 The title of my talk is such because the old breed was the name given to the First Marine Division in World War II. I went to college graduated from high school in 1942 and went to college and Marion Institute for one year and joined the Marine Corps while I was there and 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 and ironically after all I went through I still think that it had extremely high standards and it it upheld them all the time. Now there are several places I could begin I could begin by quoting someone very profound and so forth but let me just give you one quote that our DI told us the first day in boot camp he said you people are stupid. The first thing he said to us this was before we'd had any SAT test or ACT or anything of that sort but 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. So that that was the reality of the Marine Corps that I entered the reality descended upon you quickly. Early on in my boot camp training I one day got out of step I never have understood why but I usually managed to keep up the cadence and he walked up beside me in a very quiet voice and said boy you pick up the cadence or they're gonna have to take us both to sick bay because it's gonna take a major operation to get my foot out of your rear end. You know I never lost the cadence after that. Never. But to press on with 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 Fussell was and that I was I was in the Pacific he was in Europe but the kind of thing that he was subjected to every day the kind of life that the face the frontline infantryman experienced and what he thought about it and how it affected him then and then I would like to make some fewer remarks about how what the aftermath was. Now I will quote somebody someone profound Julius Caesar said that terror robs men of their power of reason and judgment and impairs their physical capacity. That is absolutely true because the primary emotion on a battlefield was sheer absolute terror as Paul has indicated. Even the veterans my first my gunnery sergeant who didn't seem to have a nave in his body told me at the first reunion I went to the first Marine Division after the war he said sledgehammer I was as scared as you were but I just couldn't show it and he said you remember that patrol we went on on Pella Louie into that swamp the 40 of us went on into this swamp to hold up 1500 jabs that was supposed to be on the other side of the swamp and we were supposed to hold them up long enough to get help he said we did that was a suicide patrol and he said I didn't tell anybody well when he told me then I fell into the nearest chair 40 something years later I think it was Paul who said that the combat veteran has to live through the experience and then if he survives he held has to live with it the rest of his life and how you handle yourself and what you make of yourself depends a great deal on I suppose you're upbringing your discipline things of this sort I want to make one or two remarks about the people we fought the Japanese soldiers to us they were Japs now with Janet Reno in there who might attack this building at any time as though we were as though as though we were branched Davidians because we might have weapons in here and there might be child abuse you can't ever tell the Japanese soldier was dedicated to his cause the American propaganda machine said he was fanatical it wasn't that at all he just simply fought to the death because that's the way he had been trained he was loyal to the emperor he believed in his cause and when he was inducted into the Japanese army he was brutalized and brutality was institutionalized in the Japanese army there are documented cases of Japanese troops first few days in combat in fact it lasted the first year if he looked at his sergeant without the proper respect you know what they called silent contempt I picked up on many a rotten coconut in base camp because of silent contempt the way I looked at somebody but the Japanese Lieutenant would have his troops standard attention then take a hobnail shoe field shoe and stand there and beat them in the face until the face bled and then course when they got into combat they didn't mind doing anything to their opponents compassion was something that was totally foreign to them this is why they could rampage through Nanking China and rape and murder over a hundred thousand Chinese over a period of about three or four weeks the best kept secret of World War two of the Japanese atrocities there's not much even written about it and don't worry about embarrassing the young Japanese by bringing it up because the only thing they know about World War two is the U.S. bomb Japan Nagasaki and Hiroshima and as Paul Fussell says anybody who thinks it was a bad idea his life wasn't saved by it because ours was we were scheduled to invade Japan and we literally would have had to kill every man woman and child because they had a song that said 10 a hundred thousand souls for the emperor all right now war to the interim infantrymen meant killing and if you had any qualms about killing the enemy you better get over it in a hurry because when you either you made an attack or they made an attack you kill them before they killed you and the first one I saw I must admit I didn't pull the trigger on his snafu shelf and our foxhole buddy said what the