Densho Digital Archive - George Morihiro Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

<Begin Segment 35>

MA: How did that affect you, I mean, almost dying, getting shot at, and then going back? I mean, you said earlier that you were a little more cautious.

GM: Well, as I remember, the only thing was that when I went back to the line, I was more conscious of getting killed than I was before. I said, "Hey, you can get killed in this business, you can get shot at." But that was quite a bit of experience that, going back to the line was just as dangerous as getting back to the line. And it's a funny thing about soldiers, you're there to fight a war and you know you can get killed. You know that tomorrow, that good friend of yours or another buddy won't be there tomorrow, somebody's going to get hit or get killed or something like that, and you gotta be prepared for it.

MA: How do you prepare yourself for that? I mean, to witness so much death?

GM: Well, it's the experience you have and the stories and training you get. You get prepared for that pretty easily. It'd be traumatic for me to see somebody get hurt today on the street or something, by a car or something, because I'm not used to it. But war, you get used to bullets flying over your head, and you know how close the bullet is by the sound of it, you hear an artillery shell coming, you say, "Oh, that's going to hit over here," things like that. It's an everyday thing after a while. You don't want to be out there too long, because chances are, you're going to get killed. But you want to get home because you know that there's something nice at home. You'd like to get home, but maybe you can't.

MA: What's it like, I mean, I guess, seeing your friends or people you knew, kind of just die or not be there the next day? I mean, how do you...

GM: Well, I had this policy like most of 'em, we didn't want to make too many good friends, we just knew each other. But you don't want to be, only came with my real close friends, the rest of 'em weren't that close. Because when one dies, you're gonna lose your good friend, and you know that he may die and stuff like that. We had one, this guy from Seattle, Ted Watanabe. He came up on the line when I was in the hospital, and before the night was over, he was dead. So, you know, things like that, you can't feel any more sorry about him than the guy that's been fighting all the time and gets killed or stuff like that. It's, it's a war. Today, people are scared. In this war here, two thousand people got killed. We got more than that getting killed on the roads in this country every day, people never think about that. People die from heart attacks or some kind of sickness in this country, they don't care about that. But when you hear about two thousand soldiers dying in two years, a couple years, they're scared of that. You read the newspaper, you read the obituary every day, and at least every week there's two or three Japanese dying. Do you get scared of that? You might be one of 'em, you know. But when you hear of a couple guys getting killed in Iraq or someplace, you think it's a bad thing.

MA: Were you able to stay with some of your friends from Fife, or keep in touch with them? Did they come over to, and fight with the 442nd as well?

GM: Oh, yeah. They were, but when we were in camp, a lot of us made lots of friends in camp. So we kept in touch with people we knew from before, and they might be in another company, and when we ever get a break somewhere, they'd travel over to your company maybe a couple times a week and talk and go back to their company. You know, it's, Bill Yanagimachi would always come to our company because he wanted to see Shiro Kashino and Shig Murao and all the rest of the guys, you know, and then you go back. We kept in touch with each other, and they know when somebody gets killed in another company, "So-and-so got killed," the news travels pretty fast.