The 2006 Student
On-Line Essay Contest Winners:
Third Place
Quanning
Alexander Branch
Columbia Falls High School
Columbia Falls, MT
I believe the most important
lesson we can learn from World War II and apply to
our lives today is about camaraderie. My grandfather,
Hugh Branch, was captured on the Bataan Peninsula
in the Philippines on April 9, 1942 and was a captive
of the Japanese from then until January 30, 1945,
when he was rescued by American Rangers and Philippine
Scouts. He survived nearly three years of brutal conditions
during which many, many more people died than lived.
He didn’t do it alone, however. In fact, he
survived because he wasn’t alone.
Quan is a term which became widely used in the POW
camps, Cabanatuan in particular, to describe several
things, one of which being a tight group of friends.
Quan was used first to define anything edible over
and above the Japanese ration, and then as a verb
meaning to cook a personal meal. Soon it also became
an adjective for delicious food, and finally came
to mean a group of men who got together to cook a
private meal. With all the meanings of the word, a
quan could quan quan quan, or get together and cook
delicious food; and in a world where food was survival,
men who shared it became more than friends, they became
brothers. They became a quan.
The men in a quan didn’t only share food, though;
they also kept each other alive. If a man became too
ill to work, the Japanese cut his rations. If that
man was alone, the grip of starvation would overcome
his will to live and kill him within days. As part
of a quan, however, a man might stand a chance at
life because his friends would shave their own rations
for him until he could work again. They might help
clean him, try to get medicine for him any way possible,
or, if death were unavoidable, just be with him to
the end. Sometimes what pulled a man back from the
brink of death was not just the will to live, but
also the need to be with his quan. Camaraderie could
be enough.
In today’s world, we see divisions among people
everywhere. The Palestinians are fighting the Israelis,
the Pakistanis are fighting the Indians, the Muslims
are fighting the Christians, the Shiites are fighting
the Sunnis are fighting the Kurds, the poor are fighting
the rich, and everybody is fighting to live. If everybody
could try to see through the lens of history, however,
they might be able to stop fighting and just live,
or at least live justly. On the global scale of today,
the fate of a few men from history may seem trite
and irrelevant. If we look at the lesson, though,
instead of just the facts, we can learn to live together.
Under extreme duress, men who had never known each
other and who appeared to have nothing in common but
starvation and disease came together and learned to
live. They formed bonds of camaraderie that staved
off despair, warded off death, and gave them an anchor
in this world.
Today, we too live under extreme duress. We may not
be starving, but the world today is such a difficult
place to live, what with the pace of the 21st century
and all the accoutrements of a life in it, that living
in a state of perpetual war is certainly not what
is best for us. We must learn to let our differences
not matter and instead focus on those things that
can bring all of us together. We must learn to make
friends instead of enemies, to let bygones be bygones,
and to live in peace. It sounds impossible, sometimes,
but if my grandfather and the other men held captive
by the Rising Sun learned to forget what made them
different and remember what made them the same, then
so can we. They stood to gain nothing from fighting
and everything from quanning, and we are the same.
So, like them, we should give up any fight for domination
and instead fight for survival, because living is
all that is truly worth fighting for in this world,
and we stand a better chance united than divided.
So go ahead, quan.
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