My cousin Nelson survived Iwo Jima, landed on that stinking rock on the first day of that battle, of the men in his company, five men walked off 36 days later, he was one of those five. He went on to retire from the Corps 33 years later as a Major, served in the Korean War and three tours in Nam.
He never talked about his service until one day after his retirement we were visiting my aunts house, I asked him out of all his service our nation, what stood out in his mind.
He replied; "I still have nightmares about Iwo Jima." I said, "those Japs were fanatical fighters."
I will never forget his response, or the way he spoke it, without emotion he said "Yea, and we beat 'em, what does that make us?" We sat there not saying anything for a while, he sipped his scotch and then unleashed thirty years of pent up memories about those 36 days.
War at that level is horrific as nothing we who were not there can comprehend. No book, no movie and certainly no "war game" on a computer can duplicate the experience of being locked in a fight for life like Iwo was. I doubt any Civil War battle would either because of the length of fighting, 36 days, 35 nights, no stopping, sleep and your dead, stand up and die, stay still and be blown up, walk in the sand on the beach with 75lbs on your back and you sink up to the ankles, the smell of rotting flesh, human waste and sulfur mixed with the burning sent of cordite and napalm in a salty fog from the ocean, the roar of mortar, machine guns, air craft, artillery shell, the scream of men dieing and the screams of men killing.
He didn't sleep for the first seven days, crawled from the beach through other men's intestines, watched as men were vaporized by exploding shell and burned alive by flame throwers, dancing while their flesh melted until someone mercifully put them out of their misery. Every night the order was "stay in your fox hole, do not stand up for any reason, if you see anything standing shoot it!" Nelson cried while he said " I don't know how many men I killed, some were Japs, some ...I just don't know, I will never know, and I see them in my sleep, I hate sleeping."
Men shaking from exhaustion, deaf from the roar of endless war, and from seeing so many strange things our minds can not be prepared for, figures moving in the mist of fog and the glare of man made flares drifting under their little parachutes and their orange sometime green glow, and on Iwo, unlike any battlefield created by man or nature, the island itself was alive, it was a volcano. The dead reacted to the heat in strange ways, gasses in the intestines heat up and expand within a hour or two they appear to be anything but a human, as they cook, and as the gases find the place where a bullet or shrapnel has ripped a hole, it races through it and at times it was as if the dead were singing, to many who had not slept in days the chilling song of the dead was just to much.
Iwo Jima was hell incarnate, 70,000 men from two nations on a hot rock in the middle of the ocean with no way out, no retreat, and no place to hide, enemy in front of you, behind you, above you and beneath you, that was if you were on the winning side. Living in a smoldering cave carved out of hot rocks, no hope of reinforcement and knowing you and everymen there was going to die fighting a enemy that didn't know the word "stop." Being bombed, shelled shot at and burned alive by flame throwers while slowly starving to death.
Our enemy was fanatical, we defeated them, what's that make us? RIP Nelson, your time in hell is over...Study history all you want, read every book you can, watch the movies, play video games. You, and I, mercifully will never know what warriors go through unless we live it. Every war has it's own crucible, WWI saw prolonged battles on a scale not scene before or hopefully ever again, our current wars have their own hell.
My picks;
Grant, Sherman, Hancock, Lee in no order.
Sometimes you wonder if some people's souls missed the connection with their bodies - he's one.
Bringing the