I knew from the beginning that I wanted to fight my war in the air.
There seemed to be some sort of an appeal about it,
or a sense of excitement,
so that was my objective.
So within three weeks of Pearl Harbor,
I went out to Fort Lewis, Washington
to apply to the Army Air Corps.
I wanted to become a fighter pilot.
And much to my surprise,
I failed a colour vision test.
And I continued to take the test at other locations
over a period of time,
until, gradually, I memorised what I should see -
what numbers and symbols I should see in the test -
and then I passed it.
But it was not until I got to Anchorage, Alaska
and I was working for the corps of engineers
while I was still trying to get into service,
and I passed it up there,
in early August of 1942.
That is, the day they were killed, we talked about the circumstances,
and we packed up their things,
and maybe at the officers club that night, if we went in there,
we might talk a little bit about what the angle of the flak had been
so we could try to avoid certain approaches on targets.
But then we never talked about them again.
We never talked about them again.
It's just as if they did not exist.
Yet, the killing we did
haunted us all the time.
We thought about... or, I did - I can't speak for the others.
But it was the killing - the numbers of...
Orders were being prepared
to send me to a fighter squadron - fighter group -
flying off Okinawa,
to participate in the invasion of Japan.
And when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
on August 6, 1945,
and we started to comprehend what this meant.
And then the second was dropped on Nagasaki, four days later,
we realised that our war was over,
and that we were going to live through this thing.
I can't believe that it ended like that, so fast,
and those of us that were primed again,
fortified psychologically and emotionally to go back to war,
were now reprieved,
and we would be able to go on with our life.
I've never been able to understand
the objection to the fact that the atomic bomb was dropped.
We just burned all the adrenaline our body could produce,
and sometimes when we would come home and land our aeroplane
and taxi up to our hardstand and turn off the engines,
we would just collapse, just sitting there in the cockpit.
There was nothing else left.
We had burned all the adrenaline,
we had used all the energy that we had, and we just...
Sometimes I had to be helped out of the cockpit.
Fellow who owned the building... (Clears throat)
...said that we had to leave
because his son was coming home from the Pacific.
His son had been injured,
and he didn't want any 'Japs' in his apartment building.
And so she gave us notice,
and I said, "But my sister-in-law is pregnant.
"She's expecting in August, end of August."
The baby was born about the 21 st.
But he's... he was adamant,
and so we looked in the papers, and St Paul was just...
...there was no place to be rented.
We went after ad after ad, looking at places.
They were just little, you know...
...places not really livable, to me.
My sister-in-law and I both went to check them out.
She was pregnant and it was such a chore.
And so finally, I said, "You know what?
"I'm going to go over and talk to this fellow."
First of all, I went at the front, and his wife...
It was a Sunday and it was a beautiful day,
and his wife and her friends were sitting in the front.
And I said, "I'd like to talk to Mr Lauer."
"Mr Lauer is in the back. He's watering."
So I walked to the back of the garden,
and he wouldn't turn off the hose at first - he saw who I was.
And on top of that, he was very hard of hearing.
So I said, "Mr Lauer, I need to talk to you!"
And I told him - I said, "You know, my husband is in the Pacific.
"He's with military intelligence.
"He's fighting side-by-side with your son and others like your son."
And I said, "I'm sorry that he was injured,
"but you just have to understand
"that we're on the same side, and my husband..."
You know, I made this plea,
and "Eh?" and a couple of times he couldn't hear,
and then finally he turned off his hose and he listened,
and didn't say yes, no or anything.
He didn't comment.
And so I went away, thinking, "Well, I tried my best."
And I left and didn't hear anything after.
We just... we were able to stay.
So I thought, "Well, it must have worked."
So I guess I reached him.
And I told him, I said, "Be sure to ask your son,
"'cause he'll tell you that these Nisei boys are fighting with you,
"you know, fighting with them right there."
He was two years older than I was,
but it seemed like he needed my help more than I needed his.
He was a sweet kid, easily, um...
...so agreeable, and a little bit gullible, you know?
And very good-looking.
And I just felt that he needed me,
and him leaving like that really broke my heart, I tell you.
And, of course, my mother -
that meant two boys now were in the service.
And, um...
...it was really hard to give them up.
From his letters, you couldn't tell.
He was a reserved person,
and I don't think he wanted us to know,
because he was probably protective of Mother and I,
and my other brother.
He's a wonderful guy, anyway.
