<Begin Segment 26>

MA: So how long were you at Camp Shelby? You got there, you said, at the beginning of '44?

GM: I don't know. Six, seven months? Seven months?

MA: How well... I guess, how well did your training at Camp Shelby prepare you for the real thing?

GM: Well, it wasn't, what I expected was that they train us to fight the war. But what, what it was was a basic, what we call the basic training. And it was a conditioning of civilian life to army life: hard marches, how to shoot the guns, techniques in bayonet fighting, reading compasses and things like that.

MA: So what exactly were you expecting when you...

GM: Well, I was expecting more of infighting, what you call a little closer type of fighting situations and things like that. And that's, that's why I got in trouble at Camp Shelby. See, I was a private, and towards the end of the basic training, I told the sergeant that lived with us in the same barrack, I says, asked him if he was going to go overseas with us, and he says, "Yeah," and I said, "Well, why don't you teach us something?" You know, it was kind of insult to him, because I didn't realize he was teaching us things that he was supposed to, but not the things that I wanted to learn. I want to learn how to fight, and they were just teaching you the basics, how to march and stuff like that. Well, that didn't go over with the sergeant very good, because two days later, he awarded me the BAR.

MA: What's the BAR?

GM: BAR is this Browning Automatic Rifle. It's a big gun, it's a deadly gun, probably the best gun for the army, and, but it's heavy. It's a twenty-one-pound gun, where the rest of them carried a nine-pound gun, twenty-one-pound gun could be pretty hard on you on a long march.

MA: So no one really wanted to do BAR?

GM: No, no. Besides, in the wartime, if you carried a BAR during the war, on the front line, if a sniper was going to fire at a bunch of you, he'd pick out the BAR man first, so you're the prime target. So that makes it a little bit more exciting. So I'm a BAR man, so there now I learned all about the BAR, how to put it apart, take it apart and put it together, even in total darkness. I could do it blindfolded. You know, it's a complicated gun. And I got the gun and like I say, got me in trouble because on these 25-mile hikes, I got tired first before the rest of the guys got tired, or I got cramp in the leg. And of course, that led me to a whole bunch of other problems, too. I had to pull out of the march because I got cramp in my leg, and first sergeant got mad at me because I was the only one in the outfit that dropped out, and he put me on KP duty.

MA: What's KP duty?

GM: Kitchen Police. Wash all the dishes and all the stoves and everything. I was on this duty for three days while everybody was shooting their guns, and then after, I got a small chance of firing my gun, but not a complete chance, and I missed the target every time, and the guy at the target gave me a bull's-eye every time.

MA: Why did he do that?

GM: I don't know. At the end of the day, he must have been in a hurry to get out of there. But every time I shot, I missed the target because my bullet's hitting the ground in front of the target. In fact, halfway to the target it was hitting the ground. And the guy kept telling me to, "Raise your sights," and I kept raising my sights, but it was raising it in the wrong direction, so the bullet went farther off, and the guy kept giving me a bull's-eye at the target. He probably couldn't find where I hit the bull's-eye, hit the target, so he gave me a bull's-eye. So I got bull's-eye all the way through my target practice, and they made me, gave me a medal, "expert BAR man." Which just now I get this MOS, my specialty is BAR, so when I go overseas, I'm one of the six guys that got picked out from our group and I had to join I Company before the other guys did, and they gave us a automatic rifle, which ended up to be a BAR. [Laughs] So, but I loved the gun so much I enjoyed it. It was a terrific gun. There was some thrill in it, because you know that you're gonna be shot first, before the rest, by a sniper. [Laughs]

MA: So you thought that was an exciting thing? [Laughs]

GM: Yeah, you know, they had to pick me out first. And it was really funny because of the fact that when I first joined the company, two days later, Yahachi Sagami from Fife came to me and greeted me to the 442nd and he says, "What kind of gun did you get?" What company I was in, I said, "I Company," "Yeah, that's a company." He said "What kind of a gun did you get?" And I said, "I got a BAR." And he got excited and he says, "Get rid of it." Because his brother, one week before, seven days before, got a bullet right between his eyes by a sniper, and he said, told me, he said, "Yohei got hit seven days ago by a sniper, because he carried a BAR." He said, "Get rid of the gun if you want to, don't want to get killed."

MA: What did you respond to that?

GM: I didn't, that made him more excited, sort of, like. I didn't care. But then he says, "Who's your platoon sergeant? And I think, "I think it's Kash."

MA: You mean Shiro Kashino?

GM: Yeah, Shiro Kashino. He said, "What?" He said, "Get the hell out of the company. He'd kill you." [Laughs] And that made it more exciting yet. But that, that was a good thing, because Shiro was one of the best men I ever worked for. He was terrific. He gave you so much confidence, I was never scared of the war under him. Him and Lieutenant Kubota, a lieutenant, and Shiro was, I think, two of the finest men in the whole outfit. They cared for their men; both of them cared a lot about the men under him, you know, and that made a lot of difference, because you felt so confident. If they were scared, you'd go scared, too, you know. But they were really good, and Kash was a little bit crazy. He'd, trouble with him was that he, he let himself do some of the dirty work before asking somebody to do, because he figured they might get killed. But he'd do it himself and that's the kind of guy he was.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.