"MIGHT SHE BE REMINDED"

I used to work with a man named Frank who as an 18 year old American soldier was bayoneted twice on the death march, He had been wounded in the leg earlier so he lagged behind, So he got run through by some Japanese soldier who grew tired of telling him to keep up with the others. Later as he lay on the ground a second Japanese soldier came by and decided he was still looking too healthy, so another bayonet went through him. After that he didn't move much. A day later as he lay there dying some natives came and carried him off and treated his wounds in secret back in their village. A year later he was well enough to join their resistance. Pre positioned caches, targets of opportunity, fight, kill and run, never lead them back to a village, and on and on until the Americans came back years later.

Gosh he hated the Japanese. Hated MacArthur too for forgiving so much. It was the early 70s. He drove a coal truck, I was the night watchman in the coal yard. Along came the Nissan cars. Suddenly he had a string of strange accidents with the coal trucks. Kept smashing them into Nissans. One day he sideswiped one that was actually driven by someone from Japan who made the (almost fatal) mistake of saying not nice things to him in Japanese. Words he had heard before when dealing with Japanese soldiers and their 'secret' police. He beat that man half to death with one of the big wrenches those trucks carried. When the police arrived he was happily smashing the Japanese car to pieces with the wrench while the driver lay unconscious on the ground with a cracked skull, A big hubablu of course. Arrested, charged with attempted murder, psychiatric defense, fighting words, all that. In the midst of it the guy with the cracked skull went back to Japan and the case fell apart. So Frank came back to the truck yard. The owners wouldn't let him drive the trucks anymore, but Frank was union, and the union went to bat for him. The long and short was Frank became the night mechanic in the truck yard I was the night watchman of. I heard many tales about WW2 from him. About fighting a guerilla war and staying alive, about villagers who helped and those who died. About the things the Japanese did. Comfort women and how they were treated (including the American nurses who had treated him at Corregidor, as well as some girls and women from native villlages the Japanese visited), tracking down and executing the families of Philipine soldiers, beating village headmen an their wife to death, fun stuff like that. Stuff like the Romans did in what later became England. And I was told of things done as revenge Why a club is sometimes better than a gun, etc, etc. 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for almost a year I was stuck in a shack listening to the tirades about the Japanese and the Philippines. Poor Frank. He had the worse case of PTSD I have ever seen, but he was in the wrong war. The Veterans Administration did not offer PTSD treatment for WW2 vets.