Word: kuroki
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Before the war, when Ben Kuroki helped his father raise sugar beets and seed potatoes on a farm in Hershey, Neb. (pop. 487), nobody paid much attention to the color of Ben's skin. The day after Pearl Harbor, Kuroki enlisted. On the train to camp, he heard for the first time what became an agonizingly familiar question: "What's that Jap doing in the Army?" To answer it, Japanese-American Ben Kuroki volunteered as an Air Force gunner...
After flying 30 missions in a B-24 over Europe and Africa and winning a pair of D.F.C.s, Sergeant Kuroki came home-where he could have stayed, had he liked. Instead, he volunteered as a gunner on a B-29 in the Pacific theater, had to pull a few strings to get the job because he was a Nisei. In a bomber christened Honorable Sad Saki, Kuroki flew 28 missions more, including strikes on Tokyo and Yokohama ("my mother's home town"); he was the first Nisei to win a D.F.C. in the Pacific. Back home again, Kuroki assigned...
...Airman Kuroki off to a flying start, 42 Nebraska weekly editors, publishers and staffers, including several ex-G.I.s, came from miles around, pitched in to help Ben make his first edition a memorable one (the volunteer staff called it the "Welcome Ben Kuroki" edition).They did a good deal more. For the first edition, which rolls off the presses this week, they put together 40 pages instead of the usual eight, and drummed up an overflow supply of 3,300 inches of advertising. Said grateful Editor Kuroki: "This couldn't happen in any other country...
Earned Repose. He had earned his rest. Few men can ever have gone through more plain hell trying to find a place in the special hell of battle. Ben Kuroki's father was a seed-potato grower in Hershey, Neb., a town of about 500 people. Ben and his kid brother Fred (now overseas with an engineer outfit) volunteered for the Army two days after Pearl Harbor, were accepted a month later. Ben landed in the Air Forces and started to run his personal gantlet at Sheppard Field...
When he is ready for combat again, Ben Kuroki hopes to go to the Pacific theater. His roommate at Santa Monica now is Tail Gunner Edward Bates, who lost a brother in the Pacific. Says Ben: "I promised him the first Zero I get will be for his brother...