Page 172 - Anthology

We boarded a truck with all our duffle bags. It was a long way through the woods and around the top of
the mountain. We saw several children behind a fence; I remember seeing one white child in that bunch.
The child even had white hair.

They built a fence around the area where the women lived. There were four or five girls in each tent; one
night I was sleeping in my tent; for some reason I could feel something pulling on my mosquito net cover.
There was this pulling, pulling, pulling on my netting. I had tucked the netting in good all around me. It
scared me to death. I woke up and there was a man standing there. I started screaming and woke the
other girls up; he ran off and out of our tent. Someone yelled out asking him if he was the police and he
said yes. But the real police caught him, and he got into a lot of trouble. I was so frazzled that I could not
talk. They tightened security after that, but it was a scary moment.

Around Christmas that year we were to be moved to Leyte, Philippines. My name being the last in the
alphabet, I was one of the last to board the plane. The men were good flyers, but somewhere along the
way we got frightened because we thought we were going to crash. The plane was having some kind of
mechanical problem. We had to land at another place, another island where a lot of Marines were
stationed. The girls had to stay in a special place they created for us. The next day we boarded the
plane for Leyte, Philippines.

The first day we got to Leyte was a little frightening. It was the day that MacArthur said: “I shall return.”
We could see his wet trousers as he was wading in the water. A lot of people said he only did and said
that for the papers.

General Douglas MacArthur and staff land at Palo Beach, Leyte, 20 October 1944

"I came through and I shall return." - General Douglas MacArthur

That night was a bad night on that island; the Japanese were working, trying to kill as many as they could.
I saw a lot of dead Japanese soldiers. That was the first time we had seen any Japanese dead soldiers.
We sat around talking about it that night. We came to figure that it was just part of the war. The next day
the bodies had been taken away.

We stayed at Leyte for quite some time; it was a real bad place to live because of the storms. We had to
wear boots up to our knees, and sometimes we’d get hung up and would have to have someone come
pull us out. We had to fight the mud, the storms and the mosquitos.

My job involved keeping records of the pilots; their missions and how many planes they had shot down.