Iwo Jima

But it's I'm going to have to ask somebody why.

But they say it's like an unbelievable, unbelievably important, unbelievably dangerous in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

He carved a path to American victory, literally carved a path so soldiers could get in and win.

Through a deadly gauntlet of enemy strongholds, back and forth he went.

And he did it for hours and hours.

People said they've never seen anything quite like it.

Out of the 300 flamethrower operators, you had 300 flamethrower operators on Iwo Jima, They had a casualty rate of substantially over 90%.

So, like I said, it's dangerous.

But it's I'm going to have to ask somebody why.

But they say it's like an unbelievable, unbelievably important, unbelievably dangerous in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

He carved a path to American victory, literally carved a path so soldiers could get in and win through a deadly gauntlet of enemy strongholds back.

And forth he went.

And he did it for hours and hours.

People said they've never seen anything quite like it.

Out of the 300 flamethrower operators, you had 300 flamethrower operators on Iwo Jima, They had a casualty rate of substantially over 90%.

So, like I said, it's dangerous.

And meanwhile, the war in the Pacific is just savage.

The book takes you to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and it's not sanitized at all.

You can almost smell the mud and the cordite.

The fanaticism of the Japanese soldiers is a huge part of the story.

They'd been through the Depression.

Those kids of the 60s and the 70s were putting nothing over the guys who occupied Japan, fought in Okinawa and Iwo Jima or went through the Ardennes.

Do you think that's why it didn't work then and maybe we haven't got those antibodies

anymore? That's a great theory about it.

I always thought myself, and I'm no expert on this, but I always thought that, and some people at the time pointed this out, that the picture we saw the next day of the firefighters raising the American flag over the wreckage.

It looks very similar in its form to the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Why not do that? And then maybe add a couple of things to it about, I don't know, the war, the fire, whatever.

I

People who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

Jim, there was also the moment where the first responders raised the flag at Ground Zero and almost like an Iwo Jima type moment, which was incredibly powerful.

I had a colleague, still one of my colleagues, went to Walmart because everyone wanted an American flag at that point and there were not nearly enough on the shelves.

And so there was a package that had several small American flags and people were opening the package after they bought it and handing out individual flags to other people who desperately wanted one.

I read the Mosquito Bowl book by Buzz Bissinger, and it's a terrific book, a true story about a football game that was played in the Pacific Ocean.

in advance of some of the invasions of Japanese islands, Iwo Jima, et cetera.

And the book is fascinating.

And the last time Peter Berg made a film out of a Buzz Bissinger book, it was Friday Night Lights, one of the best football movies ever made.

Oh, yeah.

We did a drive by of Iwo Jima.

That's right.

Oh, you're right.

But they're redoing that.

So it's going to look really pretty.

After we went through there, we went through Iwo Jima.

We did stop at CB's.