<Begin Segment 37>

MA: At this point, you were twenty? Twenty-one?

GM: Yeah. Twenty. I got out in... twenty-one, I was twenty, nineteen and twenty, but I was too young to really feel responsibility and dangers and stuff like that. I was, I was one of these guys if they asked me to do something, okay, let's do it, but I wouldn't say, "Hey, I don't want to do it, too dangerous," or anything like that. But lot of the guys, it felt different. Older guys, they...

MA: Oh, what was the difference then between the older guys and the younger guys?

GM: Well, they realized, they had more experience, so they realized it's better to be living than to get shot up and everything. But a lot of 'em were married, too. And a lot of 'em were getting disgusted of the war, going through it more than I did. People with trench foot don't get any help from it and their feet start rotting away. You know, people get shot at and nobody pays any attention to the wounds or something like that. To me, I've also went alongside of Kim all the time, and Kim was a very cautious man, and I think I was a little bit more reckless. Not reckless so much as I didn't value my life as much as he did. There's a difference. When you meet all the people, you can tell who are serious about life and who isn't serious about, everybody's a little different. And I get in positions where I would feel that, gee, I wish I was home, you know, just home, not here. Just home, to get away from some of the stuff you have to go through, because, you know, you're living like an animal. You have no house, you only got what you carry, you got very little food, somebody's trying to hunt you down. [Laughs] And you're trying to hunt them down, see. And you have no hatred, hatred toward the other person, and he don't hate you any more than you hate him, he's another human being. But war is just that way. It's, "Okay, I got a job to do and I'll do it," but I think the whole thing is believing what you're doing, how important it is for, not only for yourself, because you might not enjoy it, but for other people who will be living later on. Like the boys in Iraq today, their life is not that much in danger, but they're fighting for something that people don't know, and that is the life that they're going to get from here to next fifty years. And so when I went to war and come back, I have seen the what you call, the fruits of your labor. I enjoyed it, because this is what everybody got, and that's a very, very good life that we lived in the last fifty, sixty years. And some people don't even appreciate that because they haven't seen the bad side of it. And if you've seen the bad side of life, you really think, "Hey, this life we're living is real nice."

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.