The War Relocation Authority offered children a small selection of recreation opportunities, like baseball and scouting. One of the Wyoming scoutmasters wanted his local Boy Scout troop to visit the children inside the barbed wire for activities, but the white families refused, certain their kids would be harmed or killed, either by the people who were incarcerated or by the men in the watchtowers.
“These children are Americans, who read the same handbook and say the same oath as you, we should go,” Scoutmaster Glenn Livingston insisted.[13] Eventually, a Boy Scout jamboree was planned for inside the Heart Mountain camp. Dozens of young boys were paired in pup tents for the sleepover, eyeing each other warily. They spent the day tying knots, starting fires without matches, and actively playing tricks on each other. As night drew nearer and the canvas tents were erected, the boys each built a small moat around their tent in case it rained.
Norm and his tent partner dutifully shoveled out their trench, and his partner said, “There’s a kid from my troop in that tent right there, and I don’t really like him much. Do you care if we direct the water from our moat that way?”
Norm said, “I don’t care, it’s no skin off my nose.”
When rain began to fall during the night, Norm’s tent partner began to laugh hysterically, so much so that Norm had to whisper, “Keep it down, buddy!” The boys stuck their heads out of the tent long enough to watch the water from their moat flood the tent of the other, unliked scout, sweeping it off its stakes, toppling it over.
This struck both of them as tremendously funny, and they collapsed into their sleeping bags, burying their faces in their pillows to stifle their laughter. Now bonded over their shared peskiness, they saw each other again every time a Boy Scout activity occurred. Norm’s new friend felt it was unfair that American boys should be imprisoned behind barbed wire. They wrote letters back and forth, keeping up their correspondence for years, even after Norm’s family was allowed to leave the camp near the end of the war. The Minetas moved to Illinois, where Kay taught Japanese to members of the military.[14]
When Norm joined the military after college and was deployed overseas during the Korean War, he and his friend lost touch. Norm’s family was one of the lucky ones—after their incarceration ended and they spent a few years in Illinois, they were able to return to their California home, which had been rented out to a college professor in their absence. Most other Japanese families didn’t have the same good fortune, their lives and livelihoods forever disrupted by the stroke of a president’s pen.
Twenty
Daniel InouyeEurope, 1943
When Daniel finished high school, he wanted to join the war effort. The day after the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States declared war on Japan, and men were being drafted to fight, not just in the South Pacific, but also in Europe and Africa against the Nazis. Daniel was shocked to receive a piece of mail that showed his draft status had been changed: no longer a 1A, fit and ready to serve, but 4C: an enemy alien. Japanese Americans were to be excluded from military service.
Instead of joining the army, Daniel decided to fulfill his promise to become a doctor. Japanese Americans living in Hawaii largely escaped incarceration, thanks to some local officials who stood up to U.S. military generals. One was a police captain who said, “I have complete confidence in Hawaii’s Japanese Americans.”[1] Plus, to move most of the population off some of the islands would be next to impossible, and they made a convincing case to higher-ups that they could just step up enforcement.
One day, Daniel heard a knock at the door. When he opened it he found three armed and uniformed men demanding his father’s prized possession: a new shortwave radio. His dad had registered it as required, so he was sure they just wanted to check it out and make sure all was well. Instead, one of the officers pulled out a screwdriver. He plunged the screwdriver into the back of the radio, snapping the wiring inside. He pulled the tubes out and smashed them on the ground.
Daniel felt sick inside as his father watched them destroy his radio. “Here,” his father said, grabbing an axe. “Let me help you.” Daniel watched as his father smashed his own radio into tiny splinters. “Now you’ll never have to worry about it, eh?” he said. “My son will clean up the mess.”
Throat tight, Daniel choked out, “He gave blood twice.”[2] His father was a good American. His eyes blurred at the men’s cruelty. It would have been enough to disable the radio. Destroying it entirely was inhumane.
Japanese Americans, the Nisei generation, citizens at birth, petitioned the government repeatedly to allow them to contribute to the war effort. For over a year, the petitions fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, Daniel kept up his pre-med studies. Finally, in March 1943, President Roosevelt agreed to form a segregated military unit of Nisei. Eighty percent of eligible Japanese Americans volunteered for military service. They bought more war bonds than any other group.[3] But they would only be allowed to serve in Europe—the Pacific theater was too great a security risk.
The young Nisei, thirty-three hundred of them, reported for duty, their oversize packs dwarfing their average five-foot-five stature. Their training in Mississippi had to be extra rigorous, because the Japanese American men would stand alone in battle, unsupported by other units. They would have their own equipment, their own mechanics, their own medics, all Japanese Americans. They, too, were forced to ride with the window shades drawn when they passed through towns, so as not to scare the white people who might be watching.
Daniel joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose motto was “Go for Broke.” [4] When he left, his parents put their hands on his shoulders. “You do not dishonor this family,” they said, “and you do not dishonor this country. If you must die, die with honor.”[5]
He had never fired a gun before—not even a BB gun. His mother was such a devout Christian that she “didn’t want anything like that in the household.” So it was a surprise to Daniel that he was an excellent shot, and one of his first assigned jobs was that of sniper.
