Reply #9: You're right about the not talking much. [View All]

[onager]

I still remember coming home as a newly-promoted U.S. Marine Corporal.

The old man said, "Y'know, that's one rank I never held in the Army. I went from PFC straight to buck Sergeant."

"How did you do that?" I asked.

"All of our Sergeants were dead or wounded."

"Oh..."

He was in the Pacific, with the 43rd Infantry Division.

One thing he would talk about was ironic as hell--he always said the Japanese Gen. Yamashita got a raw deal. Yamashita was executed after the war, by an American court-martial, for atrocities committed by troops who weren't under his control. And IIRC, technically weren't even under his command.

Ironic, because one of Yamashita's soldiers nearly killed my old man with a hand grenade.