Yoshi is talking about getting an official place in the International District of Seattle, and setting up shop so to speak, while working hard on populating the PNW with Kitsune.
Mary and I are doing well, and I started back at work last week. It's all been minor stuff, but I'm working hard on finding leads to Barry and whoever his boss is. He's earned a permanent place on my to-do list, until I do him...permanently.
Author's Afterward
Most of this story is, fiction
Some of it, however, most assuredly, is not. All of the military units I have named except Seal team 12, actually existed, and did roughly what I described. Yukio is based loosely on a real person, whose battle in northern Italy is so described in his Medal of Honor citation. I don't know if his family survived the war or not, but many of the Nisei from the 442nd came home to find that their families died in the camps. Inchon, of course, was real, and was almost as big a cluster fuck as described. Teador's unit was real, and did some truly amazing things while working for the OSS. The Tunnel rats were also real, and their operations required balls so large that I'm amazed they could crawl down a tunnel with them.
The German Werewolf battalions were not werewolves, but they did exist, and did cause some minor havoc, though not nearly as much as Hitler had hoped for.
And then there's the bad stuff. Yes, PTSD is all too real and still fairly poorly understood. Why two guys experiencing the same battle, right next to each other, will wind up with such different results is still not understood, but people live with it every day. Yes, frontal lobotomies were a treatment of choice in the aftermath of WW II and Korea for bad PTSD cases, as was electroshock therapy, and other things that belong in the Middle Ages, instead of the field of medicine. Yes, there are vets living up in the mountains of the Olympic peninsula, and every other place that they can carve out a little escape from the modern world. They don't live in the relative luxury that Teador and the boys did, most of them aren't as well organized mentally as some of Teador's vets are, but many of them are just as big a heroes as his men are described as being. What isn't true is that the CNO, or the Commandant of the Corps, or any of the other of the High Brass have taken a stance or shown a single give-a-fuck. Instead it's been a continuous fight over money, because the services are having to choose between new equipment to replace the worn-out stuff, and taking care of troops that are no longer in uniform.
One rule that's almost universal, governments don't care what you have done for them, only what you can do now. Some of the things that were done to our vets over the years, are, or should be, an embarrassment to the nation. We're getting better, but we still aren't there, and we keep falling backward due to politics and expedience. We all need to "keep the faith".
Footnotes
1
To me Hel is the goddess/giantess that runs the part of the underworld where cowards and oath breakers go.
Keeping The Faith (John Fisher Chronicles Book 2) Page 30