It's like the Civil War series, only it's a different war and Lincoln wasn't there and most of the people are still alive

I've been watching "The War" on PBS, and as they get closer to Japan circa 1943, '44, I get a little more interested; I pay a little more attention to the people.

My grandpa was there, in Japan, which I always found kind of cool because everyone else I knew had a grandpa in France or Germany. Yeah, it's like a WWII snob. "Oh yeah? Well MY grandpa ..."

I talked to my grandpa about the war once that I remember. He showed us ball bearings he got somehow, somewhere. He showed us a whip, of all things; he slung it around on the deck while my cousins and brothers and I stared on, waiting for him to hit himself in the face. He showed us a shirt of his from his uniform. Later, we saw pictures in an album. A copy of one photo is hanging in our office at home; he's standing in his uniform in front of a big flowering bush; in another of mine, he's got his head stuck through two friends' elbows in a comical pose.

But show and tell's one thing, and talking about it is another. I don't know if he ever really tried, or if we ever asked. But I've never heard. It's just this thing now that the guys on the boats in the Pacific are doing in a kind of technicolor show on PBS. I keep looking a little closer, watching for him. And I have no idea what he did.

Still. It's interesting that Ken Burns did something that had more in common with my life than a few history lessons in high school. And no, baseball doesn't count. Nor does jazz.