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SF: Do you think living in the jungle and seeing the bodies and so forth affected your attitude toward the Japanese or the war?

JF: Oh, I think my level of disgust for the enemy was at probably about as high as it was going to go, so it didn't make a lot of difference anyway, kind of expected it. But we did play host to, one day a bunch of Merrill's Marauders, I don't know if you've ever heard of that outfit. They came through. We had a, just had received a whole bunch of orange juice. I don't know where we got it, but we gave it all to those guys. And then another time, some of the British Chindits came through. They were Ja-, they were combat fighters to the nth degree. Both them and Merrill's Marauders were. So we really went all out to try to help those guys. But they, they were just moving through. They were skin and bones and looked like hell. They'd been through a lot.

JB: So Joe, you went through, it sounds like, pretty intensive training in the United States for a couple years, and you mentioned how you were on the ship, you know, going overseas and you wanted to make use of the training that you had spent a couple years going through. What was your, what was your sense of purpose, or what did you feel like you were really fighting for or, what... I guess, what was your sense of purpose when you were serving in the military at that time?

JF: I think it was, I don't know as I ever sat down and thought about it. I mean, it was just something that had to be done, and we were the ones who were going to do it. And it was a very, there was no decision to be made about it. It was already made. You were, you were in the army, and that's all there was to it. There's no, no specific goal or idea or anything as far as, you were just going to do the very best you could. But I, you never sat down and thought, "Well, I'm really going to do the best I can if I ever get a chance." You didn't think about that. It was, all of that was just taken for granted by just about everybody. Yeah.

I recently, oh, about a year ago I sent away for a book on the 5th Armored Division, and one of the first things I found that was that, that two of my, two of my favorite officers had died, had been killed in action, in late 1944. Without, to me, the sad part of it is that they never lived to see the fact that we were on our way to victory. At that time it was kind of six of one and half-dozen of the other. But a fellow I'd known from the time he was a second lieutenant until he was a major, Major Gerald, he was commander of the 85th Armored Reconnaissance, and he was killed. And the captain who was a lieutenant colonel, he died. Had been my, had been my company commander before we both went to headquarters of the 85th Armored, he was also killed in the line of, in action.

But, this captain and I were sitting there one day, and we were going to Camp Cook on the train, and he had just gotten a beautiful pearl-handled revolver. I don't know if his wife sent it to him or what, but we were pretty good friends. And he said, "Frisino, if anything happens to me, I want you to have this gun." I said, "Thanks, Captain. Hope it doesn't." And that, because if I had stayed with that outfit, I would've, I would have been with, with those guys. And I kept looking for people I knew but I didn't find... there was a lot of names in the, in the book, but I didn't find anybody that I -- I thought my friend Lloyd Couch might have been there. I never heard from him again. I don't know whatever happened to him.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.