There are just a few. They teach men, feed them, protect them, and lead them sooner or later into the jaws of a hell that is the bloodiest, dirtiest, most vicious kind of murder that man, with all his machines, has been able to devise.
These men are loved with a kind of love that exists no place but on the battlefield -- and it is never talked about. These gents go for days without sleep, give away their clothes, go without food, keep going when they are sick, perform miraculous feats when they are wounded, and take the suicidal details rather than ask someone else to do it. They are never afraid, they are never cold, they never complain, and they spend all of their time trying to think of ways to help their men -- and to save them. I don't know if they are happy -- but if it isn't selflessness I never hope to see it.
And I don't mean to leave out the privates -- but the officers and non-coms are the ones I'm thinking of. Remember I said there were just a few like this. The stories come trickling in every once in a while. They usually stay there until they die. Surely they must be God's people. He was like that. I'm sure they swore and drank and did a lot of other things -- but I am sure God got them when they went away.".
Such selfless acts of valor were not uncommon in the heat of battle. There was undoubtedly a strong bond between the soldiers.
The Battle of Okinawa, fought on the island of Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific. It was the largest sea-land-air battle in history, running from April through June, 1945. No one on either side expected it to be the last major battle of the was, which it was. Okinawa was to be the staging ground for "Operation Downfall", the invasion of the Japanese mainland, which never occurred due to Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. American losses in the battle were over 72,000 casualties of which 12,000 were killed or missing.
