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"Each of us was needed. We couldn't field a team, couldn't put on a play, couldn't do anything unless every one of us participated. To be really needed when you are so young is very rare."
"If you are an American and make a friend abroad, the bond is tenfold stronger than with a friend made at home. Add to that the climactic experience of the war bringing it all to an end, and it has left a bond stronger than any I have ever seen."
On their last day at Brent, three alumni teetering on the edge of 60 set off to find Senior Cave. This had been a modest hillside hole, concealed from the faculty by distance and foliage, where as boys they once spent many afternoons smoking cigarettes and drinking, for want of wisdom, cherry brandy. The day was warm, the hill steep, the pine-needle footing slippery, and the men were all overweight.
They could not find their cave, which, like their youth, had vanished under more than 40 years of erosion. But as the three Americans, puffing and sweating, clambered back up the steep Philippine hillside, they knew they had shared the pleasure of searching for it.
—By Ralph Graves