<Begin Segment 24>

AI: What about personal discrimination? Did you experience any of that yourself individually?

RS: In the military?

AI: Yeah.

RS: No, I can't say that I did other than, I mean, there was, there was individual discrimination. There were remarks said to me, and, being an Asian sent to a place like Korea, there was constant, there was a constant sort of reference to, hey, you look like the enemy. And the enemy was called Joe Chink. That's what they called the North Koreans. And frequently they would call me, hey, Joe Chink. And another thing was like they called me "Pop-up," because I looked like the targets that we all shot at. Whenever we did target practice -- 'cause we had to constantly shoot weapons to qualify -- all these pop-ups had slanted eyes and buck teeth. They were from World War II, Japanese stereotype depictions. And I remember the first time I went out there and qualified with a .45, and you can't see these targets, then all of a sudden wham, this figure came up like this and here's this Jap. And you [makes shooting sound] shoot holes in it, boom, another one, another one, another one, five of them come up and they're all Japs. So, that was my nickname, "Pop-up."

AI: And how did you experience that? What was it --

RS: Well, it was extremely uncomfortable. But again, I didn't deal with that in the same way that I would deal with it today. I had no tools, I had no weapons, I had -- there was no precedence set for me. And so you just sort of, you took it. And it was extremely uncomfortable, but so were a lot of other things in life. And, and compared to those other kinds of things, and internment, and things like that, this was like a source of irritation, but one that was sort of overwhelming when you think about what it would take to turn that around. And that you weren't equipped as an individual to turn that around. So, you just sort of let it go and just sort of let it nestle someplace deep within and sort of smolder. And each time you become maybe a little bit less patient with it.

AI: So, were you angry? I mean, did you feel angry when --

RS: Yeah, I was angry but I took it out in other kinds of ways. I mean, really, for that duration of the time that I was in Korea, I was crazy. I was just crazy. I was looking for fights. I would find any reason to get into fights. And again, there was a sort of camaraderie among all the second lieutenants. And longevity in Korea was everything. The longer you were there, the more power and authority you had over people that were, that had just gotten there. And as you became a short-timer, which meant closer to rotating back to the States, you had a lot more power. And so, since we all drank constantly and got drunk almost on a nightly basis, it, and there was a sort of competitive edge because we as second lieutenants were all competing against each other, our units against your units.

And they would have these battery tests where we'd go out and every kind of firing with Howitzers. I was a .155 which is the big cannons. But we were portable which meant we drug them behind trucks. And we would do, I can't even remember the term for it... hip shoots, and we'd be out in the firing areas and storming along there and then we'd get a command to, for a mission. And we would have to pull off the highway and line all the guns up and orient them, and fire the rounds. And they would measure how accurate we were, how long it took us to hit the target and all of these. And they had every imaginable kind of firing with different weapons and time bombs and everything. And that would be the culmination. We had two of those a year, battery tests. But it was just a real sort of machismo situation. And my friend, Fred Magenheimer, and I, who happened to be in the same unit, there were two batteries per battalion, came in the first test, he came in number one, I came in number two, in all of Korea, in all of the units. And the second time, we switched. I came in number one, he came in number two. So it was like a great source of pride and everything else. And everybody in Korea knew that the two hot-shot gunnery officers were in the same unit and all of that.

So there was that kind of spirit that was built up. We'd get drunk and I mean, it was just crazy. And there'd be fights and all of these, sort of war stories with senior officers. And we'd get away with things and -- one of my additional duties was running the officers' club. [Laughs] And so I had certain privileges. I could kick people out of the club. And I could kick officers out that were superior to me, in rank, without any kind of repercussion. And I did that several times, unjustly, but just because that was part of the whole machismo of doing that.

And so I was a totally different personality for the thirteen months that I was in Korea, and, it wasn't, it wasn't a pretty sight, and yet, they had all these sort of racist songs that they would sing about... "When the ice is on the rice upon the Yalu and Joe Chink comes tippy-toeing at your -- you can bet your ass I'll be there behind you," and blah, blah, "I'll be shacked up with my chick from Yanjugol," and then so on and so forth, and I'd sing them right along, like I was not part of that. But, of course, I was subject to their jokes at any given moment. And I think that did form an anger that I was carrying around with me that I let out occasionally, sometimes physically, but certainly caused that sort of need to excel. I don't know if this is the way JAs all did things, but, I'll do you in the classroom or on the field or whatever, as a way of getting even. But I was drinking really heavily. I mean, I really thought I had a drinking problem when I left. But we all did.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.