<Begin Segment 27>

MA: Where were you when you heard about the war ending and the atomic bomb being dropped?

GY: I was at, I was in Minneapolis, we were forbidden to go into town. We were all... what was the word I'm trying to think of? We were all locked in at the post. No one was supposed to get a pass to get into town.

MA: Why did they do that?

GY: I think they just wanted the people to celebrate among themselves, rather than to have us go into town, but we were... not locked in. It was, in essence, locked in, but there was another word for it. No one was able to get into town at that moment during V-J day.

MA: What were your feelings, I guess, when you heard that this nuclear bomb had...

GY: Oh, great, great. A number of us yelled out, great, and that was the end of it. I think everybody was preparing to go home after that. I don't know how long it took to try to go home, but at that point, we had what we called the numbering system. If you were overseas, you got so many points, if you got the Purple Heart, you got so many points, if you got a medal, Silver Star, DSE, bronze, you got a medal -- you got points. And if you had something like seventeen or twenty-seven points, you were able to get out of the military faster. And I wasn't able to because I never went overseas, never got a medal. The only medal I got was the commendation medal. And so we abided our time and like I was telling you earlier, I, from Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, I figured out I would have gotten four hundred dollars on traveling money -- in those days it was good money -- on traveling wages, traveling money in the military. Then they changed my orders from Camp McCoy to Fort Ord, or Presidio. And I got down there and said, "Well, I'll still get three hundred dollars or whatever," I figured. Then they changed my orders, then instead of three hundred, I ended up with fifty dollars or whatever. [Laughs] From Fort Lewis to Spokane is not very far.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.