Daniel Inouye: “listening to my chairman reminded me of my days of youth. During World War II, when I was a young man, I had the high…”

“listening to my chairman reminded me of my days of youth. During World War II, when I was a young man, I had the high honor of serving as platoon leader of 40 men. It was a small part of the war. But if someone had come up to me, say, my colonel, and said: How many men will you lose in the next 30 days? How many rounds of ammo will you use during the next 12 months? How many grenades will you explode during the next 12 months?--my answer would have had to have been: I don't know. There is no way of knowing how many men I will lose in this battle or the next battle. I have no idea how many rounds we will fire or how many grenades we will throw. We will do our best to maintain our force. But to require any commander to come forth with even a good guess as to what one can anticipate--who in his right mind could have predicted what Midway would turn out to be like or the battle of Guadalcanal? No one had any idea. We had contingency plans as to how we should cope with the enemy if it came from the northern slope or the southern slope, but as for the outcome, we went into a battle once that lasted 5 days and we thought we would come through with minimal casualties. In those 5 days, we incurred 800 casualties in my little regiment, 300 dead--in a battle we thought we could resolve in 3 days. But we had no idea the opposing forces were three times our size. I realize my colleagues are very eager to know what the costs of this war will be.…”