THE FAMILY was up by 6:30 that morning, as we usually were on Sundays, to have a leisurely breakfast before setting out for nine o'clock services at church. Around eight o'clock, as I was dressing, I automatically clicked on the little radio by my bed. I remember that I was buttoning my shirt and looking out the window. It was going to be a beautiful day. Already the sun had burned off the morning haze over Honolulu and, although there were clouds over the mountains, the sky was blue.

The radio suddenly emitted a frenzied cry: "This is no test! Pearl Harbor is being bombed by the Japanese! I repeat: This is not a test!"

"Papa," I cried, and then froze into stunned immobility. Almost at once my father was in the doorway with agony showing on his face, listening, caught by that special horror instantly sensed by all Americans of Japanese descent.

". . . not a test. We can see the Japanese planes . . ."

"Come outside, Dan," my father said. I was 17 and considered mature enough to share his apprehension. My younger brothers John and Bob and my sister May started to follow us out, but he ordered them back. "Stay with your mother!"

We stood in the warm sunshine by the side of the house and stared out toward Pearl Harbor, where the U.S. Pacific Fleet was anchored. Black puffs of anti-aircraft smoke dotted the sky, trailing away in the breeze, and the dirty-gray smudge of a great fire obscured the mountains. Then we saw the planes -- dive-bombers -- zooming up out of the smoke with that unmistakable red ball on the wings, the rising sun of the Japanese Empire.

As we went back into the house, the telephone rang. It was the secretary of the Red Cross station where recently I had been teaching first aid. "How soon can you be here, Dan?" he asked.

"I'm on my way," I told him. I grabbed a sweater and started for the door.

"Where are you going?" my mother cried, terrified.

"Let him go," my father said firmly. "He must go."

I took a couple of pieces of bread from the table, hugged my mother and ran for the street. "I'll be back as soon as I can," I called. But it would be five days before I returned--a lifetime--and I would never be the same. The 17-year-old high school boy who set out on his bicycle that morning of December 7, 1941, was lost forever amid the debris, and the dead and the dying, of war’s first day.

The aid station was more than a mile away, and the planes were gone before I reached it. I pumped furiously through the teeming Japanese ghettos of McCully and Moiliili, where crowds had spilled into the streets, wide-eyed with terror. Almost dispassionately, I wondered what would become of them, these poverty-ridden Asians now rendered so vulnerable by this monstrous betrayal.

An old Japanese man grabbed the handlebars of my bike as I tried to maneuver around a group. "Who did it?" he yelled at me. "Was it the Germans? It must have been the Germans!"

I shook my head, unable to speak, and tore free of him. My eyes filled with tears of pity for him and for all these frightened people. They had worked so hard. They had wanted so desperately to be accepted, to be good Americans. Now, in a few cataclysmic minutes, it was all undone and there could only be deep trouble ahead.

Pedaling along, I realized at last that I faced that trouble, too. My eyes were shaped just like those of the old man in the street. My people were only a generation removed from the land that had spawned the bombers and sent them to drop death on Hawaii. And suddenly, choking with emotion, I looked up into the sky and screamed the hated words, "You dirty Japs!"

Hawaiian Harvest

If it had not been for a fire one night in the home of my great-grandfather, I might have been a Japanese soldier myself, fighting on the other side. But that fire changed everything. Before it could he extinguished, it had destroyed three homes--my great-grandfather Wasaburo Inouye's and two others.

Wasaburo lived in Yokoyama, a village nestled in the mountains of southern Japan. It was an unwritten law there that a man who lived in the house where a fire began must pay for the damage to any other building. The village elders fixed the amount that my grandfather owed at $400.

There was no way to earn such a sum in Yokoyama. Wasaburo's long hours in the rice paddies and among the tea plants on the mountainside, and the labor of his son Asakichi, barely sustained the family. So he decreed that Asakichi must go to Hawaii and work until he could pay the debt and thus preserve the family honor. Only a month before, the recruiters for the Hawaiian sugar plantations had been looking for laborers. They offered free transportation and $10 a month, an unheard-of wage. No one from Yokoyama had been interested, but now Wasaburo ordered Asakichi to sign up with them.

Asakichi had no choice in the matter. To a Japanese the word of the father was as immutable as the unwritten laws of the village elders. But he made one stipulation. The Hawaiian contracts ran five years. That was a long time for a man to be alone. Therefore, he asked to take along his wife, Moyo, and his only son, Hyotaro. His two daughters he would leave behind.

They set out in September 1899. In a parcel on his hack Asakichi carried everything they owned: his father's suit, which had belonged to his father's father, the kimono in which Moyo had been married, and the small family shrine to the Shinto gods. Moyo carried four-year-old Hyotaro, the boy who would become my father.

It was Asakichi's plan to work hard, to save his money and, at the end of the five year contract, to sail back home. But that soon became an impossible dream.

He was assigned to Camp Number Two of the McBryde plantation, not far from the town of Wahiawa on the island of Kauai. Each morning by 6:30 he was in the fields, and he worked at least 12 hours a day, until the sun vanished behind the western mountains. On the last day of each month he was paid whatever was left of his $10 after his debts at the company store had been deducted. That night he and Moyo set aside what they needed for themselves. A dollar or two was all that was ever left over to send to Japan.

