I read the Sept. 18 story “WSU receives trove of images of internment: Photos from Heart Mountain contribute clarity to U.S. history.” I was born in 1922 in Chicago. I enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard on June 1, 1941. I was in the Coast Guard station in Kenosha, Wis., when the Japanese secretly bombed Pearl Harbor. With more than 100,000 Japanese people living along our West Coast shore, our president had to make a quick and hard decision regarding the movement of all these people. My complaint is that the media label this action as a “shameful” episode of World War II.
Within days of the attack, I and five other seamen were sent to Gary, Ind., to guard the power house of a big steel mill. I won’t get into all my sea duty. But, after the war, this story speaks highly of what many of these displaced people ended up doing — and most did pretty good.
Warren S. Webster
Vancouver
