Original subtitles

The armies that fought the Great War dug into positions which they were to occupy

more or less unchanged for the next four years.

Only the trenches gave the soldiers safety from the slaughter taking place

in no man's land.

New weapons had emerged on the battlefield.

The airplane, rapid-fire machine gun, mustard gas, the tank, weapons that

turned an infantry charge into an act of mass suicide.

The American doughboys who left to join the war in Europe in 1917 departed with

great fanfare and a final plea from family and sweethearts.

Don't try and win any medals.

Just come home.

I know most of us thought that we might not make it because every time we went

into battle, we knew we weren't all coming back.

That's for sure. You're never all coming back.

Somebody's going to get it.

No battle ever, but everybody comes back.

You adopt an attitude, a fatalistic attitude of you don't know whether

you're going to be here tomorrow or not.

And so you live for today.

As a matter of fact, before we'd win a battle, we'd always take our billfolds

with all the officers.

We'd give them to the captain's headquarters and say, well, if I don't

come back, send it home.

And it was just a matter of fact thing, finally.

Part of life. You accepted it.

You just do your job.

and take care of the enemy to keep him from getting you or your buddies.

These men were asked to join a crusade and to make the world safe for

democracy.

But in the killing fields of no man's land, these men found little security in

the fancy words of politicians.

Their survival rested in the hands of the soldiers who shared the insanity and

the suffering of the trenches.

The only men they could trust were the men at their sides, their buddies.

They called themselves that during the war.

It's a word that acknowledges that we have a special kinship, that we have a

special relationship.

And it meant something good. It meant you can trust me, I can trust you. Hey,

buddy, how is it up front? It's hell up there.

Keep your head down.

So it's a way that you appeal to another person by saying we share a kinship. The

kinship is common suffering.

The kinship is common sacrifice.

The kinship is that we're both wet and we're both miserable and we've had

diarrhea for four days and we've been living on canned tomatoes or a can of

pumpkin for as long as we can remember. And even though you don't know me and I

don't know you, we're in this thing together.

That's what it's all about.

Men trapped in combat couldn't waste time pondering the international feud

that they had been sent to settle.

Before the war, two great empires, Germany and Austria-Hungary, dominated

the continent of Europe.

Within their borders, many small territories struggled for independence.

In June 1914,

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria, was visiting Sarajevo

in tiny Bosnia. In a show of defiance, a Serbian nationalist assassinated the

Archduke.

Francis Joseph, the emperor of Austria, wanted to avenge this supreme insult by

the Serbians. His government announced, the Serbians must learn to fear us

again.

Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm impulsively pledged his support for Austria's desire

to punish Serbia.

But Tsar Nicholas II of Russia declared that his army would mobilize and defend

the Serbians.

The Austrians ignored the Tsar's warning and declared war on Serbia on July 28.

Unsure of what to make of all the saber-rattling to the east, France

mobilized her army.

The German Kaiser, fearing that the French would side with the Russians,

ordered his army to attack France.

Belgium, a neutral country, stood between the German army and France.

On August 4, 1914, the Kaiser's troops marched across the Belgian frontier.

The French and Belgian armies nearly collapsed in the face of the rapid

German advance.

The British, who had promised to defend Belgium, declared war on Germany.

The Great War had begun.

It was a war to the death.

The government saw it that way, the people saw it that way. We must prevail.

A war that had been set forth in terms of...

Freeing little Belgium and saving France and stopping the bloody Hun had turned

into a battle to the death.

By September 1914, the French and British halted the German divisions just

outside Paris.

Both armies dug into defensive trenches that extended from the English Channel

all the way to Switzerland.

The fighting continued.

In 1916, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, The British Army suffered

nearly 57,000 casualties.

Europe was losing an entire generation.

The United States was not yet in the war.

President Woodrow Wilson's plea for Americans to remain neutral in thought

as well as deed did little to stop the rising war spirit.

Magazines would carry once in a while pictures, wonderful pictures

drawn by artists.

of the action on the Western Front.

And you show the dashing cavalrymen, all the beautiful white,

black horses, chasing the enemy with their sabers flashing in the sun.

And this all had a terrific impact on me.

And I saw myself on one of those horses.

chasing after the dirty Huns.

The military and the militarized governments of wartime Europe had a

system set up so that the real truth wouldn't come out.

Reporters or journalists were rigorously censored. You had to be approved, you

had to be of the right philosophical outlook, and certainly the copy that you

produced had to meet official expectation or you didn't go and you

didn't publish.

