I've finished reading Black Glasses Like Clark Kent and as I wrote last week, it continued to be a fascinating blend of personal memoir and military history. Understand that I came to this book with a unique reader's perspective: I have a degree in history (focused on US military history), I taught American history to soldiers on a US military base and I have written a memoir that draws heavily on the difference between fact and fiction in recorded history.

In other words, I am the absolute best reader for Svoboda's work.

In a lot of ways though, I am also likely to be one of the most critical. I read this book wondering if the author was really going to try and uncover what her uncle suggested happened in Japan in 1946 or if she was going to be a sensationalist and let her own ideas about the military or military cover-ups guide the narrative. I was very pleased to see her careful scholarship though - her explanations about trips to various archives, her carefully recorded interviews, and her discoveries from a variety of news sources of the period. When she can't find something or get to a definitive answer, Svoboda just lays out there what she does have and then ponders what it all means. But it is clear to the reader that there are no definitive answers in a lot of cases. Over time the very greyness of her uncle's experience becomes one of the book's driving narratives and when she then ties it to media confusion over Iraq and our the continued double-talk on that war, the idea that so much about what happened in Occupied Japan is never going to be known because easy to believe.

Even for someone who took more than one class on WWII, and who knows how incredibly that war has been analyzed and studied to death, it is clear that we will never know it all.

Here is a passage that really blew my mind - something I had never heard a single thing about prior to Svoboda's work:

Two incidents of mass rapes from that time period [spring 1946] were so outrageous that they were also reported: on April 4, fifty GIs broke into a hospital in the Omori district and raped seventy-seven women, even a woman who had just given birth, killing a two-day-old baby by tossing it onto the floor; and on April 11, forty U.S. soldiers cut off the phone lines of one of Nagoya's city blocks and entered a number of houses simultaneously 'raping many girls and women between the ages of 10 and 55 years'.

I am still blown away by this - by that fact that such acts of violence against women and children could be organized in this fashion, and that we never talk about it - we never write about it in general books on the period.

The author was primarily looking for information on the execution of American soldiers convicted in military court of crimes in Japan in her research. Her uncle stated that as an MP he saw this and it apparently haunted him his entire life. But while she did find ample evidence that there were problems with violent acts committed by American GIs in the country, trying to determine who was convicted for what and how they were punished (including by hanging) is much more elusive. It is clear that the preponderance of those found guilty were black GIs however, something else that she tries to track and explain - were the trials fair, etc. Everywhere she turns though she finds contradictions in the numbers and reports although the preponderance of evidence makes it clear that something very wrong was happening in Occupied Japan; something very ugly that did not fit the American ideal of bravery and honor.

There was one other aspect of the book that really struck me - when Svoboda points out that "who tells any war story is important; that is, who has the authority to tell it, and then when and why." Winners tell stories, and document it as they see fit and officers - or the so-called "military establishment" will often do its best to present the stories in the best light for its own purposes. (Something Pat Tillman's death reminded us all of yet again.) She points out how Agent Orange was not believed to be dangerous for years and how Gulf War Syndrome was discounted and on and on. Her conclusion on what has changed is simple: "It is only with the advent of tiny cheap recording devices that the common soldier has any power."

Those devices give all of us power now - power that was not present for anyone on any side in 1946. The final note in the multiple tragedies that Svoboda uncovers though is the death of her uncle, a man who couldn't forget what he saw - even though there was no movie to remind him.

Black Glass Like Clark Kent is outstanding - a must read for anyone interested in history and memory - in how we try to remember and hope to forget.