WASHINGTON — Charlie Pase considers himself "unusually lucky." He was just 17 when he joined the Marine Corps in 1943, hoping to help free his older brother, a prisoner of war in Japan. In the years that followed, he survived the battles of Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian and Okinawa — despite being a machine gunner "right in the middle of it" — and stayed in Japan once World War II ended as part of the force that occupied Nagasaki after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city. When he