David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister in the second half of the war

said, if the people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow.

The vast ocean that once isolated America from Europe's problems brought

her closer to war.

On May 7, 1915, a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania.

1,200 civilians died, including 128 Americans.

The attacks continued.

And by 1917, the Americans had had enough.

The final step to war came after the discovery of a secret German telegram

encouraging the Mexican army to invade Texas.

On April 2nd, Wilson went before a joint session of Congress and asked for a

declaration of war.

On April 6th, Congress voted to honor the president's wish.

Men rushed to enlist, anxious not to miss out on what looked to be a great

adventure.

What else were they supposed to go on? I mean, what reality check could they have

had? The news wasn't coming out of Europe, and when the president said our

national interests are at stake, made a moral crusade out of it, men are going

to come forward for all sorts of reasons.

Youthful enthusiasm, the encouragement of family and to carry on family

military traditions that may date back to the Revolutionary War.

a sense of boredom, no prospects.

In some cases, they were kids working on farms, they were working on railroads,

they were working in machine shops.

And a recruiter showed up and said, boys, the country needs you, and off

they went.

World War was declared April the 6th.

Well, the next day, my dad said, when are you going to enlist? It's a

breakfast table.

I said, enlist? I hadn't thought about it.

Well, he says, don't wait too long. Your country needs you.

So I went down next day and enlisted.

The only reason why I wanted to join was to be with my buddy.

If he's going to join the Army, I'm going to join, too.

He said, you can't join the Army. You're too young.

I said, well, I can lie, can't I?

Well, if you get by with it, okay.

So I did.

That's how I got in.

I was 21 years old. I knew damn well I'd be drafted if I didn't know time at all.

And I had an acquaintance in the Nebraska National Guard.

So I thought, well, that better than wait till the draft.

I'll join the National Guard and be the people I know.

I signed up the 6th of April, the day they declared war.

And I went down to Parris Island, South Carolina, for my training.

Every one of us presented as volunteers.

Hell, they come into the Marine Corps like bees in the hive.

When the country said, we need you, we need your services, they went. They were

a generation who were raised to believe that they had some obligation to this

country. that they had some obligation to their community, that they had an

obligation to their family. And all of that came before an obligation to self

-gratification or self-protection.

The country, the community, their family said, we need you. They went.

We were a clean, innocent bunch of kids, and we had to be trained completely. We

knew nothing about warfare.

I was sent to this camp.

houston san antonio texas got my uniform and everything and we learned how

to build trenches and fire steps and and how to build them out

of nothing just dig them up out of the dirt and get support and we had to in

those days it was dig a hole was one of the first things you learned to do

We had to build our camp.

We were lumbermen, woodsmen, for nearly 60 days cutting down pine trees and

leveling off ground.

In the 30th Division, 30,000 troops made a camp out of it in two months.

Then we started drilling.

In training there, me and a fellow from Raleigh, North Carolina, tied up.

for the honors of the best shot in the company.

Now, the fellows from Texas and Oklahoma, these cowboys, said, when you

get in on the range, we'll show you how to shoot because we cut our teeth on the

30-30.

Well, my two sighting in shots were bullseyes. I got nine bullseyes and a

four.

And when they got done, them fellows from Texas said to me, how the hell did

you do all that shooting?

I said, I'd done what the instructor told me to do.

And from then on, I used that method he told me, and it's real good.

They give us that training, how to throw a man, grab a man, and how to throw him

over and punch him and all. We went all through that stuff.

Have your rifle out, you take the butt of the gun and hit him and come back

with the other one.

So you pin it on the end of your gun. It can stab you in person with it.

And put us on the firing line. I couldn't hit the side of a barn door.

Every time I'd shoot, they'd ricochet.

Wilson promised the French and the British that the new American army would

be ready to join them in a large-scale offensive.

in the spring of 1918.

There wasn't much time to turn these raw recruits into combat-ready soldiers.

They had much to learn about the style of warfare raging in Europe, how to

survive poison gas and rapid-fire machine guns.

They were given enough time to learn only the basics of modern soldiering.

As soon as they were outfitted and deemed fit for action, the men received

orders to travel overseas.

So I took off for division headquarters.

I went in there and the guy says, you're being transferred to the 42nd Division

for overseas duty at Camp Mills, New York.

Be ready to leave in two hours.

And I packed up and we were off for New York.

French and British generals urgently needed men to fill out the ranks of

their depleted armies.

They wanted to break up the large American force and use the new soldiers

as replacements.