To earn more money, Asakichi built a bathhouse, and it was a success. The men and women came, as they had come to the community bathhouses in Japan, grateful for the chance to wash after a long day chopping cane. It was a small touch of home, and they paid their pennies gladly.

Then Moyo decided to bake tofu cakes to sell. In Japan, tofu, a cake made from soya-bean curd, was a basic food, and the people hungered for tofu, like the baths, as a reminder of home. The coins in the Inouyes' money jar began to mount. But Asakichi and Moyo had to rise at 2 a.m. to build the fires and bake the cakes, for they peddled them through the camp before the people went to work.

The years passed. Their son Hyotaro was sent to school, a Japanese school, of course, conducted by priests at the Buddhist temple in Wahiawa village. He was not quite ten when he finished. He had learned to write in Japanese and do small sums, which was all the schooling his father or grandfather had ever had. But some workers in the camp now were sending their sons to the grammar school in Eleele, where they were taught English. Since not a quarter of the debt had been paid when Asakichi had to sign up for another five years in the canefields, he decided to send Hyotaro to the school. Education, he saw, opened the way to a better life. A Japanese who learned to speak English could become a clerk or even open a shop.

Now there was no looking back; he told Moyo they would save out some money from the debt payments to send for the girls. Hyotaro's Americanization picked up speed. He finished grade school at 18, and eventually went on to Mills High School on the island of Oahu. This was run by Protestant missionaries, and presently he joined the River Street Methodist Church, where he met a small, bright-eyed girl named Kame Imanaga. She was a nisei, an orphan, living in the home of a Methodist minister. Hyotaro fell in love with her, and they were married in September 1923. They went to live on Queen Emma Street in Honolulu's Japanese ghetto. A year later, in the early evening of September 7, 1924, I was born.

"I Am an American!"

In days to come, sociologists and planners would point to Queen Emma Street with horror and describe it as a poverty pocket and a pesthole. Eventually it became the site of Honolulu's first slum-clearance project. The ramshackle lines of two-family houses were knocked down by bulldozers, the remains carted away, and the area today is a lovely park. But I was too young to realize how underprivileged I was, and foolishly I enjoyed every moment of my childhood. There was always enough to eat in our house-although sometimes barely-but even more important, there was a conviction that opportunity awaited those who had the heart and strength to pursue it.

Our family life was a blend of East and West. When we ate beef, we used knives and forks. When we ate sukiyaki, we used chopsticks. Although I went to a Japanese school every afternoon, it was never permitted to interfere with my American education. The language spoken at home now on Coyne Street, was English.

I remember a great celebration. After nearly 30 years of persistent effort, Asakichi had paid the family debt. There were songs and much sake and, though I was not yet five years old, I sat on my grandfather's lap and took a sip of the potent liquor. Had he chosen to do so, he could now have returned to Yokoyama village. But there was never a doubt about what he would do. His son and daughters were Americans--he would stay the rest of his days in Hawaii.

Most of the Japanese in Hawaii felt the same. But the break was difficult, even for us who had never seen the old country. The Buddhist priest who taught us ethics and history in the Japanese school actually believed we were still Japanese and often in class he told us that our loyalty belonged to the Emperor. When I was 15, I openly challenged him, declaring in class, "I am an American."

"You are a Japanese," he retorted, angered by my insubordination.

"I am an American," I insisted.

So enraged was he that he dragged me from the classroom and threw me with full force into the schoolyard, screaming after me, "You are a faithless dog!" I never returned.

But I still revered the land of my ancestors and, although I sensed that the breach between Japan and the United States was widening, serious trouble between them was too terrifying even to think about.

A Sense of Guilt

It was past 8:30 that fateful morning of December 7, 1941, when I reported at the Honolulu aid station. Confusion was in command, and shouting people everywhere pushed by each other as they rushed for litters and medical supplies. Somewhere a radio voice droned on, now and then peaking with shrill excitement. In one such outburst I learned that the USS Arizona had exploded in Pearl Harbor with great loss of life, and that other ships had been badly damaged.

A little before 9 a.m., a second wave of Japanese bombers swooped around from the west, and the anti-aircraft guns began thundering again. Mostly the planes hammered at military installations: Pearl Harbor and Hickam and Wheeler fields it was our own ack-ack that did the deadly damage in the civilian sectors. Shells apparently fired without time fuses, would find no target in the sky and drop to explode on impact with the ground, often inflicting terrible wounds and destruction.

We worked all night and into the next day. There was so much to be done -- broken bodies to be mended, shelter to be found for bombed-out families, food for the hungry. We continued the following night and through the day after that, sleeping in snatches whenever we could.

After the immediate crisis was over, I was given a regular shift-6 p.m. to 6 a.m. It was a wildly incongruous life. In the morning I was still a senior at McKinley High, studying English, history, math. In the afternoon I fell exhausted into my bed and slept like a dead man until 5:30, when my mother shook me awake, put a sandwich in my hand and sent me hurrying off to the aid station. I was in charge of a litter squad, training new volunteers and directing the high-school first-aid program.

