To many Americans over 40, a simple ceremony in Tokyo this week will perhaps serve as a strange and vaguely reassuring reminder of how shallow are the tracks of former wars. During 82 savage and bloody spring days in 1945, 12,300 American servicemen died in the closing months of the Pacific war for the control of Okinawa, a 60-mile-long island in the East China Sea. Early this week, in the gardens of the Imperial Palace, Vice President Spiro Agnew is to read a presidential proclamation, signed by Richard Nixon, that will end...
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