The wedding that Thanksgiving weekend 1958 in Chicago should never have happened. Venus Ballesteros should have been on her way back to the Philippines. Hiro Tanamachi should have died in the war. Somehow, the man who had trained to die as a suicide submarine pilot in the Japanese Navy, and the woman whose hometown had been occupied by the Japanese, met 8,000 miles away from their homelands. Venus and Hiro had both grown up poor and parentless, but support and good luck brought them to America where they found each other. This is the story of those times. Ron D Smith's has also written two novels: The Savior of Turk and The Night Budda Got Deep in It. When he isn't writing, Ron likes to make terrible noise on his Fender Strat. He lives in Kentucky with his wife and two daughters.