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TI: Any other stories about your military service --

HT: I had a good time.

TI: -- because you were... but you served in, you went to Tokyo and Korea?

HT: Yeah, I went there, let's see. From basic training camp I went to Maryland to take my training and school, went to school, instrument repairman's school. I went repaired binoculars, telescope, cameras. Then they sent me over to Washington, got on a ship, went to Adak, Alaska, we stayed there one day, froze our butts off. Twenty-four, twenty-five below zero, I remember. It was cold. They said, a guy said it's so cold that you could get a cup of water, throw it up in the air and it would turn to ice before it hits the ground.

So then we went to Tokyo, to Camp Drake over there, and we went through our final exercise. We had to shoot and make sure everything's okay. And then from there, we went to Pusan, on a ship we went to Pusan, and you could smell the Pusan town about one mile, ten miles away. The whole atmosphere stunk with the dead bodies, you know. And then when we got there, we could see bodies floating in the water. And it was, we went to camp, and we slept in a tent over there. And then, next day, we got on a troop train. This is what I hate about Red Cross. That's the only time I started hating people. We get on the train, and we could, we stood outside the train, all in a row, taking a break, then a cart came by with coffee and doughnuts. And I said, "Oh, great," it was kind of a cold day. And everybody got a cup of coffee and got a doughnut, you know, and we're laughing about it. Then this cart went down the road, it turned around and came back, and going like this. And I said, "What's that?" And they said, "Well, you pay, you got a cup of coffee and a doughnut, you owe us so much money." I said, "This is the Red Cross and we have to pay?" Oh, yeah, we have to pay. So I looked at my friend and looked right down the line, everybody looked at you and then we all did the same thing. [Pantomimes dropping something] Can you imagine? We don't carry money on the front lines. What're we gonna pay with?

Then when we get on this troop train, that's something else again. We slept in what you call cattle cars, wood bunkers we sleep on. And they had one or two military police on the front, each side, and we had our weapon and everything else, but did you know that we didn't have one bullet between us, live ammo? And we're going through Korea, and I says, "What happens if enemy attack?" He said, "Don't worry about it. We got MPs." [Laughs] With pistols. Great.

TI: And so you just have to kind of just laugh about it, I guess.

HT: Yeah. I said, "This is crazy." If we get attacked, we can't, we got a gun, no ammo. We're gonna go, "Bang, bang, bang," and scare the hell out of 'em? [Laughs]

TI: That doesn't make sense.

HT: Oh, that was terrible, you know. Then the first place we went was (Replacement) Depot, so this one guy and I was, went through school and we were always in the same group, just he and I. And we had to sleep on the sand dune out there, and that was nothing but fleas on that place. God, you look and there's fleas all over. And we got bit. Oh my god, it was terrible, sleep on the sand. Then that's the first time I got to shoot my rifle. There was, someone said, "We need two volunteers," so I said, oh, nothing else to do, we went up there and there's a big, like a dish there. He says, "Kill that dog." I said, "I ain't going to kill no dog." I didn't come there to kill dogs. He said, "He has rabies, we have to put him away." I said, "Okay," so we start shooting at the dog. And dog start crawling up, and we keep shooting it. We must have shot about fifty rounds in the dog, the dog was still climbing. And I said, and the captain came back and said, "You could stop shooting. It's been dead for the last ten minutes." I said, "It's still moving." He said, "That's the rigor mortis." Dog was still moving, it was dead. And I said, "What they gonna do with that?" They said, "Just watch." And I watched, and a bunch of Korean people were watching the whole thing. One guy said, "They want the dog." They went and got the dog, and they took the dog away. So I said, "Hey, Captain, what they going to do with the dog?" "That's what they eat. These people eat dogs." I said, "But the dog's got rabies." They said, "They don't care, they're hungry." Isn't that something? Sad, man. Oh, I felt so bad after that. I wanted to get out of the army. And all that thing happened. And that was just the start of it, but seeing something bad about war.

When we finally got stationed in Seoul, we had, I went there, about forty of us, we went to that company. I was the only Oriental there, and they assigned us to different places. And one day the captain was watching me, I was talking to these Koreans. So he says, "You could speak Korean?" I said, "No." He said, "I heard you speaking to them." I said, "I'm speaking Japanese. These are people, every one could understand Japanese." And he smiled, he said, "I got a job for you." And he came and he says, "See that detachment of the Korean army there?" I said, "Yeah." "You're in command." I said, "Oh, thanks." And he said, "See that, about three or four hundred laborers over there? You're their boss."

TI: Because of your Japanese language ability, all of a sudden you're...

HT: Yeah. So I didn't have to, so I didn't go there to do what was trained to do. [Laughs] I had a soft job. They gave me my own office, my own secretary, everything. Soft job, geez. I felt guilty about that job. But of course I still had to go to front lines. These Korean people, they saw me and they saw me coming up, they're scared. They were sitting there looking at me. And they always squat. They always squat, those people. And I said something, and they all stood up like this, looking at me. I said, "What's wrong with these people?" So I asked one guy, I talked to him, I said, "Do shita no?" And they say, "Yes, they think you're a Japanese soldier." I said, "I am a Japanese soldier. But I'm a Japanese soldier from America, not Japan." And they just, whew, they got relaxed.

TI: So they were so afraid of the Japanese soldiers...

HT: God, yes, they were afraid of Japanese soldiers. They were treated pretty bad. Oh, that's, I told 'em, "I'm American Japanese, don't worry about it. My door is open all the time, you can come talk to me anytime you want." [Laughs] So yeah, that's how I got started with those soldiers over there. We had a good time, I took 'em to front lines a lot of times, and I lost all the soldiers there. But it was...

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.