Brett Ashton - Vengeance - Hatred and Honor

Their beliefs are different, their customs are different, and they think differently. They are aggressive. Their skin is yellow, their eyes are slanted. Even “they are all myopic and thus cannot be good fighter or bomber pilots.” What a load of crap that one turned out to be!

So you keep drilling and thinking about how to prepare for an attack by the aggressors or how you are possibly going to attack them before they have the chance to attack you.

The concept really comes into play in an old Hindu philosophical doctrine that basically states, “As you think, so shall it be.” And I wonder. I wonder if you keep thinking that way long and hard enough and you keep preparing for it, if sooner or later, you will actually find somebody to do it. Then sometimes, if they don’t attack, you go ahead and attack them to prevent you from being attacked by them.

And sometimes they do attack you first, probably thinking you were going to attack them if they didn’t, and they want the strategic advantage of striking the first blow. And so it goes, round and round.

Many times you hear of the greatness and glory of battle. I never saw any glory in it—just misery and death. George Patton, for example, really was a great general. He fought in many so-called glorious battles against the Germans.

As a man who has been in combat more times than I can count, I can personally tell you most of the people who glorify combat have never been in it and have some twisted reason to try to convince others that they need to keep fighting.

Greatness doesn’t come from fighting; it comes from knowing when not to fight.

And when you are in combat and fighting for your life, it’s easy to kill someone. The hard part, for most people, is living with yourself afterwards.

During the war, I met a most interesting person. We were in Pearl for repairs, and I had some time off, so I ended up at the officer’s club for a beer. This guy kind of stood out among the rest of us, not only for his wits, which he had plenty of, but he had the reddest hair that you ever saw. He said he was the skipper on one of the smaller escorts or sub hunters, or something like that.

There was a certain indefinable quality about him that made him hard to forget, even to this day. The other officers around were making a case against him that some day time would heal all of the damage done to us in this war. He was holding his own against several others and forwarding the concept that time “is a great charlatan” and cures nothing.

I don’t know; to this day, I can still see the image of Joe Fitzgerald’s mangled body in my mind like it was yesterday. There just has to be a better way to be able to move on.

The venerable Rush Limbaugh says in one of his “undeniable truths of life” that “Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.” It postulates that people have to be aggressive and forceful to rule a country or world, or to handle a country or people who have gone insane. The problem is that with the right propaganda machines in place, who would be able to tell the difference between Hirohito, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, or Churchill? For example, if you look at the history of Germany during the time that Hitler was on the rise, a large part of the population thought he was a savior of some sort. Statement after statement can be found that he was “enlightened” and “brilliant” and would lead the world into a brighter future.

As long as this is true for this world, we will end up blindly slinging bombs at each other, both sides thinking that they are right and the other side wrong, and neither knowing the truth. I guess I would just rather sit and watch Sponge Bob Square Pants with my great-great-grandchildren on my knees than have another battleship shot out from under me.

I don’t deny this datum is true. When you look at it, you have to admit the arguments for it are undeniable. The evidence is all around us. I just wonder if it has to be true, because if you take the time to look at it a little closer, you begin to see a faint glimmer of hope for something else.

About twenty years ago, I heard the story of a man who had one of these Japanese samurai swords like the one on the wall behind me. He had gotten it as a souvenir after the surrender. After all of those years, he decided to see if the officer he had gotten it from was still alive. After an extensive search, he found him and went all of the way to Japan to return the sword.

Shortly afterwards, I decided maybe I should do the same for the officer who had surrendered his ship to me. I didn’t even bother to get his name at the time he surrendered, but it wasn’t hard for a retired admiral to pull in some favors and find the name of the officer in command of the I-57 at the end of the war. After a couple of months searching, I discovered that he had died shortly after the war.

From what I could find, after we towed his sub in to the base on Okinawa, he was released from the Japanese navy and went to find his family. He was from Hiroshima. His wife, his family, and his home were all gone in the first of the two blasts that ended the war. Nothing was left for him. Not even his honor. Shortly after that, he died, just as surely as if I had put my own Colt against his head and pulled the trigger.

In 1986, four of the former crewmen of the Japanese I-19 met with some of the former crewmen of the North Carolina to solve one of the war’s great mysteries. The United States Navy never found out who torpedoed the Showboat in 1942. The I-19 was the only Japanese submarine in the area that fired torpedoes that day but it was thought the Showboat was too far from the I-19 when the attack was launched. And the crew of the submarine never claimed to have attacked the North Carolina or the O’Brien .

After forty-four years, these men from both sides of the war sat down with each other and retraced their steps to find out that their attack, which sank the Wasp , also yielded the sinking of a destroyer and the damaging of a battleship. This was something they didn’t even know before. All from a single spread of six torpedoes, three of which missed their intended targets, only to be lucky enough to find two more targets by pure accident.

After all of those years, these men got together and found a way to become friends. The North Carolina crew members even presented a framed fragment of the torpedo that the I-19 had fired, which was retrieved from the hull of the Showboat , “with apologies for damage done to it when we hit it.”

My former crewmates and those of the I-19 are and should be an inspiration to all of us to be more human to each other.

In a war, people tend to have their attention hung up on the hardware, the ships, the torpedoes, the bombs, airplanes, generals, admirals, emperors, presidents, soldiers, sailors, and marines, whether they are ours or theirs. Just think of the victories, defeats, glory, heroism, rubble, fire and destruction, victims, deaths, refugees, genocides, starvation, cruelty, death marches, pestilence, and all of those brilliant big explosions created by brilliant men fighting for their country. As if all the world’s problems could be solved with a suitable application of high explosives. If we can only make a big enough boom, well, then things would be okay. All I’ve ever seen it do is scatter the very same problems over a larger area.

And these things are important. Believe me, nothing, and I do mean nothing , is more demanding of your attention than when a volley of torpedoes strikes the hull of the ship you happen to be eating your breakfast on. But these things only serve to draw your attention off of the more important subtleties, which seem to hide so well among the chaos of war, from humanity’s attention.