<Begin Segment 26>

MN: So how long were you in the Black Juans?

JM: Five, six years, maybe.

MN: And so you did get drafted.

JM: Uh-huh.

MN: What year was that?

JM: I believe that it was 1958. I served from 1958 to 1960. I received a honorable discharge, I did my duty as an American citizen.

MN: And now you were stationed at Fort Huachuca, Arizona?

JM: We called it "Fort Hoochie-Koochie." [Laughs] And that's where they developed the drones. That's the electronic proving ground. The most god-forsaken fort, we had people trying to desert from there... well, the only place they would take you from there was Vietnam and Cambodia, if you wanted to go anywhere. We were there and we, I want to go to Germany? No. I want to go to Korea? No. You can go to Cambodia. No, you know. And they found a lot of people trying to go AWOL. They just went crazy on you, 'cause there's nothing, really nothing. They used it as a outpost to shortstop Geronimo from fleeing into Mexico, and that's the whole purpose of the fort, to stop Geronimo. Then they turned it into a... it was a sort of hospital fort for people that had tuberculosis, and then at one point they had the black troops there, you know, just for the black troops. And then they turned it into electronic proving ground.

MN: And now you had a very interesting experience at Fort Huachuca.

[Interruption]

JM: I didn't want to go into the field units, 'cause they sent you, literally sent you out in the field and you stood out there.

MN: In the heat?

JM: In the heat and everything, and the dust, it's incredible. So I wound up as a driver. I wound up as a driver, and I was driving for this colonel, I was the colonel's driver. And one of them had this... well, one of them, he was a much older person. His wife was very young. And I looked at a lot of his silverware, 'cause I would go inside his house. Man, lot of 'em had little swastikas on there, I mean, they swiped 'em all from, you know, a lot of the German Nazi personal possessions never made it into museums and all that, they made it into people's homes. And they were, there was talk that she was kind of carrying on with the driver before me. Nice, tall, handsome young-looking white guy. And he got shipped... I think the colonel caught wind of it and shipped him to Thule. Have you ever heard of Thule? Thule is in Greenland. [Laughs] It was a Signal Corps fort. We were Signal Corps. He received orders to wind up in Thule. And I've seen pictures from Thule, there is nothing. You're underground, then when you come up, there is nothing. You are literally on a iceberg. So that was his punishment. So he figured out he's not gonna take a chance with some good-looking young, tall athletic white man, he'll pick a short little raunchy-looking "Jap" like me. And he was happy to see me. [Laughs] So anytime she kept saying, "Well, Jim, can you stay a little over?" I'm like, the sweat was coming down, like, "Oh, really? What do you want me to do?" [Laughs] Like, man, no, no, don't touch me. I mean, I don't want to go to Thule. I mean, that was, I drove for a couple of colonels. The other colonel was, he was the provost marshal and he was from Puerto Rico, little short guy. And his daughter was Miss Puerto Rico, yeah. Boy, what a, he's a little short, shorty guy like that, and his daughter was tall and built, you know. I mean, her breasts were like sunshades for this guy, you know. [Laughs] But I'm telling you, they were a nice, nice... they treated me like family. Whenever I got over there, they would bring me coffee and all that. When it came time for me to leave, they drove me to wherever, bus station and all that. Very nice. That's why I have a very, very high opinion of Puerto Ricans, 'cause every Puerto Rican I ran into was very nice. I mean, I know there's raunchy Puerto Ricans, but I've never run into them. The ones that I have treated me really well.

We were assigned to the... we were, us drivers were assigned to headquarters, the headquarters unit, and we were put into the motor pool. The motor pool is ninety-nine percent black. So there were four of us there, three white guys and me, in this sea of black folks. Well, okay, that's fine by me. No big thing to me. But my friends, one was from Little Rock, Arkansas, and he had been through the desegregation things. And he used to brag about it, and he used to say, I said, "Well, what did you do in Little Rock?" I said, yeah, well, he was the epitome of a southern redneck... I don't know what you call him. And he'd say, "Guess what we do, Matsuoka?" I said, "What did you do?" He said, "Every Saturday night," he says, "we go on a 'coon cock.'" I said, "What's that?" He says, "Well, we drive on a pickup truck and we get broom handles, and we drive as close as we could to the curb 'til we saw a black person and we try to hit him in the head." I said, "You're telling me this?" I said, "Take a look around you, and if I were you, I'd keep your voice down." He said, "Yeah," he says, then he says, "It's getting mighty dark around here, ain't it?" I'm like, "Oh, man, that's all I need is this guy." And so there was some...

