Say, is this a great thread or what?!

Cal, if you find that email and pics, I’d be happy to post for you.

Clyde, my dad was with the 1st Marine Division, too, as a 1st lieutenant and interpreter of Japanese. Here’s the patch you’re talking about. This is from my dad's uniform:



Not sure where this next one was taken. Somewhere out there in the Pacific in 1944. My dad is the tallest guy in the back row.



In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Okinawa, I published the following letter in the Japan Times:

Recently I have read articles and editorials about the Battle of Okinawa in The Japan Times and other newspapers. I have noted how some writers tie the battle to modern-day unhappiness with the American military presence on the island or to the war in Iraq. My late father's experience might be of interest.

A U.S. Marine Corps officer, he participated in the battle, serving as a Japanese-language interpreter for the U.S. forces. When I was a little boy half a century ago, he told me how the Japanese Imperial Army troops drove civilians on Okinawa between themselves and the American guns. He told of a young woman who held scissors to her throat in terror as he approached but whom he was able to convince to surrender. He spoke of a soldier he encountered in a cave, armed with a "bomb on a stick," to whom he said, "You don't want to die . . . I don't want to die." Somehow they both emerged alive into the sunlight.

My father went on to a long career with the CIA in Asia and Europe. He lived to see -- much to his satisfaction -- the Berlin Wall fall. On his deathbed in 1995, though, he looked to Okinawa in 1945 and said the most worthwhile thing he had ever done in his life was to convince Japanese civilians and soldiers to surrender rather than kill themselves.

In a letter to my eldest son, who is half Japanese, he once wrote: "We did not hate the Japanese soldiers. They were doing their job just as we were doing ours. We respected the ordinary Japanese soldier -- and he was a very good soldier. . . . We were mad at the people who started the war and wouldn't stop it even after all chances of winning were gone."

Few things are black and white. I would like to say to those who resent the U.S. military presence on Okinawa, and to those who think badly of the U.S. military in general, to remember what one proud U.S. Marine thought was the most worthwhile accomplishment of his life.

I also had a couple of sentences in there about how my dad believed that the atomic bombing of Japan had saved his life, as well as that of many other American soldiers and Japanese soldiers and civilians. The editors cut that out. Still a bit too raw, perhaps.

It’s been 12 years now, but I continue to miss my dad a lot. As Cal has written, there are so many things that I wish I had thought to ask him. The men and women of that generation were, indeed, the Greatest Generation.