Like all nisei, I was driven by an insidious sense of guilt from the instant the first Japanese plane appeared over Pearl Harbor. Of course we had nothing to feel guilty about, but we all carried this special burden. We felt it in the streets, where white men would sneer as we passed. We felt it in school when we heard our friends and neighbors called Jap-lovers. We felt it in the widely held suspicion that the nisei were a sort of built-in fifth column in Hawaii.

Not long after the war began, the military government ordered us to report all radios with shortwave bands. My father had just bought such a set. It was a beauty, picking up Tokyo and the Philippines perfectly We were all enormously proud of it for we had few possessions and had save a long time to get it. But we promptly complied with the order, and about a week later three men came to our door. They were from Naval intelligence.

"Where is your radio?" one demanded.

"It is here," Father said. "Please come in."

"No, no. Bring it outside."

We did as he said and, without another word, he dug a screwdriver in behind the backing and ripped it off. I looked at my father. His eyes had narrowed, but he said nothing. The man with the screwdriver snapped the wiring inside the set, then reached in and removed the tubes one after another, smashing them on the ground. It was needless destruction; he could have deadened the shortwave band by disconnecting a single wire.

My father's face turned black, and I knew he would not suffer this indignity in silence.

"Here," he said, "let me help you." He reached down to the pile of wood we used for our stove and hefted his ax. Instantly all three of the Naval officials reached for the bulges under their jackets.

Father smiled sadly "Put your guns away, gentlemen," he said. "I only want to help." Then with three great swinging blows of the ax, he smashed the new radio into splinters of wood and glass. "There," he said, breathing hard from his effort and anger, "that should do it. Now you'll never have to worry about it."

He put down the ax and walked back up the steps into the house, leaving us looking at each other in silence.

A Chance to Fight

The younger Japanese in the Islands suffered under a special onus. All our lives we had thought of ourselves as Americans.

Now, in this time of national peril, we were seemingly lumped with the enemy by official policy Nisei in National Guard units were summarily discharged, those in the ROTC and Territorial Guard were stripped of their weapons, and those already in the Army were transferred to labor battalions. Despite this, we fought for a place in the war, no matter how menial, and meanwhile struggled to persuade the government to reverse its anti-nisei rulings.

My own schoolwork now seemed inconsequential, and the months passed very slowly. But finally I graduated from McKinley, and in September 1942 just turned 18, I enrolled at the University of Hawaii. I was taking a premedical course, planning to become a doctor.

Then one day in January-little more than a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the colonel in charge of the university's ROTC unit called us all together. The War Department had just decided to accept 1,500 nisei volunteers to join in forming a full-fledged combat team. Our draft board, the colonel announced, was ready to take the enlistments.

As soon as his words were out, the room exploded with excited shouts. We burst out of there and ran-literally ran-the three miles to the draft board, stringing back over the streets and sidewalks, jostling for position, like a bunch of marathoners gone berserk. The scene was repeated all over the Islands. Nearly 1,000 nisei volunteered the first day alone.

We were given three weeks to wind up our affairs, and there were sentimental farewell parties from Koko Head to Kahuku Point. I suppose mine was fairly typical: a parade of aunts and uncles and cousins, the last whispered words, "Be a good boy; be careful; make us proud!" And the crumpled $5 or $10 bill pressed into my hand.

But when the day came for our departure I was in for a shock. Our names were read in alphabetical order. As each man was called, he took time for a last kiss, a last handshake, then ran for a waiting truck. "Fukuchi, Gora, Hamano." The names tumbled out. "Higa, Ikegami, Ito, Kaneko, Nagata"

They had passed me over! I couldn't believe it. What had happened? As the names continued to be read, it became clear that for some reason I had been turned down by the Army.

I was crushed. There had to he some mistake, I kept telling myself. But there wasn't. The last truck filled up and pulled away, and I was left standing there. God bless them, my parents said nothing. They understood how I felt. But as we walked slowly away, a fellow I knew on that last truck called out, "Tough luck, Dan!

"Sorry!" Involuntarily, my eyes filled with tears.

During the following days, I haunted the draft board, and finally I got the answers I sought. I had been turned down because my work at the medical-aid station was considered essential, and because I was enrolled in a premed course.

"Give me about an hour," I told them. "Then call the aid station and the university. They'll tell you that I've just given my notice to quit by the end of the week."

And I did-two days later I was ordered to report for induction.

There was a new flurry of packing and good-byes, all hasty now, and a heartfelt hug for my mother. Then my father and I caught the bus to the induction center. He was very somber. I tried to think of something to say, some way to tell him that he was important to me, and dear, but nothing came out.

After a long period of silence between us, he said unexpectedly, "You know what on means?"

"Yes," I replied. On is at the very heart of Japanese culture. On requires that when one man is aided by another, he incurs a debt that is never canceled, one that must be repaid at every opportunity.

"The Inouyes have great on for America," my father said. "It has been good to us. And now it is you who must try to return the goodness. You are my first son, and you are very precious to your mother and to me, but you must do what must be done. If it is necessary, you must be ready to. . . to. . ."

Unable to give voice to the dread word, he trailed off. "I know, Papa. I understand," I said.

