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TI: Now, when you were at Tule Lake, what was your, like your daily routine? What would be, like a typical day?

LP: Pulling guard duty.

TI: So what does that... so you wake up in the morning...

LP: And they had me scheduled to go out on these towers and spend all day out there. It was pretty boring, but what can you do?

TI: And you're standing or sitting in a chair?

LP: Yeah, you could sit, or the towers had, you could walk around the outside, and there was a... I can't even remember what kind of guns we had. I think all we had was, there was no mounted guns in the tower like a machine gun or anything, there wasn't anything like that. There was just the gun that we'd carry to go up there, like maybe a Thompson submachine gun or something. But we wouldn't be using that out of the tower. Even if somebody tried to break through the fences, we still wouldn't have shot him, at least I wouldn't. Because all you have to do is call in and they would have come out there with a jeep. There was no reason to kill anybody or shoot anybody. I wouldn't do it, and I don't think anybody else would. We probably didn't even need a gun up there, just had a telephone.

TI: Because if someone, there was nothing for them to go, I mean, it's just pretty...

LP: It's boonies out there. Where you gonna go? They can't go, they couldn't go anywhere. And there was a lot of lights at night on the tower and stuff, so if somebody tried to climb over the fences, they could, you could see 'em. It was nothing like the prison camp that I was in in Germany, I'll guarantee you that. You couldn't get out of that.

TI: Yeah, we're gonna get there because I want to talk about that whole experience, too. Just a few more questions about Tule Lake. When I interview people like Jimi and other people who were at Tule Lake --

LP: They know a lot more about the inside than I do.

TI: Right. But they said there were times when the MPs, or the guards, every once in a while would come through, the military would come through and they would search all the area?

LP: Once while I was there. One time.

TI: Can you explain how that worked? What were you looking for?

LP: The first thing that happened before we went into the compound was you're going in with no money and nothing in your pockets, and you better be coming out with nothing in your pockets. That was from our officers. And when you're in the military, when they tell you that, you better do what they tell you, because if you don't you're gonna be in big trouble. We were looking for knives and guns. There were all kinds of things in those drawers. There was stacks of money in rolls, lot of valuable stuff that belonged to the people that lived there. But I didn't find any guns, they found a few knives. It took us one day to do it all. They took a lot of sake out of there that day and they put it in trailers along the fence in our compound. Some of those guys snuck over there at night and drank it, and boy, what a bunch of sick guys the next day. It was crazy.

TI: Any other stories about Tule Lake before we move on? Anything else that you remember?

LP: Before?

TI: Yeah, or during Tule Lake. Anything else that you could think about that you want to share?

LP: Not really. There wasn't much going on up there.

TI: Now when you were there, do you recall... Jimi told me about stories where early in the morning they would do their exercises?

LP: Well, the GIs do that, too.

TI: But they had the, they shaved their heads and they would do exercises. Did you see any of that? That might have been later on.

LP: Well, you know, I got transferred to the 106th Infantry in Indiana, and I wasn't there all the time. And I wasn't there when it started, and I wasn't there when it was over, but I was there somewhere in the middle. But no, I didn't see 'em do anything like that. I was never in a detail to do that.

TI: I think later on --

LP: He would know because he was in there.

TI: Right.

LP: I wasn't in anything like that.

TI: Now besides kind of the watching and things like this, did you guys ever have to deal with any, like, criminal activity? Like if someone, I don't know, any, like disturbances amongst the people in camp?

LP: The only thing I ever seen is they had a couple small compounds that were fenced in there and they had several big guys in there. And I don't know what they did, but sometimes we had to move 'em from one area to the other. But there was no contact or anything like that. These guys were really large, for Japanese they were huge. They were a lot bigger than Americans, too. And we knew that a lot of 'em were probably well-trained, and they'd tell you, "Stay away from 'em. You've got a gun," and so we did. Just moved 'em from one place to the other and that was it. But there was never any physical contact that I ever saw.

TI: Interesting, okay.

LP: The shaving their heads and stuff, it's possible, but I didn't see it.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.