hell's the matter with you do you want him in the hole here with us talk about our foxhole and I said no so then the next bunch it ran out of that pill box with it with their Bennett fixed I was firing at him before he was typical Japanese fashion they came out of the pill box this again is rarely written about rifle benedict rifle in the right hand they are on their their unbuttoned bridges held up in the left hand so when they got killed they dropped the bridges there was something in their religion or the code of Bushido that said the lower abdomen was the the place of manhood instead of the chest to the the way it is to the western we thought we saw thousands of them on Okinawa line out there with all their practically in their best day clothes that were their last ounce of strength they had pulled their trousers down now on the front lines it's a place of passion terror hatred and believe me we hated their guts now it's been said by many writers and this is very trendy that we hated them because they were racist we are racist they want it that we we are we were the Japanese were hated because they fought for the code of Bushido which meant you had to kill as I said every last one of them before you could get the heck off the arm and when you had wounded buddies that were shot or wounded by shell fire and tried to carry them out you had to get them out as fast as you could or they got shot on the stretcher because the Jap shot them on the stretcher then they tried to shoot the stretcher team down I had a good friend it was a corpsman it was working on a wounded marina on a ridge on Okinawa one day doc just about got this boy fixed up then this nip sniper shot docking the left leg up in the hip and while we were running up there with the two stretcher teams to get pull them down got dock up on the stretch and that son of a bitch shot him in the other hip just as we got him on the on the on the stretcher now why didn't he shoot him and kill him well he shot him two places to immobilize him where we'd have to carry him then he started firing at us well we were out on all the we outran all the Olympic runners get him down at Ridge so all of us could get out of his way and fortunately didn't hit anybody while the excitement existed on the front line I mean when 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 because he'll throw it back at you before it explodes you got a decision to make and the question the problem was we probably needed Peter Jennings now he's eminently qualified they tell us so of course it might meant that he would have had to wear a helmet and that would have messed up his coiffure it had I have very little left but I've been tempted to wear a hairpiece but before I retired I was the students often confused me with Robert Redford I just bring it up but during an attack either on our part or the Japanese part the bombardment proceeding the attack you know of our attack or their attack was so loud that it was thunderous you couldn't even talk to the guy next to you and it at Okinawa at Okinawa some of the Japanese artillery barrages went on for four and five days without stop and when they went when they would finally end we were just all like that I mean you couldn't even hold your rifle steady because your nerves had just been so knocked about 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 the violence was just inconceivable we hit it lucky at Okinawa with quotes around it the Japanese had a full complement artillery there which to the instrument is one of the worst things you have to put up with except for machine guns except for snipers except for mortars except for hand grenades and except for tanks but other than that artillery was one of the worst things but they had additional artillery shipped to the Philippines before the ships got to the Philippines you told them turn around go to Okinawa and because the Philippines gonna fall so that meant that those of us who landed on Okinawa got a double dose of shelling and if you don't think when we get new second lieutenant's in and full of bravado and all this kind of stuff they've learned at Quantico one good shelling knocked it out of whether they got hit or not I mean but poor guys they didn't last but just a few days now the machine gun fire was something at least you could get away from if you could get hunkered down in the hole but if it caught you out in the open you it was tough I run across run across they met an attack across the airfield at at Pelaloo and the machine I could see the traces coming by me just like the railings on a ship or on a on a porch or something like that and the shells were just going off just erupting to the point that you couldn't even yell to the guy next to you after it was over with I got across and a buddy of mine said such a sledgehammer did you know that Billy cracked up back there on the airport and they had to actually drag him across the undercover and I said no I didn't know that what happened to him he said well you remember Joe that we all went to boot camp together with Joe got hit in the head and it splattered his brains all over Billy's face and it was that kind of thing that that happened that was apt to happen at any time snipers were a a you developed a close personal relationship with a sniper because you lay in your foxhole with your buddy my