A+Canadian+boy+living+in+Winnipeg,+Grade+11

Jay Montes Age: 18 Gender: Male Occupation: Student who eventually joins the infantry troop Appearance: An average kid of 18, tall for his age, strong physique appearance Location: Vancouver Personality: Lonely Family: 3 members (lone child) Dad is a businessman, Mom is a housewife Educations: Average Languages that you speak: a little bit of French and fluent English Your main concerns at this time in life: the health of his mother, and also his future; he wants to be a hockey player but has no money. Needs scholarship but is not very good at studying. Portrait:

Diary 1: 21st August 1940 I had been drafted to the Winnipeg Grenadiers. Together with peers of similar ages, we high schoolers had been put in the army of men to fight for the country, to fight for the cause of the country and to fight in the name of our country. With the army made up with almost half of them young and inexperienced like me, the camp has had a rather intense atmosphere, with everyone figuring how to lead a bunch of high schoolers into a potentially dangerous battle. Well, it was exactly two months since we first entered the camps and two months since I became separate from my best friend Jonathan who is probably fighting somewhere else. The feeling of loneliness, of life being meaningless keeps recurring in my head: Why a war? Why ruin the potentials and the future of many young men like me? At the age of 18, when we are supposed to be preparing for graduation, to be enjoying our last days of High School, we are instead training in a dirty, harsh field, not talking to teachers but facing the officers everyday instead. Frankly, the two months were really tough: we had to adjust to the hard, strictly regulated lives of soldiers and often had to face the angry faces of the officers. It was a depressive moment. Time went by, however, and things started improving--at least until yesterday. As part of the 1st Battalion, we had been mobilized to the United Kingdom after a long delay (we had started out the year before, and it took at least a year until we were approved of staying in the base camps) and here, we are having hardcore training--in order to execute a mission that the offices term "of utmost importance and of a huge scale".

Diary 2: 10th December 1941 Christmas is nearing, but the war is not over. In the span of three years that I had neglected to write, a lot of things had happened: our whole troop was dispatched to Hong Kong to protect it from possible invasions by the Japanese. I later learned that because of its importance as a British colony, the British had wanted to keep it and the Japanese were eager to get Hong Kong in their hands too. After having trained intensively, we arrived at Hong Kong, but personally, I was fascinated to see different armies or troops that were already ready in Hong Kong to cooperate with us and kill our enemies. The fact that other troops were already there to help us (for example, the Commonwealth was a British Indian troop) lifted the burden off our shoulder. We got close together really soon and were even talking with each other, sharing our respective experiences before being drafted here. And time flew, for today is already the third day of the war here in Hong Kong. The first two days had been intense: attacking on the 8th, the Japanese had hovered over the whole city with airplanes, ready to shoot the whole of Hong Kong down. Other than that, there is not much progress into the war--as of yet. Amidst the confusion and chaos, one glad news of the Americans entering the war is the best information that I have heard in the past few days. Though it would make the scale of the war much larger, we can now decrease our own burden of having to perform miraculously well in Hong Kong and even hope for some backup American troops to help us! In addition, from a broader perspective, I am now confident that the war would eventually come to an end--and the Americans can help finish it! Personally, I have never felt a sense of gratitude or appreciation towards Americans but these big guys definitely have the power to win the war and end all the miseries that the world would have to go through. This new news had brightened the faces of many despite the ongoing war here in Hong Kong and given us a new source of inspiration. To slightly change the subject, there are various groups here at Hong Kong, and it is pleasing communicating with them, sharing the experiences of our own lives before the war with each other.

Diary 3: 30th November 1941 The war is getting tiring: while Japan is growing stronger by the day, we are growing weaker and tires of the constant fights. For us, it is already over: we had failed to protect Hong Kong. On Christmas Day, with too much casualties but a drop in both supply and morale, our troops finally surrendered to the Japanese. All of us, including me, were sent to the Prisoner of War Camp, where we spent a miserable time under the Japanese guards. They treated us like dogs. The defeat of Hong Kong was an especially disheartening event among the many wars that happened around Asia. As a part of the force that was responsible for holding Hong Kong and fighting the Japanese out of it, we had failed. However, what comes as a greater grievance was the aftermath of the small war in Hong Kong. As prisoners of war, we were sent to the Japanese concentration camps. Most, though, could not even make it into the Japanese side; they were brutally killed. We were taken aback when after our surrender, the Japanese came and massacred a bunch of soldiers that were the closest them with grenades! The Japanese seemed determined to kill every one of us, dropping the grenades next to us but aiming at a gun at us, warning us not to move. It became so serious that Sergeant Major John Robert Osborn (whom we affectionally called Uncle John) threw himself on top of the grenade to prevent the death of at least ten men. Such an incident only made me grow hatred towards the Japanese and the war. The fact that such evil, cold-hearted Asians were successfully conquering the world was unacceptable and simply unfair. It made me shudder at the possibility when the Japanese do take over the world. It made me realize the violent, merciless nature of the war. Furthermore, it made me rage at the turn of events, both in Hong Kong and in Singapore that had let the Japanese take over two of the most important locations in Asia.

Diary 4: 4th February 1944 Sitting in the jail cell all by myself, I face death. Three years in the concentration camp is a boring, irritable thing--and I was not able to escape the daily routine of eating little, sleeping little and doing ten hours of labor a day. There were three people in my cell: Dave and Joseph. It had already been six years since I last left my home to join the Winnipeg Grenadiers and three years since we were captured at Hong Kong. Seeing no end to the war--the Japanese are just so stubborn and proud that they cannot let themselves bow down to people of any other nationality or race--we decided to escape the camp. The prison life was distressing and the absolute strictness and cruelty with which the Japanese had been treating us was impossible to bear. Thus, we planned our escape. But we failed. Every night, at 11:00 pm, there would be a shift and the guards would be replaced. Since there was a gap of less than two minutes between the interval, we seized the chance and ran for the exit (the guards at the exit were also supposed to be gone because of the end of their shift) but... Alas! That day, we met Haruto Uzamaki at the exit; he was coming into the camp to do his usual check that occurred every other week. And yes, we were caught. Since the execution of prisoners happens on every Monday, they decided to lock each one of us in a high security cell until they end our lives. Reminiscing, the war had never changed anything. It is started by the one man, one leader with ambitions, but he never fulfills it. Worse, the whole society (the citizens and the soldiers included) are the sacrifices of this one person's wild dreams. Because of his desires for power, because of his mission to follow the intuitions of human nature (that tells him to fight for power), families are torn, others' dreams are lost and humanity is robbed of its core: the very intelligence and understanding of others that distinguishes us from tigers that fight over food and birds that mate without emotions. As I count down the hours remaining until my death, I ask myself, "Why is the world not devoid of war?"