Perhaps you had family members among the many thousands of young men and women who got transported across the Pacific Ocean to those mysterious islands that they were ordered to recapture from the Japanese.
If you have occasionally wondered what Grandpa (or Grandma) did in the war, you are not alone. The generation that experienced World War Two is notorious for not speaking about what they saw and learned in that previously unimagined multilingual, multicultural environment. They just didn't know how to describe their adventures to loved ones at home afterwards, so they chose silence instead.