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Originally Posted by Scott Hutchinson
I didn't see the whole series.
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I've got the recordings - except for the first part of Part 2, "When Things Get Tough."
I've really appreciated this series. My grandfather also served in the Pacific. He was a career officer in the Reserves before the war and was activated even before Pearl Harbor, so there were a lot of family friends in the Philippines. Ken Burns highlights the experiences of one family in the San Tomas internment camp. I thought that part was excellent. I've met several men who survived the Bataan Death March and Camp Donaldson who served with my grandfather.
My grandmother's twin brother was killed in action so I never knew him. My mother and her family lived on the Pacific coast with their father and loved ones in harm's way. They had black outs and the CD wardens on every block. I never really understood my mother until I began to understand the Second World War and its effects on people of that time, both on the front and on the home front.
To have deprived myself of this and other quality television programming means that I never would have really understood why my own mother had problems maintaining relationships. It wasn't until I really saw what that war did that I understood how she was affected when her close uncle never came home and her father never really came home either.
That's all very personal, I know. But I add that to highlight the benefits of television. Too often we only talk about the bad things that happen on TV. What about the good that TV does?