<Begin Segment 12>

PW: Were you writing to your family? Throughout this entire time you were you writing letters to your family?

LS: Not to my parents, because they don't read English. But my sister, I would send her letters, not very often. The only time you have paper and pencil is when you're offline, maybe you can go to USO or Red Cross or something. If you're in the infantry, you have to carry everything you own. My personal item was, I had a small, thin wallet with a couple of pictures in it, and I think a four leaf clover that was in the wallet. But I had two pockets. Over this pocket, I had a silver cigarette case, flat, and I was hoping, if a bullet came, the cigarette case would stop it. But that's all I had, personal items.

PW: Whose photographs were you carrying?

LS: Oh, when I was in Colorado, 1942, I met this young lady. Her family were wealthy farmers in Gilroy before the war. And even though the father had been taken away to Bismarck, North Dakota, by the FBI, there was a family of eight children, a mother and eight children. So it was a family trusteeship, because the father, he owned over eight hundred acres. The father couldn't own it, because he's an alien, but the four older kids were American citizens. So they had formed a family corporation, and the four older kids were the owners. I think they're probably ten to fourteen or something like that, so they had a trusteeship. And that trustor was a local businessman, and they got together and decided, you can't go to one of the camps with all these kids. So they went to Grand Junction, and they bought a small house. And so I think two or three went in their Plymouth coupe, they drove, and the rest of the family, five, six, went by train, and they lived in Grand Junction throughout the war. Eventually, the father was released and came to join them.

PW: Is this the Hirasaki family?

LS: Hmm?

PW: Is this the Hirasaki family?

LS: Hirasaki.

PW: So tell me, you met this woman, this young girl?

LS: Well, yeah, she was about my age, one year younger, and a student. So there was nothing else to do, roller skating was one thing, and I'm not sure what else, but we just kind of got to know each other. And so we kept up on correspondence throughout the war. And actually, I don't think any of the Nisei boys thought they were going to come home alive. Almost everybody, this is what we volunteered for, and we expect to die for our country, and hope that it turns out all right. So we kept up this correspondence as much as possible. And so when the war was over, I had PTSD so badly, I just needed to get out. And my orders were, "We're going to send you to Rome. You become a second lieutenant, and you come back and take the 4th Platoon." I said, "Captain Burns," I said, "I'm not going to do that. I just want to get out of the army. I don't want to stay when the war is over. I don't want to stay in it, get me out." So he said, "I'll try my best." Well, you know, that's July. It was not until November, because there was a point system. All the soldiers coming home from Europe, you had to have so many points, you've got so many points for being overseas, so many points for citations and so forth. The Hawaiian boys had five points more than the mainland boys because when they came from Hawaii to the mainland, they got five points for going overseas. [Laughs] So they had the edge over us.

But anyway, so finally, in November, I got shipped out and finally got to Newport News, Virginia, on, again, an old, aging Liberty ship. We got outside of Newport News, Virginia, there's a heavy cross current, and our Liberty ship couldn't come across. It would go forward and get pushed back, forward and get pushed back, forward, push back. And they sent out an SOS. The ship probably can't make it to shore, we're gonna sink out here. I wish I had gotten the newspaper after we landed. It took us two more days, we finally made it. And we're sitting out there just bobbing like a cork. So finally got there, took a train all the way to Fort MacArthur, Los Angeles. I wanted to get back to Southern California and finally discharged December 12, 1945. So my PTSD was so bad, some of the other boys were living in Los Angeles, and we started seeing each other in Japantown and started drinking. We'd been drinking before, wine and gin, the American troops, all the hard liquor, bourbon, and so forth, goes to the officers. Nobody wanted gin, they would give us the gin or beer. We drank a lot of wine and cognac when we could, from buying it from the city. Well, we started drinking as much whisky, mostly, and the only way you could forget PTSD in your head, you drink 'til you pass out, and then you forget everything temporarily. That was how we treated PTSD. The military just said, "You're a civilian now. Take off your uniform and get the hell out of here." That was the way you got discharged.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.