No, he never, never complained.
We lived with that.
That was part of our part we had to play.
He never got a chance to go to a camp to regroup or whatever,
rest and relaxation or be analysed.
And a friend of his, a Fresno boy that was a friend of both of us,
came back from over there, and he had seen him in Germany.
And he said, "He looked terrible, and I think they should send him home."
Well, it didn't happen,
and when he did get discharged and came home,
he came to Sacramento
and stayed with us for about two days, or three days.
He seemed fine.
He was kind of a quiet kid anyway,
so there was no way for me to know.
I didn't detect anything,
that he was really suffering from trauma.
So he went home to my mother in Fresno,
and inside of a week, she was calling me and telling me
that she thought my brother was having some problems, emotionally.
I guess his...
...it was overpowering, I guess, the depression and the trauma,
and stress of it all,
until he just hung himself from the kitchen light
and my mother came in and found him.
Yeah. So...
Yeah. He was 22.
War can be rough.
My poor mother. She was never quite the same.
My grandfather trained me to be a warrior.
The intertribal war days were over.
But being... (Clears throat)... uh...
...a warrior in his time,
before the reservation was settled,
he kept training me to become a warrior.
Then, of course, I would ride horses all my life.
Ever since I was a little boy.
But in the wintertime...
...he would wake me up early in the morning.
Said, "Alright - don't put your shoes on, don't put your clothes on."
Running round the house, barefooted.
Maybe 15, 20 below zero.
Every morning,
it was tradition with those old Indian men
to take a dip in the river.
So in wintertime, we'd go to the river there -
maybe 15, 20 below zero -
we'd go to the river and he'd cut a hole in the ice.
It was already cut, but he had to cut it again for his horses.
So he'd remove the thin layer of snow, uh, ice,
then we'd go in there.
I tell you, that's pretty cold, you know.
He trained me to be physically strong.
By his training,
and my observing the activities around me, in my environment...
...the movement of the animals and the blowing of the wind,
direction and so forth.
So I was generally well aware
of what I'm doing and what I'm going to do.
So during World War II,
I was not afraid -
I knew what I was doing and I knew I was going to be alright.
So he trained me that way, mentally.
I was ready to go overseas.
And a cousin of mine had just come back from Europe.
He was a tail gunner.
And then, before he left,
a medicine man, a sun dance medicine man -
powerful, sacred powers.
So he gave my cousin an eagle feather,
a fluffy feather, painted yellow.
"Alright," he said, "put that inside of your helmet.
"That's your protection."
That helped a lot too, you know.
So long as that sacred protective feather
was in my helmet,
I was never afraid of anything.
I never panicked,
and I think I survived
quite adequately.
Some soldiers get excited and get scared,
panic and run, and they get shot down.
But I'm always in charge of myself.
I know what the enemy's going to do,
so I was alright.
And that little medicine in there -
I think that kind of gave me that...
...uh...
...feeling of having power over myself and the enemy.
I've seen a lot of sad situations.
People getting killed, lying there.
Civilians, soldiers -
both American soldiers, German soldiers.
And one of the worst I've witnessed was...
...we were advancing into this little town,
and, uh...
...and our company commander
stepped on a mine.
Boy. Both legs were gone.
There were just these stubs.
And so he was sitting there,
and I was standing there and couldn't help but look at him.
I was scared, you know, shook up.
And he looked at his legs and he fell over dead.
He died.
That was terrible.
Yeah, that was terrible.
I sang a song belonging to a chief who used to live here.
A chief by the name of Grey Bull.
And he would sing that
whenever they'd meet the Cheyennes, you know?
And when they do that,
they're ready to clash,
why, a Cheyenne medicine man would sing a song.
I mean, a Crow medicine man by the name of Grey Bull
would sing this song,
and the words would go, would say,
"The Cheyennes are coming now
"To do battle
"Today I shall run over one of them
"Yes, I ran all over them."
All of them. So I sang that song.
First it was the dead German boys lying all over the field of battle,
and beginning to turn yellow and so forth,
their eyes open.
I'd never seen a cadaver with eyes open before.
I'd seen dead people, like my relatives, in coffins and so on.
Their eyes were always decently closed.
And when you see violently killed people,
with holes in them and missing limbs and so on,
staring at you with open eyes as if they were alive,
you feel terribly disconnected from things.
Are you supposed to say something to them?
Are you supposed to say, "I'm sorry. Did it hurt much?" and so forth?
