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JS: I was in a tank destroyer battalion until we, I got pulled off there after a couple of months. Then the whole, they made a troop train of Nisei soldiers, and they sent us all inland. And we ended up in Midwest, various military posts in the Midwest, and I was one of those who ended up at Fort Harrison, Indiana, which is outside of Indianapolis. I was medic in the station hospital. I got some more schooling there. I went to medical technician school. I learned how to take care of, or help take care of medical and surgical, psychiatric patients and everything. So I, and I spent a year and a half there. And then, meanwhile, I'm volunteering all the time, trying to get in a combat unit. This is before the 442nd was being formed. But the guys around me, no Nisei ever got shipped out. I was, they were with a quartermaster. The largest share of the Nisei on that post were quartermaster and service companies, I think. I forget, there were quite a delegation of us in the station hospital. But in 1943 order came that eighty of us who wanted to volunteer for the 442nd could. Twenty-six of us went, left Fort Harrison, most of them from quartermaster or service companies. And I joined that group, and we ended up in Mississippi on the first day of August, I think, or the 31st of July of '43. The regiment, the 442nd had just finished their garrison training, they were ready to go out on field trips, and the temperature was about a hundred degrees and the humidity, I think, was about the same. I almost, I thought I was gonna die the first week I was down there. If you never, you've never experienced what a, what it is to be without water discipline, it's quite an experience, 'cause when, I guess we'd been there about a week and we were going on an overnight bivouac, and not very far out, maybe six, seven miles -- but that's about a, well, I think a two to three hour march -- and I was so thirsty on the, I think on the first break, or by the time the second break came along, I'd drunk all my canteen full of water, and I just couldn't hardly stand it. I got, when we got to our bivouac area, they put up blister bags and treat the water, so you're about an hour before you get any water to drink. And I had drunk all mine up and I'm beggin' for water. You heard of the Masaoka family, Mike Masaoka, who ran the, Mike was one of the people who moved to have the government allow Nisei to serve. But anyway, one of his brothers, Ike, was in the medics, and Ike gave me his water. I just, I think with about two gulps I drank a quart of water down. And I made it, but that is just an example of how bad it can be. Now, after I'd been, I spent a year and a half in this MP and I don't know how many times we'd been on marches, full field packs and twenty-five mile marches, I could make a twenty-five mile march in the summertime without even taking a drink of water, after I'd been there a year.

But that was, that's how I ended up in Mississippi. And that is the most important part of my service time. I think everything, so much of my life kind of builds up to a certain point, and in my, all my military time, that time was the most important, meaningful time I ever had in service. And the guys that came from Hawaii and all the guys that I met in the regiment while we were training, we weren't together very long really, in a matter of how long of your life a period is, and so I, the guys that went overseas, the main combat team, went over, left Camp Shelby in, I think, I believe it was late January. Yeah, something like that, because they went, I went with them to, I think it was Camp Mead, Maryland, as the medic on the troop train. But the training we went through and all the -- and the training in Mississippi is pretty rough, too. It wasn't as bad as Louisiana, but it was pretty rough. And the friends we made, and of course, we're all the same kind of people there. I mean, we're all rice burners, and we could, we'd trade, 69th Division, we'd, the cooks would, they'd trade them big loaves of cheese for bags of rice. They'd give us their rice and give 'em all their cheese and stuff like that. But, and then of course, this was the outfit I lived with and lost friends, made friends and lost friends. And so to this day, I have no, I have no communication with any of the people I trained with in any other time I was in service. I've looked for them after I came out of service and never could find people, Idaho and up in some boonies out in Washington or Oregon, never could find most of 'em. And in the mainland medics, I don't get together with 'em. I get together with some now since I joined the Nisei Vets in Seattle, but most of the medics I get together are from Hawaii, and they're not from the outer islands, they're from Oahu, because they're close enough they can get together. But other islands, you have to look specific people up, and some of 'em are, most of 'em are gone now. Like on Kauai, why, they would get up, land up there at Lihue and, when I first went there in '64 there's no, hardly any motels up there except the real fancy one where they made the movies and stuff like that, but I had one buddy up there. He saved up his coffee hours waitin', so when I got there, why, he's saved all the time, he's accumulated his coffee hours, he just took off from work and spent with me and my family. We went all over Kauai. Kauai wasn't, was kind of primitive yet, and the windward side, why, there wasn't much developed yet. In fact, we didn't even go that way. We went the other way, up on top of the mountain, up to, what's that, the Waimea River, where that grotto is where they sing the wedding song?

AC: Hanalei.

JS: My kids still sing that wedding song. They sing the wedding song at weddings, and... course, my kids all play, are a little bit musical, and so we just have a great time. But anyway, that's all my, that's the big thing in my life in the military.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.