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gky: What did you do after the second observer post?

SN: Oh, well, like I say, after that, I had enough points accumulated to come home, and so I came home.

gky: And got discharged?

SN: Yeah. It was a kind of a lonely feeling because here I went over with twenty people, got to know them real good, and then when it's time to go home, I was the only one. The others had left or some of them still there, you know. We all went our separate ways, so to speak. But it was kind of lonely when you're accustomed to, when you go to do something in the way of duty, when here I was on the way to get a discharge and the only thing was that I was the only passenger from Shanghai all the way back to McClellan air field.

gky: Well, it seems like you're pretty lucky in that when you over on the Lurline, when you went over on that Matson liner, weren't only about a handful of you there? It wasn't like thousands of troops on the...

SN: Oh, no. It was -- I don't know if you've heard of liberty ships or not. You know, they're just small freighters, and that's all. And for the twenty of us, they built, we called them dog houses. They built it on top of the deck. Just sleeping ten people on each side of the ship and that was where we quartered when we went overseas.

gky: Wow. I can't imagine there being much...

SN: Then you come back, and when you went over everybody had a good time, shooting craps, playing cards, whatnot.

gky: How much of your language skills did you ever have to depend on?

SN: Well, I'll be honest with you. My language skills during the war bordered on the minimum, and the way I got around it is I got -- in communist China, the way I got around it was, there was -- the Chinese communists also had a couple of officers that spoke Japanese. So, and they were in the intelligence section, their intelligence section. So I always brought this major, what the heck was his name -- John, John something. But anyway, so I had him interrogate the prisoners on many occasions. And then he would break it down and simplify Japanese and tell me what the heck occurred, so it worked out real well.

gky: So, in terms of the MIS experience, the MIS experience was pretty positive. It did not turn out to be dangerous.

SN: That's right.

gky: Was a very, I would think it would be very educational.

SN: It was. For me, it was. And the type of assignments that I got while in services, is something together. So when the war ended, Major Burden offered me a commission, and I said, "Well, there must be some kind of stipulation." He says, "Yeah, you have to serve two years if you want to take it." I said "No, I'd rather go home rather than to become an officer."

gky: Well, enlisted men, golly, I heard that they got something really small like...

SN: Originally, it was just $21 a month, you know.

gky: And civilians, after the war, got paid, let's see, $400 a month.

SN: Something like that.

gky: When you -- you stayed in Japan a while though.

SN: For five years.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.