"Do not bring dishonor on our name," he whispered urgently

And then I was clambering up into the back of a GI truck, struggling to hold my balance as it rumbled off, and waving to the diminishing figure of my father.

"Good-by!" I called long after he was out of earshot, a forlorn but resolute figure standing there alone as if he never meant to leave. "Good-by!"

The Face of War

We made up the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and we began our training at Camp Shelly, near Hattiesburg, Miss. I was assigned to E Company, 2nd Battalion. Our C.O. was a haole (white) who had gone to Roosevelt High in Honolulu, Capt. Ralph B. Ensminger, and from the start there wasn't a man of us who wouldn't have followed him right into General Rommel's command post. There were some Caucasian officers in the early days of the 442nd who sounded off about having to lead "a bunch of Japs" into battle. That would change-we had to show them-but Captain Ensminger was on our side from the first.

I don't know how it started, but pretty soon our pidgin-English expression "Go for broke!" became the Combat Team motto. It meant giving everything we had; jabbing every bayonet dummy as though it were the enemy himself, scrambling over an obstacle course as though our lives depended on it; marching quick time until we were ready to drop, and then breaking into a trot. The words have become part of the language now, but in those spring and summer days of 1943, they were peculiarly our own.

We shipped out in May 1944--when I was promoted to buck sergeant--and 29 days later landed at Naples. The harbor was a ruin of sunken ships, and ashore the gutted city seemed to quiver in expectation of another air raid. The roads, which had just been cleared, swarmed with lines of trucks and marching troops, and scurrying alongside, begging food and cigarettes, were the pathetic refugees of the war- men and women with haunted eyes, children in tatters of clothing.

We marched through the ruined streets to a bivouac area at the edge of town. When we had eaten, most of the men were given passes and vanished in the direction of Naples. But I was ordered to help set up the kitchen and supply tent. After working for a while I noticed a group of 12 Italians, men and women, lurking among the trees nearby watching the men in my detail with dark, fearful eyes. At last, looking back over his shoulder for encouragement, one of them edged into the open and called to me: "Signora,"

I walked toward him, "We work, eh?" He gestured at the people waiting in the woods. "We clean-kitchen, clothes whatever you want."

"Quante lire?" I asked.

"No, no lire," the Italian said. "Is nothing to buy. You give us garbage." He pointed to the rows of galvanized cans outside the mess tent. "We work for garbage."

I thought perhaps they were farmers and would use the garbage for fertilizer. "Sure," I said. "Help yourself."

He bellowed something at the group in Italian, and they ran to the cans and began cramming the slop they pulled out into their mouths-potato peels, congealing stew, coffee grounds. The men in my detail stopped working and watched with a dreadful fascination. I remembered guys grinding cigarette butts into their mess kits before scraping them clean, and other men spitting into the cans, and I had to take a deep breath to keep from being sick.

"Stop!" I yelled. "You can't do that. You can't eat..."

"You promised," their hollow-eyed spokesman said. "We work."

"No, no!" I clutched his arm and pushed him away from the garbage rack. "I'll get you food. Clean food. Come back tonight-there'll be food for you."

Reluctantly they backed off. As soon as they had disappeared among the trees I ran to the C.O. with the story. He was equally shocked. The order went out: no man would take anything he didn't mean to eat; and every portion that was not taken-a scoop of potatoes, an apple, a piece of bread-would be set aside in clean containers. At dinner that night, the Italians returned, and we gave them good food.

So I began to find out what war was like.

Fortunes of Combat

Few men fought in all of the 442nd's campaigns and battles. Our casualty rate was so high that eventually it took 12,000 men to fill the original 4500 places in the regiment. But even fewer men missed a battle as long as they could stand up and hold a rifle, and the outfit had the lowest AWOL rate in the European theater of operations.

Captain Ensminger had warned us long ago that our first battle would be bloody.

It came on June 26 and, ironically, he himself was the first man killed. But soon every man who lived bore his personal grief, as buddies fell to German bullets. In my platoon I was the only squad leader unhit, and before the day was out I was made platoon guide. G Company, on our left flank, lost every officer but the company commander.

The 442nd began its fighting north of Rome, pushing the Germans back along the Arena River. Later in the summer we were pulled out and sent to France. We spent several months fighting in the Rhone Valley, and then we returned to Italy, this time in the vicinity of Leghorn. I fought through all but two of the outfit's battles, but the war remains fixed in my mind not as an orderly progression of setbacks and victories, but as a kaleidoscopic jumble of hours and minutes and seconds, some of which make me proud and some of which I have been more than 20 years trying to forget.

One of the worst times came one morning when I was leading a forward patrol along a gentle slope toward an ancient and apparently empty farmhouse. We were barely 30 yards away when a machine gun spat fire from a darkened window and my lead scout was all but cut in half. The rest of us hit the ground, and I hollered for the bazooka. With a whoosh our rocket tore into the weathered building; it sagged crazily, and the machine gun was still.

Coming forward, we found two Germans dead, torn to shapeless hulks by the bazooka. A third, an ammo bearer, had been thrown across the room and lay sprawled against a wall, one leg shredded and twisted around. "Chambered," he whispered. "Chambered."

