Late summer 1945, an 18 year old Marine, just out of Paris Island, boards a ship in the Pacific Ocean and heads west towards the Pacific theater, where our forces were battling the Japanese military.
Sometime after August 9th, he lands in Nagasaki and is part of the peacekeeping/occupation force. When he landed, he was given an English / Japanese dictionary, a Japanese rifle, and a photograph of Nagasaki.
My grandfather was that Marine and I spent the day walking in the city, just random places, some temples, but mainly just to view the city he once called home while stationed here.
I didn’t listen to any music or books, I just listened to the sounds of traffic and watched people go by, wondering if I was walking on the same roads he walked all those years ago.
Since he passed, I inherited the rifle and dictionary, mainly because I had the safe to store it in, and my father has the photograph.
He never talked about it much. He told me about standing guard and watching the kids playing, but I didn’t think to ask him about the city and what he experienced. We as a generation lost tons of oral history, that looking back I wished I had asked about.
I went to the top of one of the mountains nearby to see the city at night, thinking how much has changed since he was last here, and looking down at the surrounding landscape at where he once was, looking for, what, I don’t know.
Just knowing I was where he was nearly 80 years prior was something.
I am going on an adventure 
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