 00:30:50.460 So he said, I had to give up the farm, and if you can believe it, loving the outdoors like I do, 311 00:30:50.460 --> 00:30:53.460 I'm in a damn insurance office. 312 00:30:53.460 --> 00:30:58.460 I had another buddy named Jim Day. 313 00:30:58.460 --> 00:31:01.460 Jim lived in California. He had a horse farm. 314 00:31:01.460 --> 00:31:05.460 When he got home, he wanted to make it into a horse ranch. 315 00:31:05.460 --> 00:31:15.460 At Peleliu, a Japanese machine gun literally, before my eyes, cut off Jim's right leg. 316 00:31:15.460 --> 00:31:18.460 It was a heavy machine gun and he was so close to us. 317 00:31:18.460 --> 00:31:22.460 The NIP just moved it just a little bit as a free gun. 318 00:31:22.460 --> 00:31:26.460 And poor Jim just toppled over. There was his leg lying on the ground. 319 00:31:26.460 --> 00:31:29.460 There was his blood spaiting out of the stump. 320 00:31:29.460 --> 00:31:32.460 I ran over there to him. The corpsman ran over there to him. 321 00:31:32.460 --> 00:31:38.460 When Jim would come to First Marine Division reunions, maybe some of you can't conceive of this, 322 00:31:38.460 --> 00:31:43.460 but we'd have to help him go to the bathroom, because his wife had to do that at home. 323 00:31:43.460 --> 00:31:53.460 The poor guy couldn't do it. Now maybe with these bars and so forth for the handicapped he could. 324 00:31:53.460 --> 00:32:03.460 I had a wonderful friend named Vermeer, and Marion Vermeer was a lumberjack from Washington State. 325 00:32:03.460 --> 00:32:06.460 He wanted to be a lumberjack when he went home. 326 00:32:06.460 --> 00:32:13.460 One day on a ridge on Okinawa, the Japs got a, they put some pressure on the army. 327 00:32:13.460 --> 00:32:18.460 I don't mean any offense to any of you army people out there, but they put some pressure on the army, 328 00:32:18.460 --> 00:32:21.460 and the army line moved back a little bit. 329 00:32:21.460 --> 00:32:28.360 That meant there was a bend in the line to the left, so the Japs got this 70-millimeter mountain gun. 330 00:32:28.360 --> 00:32:33.820 It was on small wheels, they could move it around real quick, but 70 millimeters was about that big, 331 00:32:33.820 --> 00:32:36.100 fired a high-velocity shell. 332 00:32:36.100 --> 00:32:41.980 They fired a shell and it went right behind our lines and hit out there at west and knocked out tanks for us. 333 00:32:41.980 --> 00:32:44.460 Somebody said, what the hell was that? 334 00:32:44.460 --> 00:32:47.620 One of the NCOs said that was a nipped mountain gun. 335 00:32:47.620 --> 00:32:55.540 The next shell went, I am not exaggerating, no more than a foot over my head, 336 00:32:55.540 --> 00:32:59.580 past the foxhole next to me that had two kids that were replacements, 337 00:32:59.580 --> 00:33:05.540 hit in Bill Layton's hole where Bill and Marion Vermeer were. 338 00:33:05.540 --> 00:33:10.060 Bill was blown up into the air. Vermeer just fell over. 339 00:33:10.060 --> 00:33:14.380 The two kids in the hole next to me, one of them jumped up and was doing like that, 340 00:33:14.380 --> 00:33:17.020 and the other one was yelling, 341 00:33:17.020 --> 00:33:19.420 Oh Jesus Christ, it hurts so bad. 342 00:33:19.420 --> 00:33:22.060 Make me die, I can't stand it. 343 00:33:22.060 --> 00:33:24.860 For Christ's sake, Jesus, do something. 