He reached into his tunic, and I thought he was going for a gun. It was war; you had only one chance to make the right decision. I pumped the last three shots in my rifle clip into his chest. As he toppled over, his hand sprang spasmodically from the tunic, and he held up a snapshot, clutching it in death. It was a picture of a pretty woman and two little children, and there was a handwritten inscription: "seine Dichliebende Frau, Hedi." So I had made a widow and two orphans.

I never got used to it. Deep down, I think, no one did. We pretended to be calloused and insensitive because we understood the fatal consequence of caring too much. You were no good to your men-you were through as a soldier-if you cared too much. But, hidden in the core of every man's being, there must have been a wound, a laceration of the spirit. The abrasives of war rubbed against it every day, and you thought that even if you lived, and the years passed, it would never stop bleeding.

It was while we were in France that a really unexpected thing happened to me. We had been in reserve for a while, but were just about ready to lock horns with the Germans again in what later became famous as the battle to rescue "The Lost Battalion." Nearly 1000 GIs of the 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry had been surrounded and were desperately short of supplies and ammunition. The 442nd was ordered to go to their relief.

But just as we were about to shove off, I was told that the C.O. wanted to see me. I took off for the command post, only to be ordered to report to the adjutant at regimental headquarters. There I was handed a letter. I had been awarded a battle-field commission and was now a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Army

Two days later I started back to rejoin my outfit. By the time I reached them, the bloody battle of The Lost Battalion was over. The trapped soldiers had been rescued, but the fighting was desperate. My platoon, numbering 20 men when I left, now had 11 capable of carrying a weapon -and that included me.

I was lucky, I guess. So far I had always been lucky and partly I attributed this fact to two silver dollars which I had carried through every campaign. One was bent and the other cracked almost in two from the impact of a German bullet in France. Since I carried them in a breast pocket and had a purple welt on my chest for two weeks after the incident, I had grounds for believing they really were lucky charms.

And then on the night of April 20, 1945-I remember the date well -- the coins disappeared. I searched in the darkness as best I could, and asked around, but without result. Undoubtedly I had bent forward someplace with my pocket unflapped and the coins had slipped out.

After searching some more I walked to my tent, shivering a little, for the night had grown cold. I was troubled-we had been ordered into a new attack in the morning. My brain commanded me to be sensible; so I'd lost two beat-up silver dollars. So what? But from the message center in my heart, I kept hearing forebodings of disaster.

The Last Battle

We jumped off at first light. E Company's objective was Colle Musatello, a high and heavily defended ridge. All three rifle platoons were to be deployed, two moving up in a frontal attack, with my platoon skirting the left flank and coming in from the side. Whichever platoon reached the heights first was to secure them against counterattack.

Off to the right I could hear the crackle of rifle fire as the 1st and 2nd platoons closed in on the German perimeter. For us, though, it went like a training exercise. Everything worked. What little opposition we met, we outflanked or pinned down until someone could get close enough to finish them off with a grenade. We wiped out a patrol and a mortar observation post without really slowing down. As a result we reached the main line of resistance long before the frontal assault force. We were right under the German guns, 40 yards from their bunkers. We had a choice of either continuing to move up or of getting out altogether.

We moved, and almost at once three machine guns opened up on us, pinning us down. I pulled a grenade from my belt and got up. Somebody punched me in the side, although there wasn't a soul near me, and I half fell backward. Then I counted off three seconds as I ran toward the nearest machine gun. I threw the grenade and it cleared the log bunker, exploding in a shower of dirt. When the gun crew staggered erect, I cut them down. My men were coming up now, and I waved them toward the other two emplacements.

"My God, Dan," someone yelled in my ear, "you're bleeding! Get down and I'll get an aid man." I looked down to where my right hand was clutching my stomach. Blood oozed between my fingers. I thought, "That was no punch, you dummy. You took a slug in the gut."

I wanted to keep moving. We were pinned down again and, unless we did something quickly they'd pick us off one at a time. I lurched up the hill again, and lobbed two grenades into the second emplacement before the gunners saw me. Then I fell to my knees. Somehow they wouldn't lock and I couldn't stand. I had to pull myself forward with one hand.

A man yelled, "Come on, you guys, go for broke!" And hunched over they charged into the fire of the third machine gun. I was fiercely proud of them. But they didn't have a chance against the deadly stutter of that last gun. They had to drop back and seek protection. But all that time I had been shuffling up on the flank, and at last I was close enough to pull the pin on my last grenade. As I drew my arm back, a German stood up waist-high in the bunker. He was aiming a rifle grenade at me from a range of ten yards. And then as I cocked my arm to throw, he fired, and the grenade smashed into my right elbow. It exploded and all but tore my arm off. I looked at my hand stunned. It dangled there by a few bloody shreds of tissue, my grenade still clenched in a fist that suddenly didn't belong to me anymore.

Some of my men were rushing up to help me. "Get back!" I screamed. Then I tried to pry the grenade out of that dead fist with my other hand. At last I had it free. The German was reloading his rifle, but my grenade blew up in his face. I stumbled to my feet, closing on the bunker, firing my tommy gun lefthanded, the useless right arm slapping red and wet against my side.

It was almost over. But one last German, before his death, squeezed off a final burst, and a bullet caught me in the right leg and threw me to the ground. I rolled over and over down the hill.