His unit shipped to Italy, and when they arrived, Daniel was stunned at what he saw: a city nearly completely destroyed by bombing. Children begging on the street for food. Men on street corners trying to entice the arriving soldiers by offering their teenage daughters up for a sexual encounter. “Two dollars, two dollars,” the fathers said in broken English, pointing to their fourteen-year-olds.
Tasked with setting up the kitchen area while many of the men in his unit were off having fun, Dan noticed a dozen Italian men and women lurking near the edges of camp. Their eyes were black, their frames gaunt. “Signor!” one man called to him.
Dan walked across the field and asked, “What can I do for you?”
“We work, eh?” the man said. “We clean—kitchen, clothes, eh? Whatever you want.” The man seemed terrified.
“How much? Quanta lira?” Dan asked.
“No, no lira,” the man replied. “Is nothing to buy. You give us garbage. We work for garbage.” The man gestured to the rows of garbage cans outside the kitchen tent.
Assuming the group wanted the garbage to fertilize their farms, Dan said, “Sure, go ahead, help yourself.”
The men and women ran, headlong, to the trash, plunging their fists into the coffee grounds and congealed stew. They shoveled the potato peels and discarded cigarette butts into their mouths, desperate. They scooped the garbage into sacks and bandanas, until Daniel, horrified, compelled them to stop.
“You said we could,” the man said. “You promised. We work.”
“No, no! Listen! I’ll get you food! Clean food! Put that garbage back.” The group gripped their sacks tightly to their chests. “Come back at six, and there will be food for you!”[6]
From then on, a new rule was implemented: no man would take any food he didn’t fully intend to eat, and any food that wasn’t eaten—a piece of potato or a heel of bread—was set aside in clean containers and given to the starving Italians.
Daniel’s unit was sent to France but later came back to Italy. He saw battle after battle, earning himself a wartime commission at age twenty. The war was nearly over, but troops received word that they had to fight harder now than they ever had, because any military losses the Axis powers faced would benefit the Allies in surrender negotiations.
This next part is going to seem like it is straight out of a superhero movie. You’re going to think, That can’t possibly be true, come on. But I promise, it is.
It was April 20, 1945. Word had just reached Dan’s unit that FDR had passed away, and the men took all of their feelings about America losing their commander in chief and channeled it into beating the enemy. They were going to move up in FDR’s honor, come hell or high water.
Their commanding officer briefed Dan on the next day’s assignment: take the mountain in front of them for the Allies. Anxiety descended on the camp. They were exhausted after fighting for weeks without a break. Soldiers kissed their Saint Christopher medals. They fingered their sen-ninbaris, pieces of cloth with a thousand stitches on them that were meant to protect the wearer from a thousand misfortunes. They pulled out their Buddhist charms and their talismans, mentally preparing for what lie ahead.
Daniel had his own good luck charms—two silver dollars he had won gambling—in his breast pocket. Gambling was his not-so-secret vice, and his chest bore a purple welt from where a bullet had struck one of the silver dollars and ricocheted off only a few weeks prior. The night of April 20, Dan thrust his hands in each of his many pockets, listening for the familiar jangle of the coins, waiting to feel their cool roundness graze his fingertips. But the silver dollars were nowhere to be found. Panic rose from his belly and into his chest. “Fellas, did you see my lucky silver dollars?” he asked. But over and over, they shook their heads no. Anxiety turned Dan’s stomach into knots.
Daniel and his company set off at sunrise without his lucky coins. He had an ominous feeling about what they were about to walk into. Every time they encountered a group of Germans, they took them out easily, grenade toss after grenade toss landing exactly where they aimed. Dan gripped the pineapple-shaped piece of cast iron, pushed the lever into the web of his hand, pulled the pin, and let it sail, counting 1…2…3…BOOM! The grenades exploded, embedding fragments of metal shrapnel in those unlucky enough to be nearby. Working in sync, Daniel and his men walked toward the mountain ahead, pushing the lever, pulling the pin, letting it sail, BOOM. They wiped out a German patrol without even slowing down—push, pull, sail, BOOM.
Before they knew it, the base of the mountain was before them. The slope had no cover, and at the top sat three German machine guns, Nazi soldiers staring down at the Nisei unit hugging the rocky soil. Go for Broke, they told themselves, heartbeats pounding in their ears.
Dan pulled out a grenade and found his legs being propelled by a force larger than himself, carrying him out of his prone position, running straight toward the nest of a German machine gun. A hail of bullets rained around him as he pushed the lever, pulled the pin, and let the grenade sail. He saw the BOOM hit the bunker, and as the men left alive staggered out, he took them out with his gun.
“My God, Dan, you’re bleeding! Get down and I’ll get an aid, man!”[7]
Dan looked down and watched as blood oozed from his stomach.
But he knew that if they stayed on this slope with no cover, the two remaining machine-gun nests would methodically pick them off, one by one. His legs continued moving up the hill, his men following, and before the German soldiers even noticed him, Dan sailed two grenades into their bunker.
