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Column

Could this man be a hero?

By BILL STEVENS
Published January 15, 2006

	[Times photo: Janel Schroeder-Norton]
	Tamotsu Ono, 82, waits in Port Richey for a van to take him for surgery at the VA hospital in Tampa. It doesn't come, and that's not the first time, he says. "All my friends are dead," Ono says. "I am like a cat with nine lives."

On the coldest day of the year, an old man wearing only a thin cotton shirt and shorts rode his motorized wheelchair across the parking lot of the Social Security building, along the shoulder of U.S. 19 and into the front office of the Pasco Times. He was agitated and loud. He cussed. He wouldn't leave.

Somebody called me to help, but I wasn't much use. The man was stone deaf. He wouldn't stop talking, mainly about how the government was jerking him around. He lifted a light blanket, revealing bare legs that looked as though they had been scorched by fire. One foot was swollen and wrapped in a bandage. He had a bus pass hanging around his neck and an ID card from Hawaii that identified him as Tamotsu Ono.

What should we do with him? The Sheriff's Office sent out two deputies. But all they could do was recommend an ambulance, which we didn't think Ono could afford. It was getting dark. We couldn't let him go out into the cold, but suddenly he started for the door. He steered his wheelchair back toward U.S. 19 and headed north, dangerously close to speeding cars. At the county bus stop, he turned toward me and pointed at his watch. This man who had seemed so lost knew exactly where he was going and how to get there.

More fascinating was where he had been.

The white baseball cap offered a clue.

In black marker, Ono had printed "442" and "Go for Broke." A history buff here figured that meant the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in U.S. military history. It consisted of Japanese-Americans, including many who had been placed in internment camps during the hysteria that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The 442nd joined with the 100th Infantry Battalion, another Japanese-American unit, and fought in eight major campaigns in Italy, France and Germany, including the famous rescue of the Lost Battalion, a group of Texans who had been cut off by Nazi forces. The combined force earned 21 Medals of Honor, 53 Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, 5,200 Bronze Stars and 9,