Have you ever read about the situation in Germany 3 years after WWII?
I wonder if any soldiers/marines wrote such letters, and if they would have made it into Newsweek?
Until the U.S. and Great Britain spend four years pummeling the sh!t out of Iraq and bombing every major Iraqi city to rubble, that point is, well -- pointless.
World War II may have been the last war the U.S. fought that wasn't a stupid nation-building exercise at its root.
Germany isn't remotely like what we're doing in Iraq and that's precisely the problem.
In February, 1946, my Dad's troop train, going from Tokyo to Osaka, was fired on by multiple unknown persons in the hills. A couple of GIs died, and more were wounded (my Dad was a medic, and help treat them).
None of this got any press, and wouldn't even be known if he hadn't told me about it. Dad told me the press was instructed not to go into any of these activities, yet they did happen. Some Japanese continued to fight for years--not only those who didn't hear the Emperor's command to surrender.