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Q. The notorious​ Unit 731 members​ from Japan went totally scot-free, I understand​, even though they were probably worse than the Nazis. Do you agree?A. Unit 731 was an Auschwitz equivalent. The perpetrators should all have been tried for war crimes. Particularly evil was Surgeon General Shirō Ishii, commander of the unit.Most of the victims were Chinese and a few Koreans. 30% were Russians. Those that the Soviet forces managed to arrest were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949. The rest were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data gathered, to be co-opted into the U.S. biological warfare program, as had happened with Nazi researchers in Operation Paperclip.On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence."Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as communist propaganda.Gen. Ishii lived on the outskirts of Tokyo until his death in 1959. Other "graduates" of Unit 731 include the former governor of Tokyo, the former president of the Japan Medical Association, the former director of the health ministry's preventive health research center, the former chairman and president of Green Cross Corp. and the past heads of a number of Japanese medical schools. The man in charge of vivisections, Yoshisuke Murata, became director of the respected Kyoto Medical School, and later medical director at Kinki University.Perpetrators:Surgeon General Shirō IshiiLt. General Masaji KitanoEpidemic Prevention and Water Purification DepartmentUnmasking Horror -- A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity New York Times10 Atrocious Experiments Conducted By Unit 731 - ListverseJapanese World War II veterans recall horrors of Unit 731 (Youtube)Unmasking Horror -- A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War AtrocityMORIOKA, Japan— He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic."The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down," recalled the 72-year-old farmer, then a medical assistant in a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II. "But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming."I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time."Finally the old man, who insisted on anonymity, explained the reason for the vivisection. The Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with the plague as part of a research project -- the full horror of which is only now emerging -- to develop plague bombs for use in World War II. After infecting him, the researchers decided to cut him open to see what the disease does to a man's inside. No anesthetic was used, he said, out of concern that it might have an effect on the results.That research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II: a vast project to develop weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax, cholera and a dozen other pathogens. Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army conducted research by experimenting on humans and by "field testing" plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start plague outbreaks. They could.A trickle of information about the program has turned into a stream and now a torrent. Half a century after the end of the war, a rush of books, documentaries and exhibitions are unlocking the past and helping arouse interest in Japan in the atrocities committed by some of Japan's most distinguished doctors.Scholars and former members of the unit say that at least 3,000 people -- by some accounts several times as many -- were killed in the medical experiments; none survived.The Unit 731 complex Pingfang, ChinaNo one knows how many died in the "field testing." It is becoming evident that the Japanese officers in charge of the program hoped to use their weapons against the United States. They proposed using balloon bombs to carry disease to America, and they had a plan in the summer of 1945 to use Kamikaze pilots to dump plague-infected fleas on San Diego.The research was kept secret after the end of the war in part because the United States Army granted immunity from war crimes prosecution to the doctors in exchange for their data. Japanese and American documents show that the United States helped cover up the human experimentation. Instead of putting the ringleaders on trial, it gave them stipends.The accounts are wrenching to read even after so much time has passed: a Russian mother and daughter left in a gas chamber, for example, as doctors peered through thick glass and timed their convulsions, watching as the woman sprawled over her child in a futile effort to save her from the gas. The Origins Ban on Weapon Entices MilitaryJapan's biological weapons program was born in the 1930's, in part because Japanese officials were impressed that germ warfare had been banned by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. If it was so awful that it had to be banned under international law, the officers reasoned, it must make a great weapon.The Japanese Army, which then occupied a large chunk of China, evicted the residents of eight villages near Harbin, in Manchuria, to make way for the headquarters of Unit 731. One advantage of China, from the Japanese point of view, was the availability of research subjects on whom germs could be tested. The subjects were called marutas, or logs, and most were Communist sympathizers or ordinary criminals. The majority were Chinese, but many were Russians, expatriates living in China.Takeo Wano, a 71-year-old former medical worker in Unit 731 who now lives here in the northern Japanese city of Morioka, said he once saw a six-foot-high glass jar in which a Western man was pickled in