Ticket Home
Page 30
While Ticket Home is a work of fiction, many of the places described, times of battles, units who fought there, are real. Some are fictionalized to represent a mosaic of experiences endured by our fighting men and those who waited for them.
To these survivors, living and dead, we owe a heartfelt debt of thanks and love for surrendering their youthful lives to brutality and a loss of innocence so others might live. They suffered and died in the belief that democracy, honor, and duty were values as real as the hearth-taught values of home, family, freedom, and God.
This is not a story about war, nor has it treated the battles and history of those times in an exhaustive manner. But it is a story illustrating the effects war may have on personal history, the lives of the characters, and creating in them the crisis and resolution, offering a window into their decisions that forged men and women of heart and steel.
In the end all of us who face crisis in life in one way or another will come to resolutions which change us forever. Perhaps in examining these characters and what they faced we may find meaningful answers to some of life’s most challenging questions for ourselves.
No attempt has been made to connect true names of combatants with the fictional characters or the places they fought; rather, the composite experience of all the combatants and prisoners of war studied in preparation for the war scenes can be summarized in the lives of the heroes of this story. Also, although Don Bell was an announcer at KMZH and he reported the attack on Pearl Harbor, his actual words are not represented in this book, rather they are a dramatization from reports of what it was thought he said.
While only those who lived it can truly comprehend the bravery, courage, and unyielding honor it took to survive days, months, years of war as combatants and prisoners, we may be able to imagine it in some way and by so doing honor them.
The costs are finally memorialized in thousands of homes, at cemeteries, in the hearts of millions, as they realize their beloved brothers, husbands, and fathers, while dying nobly, still died and are not coming home.
To benefit from this and all stories with elements of war, (including love stories which my trio of books claim to be) we look into the abyss of hell, the darkness of man’s meanest spirit. We must not glorify it, but we must render it awful, in all its brutality, so that we may abhor it, then eliminate it, and never act the part of aggressors in it.
Peace and love are the antithesis to war and hate. Dramatizing the contrasts of love and hate, war and peace, through storytelling, allows the reader an extraordinary journey of the mind, an opportunity to vicariously live through the characters and thus grow and draw conclusions from the actions portrayed.
Finally, we must be true to the details of war and its terrible consequences as they are so briefly treated in this and my other novels. This is so that we may remember it required the ultimate of those who only wanted to be in their loved ones’ arms again and find their Ticket Home.
AUTHOR’S STATEMENT
I have read nearly one dozen different accounts of World War II fighting as it occurred in the Philippines by authors of nonfiction historical books and editors of personal war journals.
I have tried to maintain a sense of accuracy without any characterizations which might lead one to think this story has been based upon any individual or set of soldiers. Ticket Home is a fictional story and the most important elements within its pages are the feelings portrayed by its characters and not specific facts, details, or related war events.
If any similarity exists between the characters of Ticket Home and any personal accounts from the war known by readers it is purely coincidental.
I have written this story which focuses on the times of World War II and considers the jargon of the times in referring to the American enemy, imperial Japan. The news, the soldiers, and the American public all referred to the enemy soldier from Japan as “Japs, Nips, and Tojos.”
By referring to the World War II enemy of the United States in terms natural to the people of the times I only depict it as it was. I do not wish to be demeaning to anyone of Japanese ancestry or descent.
I also apologize to any reader feeling that any expletive used was unnecessary. I never look for ways to include an expletive, pejorative, or profanity in any way. Rather, I look for every possible way to exclude them and still allow the characters to come through with the emotion, personality, and individual qualities which make them human and move the story forward.
Accurate character portrayal and realism demands a dose of words from time to time that the best dictionaries don’t have definitions for. They convey urgency, stress, anger, even bad manners, and do a much better job to conduct the feeling the character has at the moment than a string of words might otherwise.
Thank you for your understanding.
To learn more about World War II history in the Philippines and other battlegrounds you may wish to visit the author’s Web site and look under “Recommended Reading” at www.jmpratt.com and www.thebestsellers.com or write to him at: PO Box 970189 Orem, Utah, 84097
TICKET HOME. Copyright © 2001 by James Michael Pratt.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
BOOK DESIGN BY JENNIFER ANN DADDIO
eISBN 9781429979474
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pratt, James Michael.
Ticket Home / James Michael Pratt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-26633-2
1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939—1945—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Ex-prisoners of war—Fiction. 4. Oklahoma—Fiction. 5. Brothers—Fiction. 6. Twins—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.R337 T5 2001
813’.54—dc21
00-047045
First Edition: February 2001