Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbk__JC-NLc
the jurogan experience there seems to be a direct connection between the loss of faith in the military in those conflicts the korean conflict and then the vietnam conflict whereas we don't think about it that way when we think about world war ii when we think about world war ii we think about it as the good guys versus the bad guys and you know we we won and we came back and there's the the famous kiss on you know on v-day where you know in the middle of the street you know there's like there's all these romantic notions attached to world war ii that aren't attached to korea and aren't attached to vietnam yeah yeah i mean eisenhower speech people pull out that military-industrial complex but people should listen to the whole speech listen to it and watch it yeah because it's fascinating but something shifted and i don't know exactly what it is i can't put my finger on it but it keeps coming back to accountability but my question is why do we lose that sense of accountability why did we lose the importance of accountability following world war ii particularly in 1947 when we reorganized really our defense the intelligence agencies and the military got reorganized in 1947 we changed the name of the war department to the department of defense so we have precision in language precision and thought uh there's a shift there we used to have a secretary of war what do we have after 1947 we have a secretary of defense so this look there's there's that little thing little thing but language is important and then for some reason we stopped holding our senior level leaders accountable and uh and i don't know why you could point to uh this essentially a triad or um of of politicians of think tanks of the defense industry uh and kind of how people float between all those things yeah um so it became big business nato became big business um so there's there's a lot of things that came into play that weren't at play before world war ii um that become reality after world war ii so i don't know what it is i can't put my finger on it but then we have that same generation that came home and what did they do they got to work they had they didn't whine about what they'd been involved in they got to work and they built this country into what it
is today and uh and it's so hard to see what we're doing to ourselves really in this country that last book in the uh the devil's hand i put myself in the enemy's shoes and i thought hey what have they learned from us on the field of battle over the last 20 years at war and uh during the time i was writing that cove would hit summer of civil unrest very contentious political season an election cycle the enemy's learning from all those things and the the sad part of my takeaway from that research was that hey if i'm the enemy i might just watch we're doing a pretty good job of destroying ourselves from the inside yeah right now i might just just wait and watch and see what happens um but of course i had to figure out in a in a fictional sense how to deal with that and i did in a very creative way that i that was was fun to figure out but uh but it's sad to think that we've lost this appreciation i think for what was sacrificed so we could have these freedoms and options and opportunities that we do today so from the inception of this country up until today people have sacrificed everything or they've risked everything so that we could have these freedoms and now we have a segment of society that wants to undercut those freedoms because i don't think they appreciate what was sacrificed so we could have them uh and that part's that's sad i took my daughter to um pearl harbor for the 80th anniversary commemoration events this last december and uh we volunteered with an organization called the best defense foundation donnie edwards foundation that takes people back to the world war ii battlefields primarily so they can say goodbye they can make peace with what they what they did there and a lot of them it's their last trips to these places a lot of them it's their second trip the first one was actually going over the beach in normandy or going to iwo jima and fighting and now they're getting to go there in the last years of their lives and say goodbye but we went to pearl harbor and so my daughter is 16 and she sat we volunteered we took 64 veterans age of 96 to 104. wow and in wheelchairs we're getting them on and off the buses taking them to the events getting the dinners making sure they're taking their medications all that stuff and it was a
turning point in her life because she got to sit down across the table from this generation that yeah she's heard me talk about and she's read about but to hear them tell their stories and a lot of them haven't even told their stories until just a few years ago there's one guy jack holder who was on the airfield at pearl harbor he watched the planes japanese planes come over the mountains drop down strafe the runway he jumps into this what was then a sewage ditch and he showed us the the bullet holes in the runway still there in the hangar still there and so he jumps into the sewage dish he watches the planes take this left-hand turn bank and he jumps up runs to the edge of of the of pearl harbor right there on the water and watches them and watches the first torpedoes get dropped in pearl harbor and then he went back he flew a pby which was a seaplane and then he went on to uh to fight in the pacific and he sunk a uh a japanese submarine