Whatever the editors’ intentions may have been, Listen! perpetuated an image of sacrifice that came perilously close to the imagery the militarists had promoted. These were pure young men. Their deaths were noble. They could not be faulted, certainly not criticized, for having offered no resistance to militarism. It was their deaths, rather than the deaths of those they might have killed, that commanded attention and were truly tragic. Indeed, there were no non-Japanese victims in this hermetic vision of the war.
