There’s a straight line between the resilience of this soldier and the Filipino food that blesses Charlottesville.
In 1942, 23-year-old Mauro Biazon of the Philippines fought with the United States Armed Forces against Japan in the Battle of Bataan, a province of the Philippines. After the U.S. surrender, the Japanese marched Biazon and thousands of other prisoners fifty miles through sweltering tropical heat from the battlefield to POW camps. In what became known as the Bataan Death March, POWs suffered starvation, dehydration, exhaustion, and abuse, as Japanese soldiers made a sport of shooting, beating, and bayoneting POWs.
Many died. Biazon nearly did. A Japanese soldier stabbed him with a bayonet and left him for dead. But Biazon was not dead. He just lay still to make his captors believe he was. After they marched on, he crawled miles to safety…