<Begin Segment 14>

JY: The... and then we, and then, of course, we came -- and I kind of grew up in the army, actually. You know, I was a pretty naive kid I think when I got out of college, and all the sudden I was thrust in a situation where I was responsible for a bunch of guys and I had to get up and teach classes on subjects that I didn't know anything about until I read about it before I got up and taught it and things like that. So and, and just, just the situation of having so much responsibility and making decisions about things and talking in front of groups and things like that I think helped me to kind of grow up, if you will, mature a little bit.

So by the time I was ready to come back, I was what they call the executive officer of a (battery), of a artillery unit. And then just, just a couple months before I came back our, our unit commander was, was rotated out. So instead of assigning somebody in they just had me take over for that last couple months, and so then I really felt kinda tensed up because now I had like 150 guys and all this equipment and so forth that we had to prepare to rotate back to the United States. And so that was a pretty busy time. And one of the kids almost died on me because he got so seasick that he just got totally dehydrated, and that really worried me on the way back, that I'd have this kid who had died on, you know, on my watch kind of thing. I think I might have been more worried about me than, than him. But that was a time of kind of like growing up for me during that time period.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.