<Begin Segment 19>

SF: I think you, you told a story earlier about one of your soldier friends who had guarded or overseen the, some of the Japanese Americans being interned. Could you tell us that, about that?

JF: Well, we were at Camp Cook, and we, it seemed to me that we were deployed along the, along the coast from Santa Barbara north when the submarine business, when a part of our battalion, in fact, part of our company, including my friend Sergeant Couch, who was with me on Pearl Harbor Day going to have his picture taken, he was by this time a platoon sergeant, staff sergeant, and he was one of those who was -- I don't know how they selected them -- but called out from this 85th Armored Reconnaissance Battalion to usher these, the Japanese Americans to a camp somewhere. I'm not quite sure just where, but somewhere in California. And they were gone, I guess four or five days. I'm not quite sure.

But everybody envied him because here was a chance to maybe get into some action against some of these rotten people who have done this. But nothing really untoward happened. It was simply a matter of escorting these people in, but this one, one fellow was saying that he was, he was manning a machine gun on the, on the armored scout car, and was he saying, "I was just watching these people like a hawk, just hoping somebody would do something 'cause I could fire." And I mean, he was really gung-ho to fire into these people. And, when he said this, I had no feeling whatsoever of, "Why would you want to do that," or anything. It just seemed, "Okay, that's a, that's a natural way to go, that, you want to hate somebody, if you want to have some revenge, why, this is the way to do it." But it never, fortunately never happened.

But I never, I never realized then that, the background of these, of these people who were in these trucks. I mean, the Japanese Americans who were in the trucks. So that was, that was my only encounter with, with that transportation situation. I'm, I'm certain that there wasn't a man in the outfit who didn't feel exactly like that fellow who was manning the machine gun, that given a chance, they're gonna fire.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.