Oregon Coast
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Oregon Coast Ch. 04 free porn video
This one is a little personal, my father in law was a Japanese-American GI in WW2 and there are a lot of echoes of my family in Doc M’s family.
The Battle of the Lost Brigade happened in October 1944. Like the Light Brigade at Balaclava, the 442d was ordered by incompetent generals to do a militarily impossible task and did it on sheer courage, at great loss to themselves. For this and many similar feats the all Japanese-American 442d became the most decorated unit in the US Army, including twenty one Medals of Honor.
I used to think that my country had outgrown the attitudes that led to the internment of the Japanese-Americans. After 9/11 I’m not so sure. I’ve heard way too many allegedly responsible people call for all Muslim Americans to be classified as ‘the enemy’. I’m proud that the Japanese American Citizens League has led the resistance to such stupidity.
There’s probably no way to write about racial/ethnic issues without offending someone. I’ve done my best, so I won’t apologize. I do hope my respect for all ethnic groups came through.
I have great respect for veterans, but am not one myself. I don’t want recognition I didn’t earn.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I grew up looking at the picture of Uncle Ed on the mantelpiece in our living room. There he stood in that old-fashioned GI uniform, surrounded by his identically dressed buddies, grinning and aping for the camera somewhere in England. It wasn’t until I was in fifth grade or so that I realized what the flag with the gold star next to the picture meant. In college I figured out that Uncle Ed was only a couple years older than I was then when he and eight hundred comrades in the 442d Regimental Combat Team died in an ultimately successful struggle to rescue two hundred and fifty American soldiers cut off behind German lines. I was never allowed to forget the lesson, usually delivered by Grandma:
‘You have a good life in America? People treat you like a real American? All we Japanese have in this country, we owe to your uncle and the 442! After what they did, nobody say that we’re not as American as anyone else! Never forget!’
It wasn’t until high school, though, that I heard the other half of the story. I came home in shock and asked Grandma if she had ever heard of a ‘relocation camp’. It was like I had struck her. She sat heavily at the kitchen table and motioned me to the other side, and for the first time in my life I saw tears in her eyes.
‘Yeah…yeah… I was at the camp when they sent me that Gold Star for your Uncle Ed.’
‘What camp? Where?’
‘Don’t ask me about that. It was a bad time. Shikata ga nai.’
I knew what that meant: don’t complain about things that can’t be changed. It also meant that she had said all she would ever say on the subject. Just to be sure Mom warned me that night, in no uncertain terms, that I was never to bring up the internment again. The way their country had treated them, and the loss of everything they had worked for, was just too painful for my proud grandparents to talk about.
When the money ran out after two years of college, I was faced with a bit of a dilemma. The military was the obvious next step, especially for someone who had been raised to idolize the Nisei soldiers who had paid in blood for my generation’s opportunities. On the other hand, I had a Buddhist’s deep seated revulsion for killing and couldn’t see myself as a machine gunner. After talking to a recruiter and a couple of 442d veterans, I joined the Navy as a medical corpsman.
Being a corpsman turned out to be a good fit with my interests. Fitting in with the other guys was a little harder. Let’s be honest here: I’m kind of small, Asian, wear glasses, refused to carry a weapon, and wasn’t interested in drinking and chasing floozies off duty. It’s not exactly the image of your average Seabee. The guys treated me well enough, especially since I was always willing to quietly fix up injuries and infections they didn’t want to explain to the chain of command, but I got more than my share of practical jokes pulled on me too.
Then came 9/11, and the whole focus of military life changed. We had never even seen a map of Afghanistan before then, assuming that a landlocked country was irrelevant to the Navy, but when they needed bases built quickly they hollered for all the construction experts they could find. Within a few months we were in Afghanistan and hard at work.
The guys treated me differently over there. I guess when people are actually getting wounded a corpsman gets more respect. They seemed to think it was a big deal that we had to go to where the wounded fell to help them, which I never understood. A wounded soldier isn’t going to get up and run to cover while the corpsman waits for him, so going to him is part of the job if you want to be effective. Sure, it can be dangerous, but the monks had taught me that life’s not permanent and it’s a waste of time and effort to pretend that it is. Besides, as a Japanese-American serviceman I would rather die than disgrace the proud tradition I had inherited. I had a job to do and I did it.
