60 Minutes - Sunday, April 7, 2019

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

Bill Whitaker hears from Ray Dalio, one of America’s most successful investors of all time who has pledged to donate half of his $18 billion fortune to charity. This finance icon weighs in on the state of America’s economy and his principle of “radical truthfulness.” Plus, student debt has ballooned into an American crisis, particularly for medical students -- but Lesley Stahl learns about the New York University School of Medicine which recently announced that moving forward it would be tuition-free. And finally, L. Jon Wertheimer explores a lesser known World War II battle in Japan that has defined the remote island of Attu. All this on tonight’s “60 Minutes.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. This is fantastic. Isn't it great? This is fantastic. Here we go. Ray Dalio is one of America's most successful investors of all time,

who has pledged to give half of his $18 billion fortune away to charity. It is mind-blowing. He's an icon in the world of finance, in part because of his management principles that includes what he calls radical truthfulness. I want a system in which the best ideas win out. So what's Dalio prepared to say to 60 Minutes about the state of our economy today? Student debt is a crisis. Americans owe $1.5 trillion. The burden for medical students is especially heavy. But now one of the country's top schools has come up with a radical solution. The NYU School of Medicine is now a tuition-free

medical school. Saving these students more than $200,000 each with the hope that... One day, if you're dealing with a patient who can't afford to have something done, you might say, it's on me. It was the only ground campaign waged in North America during World War II. The Japanese strike. After the Japanese stormed an island in Alaska called Attu. Why haven't you heard about this battle? Maybe it's because the place is so isolated. But tonight, we'll tell you the story of the Battle of Attu,

and how a Bible, a diary, and two soldiers from opposite sides of the war came to define this impossibly remote island. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Bill Whitaker.

Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's your next adventure? Everyone deserves a chance to do what they love. Pacific Life helps you reach financial goals while you go after your personal ones. Plans change over time and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while managing the uncertainties. Backed by more than 150 years of experience, you can count on Pacific Life to be there so you can go out and keep living your best life.

Pacific Life is one of the most dependable and experienced insurers in the industry and has been named one of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you, that's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you the freedom to do what you love, or visit www.pacificlife.com. One of the most successful investors of all time is somebody you probably have never heard of, despite his net worth of $18 billion. Ray Dalio avoids extensive interviews and has not allowed news cameras full access to his firm, Bridgewater Associates, until now. He predicted the 2008 financial crisis. Now he sees a prolonged period of sluggish

economic growth and the threat of a confrontation between the U.S. and China. But there's a greater danger Dalio wanted to warn us about. So we figured it would be a good investment of our time to do a deep dive on the principles of Ray Dalio. When a billionaire invites you to his boat, you gotta go. It's like a terrific day to be out on the water. Especially if he sends a chopper to take you. We flew just north of Nassau in the Bahamas to meet Ray Dalio. Turn final here and get lined up. It doesn't look big enough. Alusha is a 180-foot-long research ship,

and Ray Dalio's pride and joy. Wow, what a wonderful place to meet you. Thanks for having us out here. Dalio, who loves scuba diving, bought it nine years ago. He wouldn't tell us for how much, but he had it decked out with scientific gear, including submarines that can dive a half mile. This is fantastic. Isn't it great?

This is fantastic. Here we go. Before we go deeper, we should tell you what's on his mind. Dalio, who grew up middle class, is alarmed about the growing divide between the haves and have-nots. He points out that over the span of a decade, America's lowest paid workers had just a 14% chance of rising to the middle class. What has happened to the American dream? I think the American dream is lost. I think for the most part, we don't even talk about what is the American dream. And it's very different from when I was growing up. But what's not working?

It's not redistributing opportunity. We can call it a wealth gap. You can call it an income gap. And so I think that if I was the president of the United States, or it has to come from the top, what I would do is recognize that this is a national emergency. It's that bad? If you look at history, if you have a group of people who have very different economic conditions, and you have an economic downturn, you have conflict. In the 30s, for example, you had four major countries that were democracies that chose not to be democracies because they wanted leadership to bring order to the conflict. I'm not saying we're going to go there. I'm saying that right now,

it's a huge issue. It's unfair, and at the same time, it's unproductive, and at the same time, it threatens to split us. Dalio spends a lot of time thinking about where the markets and the world are going here at the financial powerhouse he built. Bridgewater Associates is tucked in the woods of Connecticut at the confluence of two rivers popular for fishing. It's 50 miles from the chaos of Wall Street. So you play it calmly. Calmness is critical. You know, the emotions will kill you.

