IN THE AFTERMATH of a brutal fight on the Philippines’ Leyte Island on December 7, 1944, 19-year-old Calvin Lincoln, a private first class with the 11th Airborne Division’s 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, approached a mortally wounded Japanese soldier, rifle at the ready. As the American neared, the enemy soldier asked in perfect English if he could get a priest. “That stunned me,” Lincoln recalled.