344 00:33:24.860 --> 00:33:28.940 And then he just toppled over dead. 345 00:33:28.940 --> 00:33:30.700 This was the glory of, 346 00:33:30.700 --> 00:33:33.100 and we were all after this glory stuff, see. 347 00:33:33.100 --> 00:33:35.820 This is John Wayne. 348 00:33:35.820 --> 00:33:40.140 But I'm telling you what really happened. 349 00:33:40.140 --> 00:33:44.220 I ran over, started over toward Ladens Fox Hole 350 00:33:44.220 --> 00:33:48.020 And the sergeant said, Sergeant Howard, get back on the gun. 351 00:33:48.020 --> 00:33:51.820 The mortar was right at the base of the ridge, and I had been observing. 352 00:33:51.820 --> 00:33:54.320 I had more experience than the gun that they had on it. 353 00:33:54.320 --> 00:33:58.220 He said, if they locate that mountain gun, I'm going to need you to get on the gun. 354 00:33:58.220 --> 00:34:03.620 So I must admit I was glad to get back, get down below the ridge. 355 00:34:03.620 --> 00:34:06.420 The gun didn't fire anymore. 356 00:34:06.420 --> 00:34:14.120 They brought Vermeer by me on a stretcher. 357 00:34:14.120 --> 00:34:20.920 His right leg below the knee was just a bloody bandage. 358 00:34:20.920 --> 00:34:26.520 Thrown up on the stretcher was his bundaka, or field shoe as we called it, bundaka, 359 00:34:26.520 --> 00:34:29.480 and his ankle was sticking out of it. 360 00:34:29.480 --> 00:34:40.920 And he said, Sledgehammer, you think I'll ever be able to be a lumberjack again? 361 00:34:40.920 --> 00:34:43.200 And I said, sure, buddy, you'll make it. 362 00:34:43.200 --> 00:34:48.520 You'll be back in all those beautiful trees and doing what you want to do. 363 00:34:48.520 --> 00:34:54.440 And if you don't think I didn't feel like I'd been stabbed in the heart, 364 00:34:54.440 --> 00:34:59.000 they carried him about 20 yards and didn't put the stretcher down. 365 00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:04.440 He was dead. 366 00:35:04.440 --> 00:35:10.160 Those are some of the things that are the cost of war 367 00:35:10.160 --> 00:35:24.320 To those who actually fight it, and believe you me, I could wax not maybe as eloquent as Paul Fussell, 368 00:35:24.320 --> 00:35:32.240 but I could get my back up about Bill Clinton getting into some of these things. 369 00:35:32.240 --> 00:35:39.200 There was absolutely no excuse for those rangers to get killed over there in Somalia. 370 00:35:39.200 --> 00:35:47.640 Experts have come out and said, ah, what was the guy's name that was secretary of defense, whatever his name was? 371 00:35:47.640 --> 00:35:50.720 Aspen, who was Aspen? 372 00:35:50.720 --> 00:35:59.840 Aspen, yeah, Aspen for tanks. Aspen said, well, you know, he thought about it and thought there really didn't need tanks. 373 00:35:59.840 --> 00:36:05.720 They come out, I think the Indonesian troops sent some things up there that looked like Model T Fords, 374 00:36:05.720 --> 00:36:09.680 and, naturally, the Somalis blew them all up. 375 00:36:09.680 --> 00:36:15.280 But nobody can tell me the way those rangers were situated 376 00:36:15.280 --> 00:36:19.040 in a circular defense surrounded by all those Somalis, 377 00:36:19.040 --> 00:36:21.960 if they hadn't had a couple of tanks up there, 378 00:36:21.960 --> 00:36:25.920 they would have gotten out of there with minimum casualties. 379 00:36:25.920 --> 00:36:29.600 Because, believe me, when tanks came into an outfit, 380 00:36:29.600 --> 00:36:34.280 the gooks hauled tail because they got shot up 381 00:36:34.280 --> 00:36:39.280 or something was going to give. Thank you.