Sitting down to "The Pacific" now on DVR.

After my GrandDad died I got a Jap flag to hang up in my room. He had kept it in his closet along with a box of medals and several other "souvenirs" (like a pack of cigarettes taken off a dead Japanese soldier--I smoked one once, years later, and was disappointed how they just seemed like regular stale cigarettes). I guess nobody else wanted that junk and the rest of the family thought a pre-teen boy might appreciate it even if he didn't understand what it meant. I pinned the medals on the cloth flag and hung it over my bed with his framed Marine Corp honorable discharge certificate and a picture of General D. MacArthur he kept in the hall although nobody knew why; and some were secretly very happy to be rid of.

I was always a bit disappointed that he was in the Pacific rather than Europe--where Hollywood and the rest of the American public consciousness seemed to be and where everybody thought about when they thought of WWII. I have thought a million times why that is the way it was/is.