Chapter 1
FIT FOR SERVICE
Ben Kuroki gripped the wheel of the old truck as it rolled along the gravel road that connected the family’s farm to the busy Lincoln Highway a mile-and-a-quarter to the south. It was Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, and he was headed into the town of North Platte for the sort of meeting he didn’t usually attend. Twenty-four years of age, Ben had spent most of his life on the farm the family leased from a white landowner in the nearby village of Hershey. A federal law prevented Ben’s parents, both immigrants from Japan, from becoming US citizens; a state law prevented them from owning land in Nebraska. That was the case in most farming states in the West, which had adopted “alien land laws” to prevent people who looked like Shosuke Kuroki from owning land.
As onerous as Nebraska’s 1921 Alien Land Law could be, life in the Cornhusker state was better than what Sam—as a Swedish neighbor had begun calling Shosuke—had experienced in some of his previous stops, in California and Wyoming. Farming was hard work, but he loved it. It had gotten him away from the gambling habit he had developed in Wyoming, where he mined coal for the Union Pacific Railroad for a few years and maintained the company’s rail lines in Wyoming and Nebraska, in all sorts of weather.1
Ben didn’t share his father’s love of farm life. In fact, Ben found a way to escape it. After graduating from Hershey High School in 1936, he saved some money from odd jobs and selling the pelts of skunks and raccoons he trapped. Ben and a partner bought a tractor-trailer rig for hauling produce. For about three years, they had been driving over to Omaha and down to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, delivering Sam’s potatoes and vegetables or the produce of other local farmers and returning with fruits or vegetables in season at their delivery point.
The meeting that Ben was headed to this morning wasn’t about farming. A fellow from an organization that Ben didn’t know much about—the Japanese American Citizens League—was in North Platte trying to organize the several dozen residents of Japanese ancestry to form their own chapter. Ben wasn’t sure why, but he had agreed to listen to the fellow who had traveled from California by train. Ben didn’t have deep feelings about his Japanese ancestry, but he would get to see old friends and learn more about the conflict between America and Japan that newspapers and radio newscasts were screaming about these days.
On either side of the gravel road lay fields where much of Ben’s life had played out—irrigated expanses that in recent months had yielded bountiful harvests of potatoes, sugar beets, cabbages, and tomatoes. The Kuroki family was well-known in these parts for the size and quality of their fresh produce. They lived in a ramshackle one-story farmhouse just off the road, on the land they leased.
Ben had grown up in poverty, the sixth of ten children born to Sam and Naka Kuroki. His parents had emigrated separately to America in the century’s first decade, and they had married in Wyoming in 1907, shortly after Naka’s arrival. Steady work with the Union Pacific Railroad took Sam from California to Wyoming, where he hoped to realize his American dream. The newlyweds made their first home in Cheyenne, where Sam was a coal mine laborer, according to the 1910 federal census. The couple had taken on a boarder to supplement Sam’s income. In Cheyenne, Naka gave birth to a son named Ichiro, who adopted the name of George, and a daughter named Fuji.
Around 1911, the family moved deeper into the Wyoming interior, to Hanna, where Union Pacific had its biggest coal mine. The work was no doubt a grueling adjustment for Sam, who had made a living selling silk sashes back in Japan, according to family lore. His coal-mining work was as dangerous as it was physically exhausting, with mine shafts subject to periodic explosions and cave-ins. Sam quit the mines around 1914 to act on his dream. As with the Wyoming move, the seeds had been planted by Sam’s work for the Union Pacific Railroad. He had first laid eyes on the Platte River Valley’s lush farmland during a stint with a railroad line crew, and it was there that Sam Kuroki hoped to raise his growing family in bucolic bliss.
 
FARMING WASN’T AS DANGEROUS as coal mining, but, as Sam discovered, it wasn’t without perils. Gyrating prices, fickle markets, financial upheaval, assorted natural disasters such as wind- and hailstorms and droughts—these all became perilous forces for the Kuroki family on that plot of leased land near the town of North Platte. Naka had given birth to another two daughters, Shizuye (Cecile) and Yoshie (Wilma), and another boy, Atsushi (Henry), by the time that Ben entered the world on May 16, 1917.
By then the family was living outside of Gothenburg, an old Pony Express stop on the Platte River, about thirty miles downstream from North Platte. Sam kept moving the family farther west, following the river upstream, until finally the Kurokis put down roots a mile south of the North Platte River outside the village of Hershey. After delivering Ben, Naka gave birth to another three children in quick succession: Shitoshi (Fred), in 1919; Fusae (Beatrice) in 1921; and Minoru (William) in 1923. In 1926, a frail and exhausted Naka gave birth to her tenth child in eighteen years, a daughter they named Rose Marie (sometimes recorded as Rosemary in documents). Ben had been the first Kuroki child to not have a Japanese name; Rosie, as she was known, was the second.