General John J. Black Jack Pershing, commander of the Allied Expeditionary

Force, disagreed and fought to keep the American army intact.

Pershing certainly has gone down in the lore of the American Expeditionary Force

as probably the right man at the right time, a man whose time had really come,

a man of iron will, a man of iron discipline, a man who was not willing to

compromise on any point, moral, military, tactical, strategic, as

he sought. He had been given that authority by the President of the United

States, and he carried it out to the letter.

He was the right tool for the right job at precisely the right moment.

In June, just two months after Congress had declared war, men of the First

Division shipped out for France to join the fight over there.

Over there, over there. Oh, the Yanks are coming. The Yanks are coming. The

Yanks are coming over there.

And we won't be home till it's over over there. That ends up like that.

More Americans followed the 1st Division across the ocean.

A giant passenger liner like the Leviathan converted to transport troops

could deliver 12,000 men in one trip.

14 days to cross in a 13-ship convoy.

Didn't lose any. We got across okay.

I was in France 30 days after I enlisted here.

I was 3,000 miles from home in 30 days.

By December 1917, 176,000 American troops were in France.

More arrived every day.

But as yet, no large groups had met the enemy in combat.

General Pershing later wrote, Each one of us silently wished that our army

might have been more nearly ready to fulfill the mission that loomed so large

before us.

The British and French welcomed their new ally with enthusiasm and a nickname.

The donut-shaped buttons on their jackets may have inspired the new name,

Doughboy.

The funny thing was that when the Americans joined the war, they were

nicknamed Sammies by the Allies. The British decided that a good nickname for

the Americans would be Sammies from Uncle Sam.

And they just hated it.

They absolutely loathe the nickname.

Now, Doughboy doesn't seem to be any more complimentary than a Sammy does,

and yet they didn't take offense at it. And in fact, because of what it came to

mean, which was a frontline combat-experienced American soldier, it

had a positive connotation to it.

For the Europeans weary from three years of war, the arrival of thousands of

eager Doughboys, trained or not, boosted their morale.

Americans came on the scene and they were tall.

For the most part, that was the impression of the Europeans. They were

tall, they were energetic, they were naive to a fault. They said, let's screw

the training. Let's get about the business of kicking Kaiser Bill's butt.

Pretty hard to keep those kind of people down.

As the cheers and fanfare of welcome parades faded, So too did the doughboy's

naive notion of the great adventure.

I never saw the beauty of France.

All the towns we went through were devastated.

There were just hooks standing bare walls.

All the fields were shot up. The forests we went through were mostly just

bare chunks.

towering into the sky with all the leaves shot off, most of the branches

shot off.

And so to us, France was a completely devastated country.

Anxious to try their hand at combat, the doughboys were disappointed to learn

that they were going to the battlefield not to fight, but to train.

The men, in Pershing's words, needed to become acclimated to the atmosphere of

war.

You would be sent up to the line as observers, and we would go along with

the British or the French, whichever we were assigned to, and we

would watch them.

And we didn't participate unless we were attacked, because then we would do our

best to shoot at the enemy.

But we were students, actually.

Those of us who had been in the trenches up there with the British had one hell

of a time because our troops, when we went into that trench in the middle of

the night, pitch black, couldn't see anything out in front of you.

They were all nervous and didn't know what to do. They were going into war,

and they started firing their rifles.

They just kept standing there shooting, shooting, shooting out into the

darkness.

And all I did was run up and down the trench so I could stop.

They were missing experience.

You take a French soldier who has been in the trenches of the Western Front

from the Artois in 15, Champagne in 15, Verdun in 16, the Somme in the summer of

16, his British Commonwealth counterparts, British Canadians.

Aussies, New Zealanders, South Africans.

What did they see in these guys? They saw big, clumsy, naive people who didn't

have sense enough to drop down when a shell came over, when a machine gun

started firing. They didn't know where to pick the weak spot in the barbed

wire. They had no idea about encircling machine gun emplacement. They simply

waded into it.

Germans came over and gave them a couple bloody noses. They raided the 1st

Division. Raided their trench, got in, took prisoners, killed the first

Americans, bloodied their nose a little bit. And the attitude in the 16th

Infantry, which was the regiment, the Company F of the 16th Infantry that was

raided, they said, well, we're new to this game.

That's the way it's going to be.

We'll learn.

Humbled by the German raid, the Americans spent the winter of 1917 and

early spring of 18 getting better at the deadly art of trench fighting.

