armed forces
Recounting the amazing heroics of the ‘Pied Piper’ of Saipan
He had learned Japanese on the streets of East LA where he shined shoes as a street-smart kid
It was the summer of 1944, and World War II’s Pacific campaign reached a turning point on the Japanese-occupied island of Saipan.
Soldiers and civilians alike fought to the death to defend it, since U.S. victory there would crack Japan’s outer defences and place American bombers within striking distance of Tokyo.
Fighting became especially brutal and prolonged around Mount Tapotchau, Saipan’s highest peak, and Marines gave battle sites in the area names such as “Death Valley” and “Purple Heart Ridge.”
Desperate Japanese soldiers, trapped with their backs to the sea, had charged into U.S. lines just before dawn, on July 7, 1944.
It would be World War II’s largest Japanese banzai suicide attack, and the bloodiest.
Savage hand-to-hand combat capped three weeks of the crucial, bloody Battle of Saipan that ultimately killed about 5,000 Americans and 23,000 Japanese troops.
Banzai attacks were frantic mass infantry charges, human waves intended to overwhelm an enemy. Often used a last-ditch tactic, they usually resulted in devastating losses.
Nearly all of the 4,000-plus Japanese soldiers in the final suicide charge that day died.
Soon after the 2nd Marine Division and U.S. Army forces landed on Saipan in mid-June 1944, Gabaldon began sneaking into enemy territory at night, mostly alone, to find caves and buildings where the Japanese were hiding.
He caught guards by surprise, shot them if necessary or forced them out with smoke bombs. If that didn’t work, he threatened those inside with flamethrowers he didn’t have. He sometimes held a guard at gunpoint while telling another in Japanese to get those inside to come out to just talk.
He had learned Japanese on the streets of East Los Angeles where he shined shoes as a street-smart kid. He moved in with two friends, first-generation Japanese American brothers, and learned the language and culture from their family.
Shortly after the family was forced into a Japanese American internment camp, Gabaldon, just 17, joined the Marines. Knowing Japanese helped get him in.
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The first time Gabaldon sneaked out past enemy lines, he returned with two prisoners. Threatened with court-martial and chastised for acting like a prima donna, he still went on the hunt the next night and returned with 52 more.
Seeing that he was getting results, his commanding officers gave their blessing to their “lone wolf” to keep it up.
Once he started the late-night hunts, Gabaldon said, he could not let up. Taking more prisoners than any American in any war became his “driving ambition,” he wrote in his book, hoping to surpass World War I hero Alvin York, who had captured 132.
Many of them were armed, leaving Gabaldon in a dicey spot at times.
“It was either convincing them that I was a good guy, or I would be a dead Marine within a few minutes,” he said.
He promised the desperate and wounded soldiers and civilians food, water and medical care. America’s top military brass, he told them, did not want to kill or hurt them—and would return them to Japan after the war.
He chatted to his prisoners about their families and hometowns. (His nickname among other Marines? “Gabby.”)
He told them about having lived with a Japanese American family whom he loved. He shared his American cigarettes. Within an hour, 50 or so more came over the crest of the cliffs. Hundreds more followed.
After shocked Marines saw the white skivvy flag, they sent reinforcements to help corral all the prisoners and bring them back to base.
All told, he single-handedly convinced some 800 enemy combatants, instilled with the code of “death before surrender,” to emerge from hiding and give themselves up.
Earning him the nickname “the Pied Piper of Saipan.”
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All the more amazing, because of the Japanese military’s strict Bushido code that made soldiers honour-bound to show unwavering loyalty to their nation and their emperor by taking their own lives rather than to surrendering to a wartime enemy.
One of Japan’s commanding generals on Saipan, Yoshitsugu Saitō, committed ritual suicide in a cave not long after the failed banzai attack. Many combatants threw themselves — as well as local Japanese civilians — off a steep cliff.
“Thank God I got 1,000 of them out alive,” he said in an interview with the University of Texas Voces Oral History Center.
When Gabaldon was awarded the Navy Cross in 1960, the Navy and Marine Corps’ second-highest honor, Secretary of the Navy William B. Franke cited his “extreme courage and initiative” in entering enemy caves, buildings and pillbox guard posts amidst hostile fire to capture “well over 1,000” troops and civilians.
His exploits, the secretary wrote, contributed to America’s success and “a definite humane treatment of civilian prisoners was assured.”
Gabaldon’s military days ended when bullets hit his right arm in an ambush back on Saipan in 1945.
In 1960, his exploits on Saipan hit movie screens in Hollywood’s Hell to Eternity, an embellished script with 6-foot-tall blue-eyed Jeffrey Hunter playing the 5-foot-4 Mexican American from East L.A.
— with files from History.com
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From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The global war business scored record revenues in 2024 amid multiple protracted proxy conflicts across the world, according to a new industry analysis released on Monday.
The top 100 arms manufacturers in the world raked in $679 billion in revenue in 2024, up 5.9% from the year prior, according to a new Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) study. The figure marks the highest ever revenue for manufacturers recorded by SIPRI as the group credits major conflicts for supplying the large appetite for arms around the world.
“The rise in the total arms revenues of the Top 100 in 2024 was mostly due to overall increases in the arms revenues of companies based in Europe and the United States,” SIPRI said in their report. “There were year-on-year increases in all the geographical areas covered by the ranking apart from Asia and Oceania, which saw a slight decrease, largely as a result of a notable drop in the total arms revenues of Chinese companies.”
Notably, Chinese arms manufacturers saw a large drop in reported revenues, declining 10% from 2023 to 2024, according to SIPRI. Just off China’s shores, Japan’s arms industry saw the largest single year-over-year increase in revenue of all regions measured, jumping 40% from 2023 to 2024.
American companies dominate the top of the list, which measures individual companies’ revenue, with Lockheed Martin taking the top spot with $64,650,000,000 of arms revenue in 2024, according to the report. Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems follow shortly after in revenue,
The Czechoslovak Group recorded the single largest jump in year-on-year revenue from 2023 to 2024, increasing its haul by 193%, according to SIPRI. The increase is largely driven by their crucial role in supplying arms and ammunition to Ukraine.
The Pentagon contracted one of the group’s subsidiaries in August to build a new ammo plant in the U.S. to replenish artillery shell stockpiles drained by U.S. aid to Ukraine.
“In 2024 the growing demand for military equipment around the world, primarily linked to rising geopolitical tensions, accelerated the increase in total Top 100 arms revenues seen in 2023,” the report reads. “More than three quarters of companies in the Top 100 (77 companies) increased their arms revenues in 2024, with 42 reporting at least double-digit percentage growth.”
How the 2025 Federal Budget Demands More From Those Who’ve Already Given Everything
I’ve lived the word sacrifice.
Not the political kind that comes in speeches and press releases the real kind. The kind Mark Carney wouldn’t know if it slapped him in the face. The kind that costs sleep, sanity, blood. I’ve watched friends trade comfort for duty, and I’ve watched some of them leave in body bags while the rest of us carried the weight of their absence. So when the Prime Minister stood up this year and told Canadians the new budget would “require sacrifice,” I felt that familiar tightening in the gut the one every veteran knows. You brace for impact. You hope the pain lands in a place that makes sense.
It didn’t.
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Six months into Mark Carney’s limp imitation of leadership, it’s painfully clear who’s actually paying the bill. The 2025 budget somehow managing to bleed the country dry while still projecting a $78-billion deficit shields the political class, funnels money toward his network of insiders, and then quietly hacks away at the one department that should be sacrosanct: Veterans Affairs Canada.
If there’s one group that’s earned the right to be spared from government-imposed scarcity, it’s the people who carried this country’s flag into danger. Veterans don’t “symbolize” sacrifice they embody it on the daily And when Ottawa tightens the belt on VAC, the consequences aren’t abstract. They’re brutal and direct, causing nothing but more death and destruction. But Mark Carney doesn’t lose sleep over veterans killing themselves.
Punishment disguised as budgeting for a veteran means the difference between keeping a roof or sleeping in a truck. Punishment disguised as budgeting means PTSD left untreated until it turns a human being into another suicide statistic. Punishment disguised as budgeting means a veteran choosing between groceries and medication because some number-shuffler in Ottawa wants to pretend they’re being “responsible.”
This isn’t fiscal restraint it’s political betrayal wrapped in government stationery. Ottawa sells it as hard choices, but the hardness always falls on the backs of the same people: the ones who already paid more than their share, the ones who can’t afford another hit. Carney and his cabinet won’t feel a thing. Not one missed meal. Not one sleepless night. Not one flashback.
But the men and women who already paid in flesh? They’re the ones being told to give more.
That’s not sacrifice.
That’s abandonment dressed up as fiscal policy.
And Canadians need to recognize it for what it is a government that demands loyalty while refusing to give any in return. The fine print in the government’s own documents reveals what the slogans won’t.
Over the next two years, VAC plans to cut $2.227 billion from its “Benefits, Services and Support” programs. [2] Broader “savings initiatives” reach $4.4 billion over four years, much of it through reductions to the medical-cannabis program that thousands of veterans rely on to manage chronic pain and PTSD. [3] Independent analysts estimate yearly losses of roughly $900 million once the cuts are fully implemented. [4]
To put that in perspective: no other department is seeing reductions on this scale. Not Defence, not Infrastructure, not the Prime Minister’s Office thats for damn sure. Only the people who’ve already paid their debt to this country are being asked to give again.
The government’s line is tidy: “We’re not cutting services we’re modernizing. Artificial Intelligence will streamline processing and improve efficiency.”
That sounds fine until you read the departmental notes. The “modernization” translates into fewer human case managers, longer waits, and narrower eligibility. It’s austerity dressed up as innovation. I’ve coached veterans through the system. They don’t need algorithms; they need advocates who understand trauma, identity loss, and the grind of reintegration. They need empathy, not automation.
This isn’t abstract accounting. Behind every dollar is a life on the edge, the human cost and toll is very real.
- Homelessness: Veterans make up a disproportionate number of Canada’s homeless population. Cutting benefits only deepens that crisis.
- Mental Health: Parliament’s ongoing study on veteran suicide shows rising rates of despair linked to delays and denials in VAC services. [5] Knowing MAID for mental illness alone in 2027 will take out a significant amount of us.
- Food Insecurity: A 2024 VAC survey found nearly one in four veterans reported struggling to afford basic groceries. That’s before these cuts.
We talk about “service” like it ends with deployment. It doesn’t. Service continues in how a nation cares for those who carried its battles, and this doesn’t include the cannabis cut to medication or the fight’s we have to fight when they tell us our injuries are “not service related”
The insult is magnified by the timing. These cuts were announced just days before November 11 Remembrance Day, when Canadians bow their heads and say, “We will remember them.”
Apparently, the government remembered to draft the talking points but forgot the meaning behind them, not a single one of the liberal government should have been allowed to show their faces to veteran’s or at a ceremony. They’re nothing but liars, grifters and traitors to this nation. Yes I’m talking about Jill McKnight and Mark Carney.
The budget still runs the second-largest deficit in Canadian history. [6]
Veteran cuts don’t fix that. They barely dent it. What they do is let the government say it’s “finding efficiencies” while avoiding the real structural overspending that created the problem in the first place. When a government chooses to protect its pet projects and insider contracts while pulling support from veterans, that’s not fiscal discipline it’s moral cowardice. The worst part is that This isn’t an isolated move. It fits a six-month pattern: large, attention-grabbing announcements about “reform,” followed by fine print that concentrates power and shifts burden downward. Veterans just happen to be the first visible casualty.
The same budget expands spending in other politically convenient areas green-transition subsidies, digital-governance infrastructure, and administration while the people who once embodied service are told to tighten their belts.
As a combat veteran, I know what it’s like to come home and realize that the fight didn’t end overseas it just changed terrain. We fought for freedom abroad only to watch bureaucratic neglect wage a quieter war here at home. Veterans don’t ask for privilege. They ask for respect, for competence, for follow-through on the promises this country made when it sent them into harm’s way.
Here’s what really needs to change, the liberal government has to go, thats step one. Restore VAC funding immediately. Any “savings” plan that touches benefits, services, or support should be scrapped. End the AI façade. Efficiency can’t replace empathy. Keep human case workers who understand the veteran experience. Audit and transparency. Publish a detailed breakdown of where VAC funds are cut and who approved it. Canadians deserve to see the receipts. National accountability. Every MP who voted for this budget should face veterans in their constituency and explain it, face-to-face.
Budgets are moral documents. They show what a country values. By slashing VAC while running record deficits, this government declared that veterans are expendable line items, not national obligations. The Prime Minister promised “shared sacrifice.” But the only people truly sacrificing are the ones who already gave more than most Canadians ever will.
Sacrifice isn’t about spreadsheets; it’s about service. It’s what every veteran understood when they raised their right hand. This government’s brand of sacrifice asking wounded soldiers to pay for political mismanagement isn’t austerity. It’s abandonment.
Canada owes its veterans more than a wreath once a year. It owes them respect written into every budget, not erased from it.
KELSI SHEREN
Footnotes
[1] The Guardian, “Canada’s 2025 Federal Budget Adds Tens of Billions to Deficit as Carney Spends to Dampen Tariffs Effect,” Nov 5 2025.
[2] True North Wire, “Liberal Budget to Cut $4.23 Billion from Veterans Affairs,” Nov 2025.
[3] StratCann, “Budget 2025 Includes Goal of Saving $4.4 Billion in Medical Cannabis Benefits,” Nov 2025.
[4] Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, “Where Will the Federal Government Cut to Pay for Military Spending and Tax Cuts?” Nov 2025.
[5] House of Commons Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs, “Study on Veteran Suicide and Sanctuary Trauma,” ongoing 2025.
[6] CBC News, “Federal Budget 2025 Deficit Second Largest in Canadian History,” Nov 2025.
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