One of the many startling bits of history brought forth in The Fire Agent concerned the World War l Japanese Bando Prisoner of War Camp, located in Naruto, Tokushima Prefecture, Japan. This camp housed almost 1000 German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers. It was certainly an outlier among other prisons as it was governed in the most humane ways possible, truly an eye-opener! 

While reading that chapter I couldn't help but fast-forward two decades, to World War ll, and another Japanese POW camp, Camp O'Donnell. This was the destination for thousands of American and Filipino soldiers who had survived the barbaric Bataan Death March. The conditions in this camp were horrific, utterly inhumane, and resulted in thousands of prisoner deaths, including my uncle, Peter Young, of Derry, NH. He was 22, destroyed by malnutrition and disease. So, it's Memorial Day here in the United States, and countless thousands of other families reflect upon similarly tragic stories of lives sacrificed.  

Peter T.