I'm going to leave WWII. I considered and rejected doing something on the Pacific. Fourteen years is enough. I'd like to take on a different challenge and probably a different era. But it will be another war. It's what I do.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.
The last thing I wanted to do was to be a wartime President.
I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.
It was 1943. The U.S. had already entered World War II, so I decided to join the army.
There are a lot of things I might be good at, such as competitive figure skating, window washing from ten stories up, and being an open heart surgeon. I might also make an excellent Kamikaze pilot - except for the fact that I don't want to learn how to fly and have no interest in taking my own life on behalf of Japan.
When I was 17, I was told I had the choice of enlisting in the Navy or going to jail, so I spent the next three years in the Navy.
I joined the air force. I took to it immediately when I arrived there. I did three years, eight months, and ten days in all, but it took me a year and a half to get disabused of my romantic notions about it.
It ended up taking eight years to finish college because I got deployed and went overseas.
For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.
I grew up during a time of peace, and my friends weren't joining the military - it wasn't something on my radar. But if you asked me whether I could go back and do it all over again now, and it meant I wouldn't go into filmmaking, there's a part of me that would have loved to try to be a Navy SEAL.