At 69, Ray Dalio bears little resemblance to any Wall Street shark. He's more like a quirky professor. Dalio has joined fellow billionaire Bill Gates and others in their belief that the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is a threat to democracy. So should taxes on people like you be raised? Of course. You say of course. Of course. One way or another, the important thing is to take those tax dollars and make them productive.

Very, very recently, the idea has been that cutting taxes on people like you will promote productivity. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me at all, any sense at all. So it's got to be through taxation. Yes. Am I saying something that's controversial? It's just strange to hear it come from the mouth of a billionaire. I live the American dream, you know. His father was a jazz musician, his mom a homemaker. Dalio bought his first stock when he was 12, with money he earned as a golf caddy.

Today, Dalio's firm manages $160 billion. It has all the excitement of an insurance agency. Dalio's analysts don't chase the gyrations of the market. Instead, they quietly study centuries of history, looking for patterns in stocks, politics, anything to help buy winning investments. Dalio is especially bullish on China, which he predicts will be the greatest economy of the 21st century and America's greatest rival. Last year, his global approach helped him earn a remarkable 15% for his clients, while the Dow dropped 6%.

We see the successful rate, but you hit some bumps along the road on the way here. Yeah, of course. Like in the 80s, you kind of bottomed out. Oh, yeah. The Federal Reserve is less able to revive. Back then, he was a Wall Street whiz kid, absolutely certain a depression was on the horizon. The economy is now teetering on the brink of failure.

He was wrong, very wrong. He missed the boom of the 1980s. I read that you called yourself an arrogant jerk. I was an arrogant jerk. I had to borrow $10,000 from my dad to take care of my family. Your musician dad had to cough up $10,000 to keep you afloat? Yeah, and it was one of the best things really that ever happened to me because it changed my whole approach to decision making. It gave me the humility that

I needed to balance with my audacity. He took note of his failures and other lessons over the next 25 years and wrote Principles, published by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS. Two million copies of the book have been sold worldwide. It's Dalio's recipe for creating what he calls an idea meritocracy. So what I mean is that I want a system in which the best ideas win out. And I would describe it as tough love. And I want to get there through radical truthfulness. In other words, people say what they honestly mean. And radical transparency allows people to see things for themselves. So does this get rid of the office backstabbing, politicking?

There's a rule here that you can't talk behind anybody's back. You do that three times, you're out of here. Everybody at Bridgewater is monitoring everybody else almost all the time. We saw it at this meeting where workers and managers gave each other grades in real time. What sort of grades do you get? You can see like I get blasted a lot. There's a bit of a Big Brother vibe here. That camera isn't ours. It's theirs. Nearly every meeting is recorded and scrutinized. Can you understand somebody looking at it from the outside? That sounds a little strange. No, I understand it. I understand. Maybe even a little creepy. I totally understand how that could sound that way. You also have to understand that when you're doing this a while and you look at other organizations and people are not open with each other and they're hearing a lot of spin, that from this point of view, that seems creepy. Do you have a high turnover? I would say in the first 18 months, it's about 30, maybe a little over 30 percent.

But 30 percent sounds like a lot. Some people describe it as an intellectual Navy SEALs, you know. You go, certain percentage are not going to make it, and that's the way it is. Think what you want. It's hard to argue with success. Bridgewater has made money for its clients 25 of the last 28 years. This is otherworldly. Shipwreck. A shipwreck.

Yeah. Look at that. Whether it's investing or exploration, Dalio goes his own way. While your fellow billionaires, Bezos, Branson, Elon Musk, they're all going into outer space. They're headed towards Mars and the moon. You choose to go down. Why is that?

