February 3, 1996

When I dropped Erin off at North, it took me only five seconds to recognize the movie that they were watching on video. It was Apollo 13, and the ship had just lifted off - a great scene in a great film. I hugged my daughter, kissed her good night, and climbed into my car for the trip back home. I was feeling sentimental about leaving my daughter. Then I started thinking about the astronauts. And I was proud of them, and proud of America.

So my thoughts turned to heroes and, as I drove, I thought about another hero. This one was rediscovered by my father-in-law, Stan Howell, in a book of World War II trivia that Diana and I had bought him.

A lot of strange things went on in that war. In a previous essay, I dropped the words "Executive Order 9066". It was one of those strange things. A manifestation, perhaps, of the collective paranoia in our country. We were in a war, you see, and even if the Pacific Theater was far away, at least we knew what the bad guys looked like: black hair, slanty eyes, yellow skin. So we locked them up.

Executive Order 9066 was issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 18, 1942. The order tried to cope with the possibility that Japanese Americans might have enough sympathy for their ancestral land to engage in sabotage. The order permitted various restrictions on those of Japanese descent, mostly the immigrant "Issei" and their American-born children known as "Nisei". In all, 112,000 Japanese Americans were evacuated from the West Coast and placed in 10 "relocation centers" run by a "War Relocation Authority", where some were confined for up to 4 years.

In fairness, one might point out that there really was a war on. And maybe some of the immigrants would have sabotaged the American war efforts. And the concentration camps in this country were certainly more comfortable and humane than those in other countries. They were by no means the death camps of the Third Reich. But we did take innocent civilians and lock them up with no proof, or even suspicion that they had done anything wrong.

You might say, "it can't happen here!" Or, "That's not Constitutional!" Hell, people said it back then, too. So it went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where two interesting decisions came down in 1944. In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the evacuation. In the case of Mitsuye Endo, the court stated that the prolonged detention of Japanese Americans whose loyalty had been ascertained was illegal. And either way, the U.S. government paid apologies of $20,000 apiece to the surviving detainees in 1988.

But at the same time that we were busily locking away some of our citizens, there was a critical manpower shortage. So we took as many young men as we could into the armed services. And if they happened to look Japanese, we just sent them to Europe. If their name sounded kinda German, they went to the Pacific.

I suppose that's how Sadao Munemori, U.S. Army private first class, wound up in Italy in 1945. He was serving there with the 442nd Combat Team, when an enemy grenade threatened to blow him and his fellow soldiers to Hell. Munemori decided to save his buddies the trip. He threw himself on the grenade and was killed. I don't know how many lives he saved.

The Congressional Medal of Honor is the highest decoration for gallantry in the United States and the oldest official American medal. It is awarded only to the heroes whose deeds of valor are so outstanding that they are without parallel. Many of the qualifying deeds verge on the insane. It is frequently awarded posthumously. And that's how it was given to Sadao Munemori, the only Japanese American to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II.

So they presented the Congressional Medal of Honor to Munemori's mother, while she was interned in Manzanar, in the Owens Valley of California.

Sometimes, I feel ashamed to be an American.

- Dennis Griesser

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