 I had a fellow here. He wanted to see if they couldn't write a book about the heroes in Atlantic County. I said, let me tell you something. Those of who are here who came home are not the heroes. The heroes are those who never came home. Well, they never wrote the book. War is dirty. It's brutal. It's dehumanizing. And that was Iwo Jima. We were watching the landing from the flagship for the landing force. The worst part of it became apparent immediately. They allowed the first several waves. I think it was, well, it was at least two and probably three waves to get on the beach. So they had this concentration of Marines on the beach and then they opened up. And they just knocked the devil out of us. Every round had something for somebody. It was bad. I landed on beaches in the Kwajalein and Saipan, Tinian. And I never saw bodies like that stacked on the beach. You know, you'd have to be a person here, a body there, but nothing like that. You had to pick your route through them. That's how bad it was. I thought the first night and the second night might be the last days of my life. I was convinced there was no way that we were going to survive that with the amount of enemy ammunition that was falling upon us. Bodies were all over. So I said my goodbyes, said my prayers, said goodbye to my wife, knowing that I wasn't going to survive. I was never where around landed. And to this day it was hard for me to believe. And you say, what made them continue on, knowing what was going to happen? Well, two things. One, you were a Marine and you knew that you couldn't fail. You had to do your job. And the second thing, you were an American and you knew you had to do your job as an American. There was no question that you were going to do the job that you were charged with. You were trained, you were told, you were expected to do what was supposed to be done.