I wasn’t doing anything special when the odds caught up with me. We were on our way to run a sick call in one of the local villages when an IED went off under our Humvee. Must have been a small one, because all it did was break my leg in a few places and tear up our driver with some fragments. Getting her bleeding stopped was the last useful thing I did before the military medical pipeline sucked me up and spit me out again in Landstuhl, Germany.
Once my leg was pinned back together I was off to the US for recuperation and physical therapy. The process left me with a lot of free time, which was good because Grandma was getting old fast. As long as I showed up for roll calls and medical appointments, no one cared if I spent the rest of my time with her at the retirement home.
I did get a bit of a shock the first time I made it all the way to her room on my crutches. I knew the Gold Star and the picture of Uncle Ed would be on display, but I wasn’t expecting the one next to it. Me, in my dress blues, shaking hands with the President on the day they awarded me my Silver Star. Someone had put me in for it without telling me, and while I didn’t think I deserved it I wasn’t going to turn it down either.
‘What’s this, Grandma?’
‘You make me proud, Emerson. Made the whole family proud. Your uncle would be proud too. You a credit to our name.’
Suddenly all the pain and boredom I was going through didn’t seem like such a heavy burden.
Eventually the powers that be decided that my leg was never going to be fit for active duty again, and I was discharged with a disability rating and the right to lifetime VA medical care. Between the VA and GI Bill benefits, I also had funding to finish college and go on to medical school.
Internship and residency at Oregon Health Sciences University was one of the hardest experiences of my life, but I always made time for the monthly gathering of the guys I had served with in Afghanistan. Pretty much all of us were out of the service and moving on with our lives, but the things we had been through together were a lifetime bond. I needed those guys to keep my perspective on life beyond the hospital, and they were always happy to see me.
This month the gathering was at a bar in Northeast Portland that someone had heard about. We had spent the first hour or so catching up, and I had gotten up to use the head. On the way back I had managed to get in a conversation with a cute little brunette who was helping her friend celebrate her upcoming wedding, and wasn’t in any hurry to get back to our table.
I guess I should mention that I like Asian-American girls just fine, although not as much as some of my white friends. Unlike them, I had grown up around Asian girls and didn’t buy into that whole geisha/M. Butterfly fantasy. Besides, their momma’s
reaction when they heard that I’m a medical resident could be a little overwhelming. I’ll go out with a pretty Japanese-American girl any chance I get, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll pass up a chance with an attractive girl of any other race. This girl was cute and friendly, and I was having a great time flirting with her.
‘Hey, gook, why don’t you stick to your own kind?’
I turned. Shaved head, suspenders, boots- the whole skinhead package designed to look tough. Not uncommon in Portland, but stupid and usually dangerous only in groups. A couple others were watching off to one side. I tried Plan A.
‘You’re making a mistake here. Why don’t you go hang out with your friends?’
Behind him I could see what he couldn’t: the guys I came with had noticed the problem and were getting up from our table. He had too many drinks in him to listen to reason.
‘Why don’t you make me?’
The girl I had been flirting with was standing there, wide eyed. I spoke to her quietly.
‘Could you stand back, please?’
She promptly did. A deep, Spanish accented voice came from behind him.
‘Hey, ese, if you got a problem with the Doc you got a problem with the rest of us. Why don’t you maricons go drink someplace else?’
Manny Rodriguez wasn’t much taller than I was but he was built like a fireplug. Over a lot of bull sessions in Afghanistan, I learned that he had been a rising star in the East Los Angeles Surenos when he realized that he was attending way too many funerals and was going to be the guest of honor soon if he stayed on the path he was on. The Marine Corps had turned his life in a completely new direction. Now he was an urban planner, wore a tie to work, and spoke without a trace of an accent, but when he got angry the tough cholo rose to the surface quickly. He still had the absolute loyalty to his friends that his early life had ingrained in him, and threatening one in his presence was close to suicidal. The skinhead was starting to catch on. Desperately, he looked up at Brian.
Brian was our petty officer in Afghanistan, and still our natural leader. He’s probably 6’3′ and close to 300 pounds of muscle. On the inside you couldn’t find a gentler, kinder man, but he won’t hesitate to use his size to intimidate people who start trouble for no reason.
‘Are you really going to stick up for this spic and gook?’
