It began when Spokane’s Duane Costa felt compelled to treat a tattered Japanese flag with dignity and honor.

It culminated, as Spokesman-Review reporter Jim Camden wrote last week, in a remarkable story of reconciliation. The tale’s quiet power and dignity resonated for us this winter. Now when the music of war blasts so harshly around us, we’re yearning to hear the grace notes of peace.

Sixty-two years ago, Costa’s brother Jerry returned home from serving in World War II with the Marines in the South Pacific. He showed his brother the flag and said only that a dead soldier on an island had been wearing it.

Jerry Costa spoke little of the war. He worked as a truck driver, never married, drank too much. Yet later in life, his brother says, he began seeing the faces of Japanese people not with bitterness, but with a dawning respect.

After Jerry Costa’s death in 2000, Duane Costa became more curious about the flag and the Japanese writing on it.

One day, a chance meeting with a friend who works at Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute helped unravel the mystery. The director of the school’s Japanese Cultural Center stepped in.

Fumihiko Mori could clearly read the names of a Japanese soldier, Heitaro Kodama, on the flag, his friends and co-workers and the name of their factory. He enlisted the help of several students.

Late last year, Toshiaki Kodama of Niigata, Japan, was astonished to read in a Japanese newspaper of a group of Mukogawa students and their search for the flag’s owner. It had belonged to the father he had never met, whose body he’d never been able to recover from Guadalcanal.

On Jan. 18 the Mukogawa students brought the flag to Toshiaki Kodama and his mother who had been widowed so many years ago. Both were in tears.

Like many Japanese soldiers Heitaro Kodoma wore the flag next to his body under his uniform. The Kyodo News reported that his widow, Katsue Kodama, said, “My husband carried it around him, so it is as if my husband himself came back.”

Now that flag, which had lain for so long in a scrapbook in Spokane, rests at the Buddhist altar in the Kodama family’s home.

Since the story appeared, Spokane readers have already begun to talk of returning similar flags to other families in Japan. These flags, which are revered as icons by Japanese families, were widely collected by American servicemen.

The tale of this particular flag’s journey acts as a balm during this ragged winter of war. It reminds us of the futility of reducing our enemies into stereotypes, and it echoes with the memories of other reconciliations. It recalls Sen. John McCain’s efforts to normalize relations with Vietnam despite his long captivity there. It resounds with the messages of Clint Eastwood’s Academy-Award nominated film, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which finally tells an American audience of the Japanese soldiers’ perspective.

We hear of the Kodoma family’s flag, and we are reminded that we dare not forget that the people we now call terrorists and insurgents remain connected to us through a common humanity. We recognize the wounds that will one day need to heal – those of the mourners and those of the survivors, too.

The pain and the violence in Iraq must not blind us to this hope: One day all that has gone so terribly wrong can yet be made right.