Thursday, June 09, 2011

Gunny G's Marines History and Traditions: Patriotic Fervor and the Truth About Iwo Jima...By Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhal

Gunny G's Marines History and Traditions: Patriotic Fervor and the Truth About Iwo Jima...By Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhal:

"But Americans' yearning goes deeper than a willingness to believe Hollywood formula and fantasy. It involves the preservation of a passionate faith in the hero, a belief in the individual's ability to change the course of history (the valor of Delacroix's flag-waving 'Liberty' and the resolve of Leutze's 'Washington'), a faith now so distressingly contradicted by the 58,180 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

We discovered an unusual phenomenon in the course of our research: the fake flag-raisers, people who insisted they had been in Rosenthal's picture and had helped hoist the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima. There were, and are, a lot of them."

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