Well, as I say, I find ocean exploration a lot more exciting, a lot more important than space exploration, right? And then you think about it affects our lives so much more. Dalio routinely hosts scientists who have found new creatures in the deep, such as these that generate their own light. There was also this off the coast of Japan, a live 26-foot-long giant squid. Oh, that's great. We didn't have that kind of luck, but we had plenty of company. So they'll have tiger sharks, bull sharks. What kind is this? That's a Caribbean reef shark. Caribbean reef shark. Sharks are beautiful, powerful machines.

Wow, look at this. I don't understand the resource allocation of space to the ocean. Really, in terms of return on investment, and I think about return on investment, the return on investment down here is fabulous as we went deeper the ocean became barren the coral once here was gone a symptom of nature out of balance and Dalio says a metaphor for what's happened to economic opportunity. If I come down here and I see the coral reefs are dying, and the population is dying, I know that we're out of balance. It doesn't take a genius to know that you're out of balance and you should do something.

So lately, he's been putting his money into public education to help restore economic balance to his home state. But it all comes together. His wife, Barbara, handles that portfolio. The Dalio Foundation has just pledged a record $100 million to Connecticut schools. So you and Ray are partners in this endeavor? We're not partners. Ray has his passion, which is the ocean, and my passion is public education. So he does his passion and you do yours. Exactly.

The program takes a page out of Bridgewater's investing strategies by relying on data to closely follow student performance and behavior so teachers can help at-risk students. It's paid dividends in just three years. The number of kids on track to graduate in this high school is up by 8%. It is so important for us to engage. Ray Dalio has agreed to donate half his $18 billion fortune to charity to help mend the system that made him rich.

With the right and left at each other's throats, Dalio warns time is running short. Capitalism needs to be reformed. It doesn't need to be abandoned. So like anything, like a car, like anything, a plane, a school system, anything, it needs to be reformed in order to work better. American capitalism is not sustainable. That's what I hear you saying. Yes, I don't think it's sustainable. We're at a juncture.

We can do it together or we will do it in conflict, that there will be a conflict between the rich and the poor. Which path do you think we will take? I play probabilities. And I would say it's probably 60-40, 65-35, that it will probably be done badly and that it would be a bad path. But I'm saying it doesn't have to be that way. By realizing that it is a juncture, maybe we can nudge just a little bit the probabilities so that we can have a better outcome. Going to medical school today takes more than ambition,

good grades in biology and college, and an appetite for hard work. It takes a willingness to incur a crushing amount of debt. Student debt in general is in crisis in this country. All told, borrowers owe $1.5 trillion, more than people owe in credit card debt or on car loans. People have borrowed money to attend medical school for decades, but the scale of the debt has skyrocketed in recent years, along with just about every other cost in health care.

The average medical student now graduates with a debt burden as big as a home mortgage. Now, one of America's top medical schools, NYU in New York, has come up with a radical solution. Joseph Babinski. It's a tradition on the very first day of medical school, the so-called White Coat Ceremony, a rite of passage for 24-year-old Joe Babinski and his 100 classmates at New York University. It's kind of this transition point where you go from being a potential student to a member of the medical community, even if you're at the bottom rung of the ladder still. And it's a pretty significant experience.

It marks the beginning of your journey, so to say. As he began that journey, Joe was expecting to take on a great burden. How much debt did you expect you'd be taking on? I anticipated taking on about $200,000. I can't imagine starting life with that on your shoulders. But a lot of medical students, a lot of young doctors have that. Most? I would say most. Graduating medical school, 85, 86 percent of students have debt. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is chair of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He says the prospect of so much debt prevents many people who could be great doctors

from even applying to medical school. Most of us think that it really deters people from middle class and lower income families. They look at $200,000, it seems like a huge mountain to climb, and it gets scary. And it compounds because you're not paying it off. Correct. So the interest grows, it gets worse, and that's a burden. I would think it diverts attention from medical school as well, if you actually... I think people are stressed by it.

Third-year NYU med student Elaine DeLeon has felt that stress from day one. Could your family afford medical school? Definitely not. Definitely not. Are we looking for a pair of cholecystic fluid? Her family is originally from the Dominican Republic. Her dad is a retired chef. Her mother died years ago. She agonized over her dream of being a doctor because of the cost. How much did you have to borrow for your first year? I borrowed $76,000. And if I were to pay that off on a 10-year plan, it would be $100,000 by the time I paid it off. Wow. And that's just your first year? That's just my first year. It's unfathomable. Yeah. But I think that ultimately, like, a life of serving is more important to me.

