<Begin Segment 17>

MA: I wanted to ask you about, earlier you had said that, you know, you had felt, you were patriotic and you loved your country, yet at the same time, you were being put behind barbed wire, without a trial, you have done nothing wrong. How did you kind of deal with those feelings, those two different kind of feelings? On one hand feeling, loving your country and being patriotic, and on the other hand...

GM: Well, you never give up loving your country, 'cause it's your country and you don't have any other choice. That's one of the things. We didn't want any other choice, and the experience to us was new. We've never been through this thing before, and I guess we tried to make the best of it. And I think the thing that hurt us most was that the government, after Pearl Harbor, reclassified us, and they didn't want no part of us in the army or the service. And that hurt the, a lot of young people, because they wanted to go in and be like everybody else. It wasn't so much as fighting for your country, but I think being like some-, everybody else. And being patriotic, it's not something that you want to be patriotic, it's something that's born, embedded into you so that you want to do certain things because that's what you believe in. You've got to remember, we went to school from first grade, and "pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America," every morning, and saluted the flag. And you can't be more loyal to your country after all that, for twelve years of it, practically, and give up on your country just like that. There was no such thing as giving up. You had to say that whatever they're doing is wrong, but we have to right it. Those things, you can't do it by yourself. It takes a lot of work to correct any kind of mistake that this country make. And that's why when the redress comes through, one of the most important things that we appreciated was an apology. And an apology is just a number of words there, that's all, but that was, happened to be the most important thing. It wasn't the money they gave us, because most of us by then didn't need that money. But the apology was a very important thing, we suffered through that.

MA: Did your parents ever talk to you about how they were feeling during that time in Puyallup?

GM: No, except when I told my mother that I wanted to go, I was going to go in the army, I want to volunteer, and her feeling was a more motherly feeling, that she cried all night and said that, "One boy in the family is enough." And it is enough for a mother. My father probably didn't give a damn, that much, I mean, you know. But only thing about my dad was that when I come back, then I knew how much he felt, 'cause we had a real joyous reunion out there in the front yard, hugging and dancing around.

MA: When you came back from the war?

GM: Yeah. So he didn't show it, but he showed it when I come home. Those were some things, well, I guess a normal family it's all the same if your son comes home.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.