[cynicom]

Excellent quotes...One common thread runs among all of them if true...None of them were doing the dying and bleeding and I think hindsight may have crept in there with many.

If I may, I served under Lemay as a peon during the Korean thing and he was hot to drop the A-bomb on Russia or China or anyone else that raised their head. He seems to have had different views at different times as do most of these people.

There are audio tapes of Lemay being rude to JFK over the cuba fiasco, he was hot to bomb Castro with whatever it took. Had I been JFK I would cashiered the SOB then and there.

[JohnGalt]

I hear you; it is certainly a complicated issue, I was just putting some balance from the conservative perspective.


My Great Uncle was a medic, won a medal on Okinawa, and was on the first 'boat' into Nagasaki after the surrender. A Japanese officer even surrendered a sword to him. He told me over breakfast in '96 that seeing the bomb up close, he knew it was wrong, and he believed he had been lied to about the character of the Japanese people, including the military, who were not suicidal at all-- this coming from a man who carried shattered bodies of friends around on Okinawa and watched the terrible suicides of civilians jumping off cliffs.

Great Uncle Forbes, Old Right to the corps, when he learned of what the brass said about the bombs when he got back stateside, severed all ties with his military buddies and hasn't spoken to any of them since 1945, even refusing a free trip to Okinawa in 1995 for a reunion of sorts. Still alive at 93, he will go to his grave hoping God forgives him.

Safe to say, my opinion on the subject was solidified that day.