I was born in 1951, arriving with enough protest that my father was allowed to stay with my mom and not go to Korea. He had spent WWII in England, a mechanic for B-52s. When I was a kid, I used to peruse a scrapbook he had of photos and odds and ends from the war, including a piece of Nazi propaganda, dropped over England when he was stationed there. He never talked very much about his experiences. My mom talked more about Pearl Harbor as she was in Los Angeles at the time. She also talked about the Japanese being incarcerated in concentration camps, how suddenly "Japs" became the enemy. Even in the 50s, when I was in elementary school, boys drew pictures of German tanks and swastikas, played at war, called kids they didn't like "Japs." Pearl Harbor means many different things to people, as does its aftermath. I've often wondered how it must have felt to be native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander during that time, how the US military treated the Pacific in general as one big base of operations. It is the glaring contradictions of war that are extremely painful--and often misunderstood or banished or rewritten.