I was invited by the Bataan Historical Society to be part of a panel asked to present our life experiences during WWII in the Philippines. I came to a realization that I always found it difficult to write about the war. From the time we were liberated in 1945 from the clutches of the Japanese Military, I would jot down notes about incidents I recalled. The thoughts in these notes were usually without beginnings or endings. Then I would get rid of them, not knowing why. They seemed important at the time. When I was teaching Tagalog at Berkeley, I found myself rewriting those "beginnings" in...