Nisei Christmas

“Men speak of them well or ill; they themselves are silent.”

– Stephen Vincent Benet, Ode to Walt Whitman

One Yuletide near Granada, Colorado in 1943, two soldiers sat in a dark cafe watching the snow come down. Snow was still a marvel to these California boy transplants who would be shipping out for Italy in a few days. There was no visible sun in the sky and the windows of the cafe looked as if they hadn’t been washed since the First World War concluded some 25 years ago. One of the soldiers, Private Thomas Okamoto, would go on to be one of the most decorated fighting men in the European Theater. The other, also decorated, would serve for  two years in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and see action at Salerno Bay, at Naples, at Cassino, and at Anzio. His name was Kiyoshi Nakamura. He was killed by a German sniper near Saverne, France in early 1945.

It was June of 1944, in Rome, that Nakamura met my uncle Clifford, and shared the following story. He wrote it down soon afterwards, in an attempt to keep it all straight. Perhaps a survivor could make sense of it.

We were staring out the window onto the soggy Colorado street. The flakes melted when they hit the frozen ground. Private Okamoto was talking about his uncle’s strawberry garden back in California. He didn’t know if it was still there. Yes, we were afraid to go to war and we were afraid for our families behind barbed wire at Granada. Both of us had parents detained.

A tall, thin rancher stumbled into the cafe, ordered coffee and sent a bone chilling stare in our direction. It wasn’t a hostile look, more one of astonishment, of lassitude. He turned tiredly away from us and asked the walls and ceilings what the world had become.

Then, without warning, he approached our table. We thought he must be drunk.

“Looks like snow,” he said. “How long you been in?”

Private Okamoto answered him, followed by a crisp sir. He motioned at the chair as if asking it to dance, then sat down.

“I’ve heard a lot of you pups were joining up,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to stare but you two are the first I’ve seen in uniform. Where they sending you?”

“Italy, sir,” I answered, “for the time being. Then Berlin.”

“You won’t see much of this damned snow until way past Rome. Where are you boys from?”

“Santa Ana, California, sir. We are only here to visit our families at Granada. They were relocated over a year ago,” I answered. “We brought them Christmas presents.”

“My name is Walters, Frank Walters,”  he said, describing a cold, wet Christmas at Cambrai, in France in 1917. “I was at Belleau Wood as well, and with the Brits at Chateau-Thierry after the Germans broke through in 1918. I survived. A lot of them didn’t.

“And now our government is involved with another war with Germany…and this time with those bastards, the Japanese,” said Walters, catching himself. He looked at the floor.

“You got a lot of family interned at Granada?” he mumbled into his chest.

“Most of them,” I frowned. “The others, a cousin and Private Okamoto’s brother are in the army. We are Japanese-Americans, you know.”

“I know,” breathed Walters. “Good farmers. Good neighbors. I don’t think they deserve what they’re getting. The country’s in a panic and some are up to no good.”

“After Pearl Harbor it’s not hard to believe,” said Okamoto.

Walters returned to his previous state, not saying anything for a few minutes, just staring out the window and then to the door as if expecting a visitor.

“How old are you boys?” he asked, returning to the present.

“I’m 19 and Kiyoshi is 20,” said Okamoto.

“The same age as my Tommy,” said Walters. “He was lost when the West Virginia went down at Pearl Harbor.”

We sat there in shock. After three days visiting a deplorable Granada and 14 weeks training to kill Germans, and perhaps even Japanese, we thought we’d reached a certain sense of numbness. Now we were sitting here with a World War I vet who had lost a son to the Imperial Navy, to young men his age who looked like us.

“My name is Tommy,” offered Okamoto, stumbling over his words in some attempt to ease the pain that all were feeling by now.

“You’re all Tommy,” said Walters, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “We were once children too and it was the same Christmas, but different. Germans and Japanese and English and French all wrapped up like the dark gifts of bitter winter. It’s insane,” he moved his head methodically from side to side. “They put your families in camps and yet you volunteer to fight.”

“What are we to do?,” said Okamoto. “Honor must override or anger, our fear.”

“Honor,” answered Walters, gathering his emotions. “You boys had better drop back a few notches on the honor thing and hold on to a little common sense when you get over there,” he said. The Germans are entrenched all the way up the peninsula. It’ll be no picnic.”

Walters smiled a shell shocked smile and changed the subject to the wine he had drank and the women he had met in France during his war. He then took us totally off guard and asked us to write him a letter saying that it would get to him in Lamar without an address.

“Just send it to Frank Walters,” he said.

We told him we’d send him a postcard from Naples and asked him to watch out for our families if he could.

“I’ll do that,” he said, getting up and disappearing into the snowstorm.

– Kevin Haley