if he can do it, I can do it

My father [John Bradley] told me about the challenge of this experience [...the stomach-wrenching, terrifying process of climbing down the webbing of cargo nets pitched over the sides of the great transport ships - every step of the climb encumbered by heavy packs - and securing a seat in one of the smaller landing crafts that would carry the men into the shallow water and to the edge of the beach] once when I was a young man. It was one of the very few times he ever spoke of his wartime life, and that fact made it even more memorable to me.

He told of clinging for dear life to the webbing, trying to choke back nausea and disabling terror, as he followed the back of the next Marine down. "I kept saying to myself, 'If he can do it, I can do it,'" my father told me.

So much of what all these boys would do over the next months, so much of their survival, so much of their sanity in the midst of murderous chaos, would come down to just that: following the back of the next Marine. If he could do it, they could do it.

James Bradley

Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima. May 2000. p.117