Densho Digital Archive - George Morihiro - Jack Sameshima Interview (denshovh-mgeorge_2

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AD: What was tough about war?

GM: A lot of things. I'll tell you what, sleeping in the mud. Not being able to change your clothes although they're wet for days on end, freezing weather with just a jacket on, carrying that big, Jack and I carried a BAR. This is the biggest rifle in the army, it was twenty-one pounds. The ammo around your waist is fourteen pounds, the grenade on you is... I carried four of 'em, that's one pound apiece, I carried thirty-five pounds of equipment, and I carried my pack on top of everything else. I only weight 112 pounds. That's just tough walking a hundred yards, but you had to walk for days and days and miles and miles. There's a lot of things tough about the army. It's not the food that tastes lousy, it's not the K-ration that you had to cook yourself with crackers and a little can of meat, those things aren't tough, but the things that are tough is physical. Not what the country's done to you or whatever, that part that affects you, the elements, a lot of people think going in the army and going to war and fighting, but you're fighting a lot of other things.

JS: The fighting part is only a short thing. In between it's getting from point A to point B or whatever, doing whatever there is to fill your time.

GM: There's a lot of things that you don't like about the army. [Laughs]

JS: Make sure you dig your hole deep enough.

GM: Yeah, you only dig it a foot deep and then they come around and tell you to dig it four feet deep and you don't think you have to. There's a lot of tough things about the army. But there's a lot of fun, too. I think there's more fun than anything else. The camaraderie is very, very important. And the 442nd was different from any other unit. Because we were a segregated unit from Hawaii and the mainland. The Hawaiians spoke pidgin, we spoke more or less perfect English. And when the two mix, the Hawaiians thought we're acting smarter than them because we were laughing at the way they were talking to us, "no can do," and all that kind of English that was kind of hard to understand. But when we got together and during the war, we put that aside and the friendship that developed was so strong. And our goals, especially our goals were there, finally defined to us what we had to do. Because we cannot lose, because if we lost, we lost everything. It wasn't like any other American soldier that went off to war and fought. We fought because we had a purpose. Not just winning the war, not for our country, not for this. It was all this put together in one. It was very, very important that we win.

AD: Tell me more about that purpose. What was the purpose? More than just winning for the country, what was the purpose?

GM: Why? Because we knew what freedom was, first of all. We knew it was taken away from us, we had our mothers and fathers still in, behind barbed wire fence, we had to get 'em out. But it didn't matter if we lived long enough to see that or not, we had to do it. And the fighting there was... we saw the just cause to it. And there's other things that... that's what made us strong as a unit. But there's a lot of other things that made us better yet, such as the 442nd, you have to understand, was made up of educated young people. The U.S. Army was made up of young kids, but the 442nd was different. All of us in the 442nd were at least high school graduates. The rest of the army was young kids, some of 'em who couldn't speak or read or write or anything like that, we were all educated. The other thing is that the rest of the army was just trained to fight. We were trained very good, we were trained to fight to win. Our determination was different.