¡Colores!; 610; Trinity: Getting the Job Done; Norm Mayer 2 End

We were interviewing the guy who ran all the motion picture cameras at the Trinity site. And he took pictures all over the place and so he gave us what, about 40-50 pictures, from everything from the high speed photography of the gas bubble forming at 0.001 second and then expanding out to rattlesnakes, which somebody down at the Trinity site collected rattlesnakes in their spare time. I went down there and that's horrible. That was the biggest disappointment in my life. So we thought it was something to see something, a bunch of sand. Yeah, we were down there just this March. Oh, were you? There was about 3,000 people there. Yeah, they opened it up twice a year. And I was kind of surprised. I was, we were more interested in the film. You know, there's something that you have to remember.

The great thing that happened to us, because we were in training. We were out in the field when the war ended. When those bombs dropped, that was the greatest thing that ever happened to us because there's no doubt, if we had made that invasion into Japan, most of us would have been fodder. There's no doubt about it because they estimated over a million casualties, not dead, but casualties. And that would have been such a tremendous impact because most of these fellows had already been through these bad parts of the war. Strangers that may seem a little nine square mile island is considered one of the bloodiest battles in the history of our country. So imagine being on that island, then you're out there training to go to Japan. You don't think that would have been a blood bath? That would have been more than a blood bath because just trained the way they were dug in. And the Japanese people, look at the kamikaze, they didn't care what they lived or died. We cared that we lived.

We won the live. We want to go on. So you must have been pretty scared by that idea. Oh, but what could you do this again comes back to this. You had to follow your leaders. You had to follow your troops. I don't care anything. War is never a picnic for anybody, I don't care. Where you're at in war, as long as you're where you can get shot at, and you know, when you get on these little islands and especially, they can surround you overnight and just wipe you out. We were very, very fortunate. That was a pretty big deal. That was the best deal that that ever happened. And I think if you ask anybody that was in training at that time to make that invasion in Japan, that was the best thing that ever happened. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I fully believe I would have not survived the Japanese invasion. I firmly believe that because I already had survived to them. I mean, the odds are against you when you go into that.

We're done. Thank you. That's enough. Okay, thanks. Thank you very much. You