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MN: And then I'm going to move you farther back, just to cover points that we didn't go over. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, what do you remember about that morning?

KM: I was dorming at the Atherton House, and this is a funny story, the '40s, Church of the Crossroads was considered, like, the university church for our YMCA members. At that time, it was a very popular reverend, oh, shucks, I forgot the name, but he was very popular with the university students. And while dorming there, one morning, there were a couple of us that said, hey, let's go check out Churches of the Cross, there are two good-looking sisters from Big Island there, and they were dorming at Hale Laulima. "Let's go check them out." As I say, I wanted to play the piano at the church. Oh, let's go, okay, so let's go check them out. And so to go do that, we had to get up a little earlier than usual, we had to get up a little earlier than usual, which meant we had to get up about 7:30 and get ready to go to church. I think the first church, I think was something like about 8:30 or something like that. So we were up there cleaning up, shaving, and I don't remember having too much of a beard, but washing up. Just about that time, all kinds of noise was downstairs and a big row. You know, Atherton House has an open center where you have the stairways that go up. And so noise comes up from the first floor, "Hey, what's going on down there?" "Hey, listen to the radio, put on the radio," you know. So somebody had a radio, put it on the radio. Said, "This is no maneuvers, this is the real thing, this is the real thing. Pearl Harbor is under attack." Airplanes are supposed to have red dots indicating that these were planes from Japan. So from the third floor, you could go up on the roof of Atherton House. And so we got up on the roof just to see if we could see anything in Pearl Harbor. And sure enough, from the roof, we could clearly see the skyline of Pearl Harbor. And the skyline was all dotted with black smoke, white smoke, just peppering all over the skies with the anti-aircraft burst. And then pretty soon we started to see black clouds, smoke. You couldn't see... lot of fires going on, became worse.

And while we were watching, all of a sudden we heard this big thud right in front of the Atherton House which is, as it turned out, from Atherton House out there where the highway is now, on the corner of McCully and King. Not... what school? There's a grammar school there. Oh, Ka'ahumanu, I think. And that school, I don't recall, but that school on the corner of King and McCully, a shell, shell fell down and there was a big fire right in front of us. And then the radio said, okay, all of you ROTC boys, report to the gym. This was 8:30 or thereabouts. And so we just put on our khaki, whatever khaki uniforms we had, and then reported to the gym. By the time we reported to the gym, all of us were being herded in, into the gym. And it was a mess, nobody knew what was going on. But eventually, during that day, before long, we were assigned a task of cleaning the rifles out of boxes. And they were covered with Cosmoline, these rifles, which had been stored away. We were not, the ROTC program was such that, at that point, we were not taught about rifles yet. So we had to clean out the Cosmoline, and the firing pin was separately stored, so we had to put in the firing pin into the rifles. And this was a major task. I was one of the first ones there, and then we started off, as soon as we got there, they decided, oh, they're going to take things, rifles. And I don't know if at that point, at what point I became a Hawaiian Territorial Guard member, I don't recall at what point.

But I do remember that morning, during all the chaos, there was these rumors that, hey, the Japanese landed, parachute is up on St Louis Heights. This is really, I think Tetsu Kiyama was involved. Tetsu Kiyama was advanced ROTC ahead of us. He was out, graduating from class already. And he led a group of the boys who were there to investigate what was up there. Turned out to be a group of Sunday hikers. But it was so chaotic, and having cleaned the guns that day, by nightfall, the makeshift squads were formed, and we were given these rifles. I had no, absolutely no knowledge of a rifle. Five rounds of ammunition they gave us, five rounds, which is one clip. And we were instructed, okay, you open the bolt this way. And then if you have to load the gun, you put it in and you press it down like this and you load the gun, then put the bolt back. If you're going to fire it, then you want to press the trigger button, but make sure you lock the gun first. And so they showed us how to lock the gun, and so we were issued these five rounds of ammunition which we were told to keep in our pocket, not to put in the gun. And that evening, we were shipped out to Iwilei, and as I said earlier, each one had about a 50-yard area. You got to remember, all of a sudden it's blackout, completely blackout. But we survived two, three nights of doing the same thing.

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