Life magazine's 'Picture of the Week' had shown a young woman admiring a souvenir from her serviceman-boyfriend in New Guinea: a skull inscribed 'This is a good Jap — a dead one'.
Grandpa was a Marine or a soldier who gets his ass shot off over there, lucky to make it home alive. Went through the brutality that he went through, and brought home a souvenir. And his idiot virtue signaling children don’t think enough of what he did to keep a souvenir of his sacrifice. This kind of thing turns my stomach.
My father who was in the Seabees and worked on the airbase on Tinian, traded his beer rations to a Marine for a Japanese unit flag, with several dozen Japanese signatures on it, which the marine pulled from a bunker
They likely signed it before their final battle or a banzai charge.
Dad later felt increasingly uncomfortable having it, not having “earned” it and also that it was probably was the last act and will of dozens of men, so he donated it to his local VFW, where its hanging on the wall.
Agreed.