And that's really what, like, cinched it, that I needed to pursue this despite the debt that I would be incurring. Elaine's ambition is to be a primary care doctor treating poor people. But she says that the debt burden forced her to consider a different choice. Of course you hear the prime specialties where you get paid the most, so you hear dermatology, you hear surgery, you hear all of these things, and so it's easy when you're coming in to be like, well, I paid a lot of money to be here, like I should really get my money's worth and try to pursue these more lucrative specialties. Even if you're not interested. Exactly, or at least consider them.

Dr. Rafael Rivera is dean of admissions at NYU Medical School. What are the better-paying specialties? Generally speaking, some of the surgical specialties tend to pay well. Neurosurgery, you know, orthopedics pays well. The fields that tend to pay a little less are fields like pediatrics and general internal medicine, family medicine. And those are the doctors we have lacking. We don't have enough of those doctors. By 2030, we'll have a shortage of up to 49,000 primary care docs. That huge shortage, that distortion of the medical profession, is directly

linked to the mountains of debt. And on the day of that white coat ceremony last August, NYU decided to do something about it, something dramatic. After all the first-year students had filed back to their seats, Ken Langone, chairman of the board of trustees, and his wife Elaine let everyone in on a secret. As of this very moment, the NYU School of Medicine is now a tuition-free medical school. Joe Babinski was sitting in the front row without a clue that was coming. And they announced that they are supplying full tuition scholarships for every student. Did you think you heard them right? I took a picture of the slide on my phone because I didn't want them to remove it and take it away.

So I was like, I'm documenting that this is happening. But did you get it right away? We were there and there was a sense of, did I hear that right? I still don't think I get it. Sitting a few rows away, Joe's parents, a municipal employee and a retired cop, had a similar, did he just say what I think he said, reaction. Oh, my God! This was the real-time reaction of another father at first i see students looking around at each other did i hear what he said yeah there were

there were gasps there was some quiet there was some screaming and then over a sudden the chant started getting louder and louder and before you it, the audience had erupted into cheers of joy. NYU's free tuition applies not just to first year med students, but to every current student in every class. They do still have to pay their own room and board. But for these students, it's a gift worth more than $200,000 each. And these kids went nuts. And one father yells out, I told you, you picked the right place. Ken Langone made his fortune as a co-founder of Home Depot. He and Elaine donated $100 million toward the free tuition initiative, and he helped raise the additional $350 million needed to make it a reality.

Well, that's my job here. To go out and ask other people for money? Well, I go out and I look at somebody nice like you, and I grab you by your ankles and I shake you. And when you promise me there's no more nickels, I turn your right side up. But seriously, I have two jobs here. I'm a cheerleader and I'm a fundraiser. Tell us how this came about.

Bob Grossman, when he became dean, I sat him down. I said, all right, boss, what are we going to do? He said to me, one of the things I would love to have happen is for one day for us to be tuition free. He said that right in the beginning? 11 years ago. When he first came? 11 years ago. Okay.

I said, you know what, Bob? Let's do it. And here's the way it works. It took more than a decade, but NYU now has the endowment to offer free tuition to every med student in perpetuity. When we announced it, a mother, a pediatrician came up to me 30 years out of medical school, and she told me she was still paying off her medical school debt. And she said, this morning when I woke up and I knew I was coming here, she said, I was convinced I would be in debt when I died to help my son become a doctor.

These are great people. So we just said, you know what? Let's do what we can to help make it easier for them. Do you think this is going to make you a better doctor? I think without a doubt it'll make me a better doctor. Really? How does it affect that? For one, I won't be working while I'm in school. I can focus on learning the medicine and being good at it. And that pressure isn't on your shoulders? There's none. I think about the mindset of the kid saying, somebody did something for me. Now I've got to do something for somebody. Okay, think of that. That's a big thing.

