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TI: And so did, like what did your brother think of you joining? Well, he was in the military, though, by then, wasn't he?

HY: Yeah, he did serve in the army. But then I didn't tell him either, I mean, he was...

TI: How about just your friends, close friends? Anyone kind of, because it seemed, they're probably watching you go along here, and all of a sudden it's bang, this way, just a very different...

HY: Yeah. By that time, I was rooming with three Caucasian fellows, and one of them was a fellow named Pete Trower who was in physics, and he had been a Marine officer. And so I had asked him to write a recommendation for me, and the recruiter told me later that he was very negative about the Marine Corps, and that I was wasting my time. [Laughs]

TI: So he wrote that in his recommendation, kind of? So maybe he was trying to save you, he said, "I don't want you to go to the Marine Corps."

HY: Yeah. The recruiter, I think, tried to get me into the program, but I remember he came and told me that I was rejected.

TI: Yeah, because you wanted to, as you said, you wanted to go into the OCS program. And here you are, a math major, Berkeley, at a time when they probably needed people desperately.

HY: Yeah.

TI: And so why do you think you were rejected?

HY: You know, I think it was discrimination at that time. All these things come back into mind, remember the discrimination you had before. And so I think I was... but I enlisted anyway. I got that rejection, I said, heck with it, I'm going to join anyway, so I enlisted and went to boot camp.

TI: Right. But when you were rejected, I think you talked about how this was pretty devastating to you. You were really kind of at a low point in your life.

HY: The recruiter I was working with kind of gave me the impression that this was a shoo-in. I mean, I was physically fit, I had letters of recommendation. But then I remember he looked very disappointed when he had to tell me that I was rejected. So I had a feeling that it wasn't him, it was somebody, the higher ups that were rejecting me. And I realized that not many Japanese were in the Marine Corps, one, and not many were in the officer corps.

TI: And at this point, joining the Marines -- because I think about this point, Vietnam wasn't full-blown Vietnam, it was just sort of bubbling up at this point?

HY: We thought we were going to go to Indonesia, that's where the Marine Corps would be island hopping. But, you know, I thought, well, I'm just going to enlist anyway. And by this time, I was tired of school, I wanted to get out and play animal and do physical things.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.