His excitement is that of a young boy going on a great adventure. Come August, that’s what Marvin Strombo will be doing.
The 93-year-old Marine from Missoula will fly with friends, family and facilitators to Japan to deliver to its rightful owners a hinomaru yosegaki, the good-luck flag he took off a dead Japanese officer on Saipan in 1944.
“I never really thought of it as mine,” Strombo said last week.
Through the efforts of the Obon Society of Oregon, he now knows the story of the officer who lay dead on the outskirts of Garapan, the largest town on the small South Pacific island, as U.S. forces mounted a successful, bloody July offensive in World War II.
The officer, Sadao Yasue, was the oldest of six children in a farming family from Higashi Shirakawa, in the south-central prefecture of Gifu. The entire village assembled to see Yasue off to war. His sister accompanied him to either a dispatch location or the coastline, said Rex Ziak of the Obon Society.
More:
http://missoulian.com/news/local/going-home-vet-finds-peace-as-search-ends-for-family/article_6fa87417-513a-5465-bcab-0abf1aca0fe4.html
