Peter Rukavina's friend Harold Stephens writes from Bangkok
"At the youthful age of 17 I had an experience so terrible, so frightening that for half a century I did everything possible to erase it from my mind. That experience was the Battle of Okinawa, and I was a young infantry US Marine. It wasn't the exploding shells and the bayonet charges that affected me -- it was the death, the mass of lifeless bodies on the battlefield afterwards.......
Our mind does strange things. It cuts out the traumatic experiences we had, or if it didn't we might go mad. After the Pacific War we learned to survive by not thinking about it, and not talking about it. We let it pass.
The day after this past Christmas the horrors of the past came back. In a fleeting second the Battle of Okinawa was raging again"
This is an eloquent and gripping account of what is happening from the Bangkok perspective. I don't know about you - but I am finding that weblogs are the most engaging source of information that I have found
