The popular version of the story, first published in the August 1945 issue of Air Force magazine and then taking on a life of its own, has Curdes go on to marry the nurse from Lingayen and live happily ever after. Too good to be true. “My dad might have been dating a nurse on the plane that was shot down,” reports his daughter, Valeria Whitney, “but he went out on a blind date with my mom in Los Angeles, California. Love at first or second date!”

Svetlana Valeria Shostakovich Brownell, as her name indicates, had a convoluted life story of her own. The niece of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, she was born in 1925 in Harbin, Manchuria, near the Korean border, and adopted by an enlisted US Marine, Jerome Brownell, when he married her mother in 1929. By the time the Japanese invaded Manchuria and declared the puppet state of Manchukuo in February 1932, Brownell had gotten the family out to the Republic of China, itself rent with civil war, but that June died in Tientsin (modern Tianjin) of a sore throat turned septic—strep throat. In July the American legation in Peiping (modern Bejing) sent his remains and his family via Shanghai to San Diego, aboard the SS President Wilson. Certainly the future Mrs. Curdes had no reason to love the Japanese. They were married from 1946 until death did them part.