LEWIS PULLER: Whenever this war is over,
the victory will have been won by you,
with the uniform you wear, the chevrons on your sleeves,
and the instincts in your gut, and the blood on your boots.
We will sail across God's vast ocean,
where we will meet our enemy and make the difference
between freedom of the world and its enslavement.
JOSEPH LIEBGOTT: You fought bravely for your country.
You found in one another a bond
that exists only in combat.
Every man that's wounded, every man I lose,
I have to believe that it's all worthwhile
because our cause is just.
( music playing )
( no audible dialogue )
( airplane roaring )
( film projector running )
( roar of airplanes approaching )
Man: Well, I don't know. The odds were all against you.
It was more or less like being in death row in a penitentiary,
waiting on your turn, and you knew it was coming.
Man 2: You fly a real tough mission,
and you're so glad to get back, and everybody says,
"Boy, we made it through that one, didn't we?"
And the next morning they'd come in,
put the flashlight in your face--
"All right, boys, get up. You're gonna be leavin'.
We're gonna be flyin' in two hours."
Now, that's... that's tough.
Man 3: I was 21 years old, yeah,
and we felt like we could live forever.
Don't get me wrong.
We'd still get that tight feeling...
...when we would would see bursting flak nearby,
when we'd see fighters--
we still got that feeling, but...
( anti-aircraft shells exploding )
...you can't make a living that way.
All you could do is make a dying.
( explosions continue )
Man 4: Anybody said they weren't afraid,
they were full of crap. ( laughs )
'Cause you were always afraid what was gonna happen next,
particularly in flak, you're just waiting
for something to go off around you.
And that's when the fighters would come up.
( aircraft approaching )
( machine-gunfire )
( firing )
Man: One of the men in our crew kept saying,
"I know I'm not gonna make it," et cetera, et cetera.
And you don't like to hear that.
And he was very concerned because his wife
was expecting within a day or two.
And, uh, the next day, they had him flying,
which they shouldn't have had, and...
they took so many men from our crew to fly with him,
and they never made it back.
They crashed into the Channel.
And, incidentally-- and this isn't storytelling--
but he, he, uh...
( sighs )
( voice breaking ) ...he was killed the day his son was born.
John Ketzner: The war came,
and we went and did what they told us to do.
That's the only thing I know.
The Japanese ruined my youth,
because I was 20 years old or 19 years old
and everything was wonderful,
and the Japanese, in one fell swoop,
ended all that.
And it lasted four years.
Al Villagran: Well, I can see why they get young fellas to fly to war,
or ground or submarines and so forth.
When you're younger, you feel you can do anything.
I think when you get older, you get smarter. ( chuckles )
VG Alexander: There was a 19-year-old navigator,
Jewish kid, sharp as a tack.
And I had some older boys,
my bombardier was 26 years old.
I was 22, 23.
William Toombs: Oldest man we had in our crew
was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, 32 years old.
We called him "Pappy."
Thirty-two years old!
Our navigator was 26,
and everybody else was anywhere from 22, 23.
I can look back now and see why...
young people are in a war-- not older people.
Old people got better sense.
Paul Haedike: Sometimes they say that the older you get,
the more wiser you get.
There weren't too many, I don't think,
too much younger than me.
I flew every one of my missions at 19.
The old man on our crew was our waist gunner.
He was 25.
John Doyle: I'll tell ya, when we got into this thing, you wanted to fly.
You know, you had a great time training and all that.
But when you get over there, and you got shot at the first time,
you knew you were in deep doo-doo.
( chuckles ) And you really took life seriously after that.
Robert Rowland: They said we was gonna fly 30 missions.
They started out at 25, and then they changed it to 30 when we got there.
Then we got 26 missions in, and they give us a week off,
then we come back and they says,
"You're gonna fly 35."
And that was kind of a shock. ( chuckles )
Glenn Harrison: It seemed like I was flying all the time.
There were 40 bomb groups, and our bomb group had a lot of people.
I don't know the logistics of keepin' the fuel
and the ammunition, loading the bombs at night,
getting 'em ready for the next day.
I don't know how they did it.
Morton Kimmel: When you're in a position like that,
there's no tomorrow.
You do everything that you want to do, that you can do,
when you feel like doing it, and do it then,
because you may not get the chance to do it again.
Ketzner: Wouldn't be unusual, they'd wake you up,
the first thing you'd do would be
go to the mess hall to eat.
