<Begin Segment 18>

AM: But I remember one thing, I need to tell you this one. The chaplain, there was a Utica General Army Hospital, which was installed in one of their, one of the hospitals as a military hospital. And what they did was take the soldiers wounded from combat from Europe, European Theatre, in transit from the European Theatre to where they would be going to live in hospitals near where their homes were. And so Utica was a transit (point). The chaplain there found out about the Japanese family, so my dad was called on the phone and asked if my sister and I would go visit some of the GIs who were wounded from the 442 and 100th battalion. So this must have been spring of '45, sometime in early '45. And I remember we were asked to come and visit, and I had no preparation of what it meant to come and visit something like that. We were brought to a ward, and there were all these GIs from the 442, 100th Battalion, mostly Hawaiian. But they were guys just like us, I mean, we were Asians. And that was my first experience with what war really meant. I mean, you can talk about "raise the flag" and rah-rah-rah and stuff like that, but the human cost was something that I had never known. Nobody prepared me for this. The chaplain didn't prepare me, all he did was say, "There are some people you should say hello to." So my sister and I -- and she's always behind me, of course, I'm leading the way and she's behind me -- walking up, and then for the first time encountering people with faces blown away, missing limbs. And the thing that -- and bandages. And you could see that they were Asians and you could see, and they would say something in Hawaii, if they could speak, they would say something, and say hello. But can you imagine what it was like to be at that point, I suppose I was nineteen, probably my nineteenth birthday, to encounter something like that without knowing what to expect. And I don't know what I said, I probably said something stupid like, "How are you?" and then walked along.

Well, when I walked through, and left that place, my sister and I had to catch a bus to go back home, but we had to transfer to a bus in downtown Utica. And while my sister -- Hope was all over the place, she was looking at the windows and stuff like that -- but I was standing there sort of in a, still in shock from what I had observed and that experience, and I was standing of the corner of the street waiting for my bus to come, and this woman came up to me and stuck her face right in my face like this and screamed at me, "You goddamn Jap, you have no right to be here. Get out of here or I'll kill you." And I was, having had that experience in the hospital, I had, you can imagine this frustration because I didn't know how to respond to her. I was angry, but at the same time, I was just terrified of what that meant, and I couldn't wait to get home. I couldn't go home and tell my dad because he would be so upset I don't what he'd do. I couldn't tell my mother, either, my sister, of course, was standing looking at the window, so she wasn't even part of that. And I absorbed that thing, that experience, in ways that I didn't realize how it would work itself out. But I think that in the end, what I did was accept the fact that she was inappropriate, to say the least, but that I took it, I took it as that I deserved it, maybe, that maybe I deserved that. I don't know, all I know is that it was sort of a life-forming experience for me, and I didn't even talk about it until years and years later when I could begin to process what it meant to be who I am, that I began to realize and accept the fact that that was inappropriate, it was the wrong thing for her to have said. I should not have accepted it, but I did. Since then I've learned that I shouldn't do that, but at that time, I was too young to know what to do.

DM: But what a traumatic experience to have to internalize, especially after you had just seen the cost that this kind of raises and causes.

AM: Yeah. And the thing is that I couldn't say to her, "Do you realize what I just saw?" So that these guys are no longer human beings. The thing that I remember about that experience most of all was how bad everything smelled, how rotting flesh smells. That was probably the thing that I took away from there. I'm a smelling person, you know, so that it was an experience that I sort of -- just like I told you about the wet cedar in Seattle, the trees that, in the rain, that sort of smell. Well, I sort of took away the smell of rotting flesh from that, and I just still remember that. It's an unpleasant thing to say, but the fact is, that is, that is what it was. And I had, never knew who these guys were. There were probably about twenty of them in that ward, they had 'em all segregated in one place, they didn't have them with the rest of the wounded.

DM: Oh, you mean racially segregated?

AM: Uh-huh. All the Hawaii boys from the 442 were in one room, one row. There was, nobody else was in there. So I don't -- I mean, when I think about that now, I think about what that meant and why it was like that. It's just part of the whole notion of the unfairness, it's not just inequality, injustice, it's just the things that are not right, I guess, more than... the things that are wrong more than what is right.

DM: Well, that's really an amazing thing, that they could be wounded terribly, grievously, and still return home to segregation.

AM: Yeah.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.