Book of Days

From the History Channel, This Day in History:

February 23, 1945 - U.S. flag raised on Iwo Jima

Josh has begun studying WWII in depth and so this entry was especially interesting to him. A few weeks ago, Josh, his dad and I, went to a viewing of Letters from Iwo Jima.

Almost a 3 hour movie, it was very well done, but we had to leave with a little more than an hour still to go as the fighting scenes proved to be too much for Josh and I; very realistic and gory. There were more than a few Veterans in the crowd and our hearts went out to them as we realized this had been real life for them not just scenes on a movie screen. It was enlightening seeing the event from “the other side” so to speak. You were shown the human side of people who were considered our enemy and this gave us much food for thought and discussion. We became especially attached to one character and were disappointed to not find out if he lived or died. Reading the statistics at the end of the article from This Day in History, it is very unlikely he did. I also found an interesting article with the two Japanese actors who played the two main characters.