Quotes from James D. Bradley

That is how we always keep our beloved dead alive, isn't it? By telling stories about them; true stories.

Japan had held 132,134 western POWs and 35,756 of them died in detention, a death rate of 27 percent. In contrast, only 4 percent of the POWs held by the Germans and Italians died.

When U.S. prisoners were killed, it was "murder in flagrant disregard of the Geneva Conventions." But when Americans murdered Others, "they had it coming to them.

When asked to give his opinion as to why airpower was stillborn in the U.S., with little funding or interest coming from the navy or army, he replied: "Conservatism. . . . You see, the army and the navy are the oldest institutions we have. They place everything on precedent. You can't do that in the air business. You have got to look ahead.

Like a moth, Rene was attracted to the flame of fame

Roughly fifty percent of procedure in a Marine basic-training program is about disconnecting the young American boy from his concept of himself as a unique individual, a lone operator.

Later he would declare that "not getting hit was like running through rain and not getting wet.

True combat power is arms multiplied by fighting spirit. If one of them is infinitely strong, you will succeed. —Asahi Shimbun newspaper, quoted in Japan at War: An Oral History

Iwo Jima had become the number-one front-page story in newspapers across the country. And it had become the most heavily covered, written-about battle in World War II.

Celebrities seek fame. They take actions to get attention. Most often, the actions they take have no particular moral content.

Late in his life, Rene complained of living a life of a celebrity one minute and a "John Doe" the next.

As the last stage of their training, we made them bayonet a living human

Japan was a closed book. Western ignorance of Japan was not the fault of the westerners but the design of the Japanese. For two hundred years, Japan had been shut tight. By national law, a Japanese could not leave Japan and no outsider was allowed in. Death sentences were meted out to any who gave foreigners information about the land of the gods. Almost no maps and no books existed in the English-speaking world describing the closed land.

Japan was taming her own Wild West as the Americans had theirs: by bringing the light of civilization through divine war against a barbaric enemy.

I didn't fully comprehend world affairs," but he remembered distinctly having "the typical American reaction that we had better do something about this.

The airmen were considered the most important passengers on the carriers.

Some people wonder all their lives if they've made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem. —Ronald Reagan

There must not and cannot be any conflict, estrangement or misunderstanding between the Chinese people and America. —Mao Zedong

The people of China well over a century have been, in thought and in objective, closer to us Americans than almost any other peoples in the world—the same great ideals. China, in the last—less than half a century has become one of the great democracies of the world. —President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Generations of accumulated misunderstanding between these two continental giants has so far led to three major Asian wars that have left millions dead and has distorted U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy.