Nate is an East Bay community papers editor for the East Bay Times and Bay Area News Group.
The late Lawson Sakai, left, appears with columnist Martin Snapp in the Oakland hills at a previous Armed Forces Day memorial service for World War II’s Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. This year’s service will be on May 18.On the morning of Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, 18-year-old Lawson Sakai was sitting in his kitchen, listening to the New York Giants-Brooklyn Dodgers football game on the radio.
He was told that his draft classification had been changed from 1-A to 4-C even though he was born and raised in the United States. There was worse to come. By 1943 the Army was so desperate for manpower that it reversed itself and created a segregated Japanese American regiment called the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and thousands of young Japanese American men, including Lawson, volunteered.
They were called the “Purple Heart Battalion” because of the thousands of casualties they suffered. Lawson was awarded four of those Purple Hearts — technically, a Purple Heart with three Oak Leaf Clusters — and he would have been awarded a fifth if he hadn’t refused because he didn’t think his wound was serious enough.
During another time of national crisis — the Revolutionary War — Thomas Paine wrote, “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
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