Today is the 68th Anniversary of the Invasion of Okinawa, the costliest invasion in American History with an armada larger than D-Day. It occured on April Fool's Day, which also that year was Easter Sunday. I memorialize it in my latest book, Pacific Crimson in the following verse:

We Called it Love Day

Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands, Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day, April 1, 1945

Where’d they go, the savage hord,
That promised to kill all spam aboard
Our little creaking LSTs
As we washed up from the Jappo seas?
Our stomachs churned with steak and eggs,
And swelling tides on numbing legs,
To hit the beach as we know how,
To fall beneath the undertow.
But even in the enemy’s wake,
We’ve been cut a fucking break.
Where’d they go?

No fire fight to greet us here.
No mortar blast — no ferrous fear.
Just the gentle sloping beaches,
Ripe for feet and sweet as peaches.
Only yells of gunnies cursed
To get off the beach as we rehearsed
And push on forward to the spot,
Marked objective by the dot
On plastered maps on war room walls,
As nothing here befalls;
And so we brazenly go.

Of course, we’re raggety, but not stupid.
We know that fate’s not set by Cupid,
That somewhere in the high grass blows
Our sneaky bastards of a foe.
But since it’s Easter’s after dawn,
Perhaps their most watchful eye,
That on His day, we will not die.
Still, despite the calm and cool,
It is the day of April’s fool,
A glorious chance for Satan’s prank
To annihilate us on our flank.
Who am I to know?

All I see are farm house spreads,
Manicured crops and ponied treads,
Chickens to eat and cows that moo,
And that slithering snake they call habu,
And the sweetest calm I’ve ever heard,
Above my nerves and fears absurd,
A place to truly make a bow in,
A place that’s mark as Okinawan.
And down the easy hills I sway,
And tell my jokes and make my hay,
And eat raw eggs and savor tea,
And wonder why they lied to me.
Not here, the foe.

But then the rumors come our way.
That to the south the cannons lay,
And we are north and brushing breeze,
While Doggies fight the Japanese,
Down on Shuri’s wall of pain,
A place they try to clout in vain.
And they die and die again,
Because the enemy matches them
Death for death, that is their game,
A battle plan that has no name,
And thus the killing’s grown
And mounts to heights unknown
In lists of long ago.

So to Shuri I’m faced now.
I know when and I know how.
The familiar ring of war’s alarm
Bursts the bubble of Love day’s charm.
The smell of blood and shit rebound,
Above the whispering mortar’s round
And I climb into the breach,
A lesson that I’ll teach,
To a defeated foe who doesn’t know,
They’ve lost themselves to the carrion crow.
But only cleave to make us bleed,
As they their sacred homeland cede,
And I the price we pay,
A fool on Easter day.
 from Pacific Crimson - Forgeyt me Not

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BZ51YSG