Watching the Wake Island episode of Oliver North’s 2005 series “War Stories” last week, I was reminded of Brigadier General John F. Kinney’s heroic escape story. Very few POWs attempted escape from Japanese camps in WWII, and fewer still succeeded. For those interned in Japan proper escape was inconceivable, but in Japanese-occupied territories outside the homeland there was a slim chance of success. Physical escape was the least of the...

I found the following poem on the oddities of English plurals in our local newspaper today. According to the columnist, the poem’s origin is obscure: it showed up in newspapers in the late 19th century and more recently in “Crazy English,” by Richard Lederer. It’s just the sort of thing that my father and those other “hard hat poets” on Wake Island would have loved. So here, apropos of nothing, is “Ode...

In 2011, a worker discovered a group of human remains exposed on the north beach of Wake Island near the site where American POWs were massacred in October 1943. The Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) sent a team to Wake to recover the remains and excavate the site. JPAC opened a mission to identify the remains and I volunteered to locate families of the “Wake 98” to provide DNA reference samples to aid in identification. While the...

There is no better way to visit the war memorials in Washington D.C. than in the company of our nation’s war veterans. I went on the Inland Northwest Honor Flight to D.C. on October 8-9 as a volunteer “guardian” and was deeply moved many times during the trip. It was my good fortune to be matched with two fine gentlemen whose perspectives and memories gave special meaning to the experience. The dedication of the national World War II memorial...

The Railway Man is the story of an ordinary man whose horrific experiences as a POW left him emotionally crippled for decades after the war until he confronted and ultimately forgave the target of his old, deep hatred. Thousands of ex-POWs, including my father, shared the first part of that sentence; very few were willing or able to achieve the second part. Eric Lomax’s journey reveals the dark world of intentionally buried horrors and shows us...

My friend and colleague, Duane A. Vachon, Ph.D, has been writing a column on Medal of Honor recipients for the Hawaii Reporter for several years. He recently asked me what I knew about the Battle of Wounded Knee, saying that his research was suggesting that the MOH recipients might not be entitled to the honor because it was more of a massacre than a battle. I knew about Wounded Knee, but took an evening to revisit the historical sources, look...