Some men came after me, but I yelled, "Get back up that hill! Nobody called off the war!"

After a while a medic got to me and gave me a shot of morphine. The German position was secured, and then they carried me away. It was April 21. The German resistance in our sector ended April 23. Nine days later, the war in Italy was over, and a week after that the enemy surrendered unconditionally.

To Light a Cigarette

Of course the arm had to come off. It wasn't an emotionally big deal for me. I knew it had to be done and had stopped thinking of it as belonging to me. But acceptance and rehabilitation are two different things. I had adjusted to the shock of losing my arm before the operation. My rehabilitation began almost immediately afterward.

I was staring at the ceiling my first day as an amputee, when a nurse came by and asked if I needed anything. "A cigarette would go pretty good," I said.

"Yes, surely." She smiled and walked off, resuming in a few minutes with a fresh, unopened pack. "Here you are, lieutenant," she said, still smiling, and placed it needy on my chest and went on her way

For a while I just stared at the pack. I fingered it with my left hand. Then I sneaked a look around the hospital ward to see if there was anyone in good enough shape to help me. But everyone seemed to be at least as badly off as I was. So I began pawing at that cursed pack, holding it under my chin and trying to rip it open with my fingernails, It kept slipping away from me and I kept trying again, sweating as profusely in my fury and frustration as if I were on a forced march. In 15 minutes I'd tom the pack and half the cigarettes to shreds, but I'd finally got one between my lips. Which was when I realized that the nurse hadn't brought me any matches.

I rang the bell and she came sashaying in, still smiling, still "tailing an aura of good cheer that made me want to clout her. "I need a light," I said.

"Oh," she said prettily, "of course you do." She pulled a pack of matches out of her pocket-she had had them all the time-and carefully put them in my hand. And she strolled off again.

If I obeyed my first impulse, I'd have bellowed after her in rage. If I'd obeyed my second impulse, I'd have burst out crying. But I couldn't let her get the best of me. I just couldn't.

So I started fooling around with the matches. I pulled them and twisted them and dropped them, and I never came remotely close to tearing one free, let alone lighting it. But this time I had decided that I'd sooner boil in oil than ask her for anything again. So I lay there, fuming silently and having extremely unchristian thoughts about that angel of mercy

I was on the verge of dozing off when she reappeared, still smiling. "What's the matter, lieutenant?" she purred. "Have you decided to quit smoking? It's just as well. . . cigarettes make you cough and.. ."

"I couldn't get the damned thing lit."

"Look," I growled, "just light the cigarette. I've been three hours trying to get this thing smoked."

"Yes, I know. But, you see, I won't be around to light your cigarettes all the time. You have only one hand with which to do all the things that you used to do with two. And you have to learn how. We'll start with the matches, all right?"

Then she opened the cover, bent a match forward, closed the cover, flicked the match down and lit it-all with one hand, all in a split second.

"See?" she asked. "Now you do it."

I did it. I lit the cigarette. And suddenly her smile was not objectionable at all. It was lovely In a single moment she had made me see the job that lay ahead. It took me a year and a half to become fully functioning again, but I never learned a more important lesson than I did that afternoon.

A Japanese Betrothal

Homecoming was a great day I stood outside our house and I couldn't believe it. So much had happened in the two and a half years since I had seen this place. Was I really home? Then the door opened and my mother was calling my name.

I hugged her and felt her tears. I had my arm around all of them, my father, my sister May, who had been a child when I left and was now grown and beautiful, my brothers John and Robert. It was a sublimely happy moment.

John took my bag, Robert took my coat, May offered me a chair. "Shall I bring you something?" my mother whispered. "Tea? You are hungry?"

"No, Mama, I'm fine."

I looked around the house, suddenly grown smaller and yet just the same. There was the picture of President Roosevelt on the wall; a blue star hung in the window. When I turned back, they were all looking at me, my uniform, the ribbons on my chest and, inevitably, the empty right sleeve. Now came that moment of awkward silence, the fumbling for a thought after the first spontaneous greeting.

Nervously I lit a cigarette-smoking was a habit I had picked up in the Army--and took a deep drag before I realized what I was doing. Mother came to her feet as if she'd been pinched.

"Daniel Ken Inouye!" she said in exactly the old way she always used to scold me.

I looked sheepishly at the cigarette, then at her, then at the rest of them. And then we all began to laugh, my mother, too, and I knew I was home.

For a while there was a great, wild spree of homecoming celebrations. Two 442nd vets meeting on the street was reason enough for a party. But finally it was time to get back to normal living. The first thing I did was to register at the university Doctoring was out, but I didn't care. I wanted now to become a lawyer, in the hope of entering public life. The pre-law courses required a lot of work and they were harnessed to my extracurricular activities in student government and veterans' organizations. Then one unforgettable autumn day I met Margaret Awamura. Marriage had never occurred to me before that moment, but afterward it never left my mind. I proposed on our second date. It was December 6, 1947. I know, because we have celebrated the occasion together ever since.

