Ethnic Chinese --- in the Philippines since before Magellan --- doing their centuries-old, morning stretching exercises which am respecting more now that I have joined a certain age cohort. Then out to Corregidor in Manila Bay...so few tourists that day, to visit the site of America's most devastating loss of WWII. (This was 25 years ago, so perhaps there are more visitors now...?). Battery emplacements which could not withstand Japanese naval barrages. McCarthur's headquarters deep in a tunnel until forced to slip out, eventually to Australia, to plan his return. Back on land, at the Pacific War Memorial, thousands and thousands of names of the fallen. The Philippines...and Singapore, and China, and Germany, and Poland, and Russia....bear physical testimony to the most horrific war in recorded history.....and so little of it to be found in the United States. I wonder if most Americans know what VFW stands for when passing by clapboard meeting houses in America's small towns.
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