Every day when the kids come home from school they have a snack. If I'm working from my home office, then it's my job. The other day we had canned peaches.
I had spoken to my mother about our memorial day weekend and asked her about other veterans in the family. Her father was in the Army, which I didn't know, and her Uncle Adam served in the Pacific. In fact, he was one of the marines who fought on Guadalcanal. The short summary of the story was that he landed there and his ship was sunk. So for one month, he lived on canned peaches. When he came home (he survived!), he never wanted to eat another canned peach.
So my kids know about Uncle Adam, 30 days, canned peaches and Guadalcanal. But they really don't know about Guadalcanal and neither did I until I looked it up.
The battle for Guadalcanal was fought between August of 1942 and February of 1943. There are many different accounts of the battle. This is my favorite, the first account that I read.
On January 3rd 1943, Japanese headquarters conceded defeat and ordered the evacuation of their remaining troops from Guadalcanal and on the 7th the last of the defeated Japanese left the island via destroyers. They left 25,000 dead on the island and between 600 and 900 pilots in the sea. I don't have any figures on the number of sailors killed. 1,600 Americans were killed on the island and many more killed at sea. The rest of the Solomon Islands chain would take almost another year of fighting before being entirely in American hands.
We lost at least six ships in those six months. And Uncle Adam survived on canned peaches. Just a little perspective on our little occupation of Iraq.
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