“I was now in charge of three squads and a total of 41 men and then I began to realize why this was done.
If you’re an engineer, you’re selected to be an officer because you know mathematics and logarithms and all of that. If you’re an artillery officer, I suppose they’ll select you because you know something about trajectory and physics. Why would they select someone for an infantry officer? Well, he has to know how to read the maps and the compass, but he has to know how to kill. That’s a horrible thought.
I won’t tell you how many men I killed but there are some who count sheep, so they tell me. But there are times when I count men. And that’s a terrible thought because I’m certain the average person, if he or she ran over a cat, you’d never forget that. So how in the world can you forget killing a man, you know?
I was trained to kill the enemy, so you know, that’s a different perspective. You don’t think of them as people; you think of them as the enemy, and that’s the way you have to do it, because otherwise it would drive you nuts." - 2nd Lt. Daniel Inouye (MOH Recipient), Northern Italy, April 1945. #stayzero #zerofoxtrot #ww2 #reality