Of course-because we were nisei--it wasn't as simple as all that. As soon as I informed my parents, they began to arrange things in the Japanese way Tradition calls for a ceremonial event involving nakoudos--go-between--who represent the families of the prospective bride and groom and settle the terms of the marriage. By prearrangement the Inouye team (my parents, our nakoudos and I) arrived at the Awamuras' one evening bearing gifts of rice, sake and fish and took places on the floor. Our nakoudos faced their nakoudos across a low table. Behind them sat the respective families, the parents first and, farthest away from the action, Maggie and I, as though we were only incidental onlookers. Now and then I caught her eye and we smiled secretly Only the nakoudos spoke.

First, gifts were exchanged. Then one of our representatives began to extol the virtues of Daniel Ken Inouye, a fine upstanding man, a war hero, and so forth.

Next our side listened to a recitation of Maggie's qualities: she had earned a master's degree, she was an accomplished seamstress, and her family's reputation for honor was unimpeachable. (I would have liked to add that she was beautiful, too.)

The nakoudos consulted briefly with their clients and recommended that the marriage be approved. Then at last glasses were filled, and a toast was chunk. Maggie and I were engaged--officially!

A Quiet Revolution

The next years were busy and fruitful. I completed college while Maggie taught at the university. But from the day we returned from our honeymoon, politics was an integral part of our life. I attended weekly political meetings that went on hour after hour, and came tiptoeing home at two or three in the morning. I don't say it was fair, but Maggie understood, bless her, that for me it was necessary.

"But why does it always take so long?" she asked once. "Can't you all just decide what you want to do and then come home?"

"Why don't you come along tonight?" I suggested. "I think if you sat in with us..."

She stayed with it until around midnight. As always, the eight or ten of us who were present started with a discussion of our aims and aspirations; party philosophy, you might call it. Then we got down to cases-tactics, candidates, precincts, votes-the raw materials of politics. Once when I looked up from a heated conversation about the importance of block captains, Maggie lay curled up in a comer of the sofa, sound asleep. She never complained again.

What we were attempting to do was to rehabilitate the Democratic Party of Hawaii and, with it, the two-party system in the Islands. Before the war the Republican grip on the territorial legislature had been ironclad. Economic power was still held by the few dominant white families descended from the missionaries and traders who had organized the Islands' commerce 100 years before. They were solidly Republican, and their newspapers diligently preached the Republican message, and their plantation supervisors delivered the Republican vote of the field hands. As a result, the opposition almost never won an election.

A handful of us wanted to change all of that, and we believed the Democratic Party could do it if it attracted the nisei and all the other multitudes whose labor had helped to build the great haole fortunes. In 1924, the year I was born, Americans of Japanese ancestry made up a bare five percent of Hawaii's voting population. Twenty-three years later, when I came home from the Army, the nisei were the largest single voting bloc in the Islands. For all our Anglo-Saxon first names, we had gone off to war as the sons and grandsons of immigrants, heirs of an alien culture, and we were very much expected to resume our unobtrusive minority status when we returned. But the Army had given us a taste of full citizenship and an appetite for more. Thus, a quiet revolution was brewing.

We started out aiming for the moon. In 1948, there was to be an election to choose a delegate to the U.S. Congress. This was the most important office the people of Hawaii had at that time. We put up a candidate--and we lost. But we learned things, and we began to gain strength.

Our first job was to rid ourselves of the deadly influence of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. This union, which was infiltrated by communists, dominated the Democratic Party and, with that sort of backing, we hadn't a chance of getting into the territorial legislature. To wipe out the stigma, we had to get the union and its friends out of party posts. Hard work and the secret ballot did it. Jack Burns (subsequently governor of Hawaii) was elected chairman of the party, and I was made secretary.

Meanwhile, I finished college and left for George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for my law course. There I made myself available to the Democratic National Committee, and so I went on roaming.

By 1954, we believed we were really ready. Slowly we had been whittling away at the huge Republican majority in the legislature. Now there was a certain promise in the air that whispered, "Go for broke!"

In the Fourth district, where I lived, I stood for the legislature. It was the year of the eager young hopefuls. In my district alone, four of the six of us running were veterans, and racially we were a mixed bag: Japanese, Portuguese, Caucasian and Hawaiian. For the first time in years the Republicans were on the defensive. To hold us back, they unwrapped the "Truth Squad" ploy, a group of politicians who interrupted the speaker at one of our meetings, ostensibly to "set the record straight." It turned out to be a big mistake.

One of our candidates had been talking for about five minutes when in-charged the "Truth Squad." Their chairman grabbed the microphone to announce that they could no longer stand idly by while "these so-called Democrats" went on deceiving the people. The Democratic Party, he said, had been captured by the I.L.W.U. We were the willing tools of its leaders. Hence, we were, at the very least, soft on communism.

For a long moment I just sat there, the slanderous innuendo ringing in my ears. Then I got to my feet and went to the microphone. Maggie was in the audience, and later she told me, "I was afraid. The skin on your face was all tightened up and you looked as though you were going to kill somebody."

"I cannot help wondering," I said to the audience, "whether the people of Hawaii will not think it strange that the only weapon in the Republican arsenal is to label as communists men so recently returned from defending liberty on the firing lines in Italy and France. I know I speak for my colleagues on this platform when I say that we bitterly resent having our loyalty and patriotism questioned by cynical political hacks who lack the courage to debate the real issues in this campaign."