Another one of 'em was just your completely average Midwesterner who's never been out of the Midwest. And another guy was a guy whose marriage was falling apart because he was, he was prepared to get a "Dear John" letter, and his name, by the way, was John. But anyway, this one guy was just a (regular guy) you know. He was like, "Keep it down, Richard, keep it down." And one night (Richard) really got off. I don't know what triggered him. And they handled him like, with kid gloves because he was some relationship to Dale Alford, who was, I think, a congressman or something, in Arkansas. And so they handled him with kid gloves. So anyway, he got on this thing and he said, "Matsuoka, I'll tell you something. You're nothing but a kiss-ass." And I'm like, "What?" "Yeah." And he's coming off the wall like that. I'm telling you, you don't do that to someone from J-Flats. Next thing I know, we were going at it. He was bigger than me and he was hitting me in the back of the head like that, and I was hitting him in the guts. [Laughs] And he slowly slid to the ground. And my friends jumped in there and they said, "Yeah, where do you get off telling that to him? Next time you're gonna have to get through me." You know, they all backed me up. But a week goes by and hey, it's like nothing had happened. He's like, "Matsuoka, can you give me a cigarette?" "Yeah, sure, have one." Just keep the peace, man, don't say anything around here. At the end of the year, we were all going home for the holidays. And I asked him, I said, "Hey, Richard, you going back to Little Rock?" He says, "No," he says, "I got nothing to go back to." I said, "Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. You showed me your wallet, and hey, you had your girlfriend there." He said, "Aw, she ain't my girlfriend anymore. She's probably going out with somebody right now," you know. It was one of these, "Yeah, yeah, she's having a..." and I'm telling you, the man had no, he was very uncouth. He showed me a picture of his mother, and he says, "Look at her. What a...." he said, "oh, look at that fat slob." I said, "That's your mother." He says, "Yeah, and I don't know how my daddy ever crawled on top of her." I'm like, "Goddamn, man, you have no shame." I said, "You have no..." you know. No whatever. Then he showed me a picture of his sister, and he said, "How do you like this, Matsuoka?" I said, "Oh, she's very pretty." He said, "Yeah, that's my sister." He says, "I wouldn't mind getting a little bit of that." I said, "Get away from me, man." I said, "Those are your family, and those are the only people that care for you in life, and you talk about them like that?" That's the type of people you had to deal with in the army. And so, anyway, I was going, I felt sorry for him, I saw him sitting there. I said, "Look," I said, "why don't you call up your girlfriend, man?" He said, "No, she's probably going out with somebody." I said, "Well, how do you know?" I said, "Do you know this for a fact?" I said, "Well, all you do is just give her a call. If you need some coins or something, I got some for you. Call long-distance, it's New Year's Eve. Call up and just tell her, you know, Happy New Year." He says, "Oh, yeah, I'll do that. I'll do it, I'll do it." So finally I think I was getting through to him, and I had to go pack because the car that was coming to pick me up to take me back to L.A. was going to be here in about fifteen minutes. So as I came back, I saw him slumped against the hall, I said, "You call?" Says, "Yeah." "You get a hold of her?" Says, "Yeah." "Well, what'd she say?" "She said, 'Whatever possessed you to call me?'" [Laughs] That was cold. And I said, "Oh, that wasn't nice." And he had a, he had a pint of whiskey, and he just practically dropped it. I said, "Happy New Year, Richard, I got to go." Anyway, those are my memories of "Fort Hoochie-Koochie." [Laughs]

MN: After you had your fight with Richard, did the respect among the black soldiers in that area, did they have more respect for you after that?

JM: No, they just, they just thought we were just crazy, a crazy Chinaman and a crazy white trash fighting among each other. That's probably all they said, "Look at 'em go at each other." They had their own world. It was really outrageous. A black sergeant died, and they refused to bury him in the cemetery at Sierra Vista. They said, "No, we don't, we don't allow black people in the cemetery." And so the army got really upset, they said, "Well, you are going to, if you are going to be around our area, and you'd better bury him." So they did bury him, but they put him in the far end of the lot where nobody was. And then if you went into a lot of the Arizona towns, now Arizona is getting known for what they did. Every single bar had a sign, "No colored trade solicited." They didn't want no black people around them. So that's why they were all in the motor pool, they were segregated. So their whole life and everything was in a different world. So what we did, it didn't matter to them. It was just like, "Oh, yeah, this white trash and that Chinaman going at each other." [Laughs] So those were the harsh realities of the life in the '50s.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.