formaldehyde. The man had been cut into two pieces, vertically, and Mr. Wano guesses that he was Russian because there were many Russians then living in the area.Gen. Shiro Ishii, head of Unit 731The Unit 731 headquarters contained many other such jars with specimens. They contained feet, heads, internal organs, all neatly labeled. "I saw samples with labels saying 'American,' 'English' and 'Frenchman,' but most were Chinese, Koreans and Mongolians," said a Unit 731 veteran who insisted on anonymity. "Those labeled as American were just body parts, like hands or feet, and some were sent in by other military units."US POWs shot down in Japan 70 years ago dissected ALIVETerrible fate: Captain Marvin Watkins, top left, and his crew were downed over Japan. Six of them and two others not pictured were dissected alive or subjected to other terrible medical experiments at Kyushu Medical School. Pictured in the back row (l to r) are: Marvin S. Watkins (interrogated and released at the end of war) William R. Fredericks (died in medical experiment), Howard T. Shingledecker, (fate unknown), Charles M. Kearns (died at crash site), Dale E. Plambeck (died in medical experiment) Front row: Robert C. Johnson (died at crash site), Teddy J. Ponczka (died in medical experiment), Robert B. Williams (died in medical experiment), Leon E. Czarnecki (died in medical experiment), Leo C. Oeinck (died at crash site), John C. Colehower (died in medical experiment)The soldiers were flying a B-29 bomber, pictured, when it was shot down over the skies of Japan. Eight of the men on board were taken to the Kyushu Medical School and experimented on. None survived the vivisection.Medical researchers also locked up diseased prisoners with healthy ones, to see how readily various ailments would spread. The doctors locked others inside a pressure chamber to see how much the body can withstand before the eyes pop from their sockets.Victims were often taken to a proving ground called Anda, where they were tied to stakes and bombarded with test weapons to see how effective the new technologies were. Planes sprayed the zone with a plague culture or dropped bombs with plague-infested fleas to see how many people would die.The Japanese armed forces were using poison gas in their battles against Chinese troops, and so some of the prisoners were used in developing more lethal gases. One former member of Unit 731 who insisted on anonymity said he was taken on a "field trip" to the proving ground to watch a poison gas experiment.A group of prisoners were tied to stakes, and then a tank-like contraption that spewed out gas was rolled toward them, he said. But at just that moment, the wind changed and the Japanese observers had to run for their lives without seeing what happened to the victims.The Japanese Army regularly conducted field tests to see whether biological warfare would work outside the laboratory. Planes dropped plague-infected fleas over Ningbo in eastern China and over Changde in north-central China, and plague outbreaks were later reported.Japanese troops also dropped cholera and typhoid cultures in wells and ponds, but the results were often counterproductive. In 1942 germ warfare specialists distributed dysentery, cholera and typhoid in Zhejiang Province in China, but Japanese soldiers became ill and 1,700 died of the diseases, scholars say.Sheldon H. Harris, a historian at California State University in Northridge, estimates that more than 200,000 Chinese were killed in germ warfare field experiments. Professor Harris -- author of a book on Unit 731,”Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up" (Routledge, 1994) -- also says plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused outbreaks of the plague that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 through 1948.The leading scholar of Unit 731 in Japan Tsuneishi Keiichi, is skeptical of such numbers. Professor Tsuneishi, who has led the efforts in Japan to uncover atrocities by Unit 731, says that the attack on Ningbo killed about 100 people and that there is no evidence of huge outbreaks of disease set off by field trials. The Tradeoff Knowledge Gained At Terrible Cost.Many of the human experiments were intended to develop new treatments for medical problems that the Japanese Army faced. Many of the experiments remain secret, but an 18-page report prepared in 1945 -- and kept by a senior Japanese military officer until now -- includes a summary of the unit's research. The report was prepared in English for American intelligence officials, and it shows the extraordinary range of the unit's work.Scholars say that the research was not contrived by mad scientists, and that it was intelligently designed and carried out. The medical findings saved many Japanese lives.For example, Unit 731 proved scientifically that the best treatment for frostbite was not rubbing the limb, which had been the traditional method, but rather immersion in water a bit warmer than 100 degrees -- but never more than 122 degrees.The cost of this scientific breakthrough was borne by those seized for medical experiments. They were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water, until a guard decided that frostbite had set in. Testimony from a Japanese officer said this was determined after the "frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck."Museum visitors Harbin, Helongjaing ProvinceA booklet just published in Japan after a major exhibition about Unit 731 shows how doctors even experimented on a three-day-old baby, measuring the temperature with a needle stuck inside the infant's middle finger."Usually a hand of a three-day-old infant is clenched into a