Poverty

The women there, he told me, like the ones in National Geographic magazines from the poorest parts of Indonesia, skulking around foraging for food with one hand, holding a baby in the other, would do anything for help. They were desperate.

"They'd run up along the train," Pop Pop explained. "And shoot their breast milk at the glass for the GIs. The guys got a charge out of it."

Pop Pop's head dropped a little, as if falling into some distant memory, "I always felt bad when they did that."

Is that something to be deeply sad about? It is for me, every time I think of the desperateness, the utter despair those moms felt. The inconsolable situation those people were in, caught in the middle of some other people's war. The war may have been in their backyard, but it wasn't theirs. It came from a far-away, unknown place, and they watched it happen helplessly, unable to influence it in any way, like ants watching a giant foot destroy their excavated dirt mounds sealing off their homes below.

"It must have been like another world over there," I said.

Pop Pop agreed.