<Begin Segment 18>

SY: So by this time it was around the, was it 1943 when you were...

FO: No, I went in in '44, so it was in 1945, '46.

SY: So it was very close to the end of the war.

FO: Yeah. So we all got on the train when we graduated, and then we went to San Francisco and we got on this troop ship and we zigzagged because the war was still going on, we zigzagged all the way across the Pacific. And it took us thirty to forty-five days to get to the Philippines.

SY: Wow. What was that like?

FO: Well, everybody played poker, or some of these guys studied, and some of these guys just slept. When we got to the Philippines, it was funny, because we never had training to climb down the Jacob's ladder. I don't know whether you're familiar with Jacob's, it's a rope ladder they throw overboard, and you're supposed to climb down on this rope ladder.

SY: To get off the boat.

FO: We never had training like that to get off the boat.

SY: I see.

FO: So this guy who was my deskmate in Snelling, he was ten years older than I. And we looked at it and said, "My god, how are we going to do it? We never got any training." So I told Joe, I think it's okay if we put our arm around the rope and climb down and go that way instead of grabbing it like this, because you're going to slip. "But if you put the whole arm in there, you might make it," I told Joe. "I guess so," he told me. And then we had to throw our luggage, our duffle bag, overboard. And I says, "Hey, what if we miss?" There's a platform down there that's floating. And I says, "What if we miss?" And the guy tells me, "You're gonna go after it." [Laughs] I said, "Come on, now. Let's go to a port and let us get off at the port." He says, "Get overboard." So that's when we went, and then when we landed, we landed on, we were on these landing craft, and that thing was bobbling like that. And there was about twenty of us on that thing with our luggage. Everybody got seasick. So when we landed, when the ramp came down, everybody crawled out. I'm telling you, they really crawled, crawled out. They were heaving left and right, they were really sick. And I told these guys, "You guys are hell of a soldiers. What if there was a war on? You guys would all be dead." Then the guy that was handling the landing craft, he told me and another guy, "Hey, you, unload all the luggage." So I unloaded half the luggage and the other guy unloaded the other half.

SY: Because you were not seasick.

FO: Yeah, we weren't seasick. I don't know why we weren't seasick. Everybody else, oh, I'm telling you, it was a mess.

SY: Well, if you were on a boat for thirty days...

FO: Yeah, you would think that everything would be, you can get used to it.

SY: Yeah. But just on that landing...

FO: Landing craft was going like this.

SY: I see.

FO: So you wonder how the Marines did it when they landed on all these islands.

SY: Right, because they had to go right into battle.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.