buddy was snafu Shelton who was from ten from the swamps of Louisiana he still had the bark on and we had a very fascinating juxtaposition I suppose they would call it today of the large prayer and the 23rd Psalm on my palm and goddamn you son of a bitch on Smurf whose part I mean he could cuss a blue streak because you knew that sniper was after you personally and so therefore you could case him personally but the problem was he never could yet and Japanese snipers were cracked shots they their actual records of them hitting a marine on Pella lewitt 600 yards and so they were cracked shots the volume of fire that came at us when the Japanese pulled in the attack when you think of the amount of steel and fragments and bullets that came at a man it's my company had 64% casualties at Pella lewitt I didn't get a scratch it lasted 30 days and 30 nights because they fought all night fought us all night but I recently got a letter from an Air Force man who had been stationed on okinawa and he said that on this particular ridge that we had been on and the Japanese pulled his major not bonsai not the stupid kind at John Wayne modem down by the thousands but a well-planned counterattack at Okinawa he just was curious as to the volume of fire that possibly maybe he could find some he he he measured off a square foot and then he dug just below the surface and he wrote me that he found 30 pieces of shrapnel and or bullets and when I was out there I thought I was gonna catch every one of the 30 every time I took a step every man thought that he was the object of the whole and entire Japanese barrage at night the nights were sheer terror in the Pacific the typical German soldier was a superb soldier from everything anybody writes or says about he wanted to fight as honorably as he could and then get home to the family the typical Japanese soldier wanted to fight honorably and die for the emperor so honorably and die for the emperor so that meant you had to kill him before you could get it over with and because he made that difficult because he didn't want to die and he wanted to carry you with him so if you took a position and wounded a bunch of and they were lying around and because we had to feel stripping for souvenir somebody went around and shot each one of them in the head routinely some of that fits call the guys a possum squad and it was said later that they must have thought all those guys that that made those took those positions all crack shots because all the Japs had been shot in the head but they would play dead they would go to any kind of ruse to get help such as slipping behind the lines at night and calling for a call and begging for assistance but fortunately I went into a veteran outfit as a replacement and you could understand the you could the intonation of the voice you could always recognize it now the fatigue that a combat combat infantryman is exposed to and that he knows is there is absolutely nothing like it in civilian life sometimes I feel so sorry for these I don't I'm not much of a sports fan but I'm a I'm a boy birdwatcher and that's what I spend most of my time outside doing but sometimes on the news it shows these exhausted football players are exhausted basketball players and I weep so much I almost have to paddle out of the room in a canoe because they are so tired but Paul can tell you that when you go for two weeks or 30 days or is it at Okinawa it was one week short of three months and they were they were about ten of us out of my company that made it all the way through Okinawa and didn't get hit and we were literally walking around like zombies and our had weighed about a hundred and forty five when I went into the campaign when it was over we got back what got up north built a tent camp I weighed up about a hundred and twenty five a hundred and twenty everybody lost weight just from just the sheer stress the you can't imagine bringing up ammunition in the mud the fatty caliber ball which was the standard ammo for the M1 rifle was the box was it weighed over a hundred pounds I guess don't you ball the the genius who designed the box had two little handholds in the end of put the the tips of your fingers in that to lift up a box that weighed over a hundred pounds in the mud and it had mud spit all over it and of course this just brought forth more creative casing on the part of the troops but at night the Japanese as the historians say the military they tried to infiltrate the lines at at Peleleau they had a whole battalion that was assigned to raid the lines they weren't trying to infiltrate they would slip up as close as they could to us throw a grenade and come in screaming with ebus either a sabre or Bennett or something of this sort now the idea of a sabre in a modern war is sounds ridiculous I had a buddy that his right arm was amputated by a Jap officer who slipped up close and then jumped in his position I had another buddy who lost two fingers that he was holding on to his rifle and the Jap came around with a sabre like that and cut his two fingers off and then he pullax the Jap just like he hit a baseball with the butt of his rifle and killed him but they usually got killed in those night attacks but we always had casualty the it has been shown that the longer combat went on the west the stress got and the more exhausted the troops got because the