The way a nation treats its veterans speaks louder than any patriotic slogan. Today, in the middle of a government shutdown, Democrats in Washington are once again showing that veterans are not their priority.
Instead of ensuring our troops get paid on time, they are holding up a clean Republican funding bill in pursuit of subsidies and benefits for illegal immigrants.
This indifference is not new—it reflects a pattern in American history where veterans, even those who sacrificed the most, have too often been forgotten.
That reality was made chillingly clear when Sapphire Dingler, a graduate student in public history, unearthed disturbing testimony in recently digitized U.S. archives.
The records detailed atrocities committed by Japanese doctors during World War II against Allied prisoners of war—including Americans.
One doctor, Hisakichi Tokuda, inspired by the infamous Unit 731, conducted gruesome experiments such as injecting soy milk intravenously into captives.
Men suffered seizures, collapsed, and died. Their fates were recorded in dusty files that had gone largely unread for decades.
These stories were not isolated. In 1945, Italian officer Ernesto Saxida was subjected to repeated injections before dying in agony.
American prisoners were experimented on at Kyushu Imperial University, their deaths later disguised in official records as casualties of the atomic bomb.
Testimony at the Yokohama War Crimes Trials confirmed what many never knew: Western POWs were not spared from the horrors of Japanese medical experimentation.
Some were literally cut open alive. And yet, for decades, these truths were obscured or buried, their memory erased twice—once by their deaths, and again by history’s silence.
Groups like Pacific Atrocities Education are now trying to correct that silence by bringing attention to the Pacific front’s forgotten brutality.
But their work underscores a shameful fact: America has not always stood up for its veterans or even preserved their stories. At times, our government actively covered them up.
Hellbound and Down 