fist," the booklet says, "but by sticking the needle in, the middle finger could be kept straight to make the experiment easier." The Scope Other Experiments On Humans.The human experimentation did not take place just in Unit 731, nor was it a rogue unit acting on its own. While it is unclear whether Emperor Hirohito knew of the atrocities, his younger brother, Prince Mikasa, toured the Unit 731 headquarters in China and wrote in his memoirs that he was shown films showing how Chinese prisoners were "made to march on the plains of Manchuria for poison gas experiments on humans."In addition, the recollections of Dr. Ken Yuasa, 78, who still practices in a clinic in Tokyo, suggest that human experimentation may have been routine even outside Unit 731. Dr. Yuasa was an army medic in China, but he says he was never in Unit 731 and never had contact with it.Nevertheless, Dr. Yuasa says that when he was still in medical school in Japan, the students heard that ordinary doctors who went to China were allowed to vivisect patients. And sure enough, when Dr. Yuasa arrived in Shanxi Province in north-central China in 1942, he was soon asked to attend a "practice surgery."Two Chinese men were brought in, stripped naked and given general anesthetic. Then Dr. Yuasa and the others began practicing various kinds of surgery: first an appendectomy, then an amputation of an arm and finally a tracheotomy. After 90 minutes, they were finished, so they killed the patient with an injection.When Dr. Yuasa was put in charge of a clinic, he said, he periodically asked the police for a Communist to dissect, and they sent one over. The vivisection was all for practice rather than for research, and Dr. Yuasa says they were routine among Japanese doctors working in China in the war.In addition, Dr. Yuasa -- who is now deeply apologetic about what he did -- said he cultivated typhoid germs in test tubes and passed them on, as he had been instructed to do, to another army unit. Someone from that unit, which also had no connection with Unit 731, later told him that the troops would use the test tubes to infect the wells of villages in Communist-held territory. The Plans Taking the War To U.S. Homeland.In 1944, when Japan was nearing defeat, Tokyo's military planners seized on a remarkable way to hit back at the American heartland: they launched huge balloons that rode the prevailing winds to the continental United States. Although the American Government censored reports at the time, some 200 balloons landed in Western states, and bombs carried by the balloons killed a woman in Montana and six people in Oregon.Half a century later, there is evidence that it could have been far worse; some Japanese generals proposed loading the balloons with weapons of biological warfare, to create epidemics of plague or anthrax in the United States. Other army units wanted to send cattle-plague virus to wipe out the American livestock industry or grain smut to wipe out the crops.There was a fierce debate in Tokyo, and a document discovered recently suggests that at a crucial meeting in late July 1944 it was Hideki Tojo -- whom the United States later hanged for war crimes -- who rejected the proposal to use germ warfare against the United States.At the time of the meeting, Tojo had just been ousted as Prime Minister and chief of the General Staff, but he retained enough authority to veto the proposal. He knew by then that Japan was likely to lose the war, and he feared that biological assaults on the United States would invite retaliation with germ or chemical weapons being developed by America.Yet the Japanese Army was apparently willing to use biological weapons against the Allies in some circumstances. When the United States prepared to attack the Pacific island of Saipan in the late spring of 1944, a submarine was sent from Japan to carry biological weapons -- it is unclear what kind -- to the defenders.The submarine was sunk, Professor Tsuneishi says, and the Japanese troops had to rely on conventional weapons alone.As the end of the war approached in 1945, Unit 731 embarked on its wildest scheme of all. Codename Cherry Blossoms at Night, the plan was to use Kamikaze pilots to infest California with the plague.Toshimi Mizobuchi, who was an instructor for new recruits in Unit 731, said the idea was to use 20 of the 500 new troops who arrived in Harbin in July 1945. A submarine was to take a few of them to the seas off Southern California, and then they were to fly in a plane carried on board the submarine and contaminate San Diego with plague-infected fleas. The target date was to be Sept. 22, 1945.Ishio Obata, 73, who now lives in Ehime prefecture, acknowledged that he had been a chief of the Cherry Blossoms at Night attack force against San Diego, but he declined to discuss details. "It is such a terrible memory that I don't want to recall it," he said.Tadao Ishimaru, also 73, said he had learned only after returning to Japan that he had been a candidate for the strike force against San Diego. "I don't want to think about Unit 731," he said in a brief telephone interview. "Fifty years have passed since the war. Please let me remain silent."It is unclear whether Cherry Blossoms at Night ever had a chance of being carried out. Japan did indeed have at least five submarines that carried two or three planes each, their wings folded against the fuselage like a bird.But a Japanese Navy specialist said the navy would have never allowed its finest equipment to be used for an army plan like Cherry Blossoms at Night, partly because the highest priority in the summer of 1945 was to defend the main Japanese islands, not to launch attacks on the United States