And I was still in command of my platoon,
and we attacked a German position through a smokescreen
which was so thick that you didn't know where you were.
It's a bizarre thing.
It was a technique dating from ground warfare from the First World War,
but we did it anyhow.
And there were dead Germans all the way along,
and people were stepping on mines and blowing their feet off, and things.
And my people were relatively untouched.
And when we had to clear a woods,
a small woods that was separated from everything else,
maybe a half-mile wide and a mile long,
and the Germans had been preparing that defensively, that position,
for months, probably since Normandy.
And we attacked it cheerfully, as cheerfully as we could,
running in with our rifles at port arms and so on,
through machine-gun fire,
and a number of people were hit and killed by that.
On my left, I remember, I was lying on my stomach,
trying to keep as low as possible to avoid this machine-gun stuff
that was going on about an inch above my head,
so close that I could feel the heat of the bullets as they passed by.
One of these replacements, who'd never impressed me very much,
'cause he was rather fat and clumsy,
he kneeled up, and he was aiming at a machine gun
some distance from us.
And before he could get a shot off,
they hit him
with, I think, about three bullets.
And I saw only his back - I didn't see his face or anything else.
Out of his back, there flew what looked like little clouds of dust.
But they were powdered blood, they were bits of flesh tissue,
and they were pieces of cloth uniform.
And about three of these came at me,
and then he collapsed, and that was the end of him.
When I came out of the war, I could not be recognised,
and I had a terrible time with my family,
'cause they'd been reading the 'Saturday Evening Post'
and 'Life' magazine all during the war,
and they thought it was a sort of cheerful game that we won.
They knew I was in the infantry
but they thought that was a branch of the service
where you did a lot of running,
you know, moving, athletic stuff and so forth.
They had no idea that it was about close-up killing.
The mission of the infantry, as I learned in training many times,
was that the infantry is charged
with a mission of getting as close as possible to the enemy
and destroying him,
and that means tear him to bits, if possible.
So that was impossible for my parents even to understand.
I had some notes, fairly bloodthirsty, that I'd written about the war,
and I gave them to my dad afterwards and he couldn't finish them.
About all the 'good war' stuff -
to say that I'm offended would be a grave understatement.
I'm appalled by it, by the lack of imagination of Americans,
by the obligatory optimism of Americans,
by their difficulty in understanding
the troubles of people who are less well-placed than they are -
I'm talking about the poor,
and the infantry are the poor, in time of war.
I've had a very difficult time, sometimes,
trying to explain what happened to me.
People say, "What's the matter? Why are you so irritable?"
I'll say, "I'm irritable because I thought of a college friend of mine
"who spent the war as an admiral's aide in the Pacific
"and never fired a gun or was fired at.
"And the conflict, the contrast,
"between what he was doing and I was doing
"is just too appalling
"to bear without some kind of emotion of resistance and anger."
I was angry that everybody didn't understand the...
...the... situation of soldiers
who fought the war on the ground.
Well, basically, when you're in OCS,
there were six of us,
and you lived, ate, slept and everything else together.
You studied together, and I still remember it -
it was Gallicly, Galloway, Gamble, Gardiner, Gaughton, Ginsberg.
Forward observers up forward to find targets for the artillery,
and you worked with the infantry.
In our unit, the forward observer, if the infantry was moving,
you had to stay with the lead platoon of the attacking company.
And the reason for that
was that chances are, you wouldn't bring artillery down on yourself.
You'd keep it out in front.
And that was there, but then we also went for targets,
if we could go out and find some targets.
To be perfectly honest, it was boring.
We didn't have but four officers,
and most of the time there wasn't but one available.
If I was not forward, then I had to read the mail.
And it was just about as boring as you could get.
I do recall one fellow
that I just didn't read his letter to his girlfriend -
it was 10 pages every day,
and there just wasn't any sense to it.
He was only writing his wife about a page,
but he was... his girlfriend was in England.
One example was a platoon, which basically had 50 people,
jumped off one morning,
and I happened to hear them on the radio that afternoon.
The battalion commander was asking how many men they had.
They had chocolate - wanted to wait for dark
and they would send up chocolate bars.
He says, "We've got one for each man. How many do you want?"
He says, "Send me five."
He only had five men left out of his platoon.
Himself and four, apparently.
But you just lost folks like mad in there.
I'm sitting, when after I was captured, several days later,
maybe a week - I don't know.
