Trip from Hell Day 3

My alarm chimed at 5 am and after a miso soup-and-rice standard breakfast, we left at 8 am and arrived at a peace museum and peace park. So, I'm thinking YOKATTA thank God this is the last day on this crazy trip. But I was very wrong; peace park and museum sound so generic and don't fully capture the feeling of what I saw. Throughout the trip, I was so concentrated on the meetings and creature comforts that I totally missed what the Okinawa Trip was about. It wasn't about seeing Okinawa as a tourist, it was about Heiwa. I am saying heiwa, the Japanese word for peace because English doesn't have a deeper word for peace. Apparently, there was a major battle in Okinawa in 1945 which killed about 200,000 people (over 2.5 Invesco Fields full, 10 Pepsi Centers, 1/3 of Okinawans) . Yeah yeah, ok I know what you're thinking, on paper, "200,000 deaths" means nothing to me either and I'm sure it means nothing to the students when they read about it in textbooks. This is why EVERY Japanese student in 7th grade, age 13, must go visit Okinawa, Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Nothing I can say will be able to have you experience the feeling of it. The museum featured a junior high during WWII that was taken over by the military, where students worked night and day in a cave, buried the dead, nursed the sick and were educated that their country needed them. The US surrounded the Japanese army in Okinawa but instead of giving up, the army fled south and forced every able person on the island to fight to the death, man, woman and child to stop the US from entering mainland Japan. Japan tried to delay the invasion using every means possible; i.e. once US soldiers found them and started shooting, students were abandoned or forced to leave the caves and face the soldiers in the middle of a battle. What made my experience so deep was watching the students as they read about what happened to students their age, schools with sailor uniforms, the same uniforms they are still wearing almost 60 years later. I watched these 13-year old giggling/energetic kids recognize themselves in the photos of the dead students. When coming out of the museum, the students were really scared, one girl was holding her stomache and wasn't talking and I felt like the biggest jerk ever on the other side of the coin hearing America-gun and US soldier. On the next bus ride, students start pulling out work-gloves and flashlights. So I'm looking around completely confused and wondering what's going on when the teacher asks me, "Do you have a flashlight and gloves?" Well, umm although I like to carry alot of things in my purse, as a general rule, I draw the line at flashlights and gloves. So the teacher rented one for me and I have absolutely no idea what was going on and everyone is grabbing helmets and I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON and he can't explain so I'm just going with it, right? So some of my favorites grab my hand and lead me into the forest where I'm sure we are going into a construction site or something. Nope, we go into an entrance of a hidden cave and descend into the "Hell on Earth" that the same sailor-clad students experienced 60 years ago, maybe on a sunny day just like this one. But today, instead of hiding from Americans in caves, Japanese students are leading an American into the cave holding hands; life is funny...