mainland.If the Cherry Blossoms at Night plan was ever serious, it became irrelevant as Japan prepared to surrender in early August 1945. In the last days of the war, beginning on Aug. 9, Unit 731 used dynamite to try to destroy all evidence of its germ warfare program, scholars say. The Aftermath No Punishment, Little Remorse.Partly because the Americans helped cover up the biological warfare program in exchange for its data, Gen. Shiro Ishii, the head of Unit 731, was allowed to live peacefully until his death from throat cancer in 1959. Those around him in Unit 731 saw their careers flourish in the postwar period, rising to positions that included Governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and head of the Japanese Olympic Committee.By conventional standards, few people were more cruel than the farmer who as a Unit 731 medic carved up a Chinese prisoner without anesthetic, and who also acknowledged that he had helped poison rivers and wells. Yet his main intention in agreeing to an interview seemed to be to explain that Unit 731 was not really so brutal after all.Asked why he had not anesthetized the prisoner before dissecting him, the farmer explained: "Vivisection should be done under normal circumstances. If we'd used anesthesia, that might have affected the body organs and blood vessels that we were examining. So we couldn't have used anesthetic."When the topic of children came up, the farmer offered another justification: "Of course there were experiments on children. But probably their fathers were spies.""There's a possibility this could happen again," the old man said, smiling genially. "Because in a war, you have to win."Rape of Nanking10 Atrocious Experiments Conducted By Unit 731 - ListverseTHATCHER BOYDThe events of World War II may show humanity at its lowest point. Clashing political ideologies and the ensuing worldwide combat produced a nearly unprecedented level of bloodshed and destruction.Although The Holocaust showed the extreme nature of the war and the horrifying extent to which a nation could be driven, Japan’s Unit 731 facilities, an Auschwitz equivalent, held their own horrors in human experimentation. These are just some of the experiments that were performed during the unit’s existence from 1936 to 1945.10. DismembermentPhoto credit: maywespeak.comLike experiments at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, Unit 731 doctors and researchers studied the potential survival of soldiers on the battlefield. But instead of using Japanese soldiers for these experiments, Unit 731 used Allied POWs as well as Chinese and Russian civilians.One such war-influenced experiment was in various dismemberments, particularly limb amputations, to study the effects of blood loss. Other forms of dismemberment were purely experimental and not combat-related. For example, some amputated limbs were reattached to other sides of the body. Other times, limbs were frozen and amputated until only the victim’s head and torso remained.Often, this was done without anesthetic for fear of negatively affecting the experiments. Test subjects were degradingly called marutas (“logs”), a reference to the phrase, “How many logs fell?”9. Nanking AtrocitiesPhoto credit: TimeUnit 731 was one of the two most infamous, large-scale war crimes committed by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The second war crime was the Nanjing Massacre.Besides the atrocities committed, the correlation between the two war crimes was that many POWs and civilians captured during the campaign were used in the Unit 731 experiments. By and large, the anti-Chinese sentiment was still in place between the two events. As soon as Japanese soldiers entered China’s capital in December 1937, the city was host to mass murder and rape.After the orders to eliminate all captives eventually arrived, no one was spared. The atrocities included beatings, drownings, decapitations, mass theft, forced incestuous rape, live burials, addictive drug distribution, and numerous unrecorded crimes.There was even a contest between two Japanese officers to see who would kill 100 people with a sword first. Unlike many of the participants in Unit 731, however, these officers were tried and executed.8. VivisectionPhoto credit: unit731.orgOne of the most common and brutal experiments performed was vivisection. This was done on live subjects without anesthesia as it was believed that the symptoms of decay after death would skew results.One purpose of these vivisections was to practice surgery. In fact, multiple different surgeries were often performed on a subject. Once the victim was of no more use, he was killed and dissected before being burned or placed in a large burial pit.Other times, vivisections were performed to see the internal effects of diseases. Vivisections were also part of crude experiments, like the removal of the stomach and the attachment of the esophagus to the intestines. Images of and testimonies about these surgeries are available online. But view them with discretion as they are extremely graphic.7. Lethal InjectionsInitially, many of Unit 731’s disease experiments were performed as preventative measures. The Japanese had found that 89 percent of battlefield deaths from the First Sino-Japanese War were from diseases. But these experiments into preventative medicines and vaccines evolved into offensive use as the war progressed.Unit 731 was split into eight divisions. The first focused on experimenting with bacteriological diseases, including the bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid, and tuberculosis. These bacteria were injected into subjects regularly, and the resulting infections