"How do you do, Mr. Doss?" I boom as an opener. "How are you?"
"Actually, no, I don't recognize many places," he demurs, with an indulgent shake of the head. "Okinawa has truly changed."
"So, er, where have you been so far, Mr. Doss?" I bellow.
"Oh, for sure," he agrees. "Up on those escarpments I should have been killed a number of times but, on top at least, with the Blessing of the Lord, I never was wounded once. The Japs were told to kill us medics, `cos it broke down morale. But I never carried hate in my life."
"And how does it feel to be back in Okinawa?" I shriek.
"Just the once," admits Mr. Doss. "I found the place, but I haven't found the man yet. He fell at my feet and I tied his intestines back in. I wonder what happened to him . . ."

The chances are good that he is around here somewhere. It's 50th anniversary week in Okinawa and the veterans of the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War are back in force. In key hotels in Naha, the lobbies are choked with brigades of mottled oldsters in slacks and T-shirts. Around the islands they whiz in wheelchairs, buses and military helicopters, 600 of them, plus wives, grown-up children and an attentive support corps of guides and military minders. There are battleground tours, memorial services, plaque-dedication ceremonies, wreath-layings, informal beach buffets and formal commemorative balls. The pace is hectic, heat and humidity are high, and Ken, a bilingual Californian who's been hauled in to work as an interpreter, is showing the strain. "My greatest horror," he says, "is of finding some 75-year-old guy stuck in the sun in his wheelchair, slowly baking to death."

The vets have come through worse than this, of course, although none of them are talking much about it. It's only when you read Desmond Doss's citation that you learn how he earned his Medal of Honor. In the battle for Kakazu Ridge, under grenade and machine gun fire, he rescued 50 wounded men, some of them less than 10 yards from the enemy, and lowered them to safety over a 10-yard drop. He was the only man in that skirmish not to be injured, and when he finally got hit a few days later, he gave his place on the stretcher to another man. Private Doss was, and is, a pacifist. Throughout the whole campaign he refused to carry a rifle.

The media--American and Japanese--is hungry for stories like this, although they're frustratingly hard to come by, especially for the local press. "Excuse me poor English," says a pristine TV lady to a vet beside a war memorial. "But how many did you killed or see, you think?" He just smiles and walks away.

The U.S. military, however, shows no such modesty. No ceremony is complete without a gruff prayer about God's blessing on Our Great Country, and breathy orations from commanding officers, retired generals and the ubiquitous U.S. Ambassador, Walter Mondale, who seems to be following me around the island. Certain key concepts crop up again and again: peace, freedom, liberty, democracy, sacrifice, glory, 50 years of friendship between our two great nations. The shocking American casualty figures--14,000 dead in three months--are regularly quoted, although no on goes into much detail about them. Desmond Doss is the only one to mention spilled intestines.

There are token efforts to be bilateral about the whole thing. The Hinomaru flaps next to the Stars and Stripes; Kimigayo is heard almost as often as The Star Spangled Banner. But apart from a handful of wives and camp employees, there are almost no Japanese or Okinawans present at these events. The more thoughtful among the vets seem a bit puzzled by this. "I never expected it to be like the D-Day commemorations," says Henry Mohr, who spent the battle offshore, being kamikaze'd and torpedoed on the USS Eisele. "But it's the one disappointment."

The present-day military avoids the subject. Base-community relations are their big headache, though not the headache you would expect. The 16 U.S. bases take up 20 percent of the land area of Okinawa island and, according to the last poll, 80 percent of Okinawans wish the bases were somewhere else. Governor Masahide Ota has been campaigning for years for the removal, or at least reduction of the bases. This year he finally got a concession. A military facility at Naha Port will, it now seems certain, be closed down--and then relocated a few miles down the coast.

The climax of the week is Friday, the official anniversary of the end of the battle. The Cornerstone of Peace, a large elaborate memorial, is being unveiled in a cliff-top park in the south of the island. The granite tablets bear the names of all 200,000 people who died in the battle--American GIs, Japanese army, Okinawan civilians, Taiwanese and Korean slave laborers--listed alphabetically without distinction of rank, cause of death or service. This is Okinawa Prefecture's party and everyone is welcome: the Prime Minister, Diet members, vets of both sides, Walter Mondale (again).

Only one group is conspicuously absent. The U.S. military were invited on one condition: that they come in civilian clothes. The colonels insisted on their uniforms; in the end they stayed away. Local organizers have similar stories of mutual misunderstanding: ceremonies redrawn or abandoned. "The problem," says one, "is that no one has agreed on what we're remembering. For the military it's the celebration of a great victory. For Okinawans, it's the greatest tragedy in our history."