I hear you, Rhuby, and thanks ModGod for expressing what I too feel.
This brings up a slightly tangential thought for me - I recognized an amazing contrast as a child, learning about the WWII military experiences of my father and my uncle. My dad was Chief Quartermaster on a Navy fueling ship in Alaska, and I don't think he ever saw battle (i.e. Attu) - he froze off half of one lung guiding the ship through a storm, and spent the last couple of years of the war in a Naval hospital with TB.
My uncle was on the front lines - Army infantry, I imagine - and took a bullet that he carried with him for the rest of his life. My uncle (and probably to an even greater degree, my aunt) harbored the bitterness of the ages toward the Japanese because of a bullet from some guy who was just doing his job, same as my uncle.
Maybe it's the glaring disparity of their respective service records - but when my dad spoke of the Japanese, it was always with the greatest respect. See, Dad had been a Merchant Marine in the 1920s, long before travel to Asia was an everyday occurrence. His experience in Japan was so profound that *that's* what he carried with him all his life, not the memories of the war. He could have easily succumbed to the same bitterness that my uncle did - after all, if it wasn't for the Japanese, there would have been no reason for him to be in Alaska on that boat during that storm and he would've had full lung function, blah, blah, blah. But he didn't. He had an awareness of the cultural differences borne of peacetime experience, and yet he understood the underlying similarities among humankind.
It makes me glad to be my father's daughter.