What the doughboys learned from their patient teachers might save not just

their lives, but also the reputation of their commander.

General Pershing had faith in his soldiers.

He had fought hard to convince the Allied leaders that the Americans should

fight together in their own sectors along the front.

Pershing was taking a great risk. If his men, still unproved in combat, could not

stop a German assault, Paris could be captured and the war would end in

disaster. In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched three new major

offensives to try and end the war before Americans had arrived in overwhelming

numbers. The first was on March 21st on the Somme, drove the British back 25

miles, took back all the gains that they had achieved through the fighting in

1916. They launched their next one in April on the Chemin des Dames again,

drove the British and French back. And then in May, they launched an offensive

up in Flanders.

The Americans were rushed up in trucks, and the infantrymen always said, in this

man's army, you march, and when they run you up in the trucks, it's going to be

bad.

The American 1st Division halted the German thrust in their sector at the

town of Cantigny, the first clear-cut American victory of the war.

Further to the west, the U.S. 2nd Division, including a brigade of

Marines, fought to recapture Belleau Wood.

Belleau Wood, uh...

You couldn't reach out on anybody because they

were in there with a lot of Germans

and had machine guns.

We did that.

I was afraid. I'll admit it. I was afraid a little bit. As soon as I got up

there and got to shooting, I lost all that there.

And I'd done what I was trained to do.

That was kill Germans.

You only see what's right in front of you.

That's all you're interested in is right in front of you. This down here that's

making the noise, not that you hear some of it, but this is what you're, here's

your danger point, right straight in front of you.

That's for you watching.

And if them fellas, somebody's moving out there, you knock hell out of them.

We were all mixed up together out there.

But they were behind us and in front of us and all around.

You couldn't just go out there and say, this is the line, and that's it.

I don't care what others say about it.

That was the nastiest way to fight a war there could be.

Captain John Thomason, a combat artist and historian, fought with the Marines

at Belleau Wood, June of 1918.

Of that battle, he wrote, day and night for nearly a month, men fought in its

corpse-choked thickets.

killing with bayonet and bomb and machine gun.

It was gassed and shelled and shot into the semblance of nothing earthly,

pockmarked with shell craters and shallow dugouts.

Finally, it was taken.

Any doubts that the Americans could fight vanished when they stopped the

German offensive at Belleau Wood.

The Marines and the men of the 2nd Division fought furiously.

So furiously that the Germans even gave the Marines a new nickname, Devil Dogs.

This was a divisional operation in which the Americans went from being on the

defensive with the Allies to being on the offensive.

Defensive to offensive.

And that was going to be the primary American experience for the remainder of

the war. And as any good infantryman knows, what happens to you when you're

down... In a trench firing at people attacking you is different, is a whole

different experience than when you're the one who's got to climb out of the

hole dug in protective Mother Earth and advance in full view of the enemy who's

waiting for you and knows you're coming.

You're living in this special world, a soldier's world, where nothing matters

but survival.

You don't think about killing a man, per se.

And that killing him.

My reactions were, it was just an object.

It was a dark object out there right in front of me.

And I had to punt two or three shots into it, which I did because I didn't

think that, I couldn't stop and think I might be killing someone.

father or son.

You can't think about those things.

It's either him or you.

But this time, I was a man. I wasn't a kid anymore.

You'll grow up overnight.

Nothing compared with getting an order to go over the top.

If you know you're going over in the morning, you sleep fitfully.

Because you know that this could be your last night on Earth as a mortal.

You really feel that way. You really think, maybe this is my time.

Our engineers had dug some steps out of the trenches.

And there I stood at one of those steps.

A 22-year-old punk kid with a...

a platoon of men behind me waiting to go out of that trench not knowing what to

expect knowing that that i was responsible for

that whole troop men behind me and that's scary and your own life along

with it these people had formed a bond between themselves

if i let the group down if i let my friends down then i expose them to

greater risk

It's the feeling that we're here, we're in this thing together, and if we're

fighting for anything, it's not to make the world safe for democracy, it's not

for the Statue of Liberty, because those are intangibles when you're crouching in

a muddy trench with shells bursting overhead.

So what are you there for?

In the end, you're there, you're fighting for each other.

You're fighting for your own survival and for the survival of your friends.

Survival depended on teamwork.

Before the infantrymen began an attack from their trenches, the artillerymen

would open fire on the enemy barbed wire and machine gun nests.

We didn't run across New Man's Land. We followed a rolling barrage.

