With Hawaii's Aja Boys at Camp Shelby Mississippi

              Stars were still bright, sunrise
an hour away. The locusts stopped
whirring in the pine trees while
Nakamura took over. Then they
went back to their own shrill
song, which seems to go with this
heat as an accompaniment.
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Fifteen  minutes  later Nakamura
sounded reveille, and then whipped
off chow call a quarter of an hour
after that.
We looked him up.
"I used to play trumpet in the
Waialua   high   school   band,"   he
said. "So they sent me to a bugle
school when I got back here."
Before he became a soldier in the
U. S. army, he built concrete irrigating flumes on the Waialua plantation.
Under the mess tent a corporal
was baking hot cakes. His touch,
and the results, were professional.
They should have been, because
he used to cook hot cakes at the
Naniloa hotel in Hilo, and at the
Royal and Moana in Honolulu. He is
George Tsukahara of 1356 College
Walk, Honolulu.
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Sitting at the base of an elm
tree, eating hot cakes, scrambled
eggs,    toast   and   coffee,   and
scratching   chiggers,   were   other
Hawaii boys.   One of them was
Harold Y. Sato of Paia, Maui, formerly   a   tractor   mechanic   for
HC&S Co. His mother and father,
Mr. and Mrs. Jihei  Sato, live at
Paia. They might be interested to
know that there is nothing wrong
with their boy's appetite.
Mrs. Kama Higa of 2257 Kameha-
meha   IV   Rd.,   Honolulu,   can   be
given the same assurance about her
boy, Hideo Higa.
Others in the group at the tree
were Y. Kawakami of Kalaheo,
Kauai; Angelus K. Matsushima of
Makaweli, Kauai; S. Chinna of Ka-
lihi valley, Honolulu, who already
has two years of army service behind him; James T. Masatsugu of
Waialua, Oahu; Y. Roger Hiraoka
of Fresno, Cal.; Hisashi Tamura of
Hilo, who drives a jeep; Norman H.
Nishimoto of Honolulu, who worked
there for Sears-Roebuck, and Robert
Wakuya, who thinks Waialua plantation on Oahu is the only place to
go back to live.
They talked about their trip
across the continent. "San Francisco is a beautiful ci*y," Wakuva
said. "All those bridges, and the
big buildings on the hills. We like
New Orleans, too, but oh boy,
plenty hot!
"I'm going back to Waialua. You
know John Midkiff? He's manager
there. I like it there. It's my home."
Private Kawakami of Kalaheo,
Kauai, with pride that would become one of those tradition encrusted regiments that trace their
history back to Balaklava or Green
Mountain or the Alamo, said:
"The Kauai boys celebrated the
fifth month anniversary of the
442nd infantry yesterday. We were
the first inducted in Hawaii. March
11, 1943."
tt tt tt
First Lt. Keith Stivers, regiment
headquarters motor transportation
and mess officer, a slender, gentle
young man who teaches these AJA's
judo and what the army calls "dirty
fighting," strolled by.
"When this war's over," he announced, "I'm going to take a
vacation in Hawaii. I'm going to
spend a week with each one of my
men, and I'm going to have me a
luau every Sunday."
He was extended a year's worth
of invitations on the spot.
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Later in the morning we saw
Maj. E. L. O'Connor, formerly of
the Honolulu liquor commission, in
the field with his troops. He is
executive officer of the 3rd battalion of the 442nd.
We stopped at the command post
of the 3rd battalion to talk with
the commanding officer, a husky,
gray haired lieutenant colonel from
Illinois named Sherwood Dixon.
When the armistice was declared in
1918, he was a corporal with American troops, fighting with Italians
and British against the Austrians
at the Piave river.
"These men," he said, "all wanted
to go to war. They volunteered.
They aren't malingerers. I never
saw a more willing lot of soldiers
in my life.
"Ninety eight per cent of them
qualified in rifle fire. I had grown
up to believe that 85 per cent was
pretty good."
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