Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

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GI: But to tell you the story, I want to tell you the story about my brother Tom because he has a, he had a different kind of a story. My brother Tom married a German American girl about 1935. When times were tough and my older brothers were out chasing around with the hakujin male friends and hakujin girlfriends and things like that, it was a no, no, no deal. In fact, my older brother had a reputation of doing something bad, and that was dating hakujin girls. Okay. But he, my brother Tom, I had mentioned that he did not drink or smoke, and he was the conscientious one, really conscientious, and he lived at home at the time, and he became friends with this Winona Meerbaum, and became quite serious. And he brought her home to our home and presented her and asked my folks if they would object to them getting married. And guess what? My mother and dad said, "Tom, if she's your choice and vice versa, you have our blessing." It was an unheard of situation because I'll bet you nine out of ten similar marriages, it broke up the whole family. They even got to a point where they wouldn't speak to each other. But my folks were wise enough I guess to foresee the future and probably the idea that my dad had become fluent in English. My dad had a lot of association with Caucasian people. My brothers had a lot of association with Caucasian people just as well as we did, and that must have made things that different. See, the war wasn't on or anything yet. Anyway, most of the marriages like that broke up the family. My brother and his wife just became, just, I think, that much stronger for the whole family that, well, it was a great deal. People couldn't talk bad about my brother Tom because he was specimen of a good man, you see.

Well anyway, when evacuation time came along, my brother woke me up. Tom came and woke me up to get my wife and I to move across the river, and same side my brother Tom and them lived, he lived in Auburn at the time. So my brother Tom, they didn't have any children yet. My brother Tom negotiated with the authorities and got permission to go to the Puyallup Assembly Center where the Seattle bunch went when we were going to go to Pinedale which is 800 miles away, and they accepted that. So my brother Tom who goes into Pinedale Assembly Center, I mean the Puyallup Assembly Center, and we used to go visit with him because it was open for us yet you see. There's a camp right in our backyard, but we were allowed to go to that camp, and we visit outside of the gates and we'd go up there and make an appointment or something. I don't know how we did it, but we had an appointment to see my brother Tom at the fence. Well, his wife stayed out of camp because she didn't have to go, and she started taking care of all the details of my brothers and the rest of our family and the other brothers and everything. And so she was driving the truck and everything else doing all these things. So that was a very unusual situation there because many, many Caucasian wives went to camp and lived with their husbands in the camps. There were several in the Puyallup Camp. And, but Tom's wife stayed out of camp even after we were shipped out, and so she was all alone then because Tom was in the camp in Puyallup and we were all down in California. And she, thank goodness, she stayed there and took care of everything that she could.

But at that time, evacuation time, my brother Mike who had volunteered for the service, I got a deferment. I didn't ask for it. They gave me a deferment because my brother Mike was designated as a head of the family because my dad was interned on the night of December the 7th. Anyway, my brother Mike was in Arkansas I think in Camp Robinson, and he called me one time, at that time. "George," he says, "go to the Red Cross and get me an emergency furlough." He says, "I got to come home and help clean things up," and even after you're gone, that was what he was after to help with things after I'm gone. So I said, "Well yeah, I'll do it." And he thought sure he would do it. Well, I went to the Red Cross and nothing doing. "Your brother's in uniform. Whether he's in uniform or not, he comes here, he's going to have to leave the same time the rest of you leave. That wasn't, that didn't make sense, but that's, you may not have an incident like that in any other reason, so he never got to come home. Here's another reason of my bitterness of not wanting to volunteer to serve, and I'd have gone if they had called me, but they never called me.

[Interruption]

GI: Well, as I talked about my brother Mike, in February, I think it was, 1942, because my father was interned on the night of December 7, 1941, my brother Mike, who was single, was deferred by the draft board as a head of the family, and that really didn't mean much because he probably wouldn't have had to go anyway because of his age. He was thirty-three, thirty-three years old then, so I don't know particularly what the situation was then. But anyway, when he volunteered for the services, he tried everyone; the marine, the navy, the coast guard, air force, everything, and they wouldn't even talk to him, but they would take him in the army. So he went to the army. But I told him at the time that, "Mike, my number was up." They were ready to call me. And so the draft board wouldn't budge, but they told him, "Well, you go, and if you get accepted in the service, then we'll use that as a consideration for what we'd do with George," in which case they deferred me so that my wife and I were married a month before the war, and we were right there anyway, so we could look after the family even though my father wasn't there.

Then another thing that happened as far as my brother Mike is concerned that upset me and upset him, too, of course, and a lot of us, was that he was at I think it was Camp Robinson, Arkansas, and had attained the rank of I think they call it T-4. It was a technical sergeant. So you would think that if he were transferred to the infantry or wherever it was, that didn't make sense for us anyway because he was able to do this clerical work which was valuable to the government as well. But that if they should take him to any other department that he would retain his rank. But when he got transferred to Fort McClellan I think it was for training, they busted him. They took his rank away from him, so he became a buck private, and you know, that really, really got us to thinking that that didn't make sense. And then he came home on furlough, and we talked about it. He wrote us letters and said that he's quite sure that his disability in his knee or something would keep him from going to infantry, so he's hoping that he doesn't have to go to battle. Bang, bang, bang, he was gone. They shipped him overseas, and I don't, I think that was the first battle he was in was the Battle of the Lost Battalion, the Bruyeres/Biffontaine area. And he was probably, we have a couple of letters from him. And from the letters we received, he probably was out there two or three days before he got hit. We have his medical records. I've got it in my file, and he was just shattered in his guts. But here's the thing that, another thing that bothered us was that his wife got a, she was here, got a telegram stating that he was injured in, "slightly wounded in action" on October the 29th. Then we had hopes that, well, we hoped that he doesn't have something that's so simple he's got to get back out there and get on the lines again. Oh, about thirty days -- I think my sister-in-law still has that telegram -- about thirty days after, a telegram came saying that "we regret to inform you that he died from wounds on November the 4th." Well, "slightly wounded" and thirty days later they come back and tell us that he died after we thought he was still living. That didn't make us feel good. And so that's my story of my brother after he was there. He was buried in the Epinal American Cemetery in France nearby Biffontaine and Bruyeres and later moved to, brought here, then the final burial was in Washelli Cemetery in Seattle. I got to collect my thoughts here. Well, I can't think of it right now. But anyway, so that was it. I remained deferred.