The same year of Rosie’s birth, the family marked another milestone when the oldest child, Ichiro—now known as George—graduated from tiny Hershey High School and entered the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. A fast runner, George held the South Platte Valley track record for the mile race for several years after his graduation, and he continued to compete for the Nebraska Cornhuskers track team. A sports columnist writing in the Sunday Nebraska State Journal newspaper in Lincoln once noted his admirable work ethic, but only after introducing him as “George Kuroki, a Jap from Hershey.” The columnist had used what was then common shorthand for the word “Japanese”; Ben would grow to hate the word long before it was deemed an ethnic slur and retired from common usage.2
By the waning months of 1929, Sam Kuroki had earned a reputation in Lincoln County as a skilled and industrious farmer. At the same time, the Kuroki children were doing well in school, their lives largely integrated with those of their white classmates. There were one or two other Japanese families with children in the Hershey school and a few Mexican families, whose men worked as laborers on the local farms. George was in his third year at the University of Nebraska and the other children were scattered through the classes of the two-story Hershey school. Ninth-grader Atsushi—who now went by Henry—had brought great honor to his parents in the summer just passed by winning a medal for his essay on “Americanism” and for earning a spot on the American Legion junior baseball team. There was much to celebrate for Sam and Naka.
 
IN MANY WAYS, BEN’S CHILDHOOD was even more challenging than that of his siblings. Naka was so weak after giving birth to him that an extraordinary neighbor from a nearby farm became Ben’s primary caregiver for weeks.3
A sweet, even-tempered baby who rarely cried, in that neighbor’s recollection, Ben became a painfully shy child. His adjustment to school after the family’s move to Hershey was traumatic. Ben was in the second grade when he first walked into the two-story building in Hershey that housed the classrooms for grades one through twelve. Ben was overwhelmed by the experience. When called on to answer a question in class, he would rise to his feet and stand mutely until classmates tittered and the teacher allowed him to sit.
The work that Ben and his siblings shouldered on the farm, like shoveling manure from the barn or digging potatoes, was drudgery. But as Ben grew in size and maturity and was entrusted with more demanding tasks, he developed confidence and self-assurance. By the time he was twelve, Ben was largely exempt from the menial farm chores that fell to the younger children; his developing physical strength allowed him to join the older boys and their father in the exhausting task of sacking, storing, or loading potatoes. By the time he was fourteen, Ben could handle a one-hundred-pound sack of potatoes with ease.4
Ben entered high school as the country sank into the despair of the Great Depression. It was during those years that his paralyzing childhood shyness became a distant memory and his personality fully emerged. He was humble, earnest, and soft-spoken in manner, but he also smiled easily and was warm and friendly. He had developed close friendships, a sense of humor, and a penchant for pranks—some of them bordering on obnoxious. He was a member of the basketball, baseball, and track teams, but he was an unexceptional athlete. By his junior year, he found that he enjoyed writing and he worked on the school’s first yearbook. He also wrote the junior class “School Notes” column for the local newspaper.
Over several years, Ben had developed a close friendship with the most popular boy in his small Hershey High School class. From the time they were old enough to hold a shotgun, Ben and Gordon Jorgenson, or Gordy as he preferred, hunted ducks and pheasants together along the North Platte River. On one of their winter hunts, Ben crawled out on an ice sheet to retrieve some ducks they had brought down, only for the ice to give way. As Ben struggled for his life in the freezing water, Gordy extended the butt of his shotgun close enough for Ben to grab. He pulled Ben to safety and then built a fire to thaw him out.
By his senior year, Ben’s status had risen such that he was elected the vice president of his fourteen-member graduating class; Gordy, to no one’s surprise, was president. When he graduated from high school in 1936, Ben didn’t have the money or inclination to attend college. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, except that he didn’t want to spend it growing potatoes, sugar beets, and cabbages. Without any immediate alternatives, Ben worked on the farm and trapped fur-bearing animals along the North Platte River to earn some money. He had learned to drive the family’s old Chevrolet truck, and that nurtured an idea that he pitched to his father: He would buy a tractor-trailer rig with his trapping money and transport the family crops and those of other area farmers to markets in Omaha and beyond. Sam gave his blessing.
The life of a long-haul trucker turned out to be tougher than Ben had imagined. On his first trip in November 1938, Ben rolled out of Hershey with a load of his father’s cabbages, bound for Omaha, 275 miles to the east. Ben and his partner made it into the city without incident, but then disaster struck. Ben’s friend was at the wheel when a car ran a red light on a busy city street, forcing him to swerve to avoid hitting the vehicle broadside. The trailer tipped over, spilling nine tons of cabbages around a major Omaha intersection. The accident, written up in the Omaha newspaper and spread around the state in an Associated Press dispatch, foreshadowed further mishaps to come. Running on cheap tires, Ben had frequent blowouts. On another trip, Ben’s partner fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the road, and tipped the trailer yet again; Ben smashed into the windshield and was lucky to walk away with only cuts and bruises.
