Word: wayes
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...start with the vast Pacific Ocean from Hawaii, and you just keep going farther and farther west. You get a dramatic sense of what it must have been like to be on one of those battleships. I used to wonder why in hell little Peleliu was in any way, shape or form so damn important. But then when you see how close Okinawa is, well, you immediately understand. Peleliu was a stepping-stone...
...movie did give Hanks his eureka moment. During filming on Parris Island, he toured the Marine Corps training facilities and was impressed by the rigorous discipline the young Marines followed and the way it drew them together as a group. "Astronauts, test pilots, Army Rangers all adhere to a kind of self-government that is infectious," he says. "They become a spiritual class - part family and part competitive - that's undeniable." These are the attributes Hanks admires - and envies. "The fact is, I have no inner discipline," he says, "and Americans rigorously training to perform public service is inspiring...
...Hanks' star rose in the 1990s, he sought out new sources of what he calls "entertainable historical knowledge." Leon Uris' fact-anchored novels - Mila 18, Armageddon and Exodus - taught Hanks to feel history in a way no high school teacher ever did, but the entertainment level had to be hyperkinetic to hold his attention. It was the same with most academic histories. "The writing is often too dull to grab regular people by the lapel," he says. Ken Burns' miniseries The Civil War, which aired on PBS in the fall of 1990, gave him a sense of how he might...
...way he found was to make it a mix of spectacle and drama, drawing on his own cultural influences. It was Jacques Cousteau who first lured a TV-obsessed teenage Hanks to take biology seriously. Cousteau's art was to have the curious viewer ask, How would I fare 20,000 leagues under the sea with a steel scuba tank on my back and a tiger shark circling my underwater cage? "Cousteau was unlike anything else that was on TV, and I was sad when the hour was up," Hanks recalls. "I was uninterested in science class...
...first place," Hanks says. "How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us? Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what's going on today...