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KG Erwin -> A Quote From a Pacific Veteran's Son (8/27/2006 10:17:17 PM)
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This comes from a post on the Pacific War forum, and it nearly brought tears to my eyes. Had to share it:
"Dad never answered a question directly. Often, he wouldn't answer for many minutes--and sometimes he'd just glare at me and never answer. Other times he'd smile and say, 'That was twenty years ago--I don't remember.' After finding his Japanese flags in the attic in 1959, it took me three years before I could persuade him to talk about them, and even then he never told me where they came from. I discovered the secret only after speaking by phone with one of his old Okinawa pals in 1997, three years after his death.
There were many times throughout the course of dad's life when he'd pretend to disremember his pals names, even when looking at old photographs of them at the kitchen table. But when he was just minutes from death, as he lay semi-comatose, he called the names of several of them as clearly and distinctly as if he had spoken with them only yesterday. My mother died believing that dad actually WAS with his old buddies at the time of his death, and it makes me wonder."
My thanks to "pappy" for posting that.
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