Fighting to serve his country

One month after Pearl Harbor, Spady Koyama walked into the Spokane office of the Selective Service, signed his name and volunteered for induction.

The man looked at Koyama’s name, then looked at Koyama’s face and said, darkly, “Go home. We’re at war, you know.”

“I said, ‘I know we’re at war. That’s why I’m here,’ ” said Koyama, now 88 and retired in Spokane.

Koyama, a Japanese-American born in Ferry County, Wash., was itching to fight for his country. In fact, his Japan-born mother had been urging him on.

The day after Pearl Harbor she had told her son, “No matter what anybody says to you, this is your country. You should be thinking about fighting for your country.”

So when the draft board man told him to leave, Koyama, never a shrinking violet, held his ground. After a while, the official went ahead and “processed” him.

In fact, the Army was just beginning to realize that Japanese-Americans were a valuable asset in wartime intelligence. So exactly 31 days after Pearl Harbor, Koyama raised his right hand and joined the U.S. Army.

He was sent to an office in Fort Ord, Calif., where he reported to an officer who was ostentatiously leafing through a big book. The officer handed it to him.

“I took it and turned it around because at first glance I could see it was upside down,” said Koyama.

The officer smiled and said, “You passed.”

He was trying to see if Koyama could read Japanese in order to qualify for the military intelligence service. Koyama was fluent, more so than most second-generation Japanese-Americans. That’s because Koyama had spent six years in Japan from age 5 to 11.

He was born in Ferry County, north of Spokane, where his father was a section foreman on the Great Northern Railway. Yet his dad died when Koyama was only 5, so the boy was sent to a relative in Japan for schooling. When he was 11 his relative died, so he was sent back to Spokane to be with his mother. He went on to attend Lewis and Clark High School, play on the baseball team and graduate in 1937. When the war started, he was working on a farm in Bigelow Gulch.

Two months later, he found himself on a train out of California heading to what the officer had told him was a “secret intelligence school.” There was something odd about the train – every soldier on it was Japanese-American, some of them veterans.

“The train kept going east and some of the guys started getting nervous,” said Koyama. “One of the guys said, ‘You don’t suppose this train is going to stop in the middle of the desert, and we’ll all be ordered to get off and we’ll all be facing machine guns?’ And another guy said, ‘What the hell are you talking about? This is the U.S. of A.’ The train finally stopped in Oklahoma, and to our relief, some guys got off. Then it continued to Arkansas where my basic training started.”

Yet he was soon sent to Camp Savage in Minnesota, where the intelligence school had been hurriedly relocated. It had been in California, but in February 1942, the order had arrived to evacuate all people of Japanese descent from the West Coast.

Back home in Spokane, his mother awaited an evacuation order as well. She did not know that the evacuation order had not been extended to the eastern half of Washington, and never would be.

“My mother lived out of a suitcase with other Americans of Japanese descent, waiting for the evacuation order,” said Koyama. “An order that never came.”

Meanwhile, at Camp Savage, the Japanese-American soldiers were separated into two groups.

“The quiet types were put into one group – the introverted ones would be translators,” said Koyama. “The guys on the loud side, like me for example, were trained to become interrogators.”

Before long, he was in General Headquarters in Australia, along with Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself. Koyama’s job every day was to interrogate Japanese prisoners and extract as much information as possible. Once, while questioning a Japanese officer, the tension boiled over.

“I started to recite subjects I wanted to discuss, and the longer I talked the redder his face gets,” said Koyama. “And he finally reaches the saturation point and cusses me in Japanese and spits in my face. Well, naturally, I react like a true American. I cussed him right back in the best Japanese I know and spit in his face.”

The next day, Koyama’s request to transfer to one of the Pacific islands was granted. He went to New Guinea, where he continued as an interrogator.

Did he ever experience any kind of discrimination in the Army?

“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” he said. “Because of the fact my name is Koyama and that’s Japanese. Once, a fella in Australia got my goat because every few minutes he’d say, ‘You Japs,’ and I would say, ‘Look, I’m a Yank, don’t refer to me as a Jap.’ And a few minutes later, there he goes again. And I walk up to him with my fist cocked, and I was gonna let him have one. I said, ‘I told you not to call us Japs.’ And he looked kind of surprised and finally his eyes lit up and he said, ‘Oh, chaps! C-H-A-P-S.’ “

In October 1944, McArthur’s forces sailed toward Leyte as part of the invasion of the Philippines. Koyama, then a sergeant, was sailing toward the beach in an LST, which stood for Landing Ship, Tank, but which he jokingly referred to as “Large Slow Target.”

Unfortunately, this turned out to be true. He was in the LST with another soldier he knew only as “Andy” when a kamikaze dive bomber headed straight for them.

“The bomb landed on Andy’s side and he got the brunt of it and shielded my body,” said Koyama. “I got the ricochet.”

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the beach at Leyte, wearing nothing but his shorts. About two dozen other men were on the sand as well. He realized that he couldn’t hear out of his left ear (he had a broken eardrum) and couldn’t see anything out of his right eye because it was covered with blood. He lifted his arm from his side and discovered, to his relief that at least he still had a left ear and right eye. Then he flopped his arm down on his chest and left it there because, as he said, the Good Lord told him to.

“As soon as I did, somebody hollers, ‘Chaplain, chaplain! Look over there. There’s a guy with an arm on his chest,’ ” said Koyama.

Only later did he discover why this caused such a commotion.

“I didn’t know we were all supposed to be corpses, waiting for the big truck to come and dump us in a big hole,” said Koyama.

His injuries were grave. Shards of hot metal studded his face. The biggest hunk of shrapnel just missed his head, knocked his helmet off, crashed through a rib and embedded itself into his chest. He carries that metal shard today, beneath a jagged scar.

He never was able to find out whether Andy survived that day.

That was the end of the war for Koyama. He spent the entire ensuing year in various hospitals, including one that turned out to be a happy surprise.

“I was in San Francisco when a guy said you have to have that shrapnel taken out, and we think we’re going to send you to Baxter General Hospital,” said Koyama. “I said, ‘Where’s Baxter General Hospital?’ And the guy looks at me all surprised and said, ‘I thought you said you were from Spo-cain. Baxter’s in Spo-cain.’ “

Baxter was built in 1943, long after Koyama left Spokane. It was the precursor to the present Spokane Veterans Medical Center.

So that’s where Koyama was when one of the momentous events in history occurred in August 1945: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

“I didn’t have any relatives there, because my parents came from Okayama, next to Hiroshima,” said Koyama. “But I had a very close buddy whose family came from Hiroshima, and in fact he lost some relatives in that A-bomb. So there’s good and bad, and all kinds of tragedies and human interest stories connected with that.”

Does he feel it was necessary?

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Not only we, but the Japanese, would have lost many more thousands (if an invasion had been necessary).”

Koyama was discharged later that year, but his service in the military was far from over. In 1947, recovered from his injuries, he received a letter from the Pentagon, asking him to go back on active service.

“My mother said, ‘Go on, Gen. MacArthur still needs you.’ She was right. So I did.”

He re-joined and was soon given a direct field commission.

“One day, I was a sergeant, the next I’m an officer,” said Koyama. “I stayed on for two more wars, Korea and Vietnam.”

He retired in 1970 as a colonel. His Purple Heart and a Bronze Star are displayed, along with several other medals, on his wall at the Fairwinds-Northpointe Retirement Community, where he lives with his wife, Miya.

Near his hearth is a large automated GI action figure. When a button is pushed, the figure shouts “God Bless America!” and plays that song on a bugle.

He named the figure “Andy,” after the man who took the brunt of that kamikaze bomb.