I Had A Hard Time With This Film **SPOILERS**

The subject of memory alterations interests me, to the point that my main motivation for reestablishing contact with an old aquaintance is just to see what their recollection of an event was, that affected both of us. Its usually been something different than what i remembered. If so, i try not to bias an answer when questioning them a lil further. Its more of a test of my own memories and i'm not afraid of the truth, if theres a possibility that i've made something up to myself. This is important to me because i want to believe a memory is accurate enough to rely on it in the future.

My self verdict so far, is not to rely too much on some important memories and always maintain at least a small measure of self doubt.

As far as the guy in germany, ... my last viewing of this doc started close to the end and i didn't see anything but what a normal memory might exhibit. Was there something notable before that?
As i mentioned, he did remember what kind of songs he had been singing that the german heard, when he was hiding from the americans. He seemed to have an accurate memory of where the house was and that was confirmed by a resident there, who showed him a picture of the structure, before it was torn down. They told him the other structure nearby was from that era, but he knew that was a waste of time to go looking in it.

We were a military family that moved every 2 years and then i moved around in the service too - didn't settle down for a few more years. So, its been a quest to revisit as many of those places as possible. Its common to lose bearings when new roads or housing is constructed. What was very confusing fro me though was when i couldn't find a whole mountain ridge that was in back of our home in the philippines. Turned out at the time that the confusion was due to viewing the hills from a distance and from an angle i wasn't familiar with. I had a love affair with those hills, so that really threw me for a loop, when i started scanning for them but couldn't find it. Talk about "loot", those hills were battlefields between the US and japanese and the treasure for us jr high schoolers was finding ww2 battle souvenirs that were still lying around 20 yrs after the war. If i had gone back there a couple years, later, i would have been able to use the excuse of the volcano altering the lanscape - which is what mount pinatubo did in 1991. That was weird.

On discovery recently, the former marine in "return to tarawa" was openly wondering how good his memory was and asked himself a few times, "was that what really happened?" "Did i really say those things?" about some pretty substantial stuff. Personally, i didn't see that as mentally defective, rather, it was the opposite. I see too many younger people too confident in their flawed memories and not in the least bit concerned about their memory possibly being false. I'll bet the people questioning their own memories will have a better record of accuracy than those who dont.

Ray knew he had done something wrong to japanese prisoners but couldn't remember what - i doubt i could have that great a lapse about something like that. This reminds me of a theory of mine, that i relate to some online HS alumni from the PI. Alot of them have faint memories of some things and strong ones of others, however trivial. My strongest memories are of interesting things that got my heart beating, for whatever reason. We also tend to forget things that were unpleasant (duh). It sounded like ray didn't care very much about the hidden loot in the PI (i forgot what he said it was) so may have not put enough value on retaining it. He didn't seem to need it. I wonder if he was really after the memory of what went down there in 1945, since he was more worried about his approaching judgment day, than if a treasure was still there.

"Death, has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war"Donald Rumsfeld