The mess hall was all lit up
and everybody was laughing and talking,
and usually, they had Berlin Lynn,
or whatever her name was, on the radio, broadcasting.
We hadn't been briefed yet,
we didn't know where we was gonna go,
but this lady in Berlin knew where we were gonna go.
And she says, "Boys, you've got a tough one today.
You're going to so-and-so and so-and-so,
and we'll be waitin' on ya." And so... ( laughs )
that they knew more than we did.
Villagran: Now, in the Air Force,
when we went to the kitchen for breakfast,
and we were getting, say, eggs, we'd get powdered eggs.
That's what they had.
Once in a while, we would get fresh eggs.
You could get two over easy,
and this was a treat.
But we knew after a while that when you got fresh eggs,
it meant you were gonna have a real tough mission,
so they gave you fresh eggs.
( laughing ) That's the story.
We don't want fresh eggs, but we want fresh eggs.
( no audible dialogue )
Doyle: When you go in to get ready for a flight,
you'd go into the locker room, and you wore long johns,
and then you'd wear the heated suit, put that on.
And we had gloves that were attached to those.
You had to get your gloves into those.
They came clear around your ankles, too.
And then you had your flight suits.
Those were the things that you just wore.
Ketzner: Then you'd load back on a truck
and they'd take you to the area
where the debriefing rooms were,
so all the crews and everything
would be sitting there, waiting,
and they had a sheet over the wall.
They'd pull the sheet back and say,
"Our target today is Germany.
The weather looks pretty good as near as we can tell."
Ketzner: One thing always got me about these briefings.
The Catholic chaplain,
he was back in the corner hearing confessions...
...and giving out communions.
( laughing ) So you knew that you was goin' someplace
that you might not come back from.
( no audible dialogue )
( plane engines starting )
( engines roaring )
Ketzner: That was one of the most amazing things of the war,
the choreographing of putting 1100 airplanes together in formation at war.
Toombs: We'd all line up on the perimeter strip
that come around to the end of the runway.
And the lead ship would taxi around and line up,
and when they fired the flare to take off,
that lead ship went down the runway.
Next man pulled right up behind him.
Thirty seconds, he moved.
Thirty seconds, the third man moved.
Every 30 seconds a plane was goin' down that runway.
That lead plane never got off the ground
before that second plane was already running.
Harrison: Well, we'd just spin out there on the end of the runway
and give it full throttle,
and you had to have enough speed for it
to lift all that load up.
You had a full gas load,
you had all your ammunition for the guns,
and you had the bombload.
Villagran: 'Course, while you're up there,
I could see the sun comin' up around the Earth,
and I thought that was the most weird thing,
to see the sun comin' up and it's dark on Earth, you're knowing.
But you realized what was happening to you,
and the next thing you know, why, the sun come up,
and you see all these airplanes circling,
straining, so to speak, to get up to the altitude
with a heavy load of bombs.
Rowland: You had to form up, and you had a circle
you were supposed to fly till you got formed up with your group.
And then there'd be another bomb group over here.
And one day we come within three or four inches...
( laughs ) ...of flakin' up another bomb group.
Alexander: Well, on some of 'em,
when the young pilots'd come in as replacements,
if I was first man to take off, we'd be up in the air,
say, two or three hundred feet, climbing,
all of a sudden, boom!
Doyle: You'd see a bright flash,
a red flash, and stuff coming down,
you knew darn well it was a midair collision.
And those were scary times, as far as getting up.
Haedike: Two B-17s, one came down right on top of the other.
They all went to their death.
That's when I started smokin', by the way. ( laughs )
( no audible dialogue )
Kimmel: Well, actually, I believe that our officers
were closer to the crew
than they were with other officers.
As a crew, most crews stuck pretty well together.
We did a lot together.
( no audible dialogue )
I don't think we would have appreciated
one new man joining us.
We knew what each man was capable of doing.
Each man did his job good, and no one complained.
Haedike: We were family in the air-- you absolutely had to be.
We all had our duties.
Villagran: We just wanted to stay together.
And we flew 25 missions as a crew, all of us together.
Haedike: You're a family...
exactly-- you have to be.
However, I can remember one mission
when our flight engineer came out smashed.
And I climbed all over him.
I said, "What is wrong with you?"
We depended on one another.
( no audible dialogue )
Kimmel: There was a lot of spit and polish
with the officers, and that didn't happen.
