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gky: Will you talk about the MIS on the West Coast? So the MIS is the entire, entire unit. Can you talk a little bit again about the MIS being a, being much larger than the...

JM: Yeah. Everywhere the American army fought in World War II, it had Intelligence organizations and Intelligence personnel supporting it. So when the army attacked in North Africa in '42, in Italy in '43, and in France in '44, it had Intelligence personnel, it had MIS personnel who were doing things like, when they captured German prisoners they needed German translators and interpreters who could interrogate those German prisoners. Obviously, these were not Nisei personnel, but they were MIS. In the Pacific where the enemy was Japanese, the MIS needed Japanese speaking personnel, and that's where they used the Nisei.

gky: What do you think were characteristics that the Nisei or Kibei had to help them get through the war, and their parents, their sisters and brothers are thrown in concentration camps in the United States, some of 'em volunteered out of camp, some of them were drafted out of camp? How do you think they permitted that to happen to them, the characteristics, ethnic characteristics or cultural characteristics that helped them?

JM: When the Nisei students first arrived at Camp Savage or Fort Snelling, regardless of the attitude that they brought to the school, they were inculcated with a certain kind of discipline by John Aiso and the other instructors there. I think that was a real, I guess we'd say now, a character building experience, to put that kind of discipline on them, and it was hammered into them that they had to go out and do a good job, and they had to focus on what the army needed and not to worry about their parents and families in the camps and not to worry about what was even gonna happen to them after the war. So that's one, the experience of the school. I think once the MIS Nisei got out to the units and the places where they worked, they saw right away how valuable they were, and they could see the kind of information you could get out of one prisoner. And it was so frustrating to them that in battle after battle the American soldiers were really not very good about bringing in live prisoners, and this really bothered the Nisei terribly, partly just out of humanitarian concern, but also because they realized how important it was. And I think once the Nisei, if they had any doubts in the school, once they got out to the Pacific they realized that they were actually contributing much more than a rifleman up on the front lines. They were worth ten riflemen, or more. When the fourteen Nisei went out with Merrill's Marauders, General Merrill had no doubts about how valuable they were, and that's why he didn't want them out there as frontline infantrymen. And they sometimes got in trouble when they did that because they were risking their lives, and the attitude, once the generals found out about the MIS Nisei, they assigned 'em bodyguards and didn't want them out there on the front lines because they were too valuable.

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