John Kerry has become the first U.S. secretary of state to visit the Hiroshima Peace Park, ground zero to the first atomic bomb. He recognized the victims of World War II, saying he was there in part to “revisit the past.” As part of that history, a prisoner of war of Imperial Japan, I hope that Secretary Kerry also remembered why there was a Hiroshima and a Nagasaki, which I witnessed.

Secretary Kerry stood in Hiroshima on the anniversary of what was my second day of the Bataan Death March. After four months of brutal tank warfare in the Bataan Peninsula of the Philippines, on April 9, 1942, I had been surrendered by my commanding officers as we had run out of ammunition, food, and medicine.