were studied. The outcomes became increasingly deadly because many people lived in communal cells.The Japanese also studied the effects of injecting humans with animal blood, air bubbles that caused embolisms, and seawater. These seawater injections were similar to the seawater ingestion experiments at Auschwitz.6. Venereal DiseasesPhoto credit: CDC/Robert SumpterChildren were not exempt from the unit’s atrocities as vertical transmission from mother to fetus was studied. This included diseases like syphilis. The researchers studied how syphilis would affect the resulting baby’s health and how it would harm the mother’s reproductive system. Although we don’t know the number of children born in captivity, it is known that none had survived when the unit dissolved in 1945.While diseases like tuberculosis and smallpox could be injected, syphilis and gonorrhea required a different method of infection. This was done using a male and a female, one of whom was infected. The couple was forced to have sexual intercourse under threat of being shot. The infected bodies were later vivisected to see the internal results.5. FrostbiteOne of the more horrifying series of experiments revolved around extreme temperatures. While extreme heat was also used on test subjects, extreme cold was used more often as it was suited to certain facility climates in Japan.After the test subjects were taken outside in the cold, water was intermittently poured on their arms until frostbite set into the affected areas. Other times, limbs were frozen and subsequently thawed to study gangrene.One might wonder how the researchers could tell that the arms were frostbitten. According to one officer’s testimony, frostbite had occurred if the “frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when struck.”However, these experiments did yield scientific findings. The unit determined that rubbing a frostbitten area was not the most effective treatment. Instead, it was better to treat frostbite by immersing the affected area in water warmer than 37.8 degrees Celsius (100 °F) but cooler than 50 degrees Celsius (122 °F). A scene depicting this experiment is featured in the 1988 filmMen Behind the Sun with some artistic license.4. Sexual assaultThe rape and sexual assault of women occurred with tragic frequency in Unit 731. Like the mass rapes and sex slavery exhibited during the Nanjing Massacre (aka “The Rape of Nanjin”), sex crimes committed by Japanese soldiers and researchers were rampant. Although these unlawful acts were committed for pleasure, they were sometimes justified by the researchers as experiments about venereal diseases.However, one guard’s account of a researcher shows the disturbing and casual nature of these crimes. According to the guard, the researcher “told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. So he and another member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her.”3. Special Chamber ExperimentsPhoto credit: firsttoknow.comAlthough Unit 731 did plenty of testing in the field, the 6-square-kilometer (2.3 mi) facility was host to numerous buildings for specific experiments. Many of these buildings were used to raise fleas and culture pathogens, but some were specially built for testing.A centrifuge was built to examine how much force it would take to cause death. High-pressure chambers pushed victims’ eyes out of their heads. Forced abortions and sterilizations were conducted, and subjects were treated to lethal doses of X-rays.In an experiment to observe the innate bond between mother and offspring, a Russian mother and her child were monitored in a glass chamber while poisonous gas was pumped in. The mother covered her child in an attempt to save her, but both ultimately succumbed.2. Weapons TestingPhoto credit: china-underground.com, escapeartistes.comIn Unit 731, human subjects were also used in weapons testing at many facilities. The victims were typically taken to an experimental field like Anda and tied to wooden posts for testing. Then the victims had plague-spreading bombs dropped on them en masse, were used for target practice, had grenades lobbed at them, or were burned with flamethrowers.This was very similar to the Imperial Japanese Army’s protocol to use captured Chinese soldiers for bayonet practice. It’s an example of unnecessary cruelty. (baby above)Biological warfarePhoto credit: firsttoknow.comWorld War I brought technological advances in warfare, particularly biological warfare. Inspired by the success produced by these bioweapons (particularly the chlorine gas used during the Second Battle of Ypres), General Shiro Ishii experimented extensively in this area.In addition to dropping bombs filled with diseases like anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and bubonic plague on prisoners, Ishii designed a special porcelain-shelled bomb that allowed infected fleas to disperse and infect a wider area. Again, subjects were often tied to stakes and bombed. Scientists in protective suits examined the bodies afterward.Other times—such as on October 4 and 29, 1940—low-flying airplanes sprayed plague bacteria in the Chechiang province in China, killing 21 and 99 people, respectively. However, estimates for the total number of Chinese killed in this manner vary from 200,000–580,000 people.The Japanese regarded the Chinese as inferior. As a result, the Chinese were considered viable test subjects for these attacks. We can only speculate as to what the unit would have done on a larger scale with these biological weapons.Thatcher Boyd is a writer, actor, film lover, and drinker of a LOT of black coffee. You can reach him here to collaborate, communicate, or just shoot the