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gky: Let's jump to -- you left Camp Savage early...
RU: Yes.
gky: ...and were sent to?
RU: New Caledonia. And that was November. We graduated from school on November the 6th, and then we shipped out of Camp Savage on November 17th, which is one week before Thanksgiving, and sent to San Francisco to Angel Island where we stayed another week. And then they put us on a boat, liberty ship, I guess, and sent to New Caledonia. Of course, they didn't tell us we were going to New Caledonia. We only could tell by the direction the ship was sailing that we're either going to New Caledonia, or Australia. We thought that first we were going to Australia.
gky: The week between your graduation and the time you shipped out, did you take that week to go see and your family?
RU: No, we weren't allowed. Only those of us who had parents living in, staying in Tule Lake, Manzanar, or Poston, or Gila River were not allowed to visit their parents because General [John L.] DeWitt said, "Nobody, no Niseis under any conditions, could enter the Western Defense Command."
gky: When you went to Angel Island, who else was on the island with you? I mean...
RU: All the people that were being shipped overseas were all at that island. So we asked them, "Why can't we go and visit San Francisco, since our..." Colonel Munson was in charge of the team, said, "No, you cannot leave this island."
gky: How did that make you feel?
RU: Well, we felt pretty bad, because he said supposing we won't ever come back. Supposing we get killed, or we're going overseas, so we can't visit our parents. They won't let us go into San Francisco, so we felt... our morale was destroyed.
gky: Did you know then that you were going into combat?
RU: Oh, yes, we knew that.
gky: What did you expect?
RU: Well, we didn't know what to expect, because from the stories that we heard, Bataan Death March and all that, and we knew we were headed into very dangerous territory. [Ed. Note: The Bataan Death March began on April 10, 1942; the island of Luzon fell to the Japanese and 75,000 Filipino and American troops were forced to march to a prison camp 85 miles away in six days. Many atrocities were committed by Japanese guards and hundreds of American and Filipino soldiers died.]
gky: How did that make you feel?
RU: Well, you didn't know what to expect, until we got to Guadalcanal.
gky: But, you know, sometimes there's some kind of an excitement about it. I mean this is wartime, it is exciting in a way, and it's very dangerous, and there's a lot of uncertainty, just like your parents were facing uncertainty with their futures.
RU: That's right. Well, for us it was a kind of a unique experience because one day out of San Francisco harbor, all the Coast Guard people got sick, so seasick; they all couldn't do the job of guarding the ship. So they asked the six Niseis to take their place on guard duty, you know, guarding the ship to see that if we could see anybody try to fire at us. And so we went on eight-hour duty, and eight hours off for about four days until the sailors could get back on duty.
gky: Gee, it seems you go from being mistrusted and having to haul garbage to being...
RU: That's right.
gky: ...watching for Japanese subs.
RU: That's right.
gky: Didn't you feel that was kind of schizophrenic of....
RU: Well, that's our duty. In the army, you do whatever you're asked to do. So we took on that job while the sailors were seasick and they couldn't do their job. They couldn't stand watch, so we took their job over and did it for the first week or so, eight hours on, eight hours off. And then later, after the sailors were able to come on duty, then it became four hours on, and four hours off.
<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.