Some time after that,
I was in this little village where I had fired.
As a matter of fact, one round got away from it
and knocked the steeple off the church.
But I'm sitting on the church steps
and this German officer came up,
and he was artillery.
And he could tell I was artillery - you had your brass on your collar.
And he asks me, "Were you the forward observer over there?"
I said, "Yeah. And you up there?" "Yeah."
So he went and got me food.
And he spoke better English than I did.
He'd been to school in England.
And he got caught.
He came over there and got caught up in the war.
He came home, got caught up in the war.
And he was just like I was.
He was just in the war.
So he and I had Old Home Week sitting there on the church steps.
But that was an unusual experience.
But I was glad to see him.
Well, on one, we were on a railroad car,
and the Americans came in, strafing it,
and everybody ran.
You just tried to get away from the train,
and I went out a window and down an incline
and across to where there was a little bridge over a road -
not a big one.
And I slid under there
and there were two or three German soldiers under there
that gave up to me.
I mean, they thought the Americans had landed or something, yeah.
They wanted to surrender to me, and I didn't want them.
I explained to them that I wasn't in any position to take them captive.
But, yeah, they tried to give up to me.
When I went into the Marines, the first thing was...
...we was, uh... um...
...we had a little scrip to eat with.
And when you would stop in a town like Macon, Georgia,
um, the regular marines - there had been no black marines.
So the regular marines would eat in the dining room, in the regular area.
But in order to honour my scrip,
they took me upstairs in the private dining room
and they brought me anything I wanted to eat,
as long as I didn't eat downstairs.
And I immediately ordered a filet mignon with all the trimmings.
It would remind you of home,
and it broke your heart.
For instance, they had bands
that would come out and entertain the troops.
And one band brought out Lena Horne.
And one of these... we had the white troops around us,
and they would make seats
out of making trees even and putting strips,
and this was your seats.
When she came out and said, "Shoo, shoo, shoo, baby,"
a whole strip full of white boys fell off...
...fell off their seats.
We were proud as punch to see Lena Horne and other people -
Count Basie, Duke Ellington.
It really made... this is worth fighting for, is what we thought.
If we can just get back home and get a chance to enjoy some of this.
Our attitude was,
if the Germans or the Japanese won the war...
...the white folk would get on their side
and we'd have to fight both the Germans or Japanese
and the white folk.
So what we did was go over there and win the war,
and then come back up
and pick up the gauntlet where we'd try to get our civil rights.
That was the feeling.
I was on a list somewhere in the navy
to be called up at the appropriate time,
and I was in college, at the University of Minnesota.
And I'd spent my money, and my friends were going.
One of them was already a marine fighter pilot.
That was unendurable -
for me to be a college boy and him to be a marine fighter pilot.
So I felt I had to accelerate this somewhat,
and I went in to the recruiting office,
and there was - to my astonishment - an old friend of mine at the desk.
And I said, "I've got to go."
And as I talked to him, it got more and more intense -
"I've got to go. I'm out of money. Everyone else is going."
And he went to the corner of the room
where there was a great pile of files,
and fingered down to the bottom, pulled one out and put it on top,
and said, "You'll get your orders next week. Don't tell anybody."
And I went out,
and it was like that moment at the beach
when you climb the ladder of the diving board
up to where you usually dive off,
and then keep going to the one where you might jump off,
and keep going still until you get to the very top,
where you've never jumped off before,
and then you step up to the edge and jump.
I felt that I was in empty space.
Something had happened to me that had never happened before
and that I had done it.
You know, as a kid, you don't have an opportunity
to determine your life very often.
Your parents do that for you. Your teachers do that for you.
But I just made a decision that was going to change my life forever.
And it did.
Everybody joined. I wanted to be a pilot.
And everybody was in the air force.
And they wore pink pants and hats with the grommet taken out.
There was something spurious, to me, about those guys.
They flew too high.
I wanted to be in...
I didn't know anything. You have to understand that I was 17 years old.
These were impressions that didn't have any basis in reality.
I also thought that the Marine Corps,
which was an elite of the navy, as I saw it,
and therefore was the best of the best,
would be the organisation to fly with, if I could.
I began flying from a little grass field
north of Dallas.
And it was wonderful.
First experience of being up in the air
and seeing the world down below you,
it's indescribable.
But it adds a dimension to the world you've been living in.