fight of flight syndrome physiologically takes up your takes over you're all keyed up the adrenaline's pumping and believe me when that goes on for almost three months you don't have much reserve left when buddies were killed or wounded many of us just simply cried because we had a very very closely knit even the replacements came in that way became that way we had a great deal of respect for each other because in the Marine Corps you they can call it brainwashing I'll kill what they call it but the greatest sin you could commit was to let a buddy down and so you knew you could depend on any guy that had a marine uniform on whether you knew his name or not now at Okinawa we went through a period of about ten days of torrential rain this meant the tanks couldn't move it was right in front of Shuri the main Japanese defense bastion we couldn't move without the tanks because the Japs would have moved us all down we as it was we could move in behind the tanks or in the tank gun could be firing at 75 the outfit that it tried to take this particular ridge I was on before us had had had heavy casualties almost every shell hole there had a dead marine in it they couldn't get them out the maggots were in them the rain was washing the maggots off the dead over the top of the soil into your foxhole the foxhole it's now food in our 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 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 the spouse just like tenor on the spigot it was raining so hard the Japs were attacking every night we were killing them in the lines every night you try to throw mud on them with your entrenching tool then the next day or the next few days usually in the tropics they got pretty ripe in a day shells would come in and blow them all apart so the body parts just lying all over the place the guys called it maggot ridge and if you went down the ridge and slipped and fell when you slid down to the bottom when you came up the maggots were falling all out of your dungery pockets all out of your cartridge belt and everything else the personal filth that the instrument had to go through his inconceivable three months without a bath living in the mud your mouth felt like it was full of mud you had no way to brush your teeth but you had to stay a lay you had to be attuned to every tiny sound at night because they slipped around at night and they were experts at it of course you can imagine the odor of the dead the only way we could eat anything your stomach was tied in knots they gave us a little tripod like thing you put a sterno tablet on it before dawn because you drove sniper fire if you didn't and then try to heat up a can of beans or something and all heat up a little coffee packages of coffee in the ration can we had tremendous loyalty to the units and this mainly is what kept us together when you were out there and the stuff hit the fan and it was a matter of life and death sure we were all fighting for the Constitution but basically you were fighting for your buddy and he was fighting for you because that was the elemental level because there wasn't anything between us and the Japs but space and sometime at night that space was no more than here to that chalkboard there and if they got in your foxhole it was a hell of a lot closer than that the aftermath of all of this as Paul said there were widows there were authors orphans many of our guys were not married but some of them were some of them had children the one thing that we were all left with was nightmares I had them for 25 years I'd wake up in a cold sweat screaming having gone through something in a dream that was just as realistic as when it happened in a cold sweat some nights I was afraid I would have nightmares and was afraid to go to sleep so I'd stay up late reading poetry or biology or something like that hoping it didn't they didn't come now the casualties with the the dead we mourn them because like I say if he was a Marine you were sorry the guy got killed because he was special and he might if he was a buddy you you wept over it but to the guys that were wounded to the to the military historian that's just a figure but I have a buddy named John Huber he lives up in Virginia he's one of the finest young men I haven't known my yeah he ain't young he's my age but he's one of the finest men I haven't knew at Okinawa Huber's hip was terribly damaged by a Jap grenade here 50 years later he's had to have one of numerous surgical operations because his hip being out of his hip had to be replaced it is thrown his spine out of line then it through his right ankle out of line he's never complained he's because he's alive and to Huber to complain would be because would be ridiculous I had another friend named Jim Jim Cronizl whose family owned lived in Nebraska on the big wheat farm it was his ambition his dream to get back and farm that wheat farm one day I was standing right in front of a little ridge with a one of these deep Jap standing foxhole right in front of me watching through the binoculars because we'd been pulled off the line we'd made a push the day before and lost a heck of a bunch of guys out of my company so they pulled us off the line for a few days and I saw these mortar shells coming towards us so I got the binoculars and was looking and I said the guys were incidentally out of an ammo box