Densho Digital Archive - Isao Kameshige Interview (denshovh-kisao

<Begin Segment 14>

AC: And you said in 1944 you were inducted. Were you drafted?

IK: Uh-huh, yes, I was.

AC: How did it feel being in this internment camp and being asked to serve for this country?

IK: Well, I was one of... there was a lot of controversy at the time. In fact, we had some of those meetings and things, and we had some rallies, campfire rallies. But, and there was what you call "no-no boys." And a lot of those real radical people were sent to Tule Lake, but I was willing to serve. I felt that I should and I would.

AC: What was your motivation?

IK: 'Cause I'm American. [Laughs] That's all I can say.

AC: So when you were inducted you went to Fort Douglas, Utah.

IK: Uh-huh.

AC: So you left the camp, you said goodbye to Mom and Dad and your sister. How did that feel?

IK: Well, what could they say? It was up to me. They said it was up to me, so I said, "I'm going," and I just went. There was a lot of us that went.

AC: How did your parents feel about you, you know, serving?

IK: They didn't say nothing, they didn't think nothing of it.

AC: And so what happened to you at Fort Douglas, Utah?

IK: Well, you had to register, they give you a physical, they went through all that physical stuff, examined you, and you're A-1, well, then just stayed in the barracks until you got your orders. That's all we did there in Fort Douglas. They gave us a physical is what it amounted to.

AC: Then you were transferred to Camp Blanding, Florida? Where is that in Florida?

IK: It's just north of Orlando, and it's between Orlando and Ocala, I guess you've heard of Ocala, I don't know whether you did or not, but it's close to Ocala, Florida. And the camp isn't there anymore. I was in 208, Company B, and I still remember my number. You had to remember that. It's 37752636. I can't ever forget it because you can't get back into camp if you don't know your number. And if you're fooling around outside and one of the sentries asked you, "What's your number?" then you had to know it. So I memorized mine, I guess everybody did. We was too tired to go out to do anything, we bivouacked and basic training was tough.

AC: What kind of things did they make you, were they having you do in basic?

IK: Well, just regular, what everybody else had to go through, we had to go. Calisthenics where we had to do all these exercises and climb the rope, and then we had artillery where we had to shoot the guns, and then hand grenades and we had to use hand grenade guns. And then we had to do the machine gun fire drill where they have a fence that you have to stay under, and you have to stay under that fence, and then a machine gunner would fire over your heads, you know. And they're shooting real bullets. And we have to crawl a certain amount, way to get through this place, and then we'd come up. It was tough. Then we went out in bivouacs where you had to march about, oh, twenty miles sometimes, and then you'd camp out, and then you're sleeping in these little tents, then you march all the way back. You'd march all night, you march in your sleep, actually. [Laughs] So, well, I guess that's the training, that's what the training is for. But since the war ended over there in Germany, our criteria was to be in sixteen weeks of training, but I think they cut us off at thirteen and then they sent us to Fort Meade, and then from there they reclassified you. Well, at that time, my mother had a heart problem and she had a heart operation, so I got separated from my group because I got to go home on furlough to visit my mom, and she was in a hospital there. So I visited her, and I was gone for two weeks, I got to go home for two weeks. Then when I got back, my unit all left, so I had to jump in another unit, and this unit went to Fort Snelling. And I was told to go to classes there, and like I said earlier, I couldn't hack it. So neither could this other kid that I was with, we said... he knew what to do, so I says, "Well, let's do it." Okay, so we did that, and we got stuck into CIC, and that's the best place in the army is the CIC.

AC: Why is that?

IK: Well, it's the Counterintelligence Corps, they called it. And you don't have to wear a uniform all the time, you don't have to wear, nobody wears any gray, you're either a sergeant or, well, the highest grade you can get was warrant officer, but you don't have to even show that. You got a certain amount of authority, let's put it that way. But that Holabird used to be an FBI school, so we went there, and we learned how to pick locks and do surveillance work. In fact, we had to train in the town of Baltimore, we had to surveil, we had to follow, a certain person was designated as the culprit, and we, two of us had to follow him. And we'd take turns, and he'd say, "it's your turn," and he'd walk away. We did all that just to learn all that stuff. I got to learn how to fingerprint, and there was a lot of things we had to do. And we still had to do language, too. There was a couple of fellows there that they wanted to, they asked him to stay back and be language teachers, because they were good at... there was one kid that I played bridge with, and he went to Japan, schooling, and he was pretty good at it. So they wanted him to stay, but he didn't want to stay.