breeze.Unit 731 General FactsUnit 731 - WikipediaUnit 731: OverviewPure Evil: Wartime Japanese Doctor Had No Regard for Human SufferingUnit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army's Biological Warfare ProgramJapan revisits its darkest moments where American POWs became human experimentsJapanese World War II veterans recall horrors of Unit 731Published on Aug 14, 2014Former members of Unit 731, a Japanese military unit that conducted illegal human experiments during World War II, can be seen discussing the atrocities they committed in a video that was recently released. Coming just before the 69th anniversary of Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, the video has shed new light on the unit's past activities in northeast China's city of Harbin. They are telling history to a Chinese man who has been researching the unit for 16 years.South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Tai Young on May 16, 2013, criticized Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for posing for a photo in the cockpit of a plane with the number 731 written on its body, during his visit to an Air Self-Defense Force base in Higashimatsushima, Miyagi Prefecture as the figure reminds South Koreans of Unit 731, a former Japanese military unit believed to have conducted human experiments. (Photo: AAP).

I have already answered the first half of the question on another thread and thus will not address it here.But as 1973 Graduate, I did serve until 1991 when I retired from the US Army. Some of my information will be dated but I think that while details may not be the same, the the general impact will be.I got drafted during the Vietnam War in 1967 and then enlisted to get a military occupational skill of choice. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do as I found out much later, I probably would have gotten the same MOS but that is history. It all worked out very well as I was selected for West Point a soldier and then graduated from West Point.Was it worth it? Absolutely! Especially for me. I came from a very poor family in Montana. Would I have graduated from college? Doubtful because of economics. But it could have happened… I will never know. I have been very blessed!As an Engineering Army officer, my first assignment was as a Platoon Leader of Vertical Construction Platoon. For the most part, I enjoyed it very much. I think every engineer likes to build things and that is what I did with my platoon in Germany. After two years with that platoon, I was then given the Battalion’s Heavy Construction Platoon. This platoon was three times the size and normally had three projects at once. It was three times the fun!After a year plus of that, I was made the Battalion Administrative Officer S1. I can remember a parade the day after I ran an Ultra Marathon. I was extremely stiff and had to strut out in front of the Battalion to take reports! But this to me was not as fun as being a Platoon Leader. I was a paper pusher to the extreme. Since it was a Captain’s position and I was only 1st Lieutenant, when we were assigned a Captain, he took that position and I was moved to be the Pipeline Officer for Europe. This was largely a planning and training position as I never really got to do what I would have done in wartime. But it was more interesting than being an S1.Then, I got a call from my branch assignments officer in Alexandria which give me one of the most demanding project of my career: It was an emergency disaster relief project in Alaska. I wrote several pages with photographs about this project on Quora. (Look up how people in cold regions and the Arctic get their water with out it freezing!) This project required solutions to previously unsolved problems that were some real, innovative, engineering and the project was successful: it is still in use today! On completing that project I did other construction projects in remote Alaska for mostly the Air Force at their DEW Line and forward deployment sites.After that, I commanded a company in 4th Engineer Battalion at Fort Carson, Colorado. I really like commanding troops, particulary in the field. We had a 45 day down range training mission at what later became the National Training Center but when I was there, it was Camp Irwin. It was a great assignment in which I got to do things most combat engineers never get a chance to do: I used live mines, was the OPFOR against full combat battalions (and we often prevailed: on one such mission, I captured the 2 star Division Commander! He was not at all happy!) and got to call in a B 52 strike! I had good troops, a very good 1st Sgt, and we were a very tight knit unit.After a very successful command, I was the Developmental Project Officer for the US Army’s new Light Weight Company Mortar System. I fielded this weapon with the Rangers of the 75th Ranger Regiment units at Fort Lewis, Fort Stewart, Georgia, and also with Special Forces units. It was a lot of fun. I may be o erusing the word fun, but I don’t know how else to express the joy of being with them and the satisfactication of doing a job well.When I completed that, I then became the Director of Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing at Watervliet Arsenal. This did not go down well with my branch assignments officer: He was looking to put me back in a Combat Engineering unit as a staff officer. What I was advisd to do by General Thurmond was to change my branch to Ordinance as I had been selected as Acquisitions Officer. But I did not do that, hoping to eventually returned to a Combat or Construction unit. (It never happened!)From then, Engineering Branch wa not my friend. I enjoyed the technical