"Then, after a few weeks in Japan, I asked the lieutenant if I could have a few days off to go look for my parents. He wasn’t going to give it to me, but the major sitting right by him said, ‘Give the man a ten day pass.’ So I got ten days to go…

"When we got [to Bruyères, France], a friend of my brother’s came up to me and said, ‘Hey, your brother [Michael] died five days ago.’ I says, 'Wow, I didn’t know. I was waiting for my sister to write to me about it.’ But she never did.…

"We lived in town and they had telephone poles all around in the town, you know, and they said we had to evacuate in a couple of weeks. So my brother, he tried to go to his farm but there was a guard there - an Army guard - and he wouldn’t let…

"[My parents] had friends in California that they knew there. So that’s the only place…all they knew was Oxnard, California. And from El Paso they went all the way to Los Angeles to Oxnard. Walked all the way...My dad went to work for...the…

"My parents, well, they were from Hiroshima, Japan, and they eloped. The day that my mother was supposed to get married to someone else, my [mother's] sister took my father to a woodshed and had all my mother’s Japanese clothes, you know.…

"My mother, may she rest in peace, always told me I was a bum and I’d ask why I was a bum, and she’d say, 'Because you are 33 and you are not married.' I reunited with my father in 1961. He never came to this country. He stayed in…