Mike Staley

Saburo Sakai was the greatest Japanese fighter ace to survive the war. Sixty-four confirmed kills. Flew the Zero against the P-40, the P-38, the Hellcat, and the Corsair. Over Java, in early 1942, he caught a lone American DC-3 transport plane in his gunsight. An easy kill. Standard target. He closed to point-blank range. Then he looked into the cockpit. The cockpit was full of women and children, Dutch civilian refugees trying to get out of the East Indies ahead of the Japanese advance. One of the women, holding a baby, looked out the side window straight into Sakai's canopy. Sakai did not fire. He broke off, saluted the woman, and let the DC-3 fly west into the sun. Years later, in American interviews, he explained himself plainly. "I am a samurai. My father's father was a samurai. We do not shoot women and babies. If my ancestors saw me fire into that cockpit, I would not be able to meet them when I died." Five months later, over Guadalcanal, Sakai took a .50 caliber round through the canopy of his Zero. The bullet went through his head. It blinded his right eye and tore open his skull. By every medical reasonable expectation he should have gone down. He flew his damaged Zero four hours and 650 miles over the Pacific, bleeding into his flight suit, half-blind, repeatedly losing consciousness. He landed it, intact, on Rabaul. He survived the war with one eye. After the war, Saburo Sakai did not hate Americans. He became a Buddhist. He said in interviews that he had killed too many men already and would not do it again, not even in his own thoughts. He corresponded for years with former American Navy pilots who had been his opponents. When American pilots began visiting Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to pay respects to Japanese pilots they had shot down, it was Saburo Sakai who met them at the gate and walked them in. Enemy pilot. Enemy pilot. Both with white hair. Side by side, bowing at the memorial of men they had tried to kill. "We were warriors," Sakai told one American interviewer. "Now we are old. Only the young should hate. The old should remember." Japan had Zamperini forgiveness. Japan had Fuchida reconciliation. Japan also had Saburo Sakai, who refused to fire at women, took a bullet through the head, and spent his old age walking American pilots into Yasukuni. Warriors recognize warriors. Even after the war is gone.

Show up every time. You can't lose.

Measles vaccine rates have dropped and case numbers have surged, and the resulting outbreak could end up costing millions. go.f-st.co/3aQC8U6

🇺🇸Dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: November 11, 1921: Exactly three years after the end of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is dedicated at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia during an Armistice Day ceremony presided over by President Warren G. Harding. Two days before, an unknown American soldier, who had fallen somewhere on a World War I battlefield, arrived at the nation’s capital from a military cemetery in France. On Armistice Day, in the presence of President Harding and other government, military, and international dignitaries, the unknown soldier was buried with highest honors beside the Memorial Amphitheater. As the soldier was lowered to his final resting place, a two-inch layer of soil brought from France was placed below his coffin so that he might rest forever atop the earth on which he died. The Tomb of the Unknown Solider is considered the most hallowed grave at Arlington Cemetery, America’s most sacred military cemetery. The tombstone itself, designed by sculptor Thomas Hudson Jones, was not completed until 1932, when it was unveiled bearing the description “Here Rests in Honored Glory an American Soldier Known but to God.” The World War I unknown was later joined by the unidentified remains of soldiers from America’s other major 20th century wars and the tomb was put under permanent guard by special military sentinels. In 1998, a Vietnam War unknown, who was buried at the tomb for 14 years, was disinterred from the Tomb after DNA testing indicated his identity. Air Force Lieutenant Michael Blassie was returned to his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, and was buried with military honors, including an F-15 jet “missing man” flyover and a lone bugler sounding taps. History .com