<Begin Segment 7>

MN: So after boot camp you and Bob Madrid return home on leave, and your wife passed away. When your wife passed away did you think about just staying home and not returning to the Marines?

RW: Say that, what was that again?

MN: When your wife passed away, did you feel like you should just stay here in the United States and not go back, go to Korea?

RW: No. I think if anything it intensified my wanting to go. I felt like, you know, I had lost everything that meant anything to me. When she died we were only home three days from boot camp and she got sick, and we put her in the hospital at three o'clock in the morning, but by seven o'clock in the morning the hospital called, said she had died. So the Red Cross gave me a couple weeks' leave to stay home on a bereavement leave, but had I known I would've gotten separated from Bob Madrid, I really honestly would never have stayed home. It didn't dawn on me. I thought, well, when I go back I'll be with him 'cause we were together. We were assigned together to the same unit. So I stayed home for the two weeks, I had visions of going to Korea and being a hero 'cause I didn't want to come home. I'd never been to a war so I didn't know how you can determine what you're gonna do in a war. So when went back to Camp Pendleton, then, of course, I was assigned to tank school, and that was set my rest of my Marine career and for the rest of my life.

MN: Now, before you left for Korea you visited Jo Ann's father, Mr. Yoshiya Ikeda. Can you share with us what that meeting was like?

RW: Well, he was living in the Little Tokyo area here in Los Angeles, and he was a, he was a World War I veteran, one of the older of the Issei that served during World War I. I knew who he was because in Poston he was a policeman. He was a big man. And of course, like any kids you're always afraid of the policeman. We had a little riff with some other guys, and he came walking towards the fire station where we hang out, so we all ducked out because we thought he was coming after us. But he wasn't; he was just coming over to the fire station to play that game of go that the Japanese play. Isseis used to play go at the fire station. I knew who he was, and when I visited him in Little Tokyo here before I went to Korea he just wished me well and to be careful, and said, "Be sure and boil your water," I guess he figured we were gonna be living in the same manner that they did in World War I when they didn't have water, when we got over there, there was no need to boil our water. They had plenty of trailer tanks of water, so we didn't have to do that.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.