It is a lot. NYU's no-tuition model replaces what had been a patchwork system of scholarships and financial aid. Now every med student is on full scholarship with absolutely no strings attached. This model says anybody who comes to NYU Medical School will come tuition-free, as opposed to just the kids who need the money. I like the model which I call forgivable loans,

that you basically say to every student, we're loaning you all of medical school, and if you go into primary care or one of these other specialties that needs doctors, or you go practice in a rural community like in South Dakota, or you go into an inner city community that's underserved, we're going to forgive your loan. On the other hand, you decide you want to go into one of those lucrative specialties, ophthalmology or dermatology or orthopedics, you're going to have to pay it back with interest. And I think that's a more effective way of getting the goals society wants than giving everyone tuition free.

Whatever the model, changing the face of the medical profession is a huge challenge. Consider this. There are no more African-American men in medical school today than there were 40 years ago. Forty years. Right now, more than half of all medical students come from the richest 20% of American families. Only about 5% from the poorest 20. This means that wealthy areas have lots of doctors and lower income areas don't. I know of so many communities in poor areas that don't have a doctor at all. Is there anything in this program that encourages people to go out there?

If you are from a rural background, you do tend to go back to practice in a rural setting more often than people who are not from a rural background. If you are from an underrepresented minority group, similarly, you also tend to go back to inner city underserved areas. Since the announcement, applications to NYU have boomed, especially from minorities. I think just the idea that a lot of people who come from backgrounds like mine, low income, without parents who are able to afford medical school, I think that it's a huge draw. And I think that it's a needed draw for the patient population that's served by NYU students. I think that there's a lot of folks at Bellevue where I work. This is just anecdotal, but I would say at least 60% of the patients are Latinos. And this is an excellent way to draw the right people to the right

institution. How's your Spanish? Very good. Excellent. You can really communicate. Elaine DeLeon is in the final year of an accelerated three-year med school program, one year less than the norm. But when we saw her on the day of the announcement, You're not going to believe the news that just came out. calling her dad to give him the news, you wouldn't know she was saving just one year of tuition. Already I felt like one of the luckiest medical students in the country

because I am in the three-year program. I'm already decided on primary care. I'm already going into this residency program here. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, and by the way, like your last year is free. And it's like, it was just this incredible feeling of freedom. So do you think all the other medical schools are going to at least try one model or another of free tuition? Absolutely. They all will. I mean, I think almost all of the medical schools have been driving to that before NYU made its announcement. And I think they will redouble their efforts. This has been a issue that most deans of medical schools are passionate about. They'd better be, because otherwise those deans at Harvard and Hopkins and Stanford are likely to see the very best medical students attending NYU for free.

You've got a right to push and say, well, why didn't you make kids who could afford to pay, pay? Because we really wanted to be blind in terms of the kids coming here, and we want them to know that they owe us nothing. But one day, if you're dealing with a patient who can't afford to have something done, you might say, it's on me. Pass it on. Most of us learned in history class about the critical World War II chapters in the fight against Japan. Pearl Harbor, Midway, Iwo Jima. But who among us learned about Attu,

site of the only ground campaign waged in North America during the entire war, and a surpassingly brutal battle at that? Perhaps it's because Attu is the westernmost point of the United States, the last jewel in Alaska's necklace of Aleutian Islands. Perhaps it's because Attu's weather is so combative, the island might be as difficult to reach as anywhere on the planet. But while the fight for Attu's weather is so combative, the island might be as difficult to reach as anywhere on the planet. But while the fight for Attu has been exiled to the smallest of military footnotes, a new book to be published this week by Simon & Schuster, a CBS company, tells the story of how 76 years ago, a Bible, a diary, and two soldiers from opposite sides of the war came to

define the impossibly remote island of Attu. We set out in search of history, flying across the volcanic chain of Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Our destination, Attu. Two plane stops and 1,500 miles from Anchorage, Attu is so far west that if you drew a straight line down from the island, you'd hit New Zealand. We had taken off not knowing if our plane could land on Attu. Attu's home to some of the worst weather on Earth. There's only eight days a year when the clouds and fog lift.

