Uncommon Valor Was a Common Virtue

It's the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima.

We fought for five weeks to take a seven-and-a-half-square-mile island. It cost 6,000 Marines, a thousand of them in mop-up operations, the week after the island was taken.

There were 21,000 Japanese on that island. To take it, we had to kill 20,000 of them.

The WSJ article pointed at in the title is good. The chapter on Iwo Jima in P. J. O'Rourke's Peace Kills should be required reading. But this, from another article, brings tears to my eyes as I sit here, re-reading it.

We kept hearing that we were going up against the best soldiers in the world — the Germans and the Japanese. But they are the ones who came up against the best in the world — the Marine Corps.

Among the regiments who served in that battle were the 26th Marines, with whom I later served.

Semper fi.