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LD: You respected the guys that you were with in the Merrill's Marauders, not just the other Nisei, but the other fellows in your --

HM: Oh, yes. They saved our lives. They saved my life many times. Oh, at one point, they grabbed me and pulled by my legs until I was all scraped here, strawberry, you know. I was out on patrol duty listening to the enemy at night, just talking, maybe in a drunken stupor, I don't know, but they were talking loudly as Japanese do. And listening, well, we got discovered, I don't know, somebody coughed or something, I don't know what happened. But anyway, the enemy machine gun on the perimeter started firing. If I had stayed there, naturally, the machine gun was in firing range, it would hit me. They don't only machine gun fire that way, they're gonna move back and forth. And these guys are six-footer, two hundred plus pounds. I'm a hundred thirty pounder, he just grabbed my shoes, pulled me back, I don't know how, maybe thirty yards, saved my life. That's one incident.

Same thing when we all had to jump in the river at one point. We were being fired from the opposite bank, and we could run into the jungles that way, and we're going to get all dispersed. We jumped into the river, and then I submerged myself and floated down, I don't know how long. And here comes somebody grabbed my neck. They knew, I had certain identification that they knew it was me. Grabbed me right here, dragged me, saved my life. Otherwise I would have drowned, maybe, or I might have been shot. Those incidents happened.

LD: Are you still in touch with any of these guys or do you talk with any of them...

HM: For a while, see, that group, forty years ago. For a while, yes, we used to exchange correspondence and cards, Christmas cards and all that. I used to send them things. Some of them, the sister of one of the boys who died in combat, I brought back the remains. And, well, it just petered out slowly. After all, forty years, a long time ago.

LD: But you feel that all the guys in that unit were not brutal?

HM: Huh?

LD: Were not brutal.

HM: No, no, no. You mean American forces? No. American forces, no. Brutality was not part of their...

LD: What happened at the end for the unit? They say that the unit was overused and kind of...

HM: That is true. Well, Myitkyina is the northern terminal of the railway, and that's where the mission was, the objective was to capture, recapture the airfield. Then we went into the town, it was held by Japanese general and colonel, I think the general committed suicide or something, the colonel just disappeared. Now, this was in May of 1944. We were there June, July, August, and all our troops, American forces, were really exhausted. We had marched right across Burma. And then the food was nutritious in so far as sustaining life, but you can't be eating all the same thing day in and day out, breakfast, lunch and dinner, in small carton like this, k-ration, the same. You have selection of two or three breakfast, two or three lunch, it's written, B, L and D for dinner. And it's all highly waxed so moisture cannot get in. You live on that, you're going to get sick and tired of it. At times when we had a little rest between action, then they might drop us food by air, then we might have something like nine in one, nine person can eat one meal, which is really a feast, really a feast compared to what we'd been eating. And c-ration packed in cans, which is not palatable, let's say. But nutrition-wise, it is there. That's all been experimented, and it will sustain our life. People, well, they just throw away their food maybe, maybe gave it away, so they became weaker and weaker. Many of them, they didn't like going to eat that food. And they got disgusted, that's when morale went down, the morale went down, dissatisfaction, the commanders couldn't hold back. So the morale is weak in itself from within, not because of enemy action. Lot of them took sick, and then they were sent to the rear, and before they fully recuperated, they were sent back into combat. Not from their own choosing, but because combat-wise, soldiers weren't around. At one point in Myitkyina, they even used engineers. They were annihilated, engineers. The commander who brought them in shouldn't have brought them in.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1985 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.