Marco Masic, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, spent seven years going through archives and soldiers' letters while researching his book, The Storm on Our Shores. He accompanied our team for the trip. Only minutes from the island, a dense fog threatened to force our plane back to the nearest airstrip 400 miles away. Then the fog suddenly parted like curtains, and there it was, Attu. So when you finally got there, what was that like? It was so gorgeous.

It was so green and wild and raw. No one lives on Attu today. The Coast Guard abandoned its station and the island nine years ago. I just was struck by how such a beautiful place could spawn such sadness. The sadness began in June of 1942. The Japanese strike. Six months after Pearl Harbor, 2,600 Japanese soldiers invaded Attu, populated then by 42 Aleut natives,

a schoolteacher, and her husband. Japanese arrive in 1942. Are they expecting any resistance? Well, they didn't find it. They could have taken the island with the bullhorn. Nobody on the island was armed. America feared that Japan could use Attu as a launching pad to attack the west coast of the United States. Attu was the first U.S. soil lost since the War of 1812. So it was a propaganda victory for the Japanese. But one Japanese soldier was conflicted.

Nobuo Tatsuguchi had lived for 10 years in America, finishing medical school in California. He called himself Paul. Paul Tatsuguchi fell in love with America. His girlfriend came over from Japan. He proposed to her at Yosemite National Park for their honeymoon. They went from Los Angeles to Niagara Falls on a Greyhound bus. Quintessentially American. You can't get more American than that. Paul Tatsuguchi loved America's open roads, its skyscrapers, and its ice cream. But in 1941, he was conscripted into the Japanese army. He was a devout Christian and a pacifist forced into war. He brought his Bible to Attu. Paul Tatsuguchi's favorite Bible verse came right out of Deuteronomy. Choose life. Choose life.

Choose life. As chill winds whipped through Attu, the Japanese took to the mountains, digging foxholes and storing ammunition in sheds that can still be found on Attu today. As a medic, Tatsuguchi hunkered down in a makeshift hospital in what's called the Jarman Pass, waiting for the inevitable American counter-invasion. In May 1943, 11,000 Americans were sent north to recapture this far-flung outpost of the United States, riding on one of the boats, Private Harry Sasser. What he heard about Attu sounded ominous. And it was treacherous weather.

Storms came up just suddenly. I mean, in seconds. Sasser is now 96. But back then, he was a Mississippi boy, assured he wouldn't be on Attu for long. We were told it would be about three days, and that would be it. But that wasn't the case.

The Japanese were very tenacious fighters. The primary force of U.S. troops landed on this beach. So U.S. troops land on the shore, your adrenaline's pumping, you're expecting to be shot, and instead, nothing. All they find is black muck. Black muck. It seemed to swallow the troops on the beach with every slogging step. The Japanese were hiding in the mountain fog, their snipers waiting to pick off the Americans once they crawled up the valley. The Japanese would follow the fog up and down.

For U.S. servicemen, they said it was like trying to shoot birds out of a cloud. Paul Tatsuguchi began writing a diary. On the second day of the battle, he noted, took care of patients during bombardment. Our desperate defense is holding up well. But the Americans' four-to-one advantage in troops eventually exacted a toll. And by May 29th, three weeks into the battle, the Japanese were doomed. And so the Japanese commander organizes a final bonsai attack,

and Paul Tatsuguchi sits down at his diary and writes his final entry. Goodbye, Taeko, my beloved wife who loved me to the last. And then he bid farewell to his daughters, his younger one, born February of this year, and gone without seeing your father. Hours after writing those words, Paul Tatsuguchi left his Bible behind and advanced to an outcrop overlooking a small lake. Below were unsuspecting American soldiers like Dick Laird, an army sergeant from Appalachia. Dick Laird was a tough guy, but all the American training was that Japanese troops were bloodthirsty killing machines. And how did Dick Laird and Paul Tatsuguchi, how did they collide? Dick Laird looks up the knoll and sees that a group of Japanese soldiers has captured an American mortar. And so Laird pulls out two grenades. He pulls the pin and then

he throws it. The grenade explodes and Laird finds that some troops were alive and he and a fellow soldier killed him. He kills eight Japanese men. He does. And he wins the Silver Star for it. On one of them, he notices something unusual. What was that? There is an address book that's full of some names from California, and there is a sheet, a diary. Whose personal effects were those? He found the diary of Paul Tatsuguchi, whom he had killed as Tatsuguchi was joining the bonsai attack. The bonsai attack and the Japanese occupation of Attu came to an end later that day when 500 defeated Japanese soldiers gathered on this hill.

