Did you hear that Congress has determined that further study of the Trail of Tears is needed? They are worried that youngsters "don't have a clue" about this area of our past. I would say it is about time. I would also say that they have not even begun to understand what is missing from our history textbooks.

I watched a show on the History Channel with my father last week. It was a documentary on the True Story of the Bridge on the River Kwai. Renowned movie that it was, it was also quite historically inaccurate. The inaccuracy themselves were atrocious in the light of the fact that this popular media softened, diminished, and otherwise glossed over the horror inflicted on thousands and thousands of men and the agony-filled deaths of thousands and thousands more. Would the movie had been so popular had it been an accurate presentation of what was essentially a death railway across Thailand and Burma?

Forget the fact that the location and the very structure of the bridge were inaccurate, what was missing was the truth about the Japanese who drove prisoners of war to achieve engineering feats near impossible with current materials...this they did with their bare hands and the simplest of tools. Scholars liken the work to the building of the pyramids. Why do we not know of this?

The Japanese refused to ratify the 1929 Geneva convention treatise on the treatment of prisoners they had signed, so the starvation and slave labor was perfectly acceptable to them. The overwhelming loss of human life and unbelievable human suffering was just a part of war to them. How utterly wrong were they in this stance.

The true story can be seen in the movie created by the BBC, but the images alone are hard to stomach. The fact and figures land like blows again and again. You think the story cannot get worse, but it does. Thousands of men, clad only in rags, really little more than walking skeletons, fought to survive against violence, starvation, hard labor, dehydration, and then disease.

The first prisoners where told that they were being moved to a place that was more like a resort than a camp. The Japanese were concerned about their accommodations and wished for them to be better. It was with hopeful hearts that the first few thousand willingly began a march through the jungle that ended in a nightmare none could have imagined. They were crowed into cattle cars and shipped like animals with insufficient food and water for survival. Many died along the way. Those who survived were ill and suffering. Others were dumped in the lower holds of ships, again with little food and water, only to be killed by friendly-fire bombs from allied pilots who had no idea of their presence in the ships below. Those lucky enough to survive the journey to the new camps were horrified to realize the lies they had swallowed and soon understood that living would become the greatest battle they had ever faced.

They carved a pathway through the jungle and through mountains of rock by sheer labor. The slightest lack of progress on their part resulted in punishment. Punishments included savage beatings, being made to kneel on sharp sticks while holding a boulder for one to three hours at a time, and being tied to a tree with barbed wire and left there for two to three days without any food or water. Men were also strung up by their hands with a rope looped over a section of the railway and left to hang without food or water for hours and days on end in the scorching heat. They stumbled in fatigue and were punished. Tools broke and they were punished. Labor shortages arose from death and illness and they were punished. Approximately 1 in 5 prisoners died building the railway.

Yet, despite the savagery they faced, these valiant men beat all odds to build a 200 mile pathway through a nearly impenetrable jungle. They labored mightily to save their lives. The Japanese heralded and celebrated the fabulous engineering feat of the railway. I would hope we honor the perseverance of the brave men, living and dead, who poured out their lives in extraordinary circumstances and yet continuously looked for even the smallest ways to support each other and uplift each other so that just one more might survive.

The Internet holds many documentary and memorial sites if you know where to look. One covers the railway itself. Another remembers Hellfire Pass. Some are about the community of Far East Prisoners of War. Some are interactive like this PBS one where you can view clips of tales by survivors. Some are a tribute to those who died there. Some are eye-witness accounts.

I wonder, I truly wonder just how many other tales of gross human suffering laced with ineffable valor are absent from the "history" deemed necessary for students to learn.

While the Trail of Tears is but a small moment in the centuries of absolute travesty committed against Native Americans, I supposed I should support this small effort to bring to light the truth of exactly how America became the harbinger of freedom to the rest of the world.