The Soldier Who Wouldn’t Quit tells the story of Hiro Onoda, the young Japanese soldier sent to the island of Lubang with orders to fight a guerrilla war against the Allies until the Japanese army could retake the island:
By the time he formally surrendered to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1974, Onoda had spent twenty nine of his fifty two years hiding the jungle, fighting a war that had long been over for the rest of the world. He and his guerrilla soldiers had killed some thirty people unnecessarily, and wounded about a hundred others. But they had done so under the belief that they were at war, and consequently President Marcos granted him a full pardon for the crimes he had committed while in hiding.