Harry Sasser witnessed the mass suicide. They pulled the trigger on the hand grenade and just blew the stomach out. A gruesome scene. It was. Oh, it was. It was. It was tough. The code was death before dishonor. And of more than 2,600 Japanese men who started, only 28 survived. 28? The only battle in the war in the Pacific that had a worse casualty rate was at Iwo Jima.

549 Americans were killed on Attu. More than 3,000 were wounded or suffered weather-related injuries. Dick Laird survived. He turned over Paul Tatsuguchi's diary to superiors. Instead of containing military secrets, the diary contained human sentiments. So much so, English translations began circulating. Harry Sasser read a copy in Mississippi. Well, it was a compelling account, and as he bid farewell to his wife and to his daughter, I sympathized with him. What was Dick Laird's reaction to reading the diary?

Crestfallen, but angry because Tatsuguchi was one of the eight guys who had captured the mortar and he were going to try to kill him. But at the same time, Laird could see that Tatsuguchi loved his family and that he was human. Dick Laird never forgot about May 29, 1943. Dick Laird did not. He suffered nightmares for years. He just kept coming back thinking that I killed a guy who shouldn't have been there. You know, I killed a father.

Forty-one years after Dick Laird had fought on Attu, he pulled up to this home in Sherman Oaks, California in the spring of 1984. Did he seem nervous? Yes, he seemed nervous. This is Laura Tatsuguchi Davis, the younger daughter Paul had never met. After the war, she moved with her mother to the place her father loved, Southern California. Laura didn't quite understand why Dick Laird showed up. He didn't tell me anything until I walked him out. And when we walked out, he said, I'm the one that killed your father. And he just drove off. And I was in a daze. You were in shock.

Totally in shock. Did you have anger or resentment toward Mr. Laird? Yes, I did. Laird had left his phone number with Laura, but she refused to reach out. A decade later, another American veteran of Attu tracked down Laura. Alvin Kepi of Michigan wrote this letter. He wanted to return something he had found in 1943 on Attu's German Pass. This is the Bible that was found by the German Pass. This is the Bible your father took to war? Yes. Oh, wow. And he writes in the very first page of the Bible, therefore choose life. Therefore choose life. Therefore choose life first page of the Bible, therefore choose life.

Therefore choose life. Therefore choose life. This is the Bible that gave him strength when he won off to war. I think so. What's it like for you holding that? It gives me strength. The Bible is now housed at the Japanese American Museum in L.A. Tucked inside the Bible are reminders of what Paul Tatsuguchi lost.

And there's a picture of my sister. She was almost three, and I was three months. And he had not seen me. If this Bible could talk. Yeah, I wish it could. For years, Laura wondered why Dick Laird had been so determined to reveal that he had killed her father. Then it came to her.

I wrote to him saying, please forgive yourself. What made you do that? I started thinking, I said, this man did not belong and ought to just as much as my father. He was protecting his country. He had to protect himself. You wrote to him, none of you should have been there, but you were. And that fact cast upon you terrible duties, duties you discharged the only way you could. What happened, happened.

You were not at fault. He was not. You wanted to free him. Yeah. And I was the only one that could. Laird said that he read the letter and he cried. And he said it was the first time in a long time that he slept without nightmares. And most improbably, Laura and Dick Laird became friends, meeting often in Tucson, where her son attended school and Dick Laird had retired. He said, I killed the wrong man. You know, this is how he felt. Was it almost like he felt he killed another American? Yes. Dick Laird died in 2005. As for Paul Tatsuguchi, near the spot where he was killed on Attu,

a monument to peace was erected by the Japanese government. Signs of the American presence still abound. So do signs of a battle lost to the rust of history. Atu's been left to the snowy owls and to the ghostly winds that will go unheard.