If I walked too fast, I'd walk into our own barrage. If I walked too slow, the

Germans would pop up after the barrage lifted.

And I didn't even have a gun in my hand. I had my watch in one hand and my

compass in the other as I walked across New Man's Land with my troops behind me.

The reason we had a compass, the artillery was set up so that certain

guns would shoot in one spot, and they'd shoot a path through the German barbed

wire. That was what the compass was for, to find that. We hadn't known where that

was.

Each gun would have a section on the map marked off on the German trench.

They were to start and just go back and forth and tear that.

trench up as much as possible.

When our men were going over the top, we would put the guns

to fire in no man's land between them and the trench.

We would raise it about 20 feet and sweep back and forth and raise it about

20. And the infantry would try to follow just as close as they could and get to

that German trench just as we left to come shooting back of it to keep them

sending reinforcements in.

But even the heaviest barrage couldn't knock out every German gun.

I was machine gunned once through the side, right between, cleans the whistle,

between two ribs, and took off a chunk off my thumb, chunk out of this finger,

and the top of that finger off, and knocked my rifle just out of my hand as

it cleans the whistle.

And I wondered at first, what'd I do? How'd that happen?

I didn't even know I was hit.

And then I thought, oh boy, was I lucky.

I picked my rifle up and kept on going.

I did know that I was wounded.

Then later on, I got real wet in my drawers.

And I thought I'd peed in my pants

because I was so scared. But it was the blood running down my

legs, running down my side, down my leg.

Because machine guns and artillery pieces could be heard or seen, they

could be targeted and knocked out.

The most feared weapon on the battlefield was silent and invisible and

killed without warning.

poison gas.

The first gas used in combat was tear gas, an irritant to the eyes and lungs.

More deadly inhalants like chlorine and phosgene caused the lungs to fill with

fluid. The victim choked and drowned.

The gas mask became an essential part of life in the trenches.

The masks were tight-fitting.

They were hot. You had to breathe through a tube that was filtered through

a canister, so it made any sort of physical activity very trying. And to

wear them for hours on end was a strain on the nerves, which is precisely what

the Germans had in mind, precisely what the Allies had in mind when they gassed

the Germans as well.

Chemists developed a new gas that could kill a soldier even if he was wearing a

mask.

Known as Vesicac, this new gas seeped through clothing and burned and

blistered the skin.

The doughboys knew it by the taste it left on the tongue, mustard gas.

It hung about in low places. It hung about in wet places. So you would come

by hours after the gas vapors had dissipated in the air and it was still

permeated in the ground or it settled into shell holes or it settled into low

areas. And if you took refuge there or squatted down in one to relieve yourself

or went there to refill your canteen, you got burned with mustard gas.

I was in a depression, laying down, using the telephone.

The line went dead.

It was my job to go find the break.

The line was just laying on the ground.

I picked up in and started to find the break.

I got there, and I got a whiff of mustard gas, my first, and I thought I

had a fatal dose.

I got my mask on.

and laid down, found the two ends of the wire and splashed it.

I hoped I would not die out there by myself.

The gas, we dreaded the gas, because once the gas got into

your eyes or your nose, while you were a dead duck, so far

as any more action is concerned, because you couldn't breathe, you couldn't see.

Your eyes would flow like a faucet. The water would just run down your cheeks.

And you think you're a goner. You choke.

You can't see.

And you burn to be hell. You just think you're going to die right there.

It's a terrible feeling.

It's a lot worse than a bullet.

On September 12, 1918, the American Expeditionary Force, the largest U.S.

Army since the Civil War, finally launched its first offensive.

Half a million doughboys went into action.

Supported by over 3,000 cannons and 100,000 French troops, the Americans

attacked a bulge in the German line at Saint-Miau.

A campaign reached most of its goals by the end of the second afternoon, a

pleasing birthday present for Pershing.

who turned 58 that day.

The Allies' first offensive was a success, partly because the Americans

enjoyed total air superiority.

The fledgling air service had amassed nearly a thousand aircraft to support

the Allied attack.

It was the largest concentration of combat aircraft ever assembled.

The American flyers claimed a total of 781 enemy planes and 73 balloons

destroyed.

There were 71 officially recognized American aces.

The highest score belonged to Captain Eddie Rickenbacker.

A former race car driver, the native of Ohio, gunned down 26 enemy planes.

He earned the title Ace of Aces, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the

Medal of Honor.

On September 26th, Rickenbacker took command of the 94th Arrow Squadron, the

famed Hat in the Ring, the same day that the Allies launched their largest

offensive.