With their truck out of commission, Ben and his partner borrowed money to buy another. They began venturing farther and farther from Hershey, making runs into Oklahoma and then Texas. In February 1940, Ben drove to south Texas to bring a load of fruit and vegetables back to wintry Nebraska to sell. With another year of driving under his belt, he repeated the Texas trip again in February 1941, dropping off a load of his father’s potatoes in Oklahoma City before continuing to the Rio Grande Valley to fill his trailer with fresh citrus and vegetables.
Ben was helping his family with his trucking venture and had broadened his horizons beyond Nebraska, but there was a sense that life was leaving him behind. His five older siblings were set in their paths. His oldest brother, George, had been forced to drop out of the University of Nebraska and take over the farm when Sam suffered a heart attack; Ben’s second brother, Henry, had earned his business degree at the University of Nebraska; four of Ben’s sisters—Fuji, Cecile, Wilma, who were older than Ben, and his younger sister Beatrice—had found various jobs in Chicago. Ben’s friend Gordy Jorgenson had married one of their Hershey High School classmates in January 1941 and now owned a Hershey service station; he and his wife were expecting their first child.
As Ben scratched out a living and contemplated his future, events far beyond America’s shores suddenly loomed as a wild card. On September 16, 1940, in response to Hitler’s conquest of much of Europe and Japan’s expansionist activities in the Pacific, President Franklin Roosevelt implemented the first peacetime draft in US history. The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 required men between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five to register for the draft and to serve at least one year in the armed forces if summoned.
In mid-November 1941, Ben received a letter from the army, ordering him to report for his physical examination—the final step prior to his induction for active military service. On November 19, 1941, eight days before Thanksgiving, Ben underwent his physical exam at an army facility in Grand Island, Nebraska. He was rated fit for service. Five years out of high school, unmarried, scraping out a meager living, Ben checked the mail each day for his army summons.
 
BEN REACHED THE PAVED LINCOLN HIGHWAY—US 30—and turned east. The road passed through flat farmland as the Platte River’s north and south forks gradually converged. Approaching the western outskirts of the town, Ben came abreast of the five-mile-long Union Pacific rail switching yards that had put North Platte on the map. At the eastern edge of the switching yards, the highway suddenly curved at a forty-five-degree angle to the right. Off to the left a traveler might just catch a glimpse of the Second Empire–style mansion and ranch that had belonged to the Union Pacific’s legendary hunter, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Ben slowed, made a right turn, crossed the railroad tracks, and entered downtown North Platte.
With a population of about twelve thousand, North Platte had been the “big city” for the Kuroki children growing up. Its two-story buildings seemed enormous and its maze of streets overwhelming to Ben and his younger siblings, Fred, Beatrice, Billie, and Rosie. On his initial trip into North Platte, Ben had seen a movie for the first time. His father had brought Ben and his two younger brothers with him when he had some business to handle in town, and he had bought movie tickets for Ben, Fred, and Billie so he would know where to find the boys when he was done. The movie was All Quiet on the Western Front, the screen adaptation of German writer Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated antiwar novel set in the shell-scarred trenches of Europe’s Western Front during World War I.
Ben and his brothers found the war scenes scary, and during a climactic artillery barrage on the screen a thunderstorm hit North Platte. Inside the theater, the thunder of the shells blasting from the speakers was punctuated by hail stones pelting the roof above the terrified boys. Overcome by fear, Ben and his brothers bolted from the theater into the rain. Now, a decade after that searing experience, Ben faced the growing prospect of fighting in a real war.
Turning onto West 4th Street, Ben parked outside the Episcopal Church of Our Savior and made his way to the basement auditorium. Several dozen Japanese immigrants—Issei, they were called—and first-generation Japanese Americans—Nisei—began to fill the room. The meeting got underway around eleven o’clock.
At that moment, some thirty-six hundred miles to the west, it was six-thirty in the morning in Honolulu and day was breaking over the Hawaiian Islands.5 A few minutes earlier, six aircraft carriers of the Japanese Imperial Navy, steaming two hundred miles from Oahu, had turned into the wind and launched a wave of fighter-bombers. As Ben and his friends settled into their seats in the church basement to hear a speaker talk about how the tensions between the United States and Japan might affect their lives, 183 Japanese military aircraft were about one hundred miles from the US Navy’s base at Pearl Harbor and closing fast.