I, too, am “OLD”, 82 to be exact. As the years have flown by I have, here at what would seem the “end”, an answer to why my family and I ended up in Japanese concentration camps at the beginning of WWII in the Philippine Islands.
Specifically Franklin D Roosevelt was asked to take all Americans and get them out of there. He said, ‘No. It will be in the middle of negotiations to prevent any fighting.” or something very similar so we were forced to stay as were the Brits, Aussies, etc. It was a real disaster for so many really nice, normal people...who ended up horribly disfigured internally and externally. Yet, even today that aspect of that place and that war is ignored. But I understand better...
It has everything to do with a nation divided though we didn’t know it at the time and it occurred with in the government itself....I would love to know who made the decision. I think those people did not operate within a moral system and nor did they give a s..t if whole American families were demolished or who within the American families died.
What was amazing was the toll it took on ordinary people...the children especially and the sacrifices made for the kids by their parents. That is another time for another observation. I can tell you I was non-responsive for 4 years after we were rescued from concentration camps. General MacArthur rescued us literally the same day we were to be shot on the edge of a trench we had dug and the Japanese were going to bury us in.
Nobody gives him or his men credit for that miracle. Absolutely no one I am aware of. I think of them every day and wish I could say it to them directly.
So now I have a question: when we are finished dividing this country into 2 4 or 6 pieces, how will we treat each other then? I
Were you at Santo Thomas?