The Pacific

Episode Two was last night.

Damn.

I know Ryan has issues with it. I don't understand them but oh well. There is a difference between the theaters of war and that is something as a Bund we have not really appreciated.

It always surprised me when my grandfather would speak of the war unsolicited. So when I talked to him one time about my high school buddy going to Kuwait in '91 to assist in the oil well fire fights, (and let's be honest, making STACKS of cash in the process)I shared a story about Erik coming across literal mountains of Iraqi munitions left in the desert. Rifles, RPGs, ammo, explosives, piled and left. Erik was afraid to grab "souvenirs" because the place was still littered with land mines and the potential for booby traps was real. Ray looked at me and said,

"We didn't even dig pits when we detonated ordinance. We'd blow it in place so the nips couldn't get it." He paused and sipped his drink. "Of course, that took the tops off some of the locals but we didn't have time to care."

The locals were Chinese, our allies.

Now truth be told, Ray was a screaming racist to the day he died. And he was NO fan of the French, as we've documented. But he NEVER would have endangered French civilians by detonating German ordinance without safety procedures, even if the threat of having the ordinance fall BACK into German hands was high.

The Germans and Italians had enormous cultural and historical ties to our nation. And while the Japanese did as well, they weren't nearly as prominent. The culture gap was one of the fatal flaws for BOTH the japs and us. Few people on either side understood each other. Yamamoto was one and foretold the course of events post Pearl Harbor. Halsey and MacArthur were a couple and were instrumental in leading the "total war" effort necessary to bring about the defeat of the Japanese Empire.

So when Hanks gets on TV and says that the Pacific war was as much about race as anything, he's not way out in left field. There was no grey area, no SS troops in American uniforms behind the lines, no commonality between the sides. They looked different, thought different and believed different. They committed atrocities unknown to the Americans since the time of Little Big Horn. They ATTACKED us, unawares, and for almost almost a solid calender year was WINNING the war. So when that hatred manifests itself in films like "Flags of our Fathers" and "The Pacific," we recoil a bit? Cry revisionism? Say that barbaric behavior paints our Marines in a bad light?

I say no. I say we matched ferocity with ferocity. At no time did we as a nation march POWs 80+ miles to camps. We didn't force POWs into slave labor. We didn't use POWs as human shields in shipping. And if this show doesn't give the opportunity to show the atrocities the Japanese inflicted, then that will be too bad and a borderline crime. But so far, two episodes in, I've seen plenty of Jap atrocities.

And the night combat action at Guadalcanal? Every bit the equal to any combat scene in Band of Brothers.