Ever since my father died several years ago, national holidays reminding us to thank a vet come to mind with deeper poignancy to me. My dad was a Second World War veteran, and survived things I cannot imagine facing.
He joined the Navy at just seventeen years old, a couple of years before the outbreak of war. After training at Great Lakes he was sent to California and assigned to the USS Oklahoma. Thankfully, he soon volunteered for duty in Asia and transferred to a small gunboat on the Yangtze River. That certainly spared his life when the Oklahoma was later sunk at Pearl Harbor. He worked in the boiler room, the bowels of the ship, and because it capsized he likely would have drowned along with so many others who were trapped below.
But while his life was spared, a fact to which I obviously owe my own life, he didn’t escape the horrors of war. My father had been sent to the Philippines just before Pearl Harbor was bombed. Although the Navy and the Marines put on the best fight they could, the area was overwhelmed by the Japanese military. My father was taken captive in the second wave of the Death March, sent to such infamously horrible prison camps as Bilibid and Cabanatuan. Ultimately he was taken to Mukden, Manchuria, where he spent the longest time of his three and a half years of captivity. He weighed around 100 pounds when they were finally liberated, having suffered disease, near starvation, slave labor, mysterious medical experiment injections, and even a friendly-fire bombing for which he carried a facial scar on his handsome face for the rest of his life.
To the day he died, my father had a remarkably soft spot in his heart for the Philippines. He fought alongside the Filipino fighters, who battled desperately to keep the Japanese at bay. In his last years here on earth, my father had a Filipino caregiver and they had long talks about the islands and how this man’s countrymen were brothers in arms to my dad and other Americans during that time. If he’s allowed to look down from heaven to see the devastation caused from the recent typhoon, and if tears were allowed in heaven, I think my dad would be greatly moved by yet another tragedy visiting that nation.
Please join me in prayer and support for our veterans, and for those suffering right now in the Philippines. And don’t forget to thank a Vet today for the freedom we enjoy!
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