Growing up is a series of tests, inevitably,
motivated partly by curiosity
about what it's like to do things that grown-ups do,
that you've never done before,
and partly a series of tests
of your readiness to be an adult, I think.
By passing the tests,
you earn admission to this class of people
that you think all know what they're doing.
Aviation is...
...certainly, learning to fly is a series of tests.
But you have to remember that, as an 18- or 19- or 20-year-old kid,
you're at the same time still going through the other set of tests.
You're finding out what it's like to be drunk,
you're trying to pass the test with girls
when you really don't know what to do when you get there.
You're trying to live independently,
you're trying to act independently.
You'd be doing those, you see,
whether you were in military training or not.
On top of those, then, are the tests
about soloing an aeroplane and doing your first loop
and dropping your first bomb and so forth.
There was a song which was sometimes...
...the refrain of which sometimes was "Bless 'em all"
and sometimes "Fuck 'em all,"
depending on the audience and who was singing.
And the verses went... (Sings) # They...
# They sent for the...
#... sent for the army to come to Tulagi
# But General MacArthur said no
# He gave as his reason, "This isn't the season
# "Besides, there is no USO"
# Fuck 'em all, fuck 'em all
# The long and the short and the tall
# Fuck all the admirals in ComAirSoPac
# They don't give a damn if we never get back
# So we're saying goodbye to them all
# As back in our foxholes we crawl
# There'll be no promotion this side of the ocean
# But cheer up, my lads, bless 'em all. #
MAN: That's great!
That's the least obscene of my repertoire.
If you want the rest of them, I can oblige.
The atomic bomb was, of course,
an enormous... more than a big help.
It was the end of the war.
And we felt that, and with relief,
but also with a kind of sadness.
We had been turned into artificial adults for a few years
and we'd lived lives that were full of excitement,
and kind of adventurous lives -
lives that we could never have anticipated
back in Minneapolis and Bonesteel.
Now it was all over.
And there was... I'm sure I wasn't the only person who felt,
"Now I will have to go back to being who I really am,
"who is a college undergraduate at the University of Minnesota.
"How boring that will be.
"How narrow and limited that will be.
"What kind of future will I have
"that will be as much fun as being a pilot in the Marine Corps?"
When the Japanese surrendered,
it was announced to us.
We felt... the squadron decided
that it ought to make some gesture of celebration.
And we took off as a squadron, in formation,
and flew out over the fleet in Buckner Bay.
And I expected that was what it was going to be -
we'd fly over the fleet and then we'd go home and land.
And to my astonishment, the man leading the flight
signalled to go into a column.
So we all pulled back, one behind the other,
and dove on the fleet.
And then, to my amazement, he pulled up and did a barrel roll.
Now, a barrel roll in a TBM is like a fat lady dancing -
she shouldn't do it, and you're not even sure she can do it.
But he did it, and then the next plane did it,
and then it was my turn.
And I pulled up and pulled it over,
and all the rubbish and debris in the bottom of the airplane
came floating up into my eyes,
and the crewman in the back rattled around a bit, I guess.
And then we came out
and it was still flying, the wings hadn't fallen off,
and then we went back and landed.
And I reckon what we were doing was giving death one more chance.
It was like the storm.
Of course it could have been me.
But it wasn't.
I grieve for them. I grieve for them every day.
The two or three with whom I was most...
...I was closest to.
But, then, people die in life.
Not that young, but every life has some grief in it.
And you go on living.
I talked recently with a friend of mine.
Her name is Georgine DuVivier-Hall.
She's about my age or a little younger.
Was in college in Pennsylvania during the war,
a little women's college called Wilson College,
where she said they wore white gloves to dinner,
or at least the white gloves were part of it.
She said she really wasn't aware of the war.
There was kind of innocence in this place,
as though the war didn't exist.
But when she went home after the term ended,
she had to sit in a boxcar, sitting on a coffin,
which was a coffin of an American serviceman.
It seemed an odd juxtaposition.
They were casualties from somewhere, being brought home.
A grave responsibility.
I was now in charge of three squads
and that's a total of 41 men.
And then I began to realise why this was done.
If you're an engineer,
you're selected to be an officer because you know mathematics
and logarithms and all of that.
If you're an artillery officer,
I suppose they'll select you
because you know something about trajectory and physics.
Why would they select someone for an infantry officer?
Well, he has to know how to read the maps and the compass.
But he has to know how to kill.
Yeah, that's a horrible thought.
I won't tell you how many men I killed, but, uh...
