<Begin Segment 23>

MN: So in April 1952 you rotated home, but before heading to the U.S. the ship stopped in Kobe?

RW: Uh-huh.

MN: Was prostitution rampant at, in Kobe?

RW: Well, I think prostitution was pretty rampant in any port city. One of my friends and I were walking down the street there in Kobe and these girls came up to us and started making sexual motion with us and touched us and pretty much trying to get us excited enough to want to go with them. And the guy I was with, he was married, had a couple of kids. He was recalled in the reserves. This other Marine that was stationed there just walked by and said, "Hey, you guys better stay away from these gals. You guys are going home and most of 'em are dosed up," meaning they had some kind of venereal disease. I just told 'em in Japanese, "No, no, iranai." These older people would walk by and look at us, I don't know if they were looking at me because I was Japanese coming back from the war in the Marines or whether they were thinking, how disgusting these girls are messing with these guys, but I have to think they were looking at me because I was Japanese because I think the girl thing was nothing. I think it's just happening every day so it's not like they were doing it for the first time.

MN: You know, one of the guys in during World War II who went over to occupied Japan told me they used to have these VD patrols. Did they have things like that at that time?

RW: Gee, I don't know 'cause I wasn't stationed there long enough. We just were passing through. I know they didn't have anything like that in Korea, although in Korea if you wanted condoms they had 'em, if you wanted 'em. One of the medic corpsmen was passing 'em out, so we took a couple but we had no reason to. There was no girls around where we were, so we used it to put on the end of our rifles and stuff like that. [Laughs]

MN: So how did you feel when the ship, the USS General -- is it William Weigel?

RW: Yeah.

MN: -- docked in San Diego and you returned home?

RW: Well, it was certainly a different feeling than going. It was extremely happy, even though I didn't want to come home I was still happy to come home. I looked on the dock and my sister Mary was there carrying her son, Stevie, two or three years old, and my nieces were there with her. It was exciting to see the dock that we left, and then when the boat finally inched in and hit the dock, I mean, that was just ecstasy to feel that jolt. When we went down the gangplank with our sea bags, they brought the recruits from boot camp over and each one would take our bag off our shoulder and then they took it to load it on the trucks to where they processed us, let us out, and then we got to go to the families. There were some Red Cross people giving donuts, coffee and milk, so I got a donut and a bottle of milk, and then I went over to my sister and kids and they were all hugging, so I dropped my milk and donut, and so my sister said, "That's okay, we got lots of milk at home." And I always think of that day because I use that in my speech, and I just say that I was so fortunate to come home and be able to drop my milk and donut, and guys like Bat and Vernon Todd and fifty-five thousand guys that were killed in Korea, they didn't get to come home and drop a donut and milk. So that's the irony and sadness of coming home.

MN: Was your mother there?

RW: No, she was waiting at home for me.

MN: Now, years later you learned from your sister that your mother had nightmares. Do you know why she was having nightmares?

RW: Well, she went through World War II with two sons in the 442nd who got wounded, between the two of 'em, three times. She gets three telegrams telling her her son's wounded. Any day she could get one saying they died. Our family's just lucky they didn't die. During the Korean War there were three of us in Korea at the same time, although Ted came home not too long after we got there. She gets two telegrams from the government for Hank saying he was wounded twice, and again, luckily he's not killed. With five sons, or four sons in the war, she would just have these nightmares, yelling in her sleep. When my sister Helen told me that, I said, "Well, did you wake her up? Why didn't you wake her up if she was screaming?" She said, "Oh no, I got so scared I used to just crawl further under the covers." It scared her that Mother would be yelling in her sleep. Even I do that. I used to do it a lot. I don't know about now, but it used to wake me up before, but now, all I do now is just dream and dream and dream constantly.

MN: I'll ask you some of that later on, but I wanted to ask you right now, how soon after you returned from Korea did you go visit Bob Madrid's parents?

RW: Right away. That's the first place I went. But I have to say the visit wasn't very fruitful because I couldn't talk to them. I was crying. It was hard for me to talk to 'em. All I was doing was apologizing, telling them I'm sorry. His brother told me, "Well, you can't feel that way because he died doing what you two guys talked about, being Marines, since little kids. He died doing what he wanted to do." And trying to console me he says, "Well, if you didn't ask him to go he probably would've died in a car accident that same day, same time, same moment." That's not easy to digest and say yeah, okay, he would've died anyway. Maybe I'd rather have seen that. And I wouldn't have to live with it.

MN: Now, your high school friend, Louis Moreno, had become a motorcycle police officer and years later you found out he was visiting your mother's place while you were in Korea? Why did he do that?

RW: Well, Louie and I were good friends in high school and, he along with a friend named Jimmy Martinez. Louie said he was a policeman and so he figured if he stopped by and visited my mother every so often, park his motorcycle out there, then people in the neighborhood or any people driving by would see a policeman around there and they would think twice before messing with an old lady living by herself. Whether it was necessary or not it was a nice, great gesture on his part to do that, and I'm sure it probably helped.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.