I saw a Bird

I was trying to come up with a clever title for my post today but I haven't had my coffee yet so this is the best I could do.  I don't get to see a lot of tv but since I finally got an entire weekend without work I got to catch a few things.  For some reason I found myself watching a lot of History and Military Channel shows.  I watched 2 documentaries.  One was called X-Day which was about the planned invasion of Japan to end the war.  The second was called Galipoli which was about the battle of Galipoli between the English and the Turks during the first world war.  What stood out to me about the first documentary was the amount of civilian casualties that were inflicted on the Japanese near the end of the war.  The numbers were into the 100's of thousands.  I know that this was a different time and a terrible war.  The commander of the US bombing campaign had a quote that stood out to me "War is simple.  You kill the enemy as much as you can until he stops fighting you".  That was the strategy in a nutshell.  The war in Europe didn't officially end until Berlin fell so it was thought that the war in the Pacific would not end until Tokyo fell.  Another statistic I didn't know was that Tokyo was 80% destroyed by the end of the war due to constant bombing by the US.  The battle for Okinawa was the first time the US had fought the Japanese on their own land.  The US and specifically the Navy noted the fighting was much more intense and casualties were far higher than expected.  Because of that battle the Navy withdrew their support for an invasion of mainland Japan.  Losses on the US side were estimated to have been in the 200,000 range.  When I see things like this I wonder if leaders of countries ever fully realize the horror that they are sending their young men into.  Even if a war is completely justified and the public is overwhelmingly behind the effort, I can't imagine any president with a soul being able to sleep well at night.  There was a war movie a few years back starring Tom Selek were he played Dwight Eisenhower.  It depicted Ike and his staff during the preplanning stages of D-Day.  At one point he is told that certain divisions were expected to lose 70-80%.  He agreed to meet with these men just prior to their departure.  I believe this actually happened.  How did he do that?  How did he look into the face of a young man of maybe 18 or 19 years of age and order him on to almost certain death?  I know the answer is that his counterpart on the other side of the red line is willing to do the same thing.  If he were to lose his nerve and refuse to order his men onto those beaches, the war would likely have been lost.  Is that war?  Old men in a contest of wills; sacrificing men's lives and souls like so many chess pieces.  For what?  The common good?  I hope so.

I saw a bird today