<Begin Segment 23>

DM: Can you tell me, too, a little bit more about... you had mentioned that you felt like your work at the Tokyo General Army Hospital kind of further... sort of reinforced your, your suspicion about the usefulness of war.

AM: I said earlier that I had, was the... I worked for (...) the orthopedic surgeon, he was in charge of orthopedic surgery. And in warfare, the one thing that happens is that people lose limbs, and orthopedic surgeons are very important to this process. And when the Korean War was at its worst, when the Chosin Reservoir was overrun by the Chinese, they brought in the wounded just one after the other. It's just like the MASH unit, films that we see where the wounded are on stretchers and they get carried around on stretchers. Well, they were just put on stretchers and put in the hallways, so that each side of the hallway was filled with these stretchers full of the wounded. And most of the wounded were frozen feet and so on, so again, the smell of the rotting flesh. At one point, we were so backed up with cases that the surgeon put my desk into his, the surgery, so I could be, he could dictate while he was doing, performing the surgery. I think I was okay most of the time, except that one time, there was a, there was a Turkish battalion, the United Nations had a Turkish battalion there, and one of the Turks was going to lose his leg. And he asked the orderly to go get his camera from his bedside. So the orderly went and got his camera, and he was anesthetized from his waist down, so he was able to function above his waist. And he started taking pictures of his own orthopedic surgery, of his amputation. I almost threw up right then, I ran out of the room and I couldn't go back. And the surgeon came running after me and said to me, "Are you all right?" I said, "No." I was all right up until the time that I watched this man watch his own leg being sawed off, I just couldn't do it, and I left. So after that, he still kept my desk in the surgery because the traffic was so heavy, but I could handle it because I saw not, that sort of thing didn't happen. Turks were considered fierce soldiers, and that was an example of how one could see his own leg being amputated and take pictures of it, it's just beyond my imagination.

But it was the time that I began to realize... how we all glorify war as the solution to everything. And when I think about the collateral, the physical damage of human beings and human psyches, it just became very clear to me that I was anti-, opposed to war. I was not an anti-war, but I was opposed to war, that's the way I would describe myself. Opposed to war for very pragmatic reasons, not anything other than, "Why kill people?" The religion, Catholic religion says, at least the Commandments say, "Thou shall not kill." What does that mean? You have to start asking yourself what that means. So yeah, it became sort of my journey into looking at why war is not the answer. I mean, seriously, it is not the answer. And what it is that it costs human lives, human beings. And it's not just one human being, it's (that) the human beings are attached to families, mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers. So yeah, that sort of was my journey. So I became a pacifist long before I became a Quaker.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.