By Reg Henry
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Watching a war movie conveys a vicarious pleasure similar to watching workers on a construction site. That's a dirty and dangerous job, onlookers say to themselves, thank goodness we are not involved in it.

When it comes to ``The Pacific," the new HBO miniseries that includes Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg as executive producers, the feeling of not being there isn't mine to enjoy. Sometimes I feel like I was there, so familiar seem the memories.

Not my memories, but my British father's. He was a war correspondent for the Reuters news agency during World War II and was attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in the Pacific theater. He never stopped telling his stories.

Unfortunately, the stupid kid listening to him absorbed them almost as background music. Where exactly did my father take cover when the U.S. cruiser he was on came under kamikaze attack?

The Japanese plane had zoomed out of the sky, coming ever closer, soon so close my father could see the pilot in the cockpit. At the last second, the ship's anti-aircraft guns hit the plane and it crashed into the sea.

But for the sailors being good shots, the ship would have been sunk, and my dad and the little gleam in his eye that was me would have been extinguished, too.

What about the time he hit the beach with the Marines? He was not in the first wave and the beach was supposed to be secure, but a Japanese machine gun opened up on the PT boat dropping them off.

Did he fire his pistol then or did he return the fire later with some withering dispatches? The trademark Henry sarcasm has always been deadly.

What about the time he said his last goodbye to Gen. MacArthur? This I remember. The general said: ``Jim (they were on a Jim and sir basis), I am sorry you won't be around for the coming campaign."

This was just a few months before Hiroshima, which my father ever afterwards concluded MacArthur did not know about in advance.

My father earlier had caught one of the last convoys out of Singapore before the Japanese takeover and his ship survived while many of the others were bombed and sunk. He eventually joined my mother and older brother in Australia, where they too had fled on an earlier ship.

Not all the family were so lucky. My Uncle Arthur was in the home guard in Singapore and became a prisoner of the Japanese in the notorious Changi Prison (he survived the war).

My Uncle Kevin fought them in New Guinea and he too made it. But my Uncle Reg, for whom I was in part named, was in a ship torpedoed off the Malay Peninsula and never reached the shore.

My whole life was set on its course by the war in the Pacific. The very reason I was brought up in Brisbane, Australia, was because my father joined MacArthur's headquarters there and he liked the city.

If it hadn't been for those great adventure stories, I might not have entered journalism. As it was, Dad forgot to tell me about the mind-numbing meetings that are often a feature of journalism. I have since forgiven him.

But for those stories, I might not have given up my deferment and volunteered for the Australian Army during the Vietnam War, which in part was the result of the anti-colonial furies released by the Japanese across Indochina in the 1940s.

(My own wartime service was not especially heroic. I was an army reporter, mostly in Saigon. However, true to my traditions, my writings did hurt the Viet Cong's feelings.)

If I turn the influence of the Pacific War on my family one more notch, I recall my wife's father being in the Army 1st Cavalry in the Pacific.

He was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star and a Purple Heart with two oak leaf clusters. Much of his fighting was on Los Negros Island in the Admiralty chain.

He may very well have been in Brisbane when my father was there, because that was one of the great staging areas for American troops headed north.

Did Jim Henry unknowingly pass Nat Bishop on the street, two future grandfathers of the same set of children? How strange life is, especially in wartime.

My story is not unique, but is the common one of a collision of chance events ― a diving plane avoided, a missed machine gun burst ― and a die cast affecting multiple lives generation unto generation.

Something to reflect upon while watching ``The Pacific" ― deeper thoughts here, I think, than can come from watching the average construction site.

Reg Henry is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. E-mail him rhenry@post-gazette.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.