600,000 Americans emerged from their trenches to push back the Germans along

a 24-mile-long portion of the line between the Meuse River and the Argonne

Forest. The Meuse-Argonne offensive was not a swift victory.

The fight dragged on for weeks, exacting a heavy toll from both sides of the

line.

The Allied armies moved across France and regained territory held by the

Germans for nearly four years.

A week into the offensive, an entire battalion was in danger of being cut off

and annihilated by desperate German defenders.

But overwhelming Allied numbers gained the advantage.

The German army had begun its long retreat.

Prisoners numbered in the tens of thousands.

By late October, rumors of an armistice, an end to the war, spread through the

trenches.

We had rumors going about a week ahead of time that the war was going to end.

Everybody was being real conservative at that time there, boy. They didn't want

to get bumped off at the tail end of the war, but a lot of them got it.

At 5 a.m. on November 11th, a German delegation met with the French officials

and signed an agreement to surrender.

The word was passed.

By 11 a.m., the fighting would stop.

A guy come in there early one morning.

He said, he pushed me. He said, Bradley, Bradley. He said, come on, get up. He

said, we got some good news.

And I jumped up. I said, what?

He said, the war's going to be over.

I said, come on. He started kidding somebody. I didn't think the war would

ever end.

And so I did. I got up right quick and dressed.

And we went outside.

And we just kept on waiting, kept on waiting. We thought, it's an hour o

'clock. And all you hear, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We

just kept on going.

And at 11 o'clock, just like that, everything stopped.

It felt to me just like the world had stopped.

It stopped hurting.

The silence.

actually hurt your ears for about 30 minutes because you

had been used to so much noise.

Everybody threw their hats up in the air and they hollered.

We screamed.

It was a wonderful feeling.

Well, it's one you'll never forget.

But the first thing that came to my mind, I want to go home.

At last, all was quiet on the Western Front.

Pershing's doughboys had fulfilled the mission that had loomed so large before

them.

In six months of fighting, nearly 50,000 Americans died.

The same number killed in seven years of war in Vietnam.

Uncommon courage produced 123 medals of honor, 32 of them posthumous.

A Tennessee rifleman won the nation's highest award during a patrol in the

Argonne Forest.

Alvin York single-handedly knocked out half a dozen machine guns and captured

132 Germans.

The country celebrated his bravery and the victory of all the soldiers,

sailors, and airmen.

with a great parade down New York's Fifth Avenue on September 10th, 1919.

The American president traveled to France, to Versailles, to help decide

the terms of the treaty.

For six months, Wilson tried to convince the Allied leaders to use the treaty as

a way to create a peaceful world.

The other diplomats only wanted to punish the Germans and, in the end,

fueled greater hatred and resentment between the countries.

The doughboys had to ask.

What was it all about?

They returned with a great sense of disillusionment about what their

personal sacrifice had been for.

Wilson had said, to make the world safe for democracy.

John Dos Passos, post-war, who had served in the service of supply, said,

we've made the world safe for hypocrisy.

War is stupid.

I don't see the point in going out and killing a lot of your people.

to prove a point when you could just as well sit down and reasonably discuss it

and give and take a little and come to an agreement.

I'm against wars.

Guys who faced the enemy machine guns and went over the top.

came to a realization that their life was on the line, their life was on the

anvil of war, and the question that each one of them had to face was, is my young

death going to make a difference?

For the man who sat in a muddy hole in the ground and listened to the barrage

go over and listened to the machine guns roaring above his head, he could look

around him and see that there were plenty of young men who had given their

lives, and they had no expectation that the world would be one whit a better

place to live in.

And I think when a man arrives at that point, it changes him for the rest of

his life. He realizes that his life has been a currency that someone was willing

to spend in a good cause, but perhaps...

perhaps cheaply.

I thought to myself, well, I believe what I should do is start telling these

young people what war is really like.

And I told them that Sherman said, war is hell.

That's in the Civil War.

And I said, he was exactly right. It is that. It's hell on earth.

America hailed as heroes yanks like Alvin York and Eddie Rickenbacker for

acts above and beyond the call of duty.

The country took to its heart the lost battalion and New York's Fighting 69th,

even a carrier pigeon that had lost a leg and an eye to deliver a message

entered the folklore of the Great War.

But those men who returned with medals weren't driven to bravery on the

battlefield by fame and fortune.

These heroes overcame their own fears not for selfish reasons, but to save the

lives of their buddies, the men at their side who they believed would have done

the same for them.