Brian’s eyebrows rose. His voice was calm, quiet, and even deeper than Manny’s.
‘The spic and the gook are my brothers. You’ve been given two chances to walk away peacefully, and you’re not getting another. Now get moving.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the guys open the front door of the bar. What the skinheads weren’t realizing was that this scenario had played out in a lot of bars and EM clubs all over the world, and they were the only ones who didn’t know what their role was about to be.
‘Don’t you have any white priiiiiiiiii…’
He didn’t finish the sentence before he went flying out the open door without touching the ground to land on his hands and knees in the street. Manny and Brian turned to his two buddies.
‘You guys want to be next?’
They had their hands up defensively.
‘No, no, we’re cool.’
‘Good. Go pick your friend up and don’t come back.’
They quickly scrambled out the door. Manny grinned up at Brian.
‘You getting rusty, compadre. You almost hit the doorjamb with that pendejo.’
‘Me? You threw the timing off, you ugly dwarf. I was going to ask someone else to help me throw the next one.’
They laughed and turned back to their beer.
I looked around. The little brunette’s entire party was staring at me, wide eyed.
‘What the heck was that?’
‘Guys I served with in the Navy. We’re having our monthly reunion. I tried to warn them not to push it, but if they had any brains they wouldn’t be skinheads.’
‘Are those guys always like that?’
‘Best people I’ve ever known, but we didn’t survive Afghanistan to take crap from punks like that at home. They would have done the same for anyone else at that table.’
I motioned the girl aside.
‘Look, I don’t want to put a damper on your friend’s bachelorette party. Could I call you some other time?’
‘Uh, sure. Got a piece of paper?’
One thing medical types are never short of is notepads with the name of some drug or another printed on them. She quickly scribbled down a phone number and handed it to me, and I went back to our table to catch the tail end of Manny’s story about his struggle to pass Statistics so he could finish his MBA. Nobody thought the whole skinhead thing called for further discussion. In the scale of things we had seen together, it just didn’t signify.
A couple days later I called the number on my notepad. An extremely calm male voice answered.
‘Holman’s Funeral Service. How may I assist you?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Holman’s Funeral Service.’
‘Is this 232-5131?’
The professional calm was wearing a little.
‘Yes it is. Do you need immediate services or would you like information on pre-need arrangements?’
‘I guess you can bury my love life if you want.’
‘May I connect you to Alcoholics Anonymous? They may be able to help you more than I can.’
‘Sorry to bother you.’
‘Right.’
The guy hung up abruptly.
The next day at lunch I was bitching to Karen about it. She’s a surgical nurse. Really nice girl, very pretty, and I sometimes regretted that I hadn’t asked her out when she was single. Shikata ga nai, Grandma would have said, she’s happily engaged to one of Brian’s adopted brothers and considers me more or less another brother.
‘Why can’t a girl just say no when a guy asks for her number? Here I’m looking forward to talking with what I thought was a cute girl I’d met, and instead some undertaker accuses me of drunk dialing. It’s embarrassing.’
‘It was rude of her, but you have to realize that your crowd can be intimidating. We both know that Brian and Manny are a couple of teddy bears, but it’s not obvious to people who don’t know them.’
Manny wasn’t exactly a teddy bear, in my opinion. I once saw him beat a would-be suicide bomber to death with an entrenching tool in a desperate effort to prevent him from blowing up a school, but it wasn’t a story I wanted to tell Karen. I had also seen him rendered completely tongue tied and red faced by a little frivolous flirting. Karen’s totally in love with Dave, but she still likes being a girl and doesn’t see any harm in acting like it.
‘What, was someone going to rough her up for saying she wasn’t interested? Oh, who cares, no use worrying about it now. I just get tired of all these games. Why can’t I find a pretty, sensible girl like you or Jennifer and not have to deal with all these games any more?’
‘Well, the fact that eighty hours of work is a light week for you doesn’t help.’
Karen thought for a second and smiled.
‘You know, it was Jennifer and Lydia who set me up on a blind date with Dave. Let me talk to them about it. This could be fun.’
A couple weeks later Lydia called me up.
‘Hey, Doc, barbecue at Jen and Brian’s place next Saturday! Be there or be square. Plus, I’m bringing a new teacher I want you to meet.’
