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MN: Now, when you first arrived in Pusan you had this chance meeting with Torao Oyama, or Aoyama. Can you share this story with us and what happened to him?

RW: Well, I wish I could tell you what happened to him, because I tried to send some kind of a care package to him when I got home, but they said there's just no way they could do it. When we first got to Pusan they trucked us over to this large airfield that had large tents, large, what they call squad tents, and we were there waiting for our flight to fly us up to, up near Chunchon. So while we were waiting there -- we had to stay there, like, a couple days, before it was our turn to fly -- and there was no fence around it, so there must've been hundreds of kids running around. They were stealing backpacks and stuff like that. So the MP, military police, would come through and chase these kids and get them out of the area. As I watched what they were doing, I saw them come and kick one of the kids so hard the kid flew up in the air, just trying to get him out of the area. This one little boy came running by my tent, right by me, and I grabbed him and I pulled him into the tent and I said, "Here, hide. Stay here. Get under my cot." And he got under my coat and I hid him for a while. Then the MPs were gone and he got out. Then I started talking to him, asked him his name, and he told me Torao Aoyama, "Oh, you Japanese?" "Yeah." Anyway, he started hanging around with us, so I gave him some of my rations and some of the other guys in the tent took a liking to him and gave him some of their rations. And I asked him where his parents were and he said they were killed up near Seoul. And I said, "You have any relatives?" He said, "I have a sister in Japan, but I don't know where she is."

He followed me around and followed me to the Red Cross area. They had a shower down there, so he followed me there. And as I'm walking he tells all the kids, "This is my niisan, this is my niisan." And so he hung around with me and we took care of him, and then the morning we were gonna leave, the night before, I told him, "We're gonna leave in the morning at five o'clock in the morning, so I won't see you after that." He started crying and he asked if he could go with me, and I said, "No, see, the Marines over there are climbing in the airplane up the ladder and they check each guy. I can't take you. If we were going on trucks," I said, "I'd hide you on the truck, but I can't." So he was just all upset, and so I gave him one of the boxes of my day's rations, and some of the other guys gave him some, so he's got all these rations, and we gave him some money. We figured that by the time he got out of the tent, that stuff would all be gone. They'd just demolish him. And one of the Marines even took a dog tag off and told him, "Here's a dog tag. Anybody try to take that stuff away you show 'em this dog tag, tell 'em I'm gonna come and beat the S out of them." So that's how much this kid impressed us. He was not one of the other wild kids. Just by stroke of luck I just happened to grab this one kid and talk to him and bring him into the tent, and everybody took to him. And then the day we were getting on the plane, lined up to get on the plane, I look back and he was over by the edge of the tents. He was crying, but nothing I could do.

MN: How old do you think he was?

RW: I would think he was probably between ten and twelve. I think because he seemed more intelligent, he'd have to be more like twelve, but not much more than that.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.