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My beloved aunt is a Japanese. When I was a boy, she would sometimes tell us of the final days of the war. She and all her classmates were evacuated to a number of caves in the hill country outside of Fukuoka. With tears in her eyes, she would describe how she and the other children would spend the day beating the tall grass with sticks in order to scare up enough insects for a meager supper. They would roast the bugs on skewers for food. Fukuoka, which is on the island of Kyūshū , was the headquarters of the Sixteenth Army Group, tasked with defending Kyūshū from the upcoming Allied invasion. If the bomb had not been dropped, Kyūshū would have been bombed into sand, and probably nerve-gassed as well, during the run-up to the invasion of Japan.

At the same time, one of my uncles, her brother-in-law, was a sailor onboard USS ESSEX. I once overheard him talking to my grandmother about the afternoon when a Yokosuka D4Y3 "Judy" kamikaze airplane crashed onto the ship's portside flight deck. At the time of impact, the crew was in the middle of refueling its planes. The resulting explosion killed many of his shipmates and wounded many more, including him. He was running ammunition to one of the ship's antiaircraft gun tubs as the Judy bored in; he leaped away as the plane hit, and when he returned, the gun tub he'd been serving was filled with something like stew -- the torn and liquefied remains of its crew. In quiet, matter-of-fact tones he told her of how he and his shipmates worked through the night, desperately bracing bukheads with wooden stanchions and filling in holes with mattresses and body parts in an effort to keep the ship afloat.

These stories were anecdotal, and may be inaccurate; their memories, and my own, are imperfect. But one incontrovertible fact stands out in both stories, and that is that war is hell. It can be fought honorably, and for honorable reasons, but there is nothing good about it unless it serves to end a greater evil. When war can be avoided, it should be. When it cannot be avoided, it is best fought as brutally as possible in order to bring it to an end as quickly as possible.

May God rest the souls of all those who died in World War II -- on all sides.