problems of CAD at that time (the mid 1980’s,) and became the US Army Representative for CAD to the Department of Defense Manufacturing Technology Advisory Group. I made a mistake though, in bypassing my branch, that would cost me about six years later.From that I was chosen by the United States Military Academy at West Point to become an Instructor (and later when I had a Ph.D. as Associate Professor,) in Engineering. Again my branch was not happy. In the mean time, I completed both a Masters Degree and the course requirements for a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, all paid for by the US Army. In addition, I completed the US Army Command and Staff College by correspondence and was awarded their Commandant’s List for my efforts.I taught Engineering at the United States Military Academy for four years, and while there, wrote and completed my Ph.D. Thesis. I have to tell you, being a Instructor and then an Associate Professor at West Point is a heck of lot more fun than being a Cadet there. In addition, I was the Officer in Charge of the Mountaineering Club there and took my Cadets to Scotland and Joshua Tree. I also took Cadets on the their Summer Training Program to the Northern Warfare School at Ft. Greeley! I enjoyed being with the Cadets!Then, I was informed by Engineering Branch that I was going to have “terminal assignment.” For me it was commanding the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory at Ft. Wainwright, Fairbanks, AK. (They also offer a position at Vint Hill Farms which also had some interset for me.) For this posititon I graduated from the District Engineer’s Course, then at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. It was a very concentrated course on US Law and Contract Law as District Enginners may have more power than Governors of the States with regards to waterways and and other functions that they are in!USCRREL-AK was really a dream job. With the exception of my Commander, I really love the job, amd solving problems that people had in Cold Regions (defined as anywhere where the temperature was less than 32 degrres Fahreneit.) I work closely the 6th Infantry Division (Arctic) and with all of the Department of Defense.I then retired. Since then, West Point has opened doors that I might not even find. The people I worked with were really the best!Since I have been so critical of Engineering Branch, I need to explain: The function of Engineering Branch is to fit engineering officers to the best needs of the US Army. For these people, they focus on the Combat Arms, primarily. They develop soldiers through assignments to close with and defeat the enemy in wartime. I was an anomaly for them. There is a checklist of what an officer needs to do to become the senior leaders of the US Army. I broke that list after a successful company command. I did not get the appropriate troop assignments at the appropriate times. My duties as a Devopmental Project Officer, and then as a Director of Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing and as a Professor at West Point took me away from direct troop responsibilities for 8 years. This is an “abomination” to a Combat Arms Officer. I did it willfully: I was advised by very knowledgeable people to do other things. I felt that what I was doing was very valuable to the US Army at the time I was doing them and the best use of whatever talents I have. Engineering Branch did not agree as I was not not doing what they knew (and were correct) the path to higher commands.So, I can not have regrets. But I did love the US Army and would have continued to serve. And, if given the chance, I would have gladly returned to combat units as I loved commanding troops. But the system could not accomodate.

I have a friend, from the East Coast, whom I once invited to drive with me back from Seattle to Moorhead, Minnesota, where she was a professor at a small college, while I was still a graduate student. She’d been to Iowa — we’d met in grad school — but no farther west. Certainly not Montana, Idaho, or most of North Dakota (Moorhead is kind of a twin city to Fargo, ND).While she was in Washington, I naturally took her to see wilderness: the miles and miles of trees which had been around since the Common Era began at least, the snow above the tree line even at the end of summer, when we were leaving. She commented how there were so few houses there, and towns where you might not see a single person on the street as we drove through. She was accustomed to much more closely-settled land.But that was nothing to her reaction as we drove across Montana — mountains, trees, mountains, trees, ranches far fuller of cattle than humans — and North Dakota — plains, rocks, and hundreds of miles of nobody at all.“Oh, Amesley!” she exclaimed. (All my closest friends call me Amesley.) “You never told me how BIG the west was!”And she kept saying that — how big, how empty, how… well, vast — over and over the three days it took to drive overland to Moorhead. (Westerners are used to driving forever to get somewhere, but for Marj, we had to stop after six or eight hours.)I realized then that those of us from the West had never really managed to articulate what we missed in Iowa. People from more populated places — like Marj’s Pennsylvania — didn’t understand when we talked about how we felt exposed from not having mountains on the horizon, and how exhausting it was to never find an outdoor place where there weren’t people, or at least the signs of people — walkways, literal signs, a pump.What I love about my country is the land.I grew up on an island and was really accustomed to the idea that for thousands of miles around there was