re: #39 Taqyia2Me

My dad was Navy - South Pacific, came back from there deaf. He only spoke of his service once, very late in his life, and briefly at that. He was using one of those scopes to help figure out the distance his destroyer’s big guns had to shoot while they were providing support for a Marine landing somewhere. He said, “I saw those Marines there trying to get ashore, and arms and legs flying all over the place.”
Talk about sacrifice…

I know a vet who was a PoW in Japan during the war. What these men went through is well-documented and widely known so I won’t repeat it here. He rarely talks about it anyway.
He did tell me about an extraordinary incident he witnessed on a parade ground next to where he and his fellow slave-laborers had been put to work, one that provides a unique, if horrifying, insight into the character of the Japanese forces during that time.

The area was apparently used to drill new conscripts. One day the vet noticed an officer yelling at one of the soldiers on the parade ground, while the rest stood to attention. The officer wasn’t satisfied with the soldier’s response and starting beating him with a riding crop. The soldier fell and the officer continued to kick and beat him until part of the soldier’s skull came off and his brain was exposed. The officer gave the body a final kick and other soldiers, no doubt chastened, carried it away. The same officer was back the next day, swaggering around with the same riding crop, the blood now cleaned from it of course.

The ex-PoW said “I understood a little better then why they were the way they were with us.” I managed to remark that an officer would have gone to prison for many years for that, if not worse. The vet said, “No, the other soldiers would have stopped him before it went that far.” I think he had it right.