Into the teeth of death

Oh, it's not really THAT scary to go to the dentist, at least not until all these choppers threatening to become crown affairs start coming home to roost... No, what made me think of this title was some of the family history my wonderful dentist related to me yesterday during a routine clean up appointment. Her parents were in their early twenties in the mid 1940's, living in Shanghai when the Japanese arrived. Her father witnessed what is called "The Rape of Nanking," and saw piles of dead bodies in the streets. The Japanese soldiers were hunting down Chinese college students and exterminating them, so my dentist's father got a group of his friends together and left Shanghai for the Chinese interior. These were city people, she told me, not hardened to walking all day and foraging for food and water. They walked upwards of sixty miles per day, and went through three provinces. At one point, they were down in some canyons with very sheer walls. Her father saw Japanese soldiers up at the top of the cliffs, looking for people to shoot. He told her the cliffs were so sheer, the soldiers didn't spot them. They hid in a monastery, and the Japanese soldiers came upon it and pounded on the doors, trying to knock them down, very nearly doing so, but didn't succeed and gave up. Her mother, a young married student pregnant with her first child, lost the baby, which my dentist said was fortunate: If you had babies that cried and gave away your position, you were hunted down and killed. It happened to one of her mother's friends. The war ended soon after, and a woman in their group was able to contact her father, a higher up in the Chinese military, who arranged water transport for the group back to Shanghai, so they didn't have to walk home. My dentist's father arranged to come to the University of Washington for further education, and thus came my dentist's family to Seattle.
Astounding and horrific, this story. May the misleaders of the USA not provoke a world conflagration in which experiences such as these will be repeated on an even wider scale than has been done to Iraqi citizens.