<Begin Segment 16>

TT: So they give you a furlough, so I went back to camp. When you're in the service like that, you don't have any money so you don't fly. Couldn't afford it. I took the slow train all the way from Fort Benning to Minidoka. And along the way, I stopped at Fort Worth, Texas, and went to Camp Hood to visit my brother. He was undergoing training for armored outfit training. It was a hello and a goodbye, you know. Stopped at Denver, visited a couple of my friends that was with us in camp, (...) -- two brothers, I don't know if you... oh, yeah, you probably know the Kusakabe brothers, Peter and John. They were going to school, so I visited with them and stayed overnight there. And on my way back to Minidoka, I went to a drugstore before I caught the train. And in the drugstore, they had whiskey and stuff all piled up from the floor to the ceiling almost. [Laughs] Well, I wanted to take a whiskey back to my dad. And I was a young kid, I didn't know anything about whiskey. And I was looking at those bottles and says, 35-proof and 70-proof, 80-proof and 100-proof. I thought, "Oh, heck, 100-proof? That must be the best." [Laughs] So I took one bottle, Old Mr. Boston, it was 100-proof. So I took it back to camp with me, gave it to my dad. He was real happy to get it. [Laughs] Then I think he shared it with his friends, must have drank most of it himself, I don't know. But years later, when I was looking in the kitchen cupboard at home, and that old bottle was sitting there on the shelf with shoyu in there. So my mother had kept that bottle and brought it back to Seattle, keepsake, and used it for shoyu.

TI: It must have meant a lot to your parents to have a gift from you. That's good. Going back a little bit to Fort Benning, I'm curious how the white soldiers treated you.

TT: Oh. The very first day, the fellows are out in formation, you know. Head sergeant there for cadre, he says, "All of you here are volunteers. So I want everybody here to treat each other equally, and we don't want any kind of problem, discrimination or anything. If there is, we're gonna kick you out of here." And he says, "Some of you here looking like the enemy," referring to us. He says, "We don't want any discrimination whatsoever." Never had a problem.

TI: So that made it a lot easier when he just, on the very first day, made that statement. And do you recall how you and others felt about that or did you guys talk about that?

TT: No. (Our group) were intermingled. We weren't together, we were separated.

TI: When you, so when you got to, finally to Minidoka and you saw your parents, any other memories from that trip to Minidoka that you recall?

TT: Well, most of my friends were all gone out of camp, but I did visit a few people. I remember the incident when I was leaving camp, people from our block came to see me off. And some of the Isseis gave me envelope, going away, dollar or two or something, kokoro mochi. After I got on the bus when I was leaving, going away, I don't remember whether it was Jerome or Shoshone where I caught the train back. But I got on the bus, pulling away from camp, I look out of the back window, and the people that had come to see me off were all leaving. And there was one lonely figure standing against the fence, against the gate, and hand up against it, holding, and that that was the most pitiful sight of my life, and that was my mother. And years later, I talked to her about that incident, and she told me that she didn't expect me to come back. That's the thing I remember most, I guess.

TI: That must be such a hard thing for a mother. That's a good story.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.