and helped sink a japanese aircraft carrier and then he goes to the mediterranean and sinks a uh a german uh submarine i mean incredible incredible that's what this generation did for us and so she got to see that but so she appreciates point being is that she appreciates what those gender generation gave us and then by default what previous generations have given us so uh we're gonna go to d-day here um this june taking her out of school we're gonna go do that and go to uh normandy and uh take the same group of veterans back to back to normandy and a lot of them it'll be their their last trip um but uh she'll get to help again get them to the events get them to dinners get them on and off the buses in and out of the wheelchairs and and experience uh that place with them i can't imagine what it must be like for them to go back to normandy and to be on that beach and i mean i've seen the photographs and you know i think probably uh one of the best uh theatrical representations of it is saving private ryan right which is horrific how do you imagine that they they nailed that scene oh yeah oh yeah i mean it's it's uh god it puts things in relative terms and for me it was in buds on the beach in hell week you know doing push-ups getting yelled at you're
freezing you're on the verge of hypothermia people are quitting and i thought hey you know what i'm not coming off of a boat on to a beach in normandy where i'm running through a hail of machine gun fire that's set up in an elevated position with no cover and concealment between me and that position right i'm like i can do a few more push-ups here on the beach you know i can shiver here in the water a little longer here those guys sacrificed that so i could follow my dream and i could be here on this beach in coronado california testing myself in this crucible of buds so i think about that that generation in particular uh quite a bit and uh and what they gave us tactically when they review storming the beach at normandy is there alternative methods of approaching that situation that people have proposed that would have been caused less casualties because it's such a crazy thing to just dump everybody off at the beach and run towards the gunfire i mean yeah i will always wonder like how why didn't we why didn't they do something differently why didn't they shoot at them with planes and soften them up first i mean it seems well we had some of that so we did drop a drop people behind the lines we had gliders going in we bombarded the shore gliders is because no no sound you know that is a good i mean that must be a part of it i can't remember exactly why but that must be that must be it but yeah the gliders going in and oh my gosh what i mean a crazy thing to be involved in just in the especially back then yeah in the 1940s being in the back of a glider essentially crashing and getting out and then having to figure out where you are and then to figure out without radios who the good guys are who the bad guys are which direction are we going like all of that so we get dropped off in the right place right um some of some were shot down and then they you know a lot of them were shot down um but uh so they did do things they did do things to soften up those those those beaches and and all of that but you know we're dealing with 1940s technology coming off of lessons of world war one which was even more horrific
um did they have missiles back then that are capable of uh like being precise or did they just sort of launch them in the general direction yeah the germans had some uh misalignment i believe they had missile technology that was a rocket technology that was um far superior to ours i think people can check me on that but no it's mostly like a gigantic bullet coming out of a battleship wow and uh and hitting something or not um so yeah it's an amazing place to go for people who haven't been to go to these memorials especially to take kids to these memorials and go to pearl harbor and to go to normandy and to go stand up on pointe du hoc and look down and see hey where the rangers had to climb up ropes and ladders and the germans are firing right down on them from these positions and they just kept climbing uh the longest day that old movie um it shows that as well and i grew up with that film it's an old black and white movie that people should watch they should watch that end saving private ryan but uh and that's the power of popular culture like these movies play an important part in uh in in our popular culture and in our history because you can show these things and create this appreciation and we're just losing that i think i mean hollywood used to be our most uh uh most prolific and valuable asset that we would export and so people from all over the world would see these movies and see this opportunity that was the united states and i think that's shifted that's shifted over time but uh that's why those war films i think are so important because you can watch that and say oh my gosh i am so appreciative of what those guys did yeah you know what my life here maybe i should uh make it maybe i can make some changes here and i can uh appreciate what they did for us so that i can have make my own decisions and uh and i can have these freedoms and opportunities rather than just complain about it because really you know what i'm not doing running into a hail of machine gun bullets as i cross this beach so there's there's a lot to be an appreciative to appreciate the previous generations what they did for us