There are some who count sheep, so they tell me,
but there are times in my life when I count men.
And that's a terrible thought.
Because I'm certain the average person,
if he or she ran over a cat, you'd never forget that.
So how in the world can you forget killing a man, you know?
Well, I was in Oakland, getting ready to get on a ship
for a boat ride back to Hawaii.
I was in my uniform with three rows of ribbons
and the captain's bars on my shoulder.
I must have looked pretty good, like a big hero,
with a hook on my right hand, where it used to be.
And so I thought I'd just get a nice haircut so I'd look neat.
I looked around Oakland, and here was a barbershop.
Three chairs, I remember that. All three empty.
The barbers are just standing around, so I walked in.
This one barber approached me and he looked at me
and he said, "Are you a Jap?"
And, you know, that was a strange welcome.
And I said, "I'm an American."
"Well, I'm asking you, are you a Jap?"
I said, "My father was born in Japan. My mother is Japanese.
"I suppose that makes me one."
"We don't cut Jap hair."
And I thought to myself, "Here I am in uniform.
"It should be obvious to him that I'm an American soldier,
"a captain at that,
"and that fellow very likely never went to war,
"and he's telling me, 'We don't cut Jap hair."'
I was so tempted to strike him,
but then I thought, "If I had done that,
"all the work that we had done would be for nil."
So I just looked at him and I said, "Well, I'm sorry you feel that way,"
and I walked out.
But it became clear to me that what the captain said was very correct -
it's going to be a long struggle.
A tough one.
We all say that if it hadn't been for that childhood that we had,
stressed,
and knowledgeable in matters that were so out of proportion
from regular childhood,
we probably wouldn't be the people we were today.
And it's just like me living in the wine country here,
where I just found out that the more stressed the vine,
the better the wine and the grape is.
So, I didn't know that.
So it makes a lot of sense.
I think Luverne probably was cleaner during the war
than at any time in its history,
primarily because we kids would go out
and we'd go the alleys, back roads, ditches, anything,
to find something out of metal,
because you could get, like, a penny a pound
for something of this nature.
And then if you took them down to the theatre, you could get in -
if you had, like, two, three, four pounds of scrap metal,
you would get a free ticket.
My two brothers and I went out one time and made a horrendous haul.
We just... I don't know.
The one major thing that I remember in there,
we had a brass bedstead.
But we had wheels, old wheels we found.
We had more than enough to get into the theatre.
So the kids who didn't have enough,
we were down on Main Street, right by the theatre,
and we're handing out, you know, "What do you need? Tyre?
"Here's an old rim, here's an old piece of metal," or whatever it was.
And so they'd get in.
Then Doc, who was the manager of the theatre,
came down and told us, "I don't want you doing this anymore.
"These kids have to get their own stuff."
Two pounds of milkweed would make one life vest.
So they gave everybody these sacks, or bags,
and then we would go out looking for milkweed.
And we got two cents a pound for these.
No - we got 20 cents a bag.
OK, now, that's a lot of milkweed stuck in one of these bags.
But we would have our patches,
and the one that I remember was from the Olsen's Dairy
out towards the Blue Mounds, along the old Rock Island railroad.
And we'd go out there at night, or after dinner,
and we would crawl down in these...
You know, it's nothing but weeds and brambles and everything else,
and we're collecting these God-awful milkweed pods.
But we wouldn't tell anybody where we were going,
because we didn't want anybody
finding the milkweed in our patch, kind of thing.
They had... in one year, I think,
there were, like, 1,300 bags that were turned in of this milkweed.
I could never understand
how they were going to take this little bit of stuff
and save some navy pilot who ended up in the Pacific Ocean.
You know, but that was the story we got.
My dad was a warden,
and there were wardens, you know, all around the neighbourhood.
These guys would go out there.
And we'd have these blackouts.
The siren would ring downtown
and you had to turn off all your lights,
unless you had a blackout curtain
that you could put over your window so that no light got out.
The dads - my dad and these other guys -
would go out and they would walk around the neighbourhood.
Now, I couldn't figure out
how the Germans were going to fly all the way across the Atlantic Ocean
and the Japanese were going to fly all the way across the Pacific Ocean
to bomb Luverne.
I mean, I just had no concept of what was going on.
They wanted these guys to have guns,
but, you know, they didn't have any guns for them.
So my dad, the first couple of times he went out, he had a broomstick.
I guess you were supposed to have this notion
that you were carrying a weapon.
