SD Realtor: My dad was in the Marines during WWII and saw action on Okinawa in 1945. He never talked about his experiences there, but my mom said he had some truly bad nightmares for many years.

The point I would make is this: The US sustained approximately 400,000 dead during the war. The Soviet Union lost nearly 28 million. As bad as our casualties were during some of the battles, the fighting on the Eastern Front between Germany and the Russians, and the fighting in the Pacific between the Chinese and Japanese forces, dwarfs our losses by several orders of magnitude.

That generation of Americans was completely focused on victory, and at all costs. My dad was on a troopship headed to Japan for the final invasion when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The US was prepared for nearly a million American casualties during the invasion of the Japanese home islands, but the atomic bombs changed all that. We (as a generation) definitely lack the fortitude that they had. With the exception of those brave young men and women that are in the military now, that is.