Lydia teaches high school and is married to another of Brian’s adopted brothers. One more in the long list of incredibly sweet, pretty girls I met too late. Lydia tends to put on a Gothy persona and is always coming up with odd, outdated expressions.
‘I assume Karen told you I was tired of the singles game?’
‘She let me in on it. Us boring married folks have to have our fun somewhere.’
‘I get the impression that you and John cook up plenty of fun.’
‘No comment. Anyway, Brian said I had to warn you ahead of time that she’s Eric Jones’ cousin.’
I swallowed hard. Eric had been my biggest fail
ure in Afghanistan, a respected member of our unit who had died under my hands during an ambush. I never thought I deserved the Silver Star they gave me for trying to save him, and I never forgave myself for failing. Hearing his name still hurt.
‘I’ll try to look past that. What time?’
‘About two. And don’t take that attitude, she’s a really nice girl.’
‘I’ll be there as soon as I get off work.’
Lydia dropped it and hung up.
Jen and Brian live in an old farmhouse that Brian converted and modernized, with some help from Jen. The farmland’s mostly gone, but they have enough left for a big back yard. There were quite a few people there by the time I got away from the hospital, including enough I knew to get started on a couple of conversations. After a while, Brian and Jennifer turned up with a young woman in tow. Eric’s cousin, obviously: Eric had been black and this girl was at least part black.
‘Hey, Doc, I want you to meet someone. Allison Jackson, this is Emerson Miyahara. Call him Doc like everyone else does.’
She gave me a bright smile. Remarkably pretty young woman, really. Kind of like a young Halle Berry.
‘So you’re the famous Doc Miyahara? Eric used to talk about you a lot. I’ve wanted to thank you for a long time for what you did for him. Is it OK to hug a hero?’
‘Whatever I did for him wasn’t enough, and I’m not any damn hero. I want to apologize to you and your family for losing him. And I don’t need any damn hug for it, either.’
Jen gaped at me, and Brian shook his head with a frown. Allison looked like I had slapped her. She turned and walked away without another word, and Brian went after her. Jen turned on me. She may look like Cindy Crawford’s prettier sister, but her temper would have scared my drill instructor.
‘Emerson, what the hell is wrong with you? I’ve never seen you treat anyone like that, especially a cute young woman who obviously thinks you hung the moon. Is this how you’re going to act when we try to help you?’
‘Look, Jen, you don’t know what it was like in Afghanistan. Losing Eric is hard for me to deal with.’
Wrong thing to say.
‘Have you forgotten that my husband was right next to you during that ambush? Do you have any idea how many nights I’ve spent holding him after he woke up screaming about it? Maybe I wasn’t there, but I sure as hell know how hard it is for you guys to deal with. Brian’s finally come to the realization that what happened to Eric Jones wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t yours either, but it sounds like you’re not ready to believe that.’
She sighed.
‘Because of you Brian’s alive and has two arms, and I’ll always be grateful for that. That doesn’t give you a right to be rude to my guests, though. I expect you to go find that young lady and apologize.’
What could I say?
‘I guess I was rude, Jen. I just hate being called a hero over that stuff.’
‘Make that explanation part of your apology, then. Get going.’
I found Allison sitting in a gazebo toward the back end of the lawn. She didn’t look happy to see me.
‘I didn’t think you wanted anything to do with me.’
‘Allison, I was a jerk to you, and I came to apologize.’
Her expression didn’t soften.
‘Yeah, you were. I was trying to be nice to you.’
‘Look, Eric’s death was my biggest failure as a combat medic. I can’t accept people calling me a hero over it. You hit a raw nerve.’
She turned to me, her expression softening a little.
‘Eric was as much a big brother as a cousin to me. I read everything there was to read about that ambush after we buried him, including the autopsy report. Two bullets through both lungs and the aorta? A full team of surgeons couldn’t have saved him, never mind a combat medic at the side of a dirt road. You can’t blame yourself. My family and I sure don’t.’
‘People keep telling me that, but I can’t accept it. It was my responsibility to keep guys alive until the medevac got there and I failed.’
‘Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Shikata ga nai, Mom would have said.’
I looked at her with the obvious question in my eyes. She half smiled, half shrugged.
‘Mom was full blooded Japanese. She met Dad when he was stationed in Okinawa. If you know what box I’m supposed to check on those forms you’re doing better than I am.’
Arisha
- 23.06.2020
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