nowhere much to walk — a boat or two, another island or two — but you could be on a ship and see nothing but the ship for days on end. I loved Hawaii as home, and the people there I feel more comfortable with than any other group, but what felt safe was the ocean.Moving to Seattle was an extension of that; you could go into the forest and never hear anything electronic, or up the side of a mountain and find a bird so unused to humans it had no fear of coming close. I could be alone in wilderness, so small and unimportant that my family, even my name, was irrelevant.Not indigenous to this land, I always feel just a trifle foreign, a visitor; at the same time, I have a deep feeling of connection. My mother was fifth generation Northwesterner; I’m sixth. I never feel as if I own the land, but it owns me. I can imagine the devastation felt by those whose ancestors have lived on this land for 20 times that long and more.The people of Iowa were really different. For them, land was owned — as were the animals. They view animals as instrumental; as objects. This is natural in a rural area, but even the hunters in my part of the world had a more mystical approach, because there were so much more wilderness than people trying to live off of it. When you hear of settlement in the midwest, you hear stories like the passenger pigeon, clubbed out of the sky to extinction, and bringing livestock, and plowing. But the Northwest is chronologically way behind that; they’re destroying the land there, but it hadn’t been much developed where I grew up. When you went out to get a deer, you had to hack your way through forest; not the nice, neat, tidy forests of the midwest, but ones where trees whose trunks were five feet tall lying on their sides were scattered around, rotting, and scrambling over them was part of any day’s activity in the forest. They smelled of salmonberries and fir, and there were few clearings in the old forest. Where there are, they’ve probably come from lightning (and now, human) fires, and the clearings can be tangled in fireweed and the beginnings of second growth. It’s not like the neat hunting trips in the midwest (at least the ones I’ve seen) where alcohol is part of the tradition and the trip is more like going through a supermarket than through wilderness — if one shot a rifle in the supermarket at the meat aisle.The U.S. is too big to be one country or culture. The Northwest — not just the Pacific part, but Montana — is what feels like home for me. I love Seattle’s politics, and I think they were like that because so many of us could go to the mountains, or the water (lakes, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the ocean are also a big part of my formative years) and carried that wilderness back with us to the city.I knew an organizer from Washington, D.C. who told me that once he stepped off the plane in Seattle he had to remember all the time to slow himself down. “You’re all so laid back,” he said, puzzled how we’d managed to get so many progressive issues approved without shouting or pushing. “You just never seem to fight.”My least favorite aspect is that of being tied to the larger country. I understand the “states’ rights” mentality of the south (though am really out of sympathy for its manifestation as “white rights”) because I share the fantasy that the Pacific Northwest secede from the union, and form an Ecotopia with Western Oregon and Northern California. Vermont could be a territory, if it liked; it’s much more like us than most of the East, probably for similar reasons. We have a history of immigrants from a much different base than other places — the Pacific Rim and Mexico. They’ve struggled (my mother went to school with young people who were ripped out of school and sent to an internment camp in 1945) but there does seem to be a commitment to difference.The nearest to a Northwest style I’ve seen in politicians outside the Northwest is Obama. He identifies with Chicago — oops, he’d probably say Illinois — but his way of expressing himself is Northwesterner. We vote on the basis of least annoying and (usually) most progressive, so this year is hard. Well, every four years is hard.I know it varies among them — but Hillary Clinton would probably not do well in local politics in the Pacific Northwest. She’s too pushy — by which I don’t mean she’s too much “like a man” but too not like us. Her supporters, ditto — Steinem’s too mean, others too entitled. Judging from her staff, she doesn’t like us either. Trump is just a cartoon.The East is far too classist a place for us to be comfortable with it. Our best universities are almost all public ones — and the private ones are alternatives, but no one automatically assumes that Reed College, say, is going to give you a better education than the University of Washington; just a more specific one which works for some kinds of people. Hardly anyone went to private school in the PNW — why would they? In fact, why ambition of the kind that’s endemic to the Washington/NY corridor? If you were that ambitious, you moved there.As for our personal interactions, Northwesterners are always processing. It’s rude to talk smack about other people, but you can discuss what motivates them and why for hours — preferably with them present. I went to visit a friend in Berkeley while I was feeling homesick in Iowa, and knew I was home when his brothers began talking about their parents’ relationship, and asked my point of view. This is not how many people in the rest of the country converse with strangers.I know Seattle’s changed, and not for the better, but what remains is what I love. That’s what I would fight for, if it came to that.