Like you say, we're a family of brothers...
...and we didn't have time for all that stuff.
But there was no saluting and...
and "Yes sir, no sir" and all that.
Each guy was his own guy.
Alexander: Well, of course, each man would do his job
and we all knew exactly who was gonna do what,
so to speak.
So I knew I had a good crew.
And we just got along beautifully.
Toombs: We had a crew chief that took care of that plane
after we got it back off a mission.
So the three of us walked that plane,
looked at everything on the ground,
ask him all the questions we could think of.
If there was any little thing
that we thought we should pay particular attention to,
for him to tell us.
Haedike: You never flew the same plane all the time.
It's just like your car havin' an ouchie
and you take it in to Firestone or somewhere to get fixed.
They'd work overnight, all night long,
trying to patch planes.
Doyle: As soon as you got in,
they would take care of any damage,
they would get in the plane and check the engines out,
start 'em up and check 'em out.
And they would clean up everything.
Kimmel: Tremendous workers.
They were so good.
We came back in B-17s with two engines,
with the tail fin shot up and busted away...
...with all kinds of holes in the plane,
and in two days, that plane was flying missions again.
Toombs: We had armor on our crew.
And he'd be there when they-- most cases, not all cases--
sometimes a plane'd be loaded before we ever got there.
Doyle: The armor gunners took care of all that.
They'd bring 'em out on big carriers, and...
it was a dangerous job.
Haedike: We did not load the bombs, no, but we did come out and check.
( no audio )
Doyle: They were all fused,
and they had fusing wires stuck to the propeller.
These fusing wires were hooked on the shackles
that the bombs are hung on,
and when they left the plane, they would pull the wire out.
Haedike: Now the bomb is alive.
If you've seen movies and you hear bombs...
( whistles ) ...goin' down, that's this fuse spinning out.
Now the bomb is live, and once it hit,
of course, it detonates.
We had two missions where I had to go back in the bomb bay
and put the cotter pins back in.
And that is a little hairy.
Why? 'Cause when you landed,
if you didn't, the bombs were armed,
and if you had trouble, of course, you'd detonate.
Villagran: Well, we talked about just about everything.
Our families, et cetera. It didn't matter what it was.
We kept pretty much of a running conversation between everybody.
It made the mission go a little easier.
Ketzner: First thing you did,
soon as we cleared the coast of England,
everybody would test their guns.
( gun firing )
Toombs: Well, of course, I can only speak for myself,
but when you're in hostile territory,
and I was in a top turret,
so all of my vision was 360--
90 degrees this way, ya know.
Harrison: Contrails would form at the tail of the ship.
The moisture in the air and the ship flying through it
made the contrails.
And a lot times we wouldn't have 'em,
because it depended on the amount of moisture in the air.
Toombs: Couldn't see a prettier sight than that.
Kind of spell-bound, ya know, spell-bound.
A beautiful sight.
Ketzner: If you're watching on the ground over in Germany,
they tell me, it took about 30 minutes for 'em all to come over.
Haedike: They said on a clear day
that the Germans could see us coming 50 miles out
from the contrails.
And unfortunately, when that happened,
that wasn't too good, because they were ready for us.
Kimmel: In 1938, I was down in Chile,
and they threw a good will tour down there.
I remember going out with my father
and seeing these big planes.
And I said to my father, "Someday I'm gonna fly in one of those."
( laughs ) Little did I know.
Toombs: The B-17 was not only a beautiful ship,
but it flew like a dream,
it flew like an overgrown Piper Cub.
It flew nice and smooth. Beautiful.
Took a lot of punishment.
Kimmel: The greatest airplane ever built,
as far as I'm concerned.
It brought us back 35 times.
Sometimes in condition that you would never even think
of trying to fly an airplane,
any other airplane,
that plane came back, and that plane brought us back.
It was a marriage, I'll tell ya.
Haedike: A lot of guys, they'd name their own planes.
And they had all kinds of kooky names.
Kimmel: The original crews
had a lot of good painters
and they had a of planes that were decorated
and had logos on 'em and so on.
Haedike: Vargas girls, like Petty girl-- Petty girls, Vargas girls,
sexy girls--
there weren't too many serious things.
I think to keep guys loose.
Villagran: Well... ( laughs )
...on a warm day it would be 20 below.
But sometimes it got 60 below.
And oftentimes I had to take my oxygen mask
and crack the ice out of it
and check if it would freeze into the tube.