I had never before called attention to my disability for the simple reason that I didn't consider it a qualification for public office. But at that moment, blinded with fury, yet coldly aware that I was engaging in a bit of demagoguery, I held up my empty right sleeve and shook it: "I gave this arm to fight fascists. If my country wants the other one to fight communists, it can have it!"

There was a moment of stunned silence then crashing applause. And some time during the tumult, the "Truth Squad" left the platform, and with them went any chance they had to win the election. We took 22 of the 30 seats in the Territorial House, and 10 of the 15 in the Senate, besides gaining control of most of the city and county councils. I was one of those elected to the House.

It was in the legislature's chambers, five years later in March 1959, that we heard the news relayed from Washington, D.C., that Hawaii had been accepted into the Union as the 50th state. This had been the dream, the everlasting hope of both political parties. Now even greater challenges lay ahead. For the first time Hawaii would be sending Representatives and Senators to the U.S. Congress.

A Visit to the Ancestral Home

I'd be less than honest if I said I didn't see myself somewhere in the brand-new political picture that came with statehood. And after hard thought and long consultation with my colleagues, I decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in the special elections called in July The campaign was brief but intense, and the outcome clear from the moment the first returns began coming into our headquarters. As early as 8:30 p.m., it was obvious that I was rolling up a big majority, and my opponent conceded defeat. I was the first American of Japanese ancestry ever elected to the House.

A freshman Congressman's life is arduous, his hours are long, and the work is often the strictly procedural, but nonetheless important, business of learning how to get things done. But there was one occasion, at least, that stands out in my memory as both exciting and unique.

In September 1960 I was asked to serve on the American delegation to the Interparliamentary Union, which was meeting in Tokyo that year. While I was there, the ambassador suggested that I visit the birthplace of my forefathers. I was delighted and, as I could never have gotten there in the allotted time by other means, he arranged for an American Marine jet to fly me to Fukuoka, a city some 550 miles southwest of the capital, where there would be a car waiting to take me on to Yokoyama village.

It was clear the people had been given advance notice of my coming. An expectant crowd waited in front of the council hall, and it was with deep feelings indeed that I responded to their warm greeting.

A man stepped forward and was introduced to me as a member of the village's samurai family He bowed and offered me the traditional samurai sword that must have been handed down among his people for hundreds of years. Again I expressed my gratitude, then asked to be taken to the Inouye family home.

We walked along the narrow, scrupulously clean streets, the people coming out of their houses to smile and nod. They were impressed, I later learned, not so much because I was an American Congressman, but because I came from a family where all four children had gone to college, and because I had risen to an officer's rank in the Army. But perhaps most important of all, I was an Inouye, a name that would always represent the highest honor in this valley because of the heroic lengths two generations had gone to, to pay a debt.

At last we came to the thatched-roof ancestral home where my uncle, now the head of the family, waited to greet me. I bowed low, strained for my best Japanese and said, "Dear sir, I have returned. I now desire to pay my respects to my ancestors and would be grateful if you would lead me to the burial ground."

He was enormously pleased, as were the other members of the family who now edged closer to me, to think that I would have taken the trouble to learn the traditional procedure for a long-absent son.

When we returned to the house from the burial ground, I was escorted to a place of honor at their table, and we had a delightful meal. Then the women and children left, and my uncle cleared his throat.

"You understand," he said, "that had your dear father stayed here, or chosen to return, he would now be the head of the Inouye family. Therefore, should you now desire to stay among us, we would be honored to have you choose any house in the family to be your own."

With equal politeness, I told him that my home was now in America and that I must return to my family and duties. Then we said good-by, and I left the village where generations of Inouyes had lived and worked in quiet simplicity-and where I, too, would have grown up but for a fire on a night so long ago.

End of the Odyssey

Two years later, my visit to the old country was given unique perspective by another visit--this time with President John F. Kennedy I had decided to run for the U.S. Senate and had been elected. I took my father with me to Washington to witness my swearing-in; and at the ceremony, as I raised my arm and swore to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States, our eyes met and held fast. I tried to imagine the thoughts and images which must have been passing through his mind.

Then later, at lunch, I received a telephone call from the White House.

"I want to offer my congratulations, Senator," President Kennedy said. "I understand your father is in town. I'd like to meet him."

Promptly at nine o'clock the next morning, Maggie, my father and brothers and I were escorted into the Oval Room of the White House. President Kennedy rose from his desk to greet us warmly. My father, usually quite open and talkative, could hardly find words to speak, but although we officially had been allotted only five minutes for our appointment, it stretched to a solid half-hour.

It was decidedly my father's day, and as we left the President, a crowd of reporters and cameramen surged around him. "What did the President say, Mr. Inouye?" they called.

My father signaled for quiet, then spoke: "I want to thank the people of Hawaii for their goodness to my son," he said. "For myself, I have seen my son become a Senator, and now I have met the President of the United States. Nothing that happens to me can be greater I will die a happy man."

I walked close to him out to our car, picturing once again the little Japanese village where he had been born. It had been his fate to make the transition between two vastly different cultures. Each had been demanding, each had been wonderful, and I felt proudly that he had done honor to both of them.