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SS: After we had, I think probably it was the next summer, my timeframes may be a little off, but army recruiters started coming to the centers to recruit for the armed services; and in Heart Mountain, we had some upheaval over that. We had, you know, the "no-no boys" who said that, you know, why should they go serve in the armed services when their parents were behind armed guards in these centers. But of course, some people did sign up and go. One of the saddest days was I was walking down to the front gate, and I don't know for what purpose, but on my way down, I met this lady that lived in a couple of barracks from where we lived, and I really didn't know her very well just from sight, and she was crying, and she was coming towards me. She had been up to the, they had a little office at the gate, the front gate. She was coming from there, and I was heading down towards the gate, and she was crying. And so I stopped her, and I asked her if I could help her, and she said that her son had, who had volunteered for the service had come to tell her good-bye because he was being shipped out the next week. He was going to Europe. And she said that she might never see him again, and so we talked a little bit, and I decided I wouldn't go up to the gate. I don't know, it wasn't anything very important anyway. So I walked her back to her barracks, and we talked. And then I used to go see her, drop by and see her, once in a while. This was an only child, and she was a widow, and so this was, you know, the only family she had. And pretty soon, I noticed that she, you know, had a flag up on her window and signifying that she had a son in the service. And it couldn't have been more than a month or a month and a half, and she got word that he had been killed in Europe. And you know, she was just totally devastated, and it was just so sad because this was the only family member that she had. And I used to think how sad it was that, you know, here she was imprisoned in a camp, you know, surrounded by barbwire and guard towers, and she gives up the only family member that she has to the service, and I'm sure she wasn't an isolated incident. It was just someone that I happened to know.

The guard towers, when we were first placed there, were manned with sentries who had guns pointed in, at the camp residents, but the administration told us that they were there to protect us in case, I don't know whether they thought the Indians would come romping over the hills or what, but anyway, they were there. But after, it must have been maybe six, eight months, they removed the sentries and the guard towers were empty. But while the armed sentries were still up in the towers, and they had searchlights, we were told not to go within 15 feet of the barbed wire fence. And we had a very unfortunate incident where a little boy was shot, he chased a ball. And of course being a child -- and probably even I wouldn't have remembered that you weren't supposed to go within 15 feet of the barbed wire fence. So there were some, you know, there was quite a bit of upheaval, and that was the only instance that I can remember of that kind of incidents taking place. There were some protests over, I think, food. There were certainly some protests when the army recruiters would come in to recruit for volunteers.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.