That was one of the worst parts of the mission,
was the cold air.
The only time you didn't feel it
is when you were fightin' fighters
or goin' over the target.
Toombs: Oh, at 30,000 feet the--
I think the temperature drops two degrees every thousand.
It'd be about 40 below at that altitude.
In the cockpit, a little bit of heat came off the number three engine,
it came into the cockpit where the pilot and I sat.
And there's enough to kind of keep your feet warm
and your hands.
( wind whistling )
Toombs: Our ball turret gunner had a gun problem,
his gun jammed, and he took his gloves off to work on it,
and both his hands got frostbitten
and he didn't fly with us for a month until his hands healed up.
Kimmel: Well, it was so cold on one mission
our copilot suffered an anoxia situation where he passed out,
and his hand froze to the plexiglass window,
and then they had to amputate the fingers of his hand
because it was so cold that his hand, when he tried to help himself,
froze to the plexiglass window.
( church bell tolling )
Toombs: Well, the British treated us very nice,
in some cases royally.
They called it "The Friendly Invasion"
'cause we flat invaded that country.
England's a small country, and we had it
absolutely covered up with American soldiers.
And they tolerated us.
( no audible dialogue )
Villagran: I was single then,
I could run around, do whatever I wanted.
But I didn't feel uncomfortable
with the British people at all...
once I got to be able to understand the language,
because... ( laughs ) that English language
is a little different then ours.
Alexander: Very good people.
As you know, at the beginning of the war
they weren't too enamored by the Yanks comin' over.
They said we were "overpaid, oversexed, and over here."
( chuckles ) I remember that.
Alexander: Flak is German 88-millimeter cannon shells.
Flak was responsible for more planes being shot down
than enemy fighters.
And when you see a flak, black puffs of smoke,
that's after the shell, of course, has exploded.
And it explodes, hypothetically,
into 200 pieces...
and it's powerful.
Rowland: You don't know where the flak is coming from.
You don't know if the next burst is gonna hit you or not.
You never know where the next one is gonna be
in a case like that, and that's what scares ya.
( explosions )
Toombs: It just looked like a big thunderstorm,
so to speak, that's what it amounted to.
But you had to keep on flyin'.
Kimmel: God was on your side when you didn't get hit.
The flak would vary so much.
The Germans had pretty good radar--
they could judge your altitude, your speed,
and your direction.
Harrison: I think the worst that I ever had--
over Kassel, Germany, I will never forget that one--
it blew my windshield out
and come into my face at 160 miles an hour.
Villagran: You'd look at that flak out there, and you'd swear
you're not gonna get through it...
where the sky's almost black with these things
bustin' all over the place.
It's amazing we did make it through as much as we did.
Villagran: Well, we had a dog,
and it looked more like a pig than a dog. ( laughs )
But it was our mascot.
We had a stove in the middle of the barracks,
and we used to make sandwiches on it and so forth.
If the dog was around, we'd feed him whatever we had left over.
He hung around the barracks until we got back.
Don't know if he had a name or not.
He was a faithful little dog.
But it had a real wide nose. ( laughs )
Harrison: Oh, you get superstitious.
I remember I had to put on a clean pair of socks
the day I was shot down.
I'd been wearing the same pair of socks.
Evidently, I think that the pup got one of my socks
and was chewing on it and hid it,
and I couldn't find it that morning,
I had to put on a clean pair of socks.
That might have been the reason I was shot down.
Kimmel: You are to believe this or not,
but somewheres around the 10th or 12th mission,
I got to a point, and I know some of the other fellas reached the same thing,
that they were feeling blasé.
"They didn't get us up to here,
they ain't gonna get us hereon."
Haedike: I was somewhat superstitious.
I always felt God would bring me home--
and I mean that sincerely--
however, I wasn't sure if it would be in one piece.
I flew five days in a row.
Five missions.
And I remember by the fourth or fifth one,
you really didn't care-- you were worn out.
You wanted to get away from it.
Toombs: I saw a lot of 'em break under pressure.
Come back and told the flight sergeant, "I can't fly anymore."
And they didn't.
Nobody pointed their finger at 'em
and ridiculed 'em.
Nobody.
Kimmel: Yes, the bomb run.
That was the worst,
'cause you had to keep everything steady.
If you weren't on a bomb run,
you could slide over once in a while,
that made 'em think they'd miss ya.