He thought that was kind of dumb,
so he'd go out with his 12-gauge shotgun,
but he had no shells or anything.
And then it got to be where these guys would stay out for a while.
And my mother finally figured out
that they may be down at Doc Blake's or Ez Collins's or some place,
having a highball.
So it was more of a social thing, I think, for these men
to protect us from I don't know what,
but they had to go out on these nightly patrols.
Collecting anything at that time was our basic source of income, for kids.
And we could go... Now this seems kind of ridiculous.
But we could go to the pool hall, for example, on a Saturday night,
and have a hot dog and a milkshake and a candy bar
for 25 cents.
The hot dog was a dime, the milkshake was a dime,
the candy bar was a nickel.
And if you had 11 cents, you could go to the movie besides.
So we didn't really need a lot of money, OK,
but what money we got, we got from a lot of the scrap things.
We had an army air base that was 30 miles away,
and a lot of those soldiers came over to Luverne on their R and R,
so we had soldiers around us.
They were flying Liberators and P-47 s out of Sioux Falls,
so we had a lot of airplanes over us.
If some guy was going - dating - one of the Luverne girls, let's say,
and they went up on an exercise,
and he was flying one of these P-47 Thunderbolts,
he would come zooming down Main Street, you know,
like, 200 feet, 200, 300 feet over the city,
you know, and the wings are going like this.
And she's working with a phone company,
she'd know who it was.
I mean, this was kind of a way they were signalling.
And the windows would rattle and people would get all upset,
you know, "These guys shouldn't be doing this,"
but I don't think it ever stopped them.
I remember another funny thing about...
The bombers went up a lot, and we were all excited to see them -
these big Liberators and B-29s, some of these,
that they were flying out of Sioux Falls.
And so we could hear them coming and we'd say, "Bomber! Bomber!"
And everybody would run out the back door
and we'd look up and we'd watch these.
Well, we had a cocker spaniel, Rinky,
and we'd say, "Bomber! Bomber!"
And Rinky would head for the back door, just as fast as he could.
Whether the planes came or not, all you had to say is "Bomber! Bomber!"
And Rinky, he's gone.
And one time, my mother had just waxed the kitchen floor.
And we said, "Bomber! Bomber!"
And Rinky goes tearing out to the back door.
His feet are just churning away like crazy,
falling down, trying to get out the back door to see that.
But that was a... we all ran out to watch these planes go over
and they went over a lot.
You know, there was terrible confusion during combat.
Just unbelievable.
I mean, no-one knew what was going on.
I don't think the Germans did either.
But one of the most confusing things was the radio.
We always had a radio in some place around us
so that we could contact headquarters and they were asking where we were.
Call for artillery fire -
you could talk to the artillery observer.
But the radio was just madness
because there was always some guy pinned down in a terrible situation,
screaming for help,
and then a very cool, calm guy in the background
saying, "This is Rabbit 3. This is Rabbit 3."
And this guy would say, "Cut that crap out!
"Christ Almighty. We're getting fired on!"
But this coming from all directions.
Well, when the war ended, I believe I was in Paris
and living a very, very splendid life.
It was very, very good.
I was working for a branch of 'Stars and Stripes' called 'Army Talks',
which was a magazine that was put out,
and travelling rather freely,
and had some nice girlfriends
and a very, very interesting, mature group of guys
who educated me more than the college had educated me.
Uh, they were...
And when the war ended in Japan,
it wasn't the great celebration to Parisianers,
but to we in the army,
who had thought maybe we'd get sent to Japan or something,
it was a great celebration.
And Paris was a great place to celebrate in,
so we did lots of celebrating there.
Quite unlike VE Day.
You know, I did shoot a fellow one time,
and it was in Bayreuth,
you know, the home of Wagner.
And there was a river that split the town in half
and we'd moved down to the river and we were in a little bar.
And our radio, it came through from way up in back of us
that there was a squad of Germans coming down the road that we were at.
And we watched them, and they came down,
and they went in a building across the street.
And we really didn't want to put up a big fight,
but pretty soon one came out and came down
and looked at the bridge that had been blown, that we were,
and then trotted up the road, a couple of blocks.
And we thought, "Well, the squad up there will pick him up."
Pretty soon he came trotting back,
so we realised, "There's no squad there."
So we sort of... everybody said, "Why don't you shoot him?"
"Oh, you shoot him."
I ended up having to shoot him.