behind me six eight of clean pinoculars and I said you guys better look out that nip gunner is walking them right down this little valley well I got what a guy usually got in a case like that oh hell sledgehammer you just nervous in the service so I said okay I'm telling you better look out just about that time it was a terrific crash as a shell exploded right in front of me down on on at ground level and I was on this little hillop there was no higher really than that blackboard the concussion knocked me off my feet and just down into the foxhole standing up it wounded five men high in God's name I didn't get my head blown off I'll never know but poor colonizer got a bad trap on wound in the head and then I had a seizure and I fell off the tractor and he said when I fell I luckily kicked it in neutral so it didn't run over me I went to my doctor and he said son you're gonna have these all the rest of your life because of that head wound get off that farm so he said I had to give up the farm and if you can believe it loving the outdoors like I do I'm in a damn insurance office I had another boy another buddy named Jim day Jim lived in California he had a horse farm he went when he got home he wanted to make it into a horse ranch at Pelaloo the Japanese machine gun literally before my eyes cut off Jim's right leg that it was a heavy machine gun he was so close to us the nip just moved it just a little bit as a free gun and poor Jim just toppled over there was his leg lying on the ground there there was his blood spitting out of the stump I ran over that time the corpsman ran over that time when Jim would come to fest marine division division reunions maybe some of you can't conceive of this but we'd have to help him go to the bathroom because his wife had to do that at home the poor guy couldn't do it now maybe with these bars and so forth for the handicapped he could I had a wonderful friend named Vermeer and Marion Vermeer was a lumberjack from Washington State he wanted to be a lumberjack when he went home one day on a ridge on Okinawa the Japs got a they put some pressure on the army I don't mean any offense to any of you army people out there but they put some pressure on the army and the army line moved back a little bit that meant there was a bend in the line to the left so the Japs got this 70 millimeter mountain gun it was it was on small wheels they could move around real quick but 70 millimeters was about that big fired a high velocity shell they fired a shell and it went right behind our lines and hit out there where some knocked out tanks were somebody said what the hell was that one of the NCO said that was a nipped mountain gun the next shell went I am not exaggerating no more than a foot over my head passed the foxhole next to me that had two kids that were replacements hit in Bill Ladin's hole where Bill and and Marion Vermeer Bill was blown up into the air Vermeer just fell over the two kids in the hole next to me one of them jumped up and was doing like that and the other one he was yelling oh Jesus Christ it hurts so bad make me die I can't stand it for Christ's sake Jesus do something and then he just toppled over dead this was a glory of all after this glorious stuff see this is John Wayne but I'm telling you what really happened I ran over started over toward Ladin's Foxhole and the side that says such how I get back on the gun the model was right at the base of the ridge and I had more hours had been observed and I had more experience than the gun that they had on he said if they locate that mountain gun I'm gonna need you to get on the gun so I was must admit I was glad to get back get down below the ridge the gun didn't fire anymore they brought Vermeer by me and uh on a stretcher his right leg below the knee was just a bloody bloody bandage thrown up on the stretcher was his boondock or field shoe as we called it boondock and his ankle was sticking out of it and he said sledgehammer you think I'll ever be able to be a lumberjack again and I said sure buddy you'll make it you'll be back in all those beautiful trees and doing what you want to do and if you don't think I didn't feel like I'd been stabbed in the heart they carried him about 20 yards and then put the stretcher down he was dead those are some of the things that are caught the cost of war to those who actually fight it and believe you me I could wax not maybe as eloquent as Paul Fussell but I could get my back up about Bill Clinton getting into some of these things there was absolutely no excuse for those Rangers to get killed over then Somalia experts have come out and said ah I asked what's what was the guy's name it was Secretary of Defense what it was asked me yeah let's say said they asked me asked me for tanks asked been said well you know he thought about and thought they really didn't need tank they come out and they I think Indonesian troops sent some things up they look like Model T forwards and naturally the Somalis blew them all up but don't nobody can tell me the way those Rangers were situated in a circular defense surrounded by all those Somalis if they hadn't had a couple of tanks up there they they would have gotten out of there with minimum casualties because believe me when tanks came in to an outfit the goose haul tail because they got shot up or something was gonna give thank you