But on a bomb run, you just had to set there and take it.
Try to shrivel up, I guess. ( laughs )
Harrison: The lead ship does it all.
You just follow what he does.
The lead ship, and then the two on each side,
one down there and one up here and around there.
Toombs: I was flyin' right above the leader,
and when you're watching him
and you see that the bomb door is open, then you open too.
And then you wait for him to drop bombs,
and when he drops bombs, then you drop 'em.
Kimmel: We can't change our altitude,
and we can't change our direction,
and we're what you call sitting ducks at that moment.
Harrison: It was rough, because any minute,
you were gonna get hit.
Kimmel: The bombs are dropped, bombs away,
and the first thing you hear is,
"Let's get the hell outta here."
We make a sharp turn, and the group follows the lead.
Doyle: After a while,
fighter attacks started coming in,
and they didn't miss very often.
( gun firing )
Toombs: They'd be out 20, 30 miles,
and they'd come rush straight at your level.
( firing )
Harrison: You couldn't hit anything with those guns like that.
By the time you saw a guy, he was gone.
You'd see one comin', he's gone.
( machine-gunfire )
Rowland: You don't have much time to shoot at 'em.
If you get off a burst or two, well, you're lucky,
then they'd go zoop!
( machine-gunfire )
( firing )
Toombs: He'll drop off, he'll fly down,
and then he'll line up on ya.
( imitates gunfire ) Then he'll peel off.
( firing )
( gunfire continues )
Harrison: The copilot was hit pretty hard when we were shot down.
A 20-millimeter shell popped right above his head
and it knocked an eye out.
So it was high noon, an ME-109 was back there blasting at us,
and I heard the copilot, he said, "Jesus Christ,
number four's on fire. Get out."
When that thing is spinnin' and headin' down,
you were glued to your seat,
you couldn't move if you wanted to.
Villagran: And you're lucky if you see two or three guys bail out.
We would count the chutes,
and usually if we started to look too long
after a ship that was going down,
the pilot would say, "OK, guys, off--"
We didn't want to spend too much time
looking at a plane going down
when we had fighters in the area and so forth.
Harrison: The gunners and the others that were watching all the time
would tell ya, "Boy, I don't think anybody got out of that one, nobody got out,"
and then sometimes you'd see chutes comin' out of 'em
before they blew up or anything.
If you didn't have your chute on
and get out of there in less than 30 seconds,
you're gone.
You're gone.
And seven out of eleven out of my crew got out alive...
and one of 'em, when he got on the ground,
they pitchforked him to death.
How could you kill a human like that?
Kimmel: As we approached the field, we set off flares.
Red flares means you have wounded aboard.
Everybody else gets out of the way
and the wounded comes in first.
Kimmel: To this day, I still see it.
When I think of it, I choke up.
I can't help it, they were friends of mine,
they were good friends, and it hurt so bad.
Especially we all felt like: "What a waste."
With the job we had, the chance of dying was at least 50%.
50% chance of living, 50% chance of dying.
Haedike: You know, a guy said, "Your name's on it."
Well, maybe it was.
But it was scary.
And I get very irritated when I hear some of these guys say, "I wasn't scared one bit."
They're full of prunes.
I was scared every time.
Kimmel: I went out to a ship one time
when they were taking a young fella off,
and I thought I could help them.
The guy they were pulling out of the ship...
( voice breaking ) ...he was calling for his mother.
Haedike: In about late 1944,
the Allies decided
to do away with precision bombing.
We went to pattern bombing.
Unfortunately, it killed a lot of people,
but brought the war to a close about a year sooner.
Doyle: The United States military
did not go out to carpet-bomb civilians or anything.
They went out to bomb factories,
rail yards, refineries,
and places that had something to do with the war.
I don't think that I felt bad about that at all.
That's what we were supposed to do.
But toward the end of the war, the Germans would not give up.
Toombs: Never thought a thing about it.
We didn't think about people being down there.
That never crossed my mind,
about a human being bein' down there.
Alexander: Never gave it a thought, they just Germans,
you know, and I never gave it a thought.
Doyle: For some reason, I didn't hate 'em.
If I had a fighter plane
come within shooting-me distance,
my thought was, "This kid probably wanted to live as bad as you did."
I really didn't have any hate for 'em.
I was just scared of 'em.
Kimmel: Never gave it a thought.
I honestly never gave it a thought.
I just felt this way:
"They're gonna do it to us,
we better do it to them before they do it to us."
And that's the way I felt, and I couldn't help it.
Interviewer: Bring any thoughts, seeing that?
Toombs: Well, I drifted off into several thoughts. ( laughs )
Most of 'em, you know, uh...
were bad thoughts when you're lookin' at a mission.
I see what took place on that mission,
and your mind drifts back to those times, you know.
Doyle: We had a lot of midair collisions.
Some guys would get mixed up, pilots,
and they'd start flying... the wrong direction and so on.
But the scary part of most of our missions
was just getting through all of that.
Interviewer: Did it get easier or harder as you flew more missions?
Doyle: I just-- Like I say, I was scared to death.
But, uh... those were not good days.
There was no radio communication at all.
We had the intercom goin' all the time, though.
I'd check in with the man with the oxygen mask on,
make sure their oxygen was flowing right.
Especially the tail gunner,
he was layin' back there by himself so much.
Harrison: You got very close with the men and everything.
And they're all young kids.
They're all dead now, I'm sure.
When you're that high up,
everything on the ground looks like a little toy.
If you see a truck or something,
it really looks small.
It was hard, but you had to do it.
We had to get rid of Hitler, and so we did it.
You guys know that some bombs went through the wings of B-17s?
I always wondered how in the world--
They were out of position...
in the formation.
God's been good to me.
First of all, he's given me 70 years
with that lady over there,
and we have a wonderful family.
We have six kids
and we have 20 grandkids, 22 great-grandkids.
So we've been a very blessed family.
I didn't say I want 'em all at the house at once.
Interviewer: What do you think about "The Good War"
and "You're the Greatest Generation"?
Villagran: Well... ( laughs ) I'm beginning to believe it.
( laughing )
Does that make sense to ya?
You kind of grew up 10 years when you went into that thing.
And when I came back home,
I didn't feel like the same man anymore.
Interviewer: What do you say to people who say, "John, you're a hero.
You're a hero"?
Ketzner: I say, "OK, you're probably right."
( laughing ) I don't know what else to say.
I wasn't one of the hero-heroes,
the guys that finish their tour and sign up for another one,
I wasn't them kind of heroes. ( laughing )
Alexander: But I want it clearly known:
I do not profess myself to be a hero.
I was the pilot;
the heroes are buried in England, Germany, and France.
The boys didn't make it, they're the heroes.
I was just a normal pilot.
This is called pattern bombing.
Interviewer: No offense, but you guys aren't getting any younger.
Why do you think it's important
that people know what you guys did?
Kimmel: Well, for one thing,
we don't want it to to happen again,
in fact or in fancy.
We just don't want it to happen again,
for my grandson, my granddaughters and their husbands.
I don't want to see them have to face what we did.
( wheels skidding )
( film projector running )
Haedike: I cannot say it much more eloquently--
it was a hazardous profession.
OK, up at altitude and, of course, bombs away and all,
and you got this on,
I think fear more than anything,
you'd perspire and sweat.
You got this on.
Ice would form, and you'd take a deep breath
and break the ice out of the oxygen mask.
And then put it back on.
This is Bud trying to get down on the floor.
This is the Mae West.
Remember I told ya about the oxygen?
I mean, the CO2 cylinder?
This is it. There it is.
CO2 cylinder.
This was before underarm deodorant, hair spray--
I think this was the birth of aerosol containers.
And if guys bailed out, they didn't want it totally inflated
couple hundred feet up,
because if they hit the water, they could break their backs.
So it wasn't that easy. I never did it.
This is a throat mic.
This is how I talked to Eric.
And this plugged in.
And as I showed ya on the helmet,
this is how I heard.
So we had our communication system.
Interviewer: But, Bud, to be clear,
this should have been returned to the government in 1945.
( laughing )
Come and get 'em, baby.
Interviewer: What we just did with you
might be the credit roll to our movie,
so you have any messages for people
that just watched this movie?
Well, I'm just so glad that people in America,
or anywhere, can get an idea what 19 and 20
and 21-year-old kids went through,
and as I tell kids when I get done with my talk,
"I'm gonna ask you guys a favor now."
"What's that, Bud?"
"When you go home tonight,
you say a prayer of thanks to God
for those 28,000 guys that gave their lives
so that you got the life you got today."
Interviewer: Well, thank you for your service, Bud.
Haedike: Not at all. Not at all.