Well, I shot him, and the next thing I knew, I was out there.
He flew up in the air,
and two of us, next thing we knew, we were out there nursing him.
Drag him back, and then the squad came out from across the street
and surrendered.
That's the only one I'm ever sure I...
I shot at lots and lots of things,
but you're shooting at smoke,
you were shooting at where you could see machine-gun fire coming from,
you were shooting at tanks, which was useless.
You never knew what you were doing.
That was the only case where you could really see somebody,
and nobody really wanted to do it.
Here he was, and he was doing no harm,
and he was really just trying to retreat,
but we couldn't think of any other way to do it.
Our movie stars in those days
were guys like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart
and Edward G. Robinson and those guys.
You know, we grew up on adventure stories.
What is the reason for a story to exist?
It's to take you out of a drab existence, isn't it,
into a different world.
That was how we grew up and those were our aims.
And when the real war broke out,
it did give many of us... many Latinos enlisted -
you know, thousands.
And I suspect that, in the back of their minds,
there was James Cagney doing his thing in a war movie or something.
But they did OK in reality.
Especially on lwo Jima,
we did find many, many Japanese who had killed themselves.
They shot themselves, they blew themselves up with hand grenades,
they disembowelled themselves with their knives, they... you know.
And sometimes when we threatened to blow their caves up
and bury them alive,
they in effect said, "Screw you. Go ahead and do it."
And we did. We buried a lot of them alive.
Our attitude was "Better them than us," you know?
And we had a saying in the Marine Corps -
"The Japanese want to die for the emperor, and we want to help them."
And that was basically it. It's that simple.
You know, you're in a war. You're not going to be feeling...
You feel sorry for a guy
when you see that he held a hand grenade to his belly
and blew himself up,
but very briefly.
I mean, that's the guy who potentially might have killed you
or one of your buddies.
They were tough people.
So, you know, if they wanted to blow themselves up,
that was one less guy to nail you.
And the shelling was so intense,
I thought I was going to lose my mind.
And I thought, "Gee, I've been in this too damn long already.
"I can't take it anymore."
But I didn't realise until later, when we were told about that defence,
how effective that defence was and how much artillery we were taking.
I thought it was me.
That was my worst moment.
That night... that night we were gathered,
and the lieutenant came over
and he said, "If we're driven off the beach," he said,
"try to swim towards the transports."
And we thought, "Jesus! What is he saying to us?"
I know that sounds ridiculous, but they actually told us that.
If we're driven off the beach, start swimming for the trans... (Laughs)
I'm a Mexican! I didn't even know how to swim right!
I sink like a rock.
So, you know, for us, it was like the Japanese - it was do it or too bad.
We met the cadets when they were training over in Pensacola.
And I had one cute boyfriend who was from the Midwest.
And when he knew he would have Saturday night free,
he would fly his training flight over Mobile
and dive down and buzz my house twice.
And that way, I knew he'd be over that Saturday night.
And I was not to date anyone else -
I was to save that Saturday night for Norm.
So I had an old maid neighbour across the street,
and every Saturday she'd sit on her front porch
and wait to see if we'd be buzzed.
And when he buzzed me, she'd come running across the parkway out here,
yelling, "Katharine, he's coming! Katharine, he's coming tonight!
"I just heard him!"
So the whole neighbourhood was alerted
to whether he would come or not.
Well, the last person we thought would ever be killed
was my Uncle Charlie Tucker.
He was such a... macho person.
He just did everything well.
And we just never thought anything would happen to Charlie.
If anyone would come through the war, it would be Charlie.
So when the news came that Charlie was missing in action
at Guadalcanal,
we were devastated.
We kept thinking
they would find him on an island, alive.
We kept thinking that maybe his plane had gone down some place
where he could get ashore and be saved.
In fact, it was four years before we finally gave up,
that they would never find Charlie,
because we just did not think the Lord would take him.
But you know the wonderful thing? He stays 22 years old.
WOMAN: That's beautiful.
During the entire war, I made up my mind
that I would never marry a man in uniform,
because I loved the uniforms.
So I thought, "Well, then, maybe I would marry him
"and realise I didn't like him at all,
"that it was all the uniform."
So I did not marry till after the war
because of that as much as anything.
And the man I did marry had on a uniform,
but it was a pilot's uniform.
And I never saw him in his dress navy uniform till the day I married him,
and he wore it in our wedding.
So... Oh, and I did like him in it.
I really did!