Although I am one of the few remaining World War II veterans who was a member of the Battling Bastards of Bataan and Corregidor, I don 't do parades.

To beat the draft, I joined the regular army for a tour of foreign service that the Japanese Army and Pearl Harbor extended to five years overseas, including 40 months of slave labor as a prisoner of war.

Thirty months of that slave labor were in Yokohama, where I was a welder in a Mitsubishi shipyard refurbishing the Japanese Navy.

We put in full days on empty stomachs, kept lively by guards carrying pick handles, which we referred to as vitamin sticks.

Our living quarters were in a warehouse on Tokyo Bay about 2 1/2 miles from the shipyard. This will explain my being on parade for literally thousands of miles in Yokahama alone, sharing the city streets with the public morning and night to and from the labor.

This letter was inspired partially by a comic strip in which characters watching drifting clouds said they looked like the smoke clouds from burning ballots after the cardinals elected a new pope.

We Mitsubishi POWs got a hot bath now and then in a wooden tub about twice the size of a two-car garage. When our work parade was returning at night, if we were to get a hot bath, we could see the smoke rising from the boiler that provided steam for the tub. I recall once telling my fellow parading POWs about the papal elections.

Another flashback was provoked by newspaper discussion of removal from state law of the governor 's "Frankenstein veto " power.

We POWs learned of Japanese labor conditions building a railroad on Taiwan. Our instructor was a tall school teacher with an amazing resemblance to English actor Boris Karloff, whom the movies converted into Frankenstein 's monster.

We called him Boris until the day he tried to teach us eyes-right and the goosetep to use when parading by the guardhouse.

Boris issued his order from the top of a coffin-shaped dais about twice as high as a coffin. When he tried the goose step routine, he got tangled in his saber and sprawled on the ground. We were careful not to laugh.

Goodbye, Boris.

After that, to us he was Tanglefoot. Frankenstein 's monster was eclipsed.

And that is how newspapers and comics can create flashbacks for former Japanese prisoners of war. It also may explain why they don 't care to be paraded as trophies by "patriots " staging parades, even though they would be riding on a red, white and blue float.

Brenzel lives in Oregon.