[PEN-L:345] Saving Private Ryan

["James Michael Craven" <cravjm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 29 Jul 98 at 7:44, James Devine wrote:
>
> I'll join the chorus on this (though I probably won't see Saving Private R
> until it hits video, since going to a movie plus baby sitting adds up). My
> late father was also in the Pacific, in the supply corps on an LST. I
> always got the impression that WW2 was the high point of his life, despite
> having had his goal of being assigned to the destroyer fleet sabotaged
> (somebody put a "Mickey Finn" in his drink, he said, right before a crucial
> exam) and having the LST attacked by kamikazes. During WW2 he had a Larger
> Purpose, much more than working in middle management in an not-for-profit
> bureaucracy to support a wife and 3 kids and a mortgage in the suburbs.
> They were fighting the Good Fight, Together, rather than the mundane
> getting and spending that characterized his downwardly-mobile life.
>
> Strangely, he worked with and liked the Japanese business execs his bureau
> worked with, while continuing to hate the Germans.
>
> in pen-l solidarity,
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
> http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html

Just to join in, my father flew 94 missions against the Japanese in
B-25s in China and Burma (10th Air Force). After the war, he
absolutely hated Japanese and thought the U.S. hadn't dumped enough
nukes on the Japanese.

In the early 1950s he started flying to Japan as a pilot for
Northwest Airlines and over his 33 years on Northwest, all but about
6 years were spent on international routes operating from Japan.

Starting in the mid-late 1950s he started learning to read, write and
speak Japanese and could do so fluently later.

When my father died in 1991, one of his pall bearers and dear friend
was Masajiro Kawato who was the Japanese Zero pilot who shot down Pappy
Boyington with whom he also became a close friend.

My  father talked rarely about the war and didn't watch war movies
much; he would just say "been there, done that, was a bitch then, no
need to relive it now."

Jim Craven

 James Craven
 Dept. of Economics,Clark College
 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA. 98663
 jcraven@xxxxxxxxx; Tel: (360) 992-2283 Fax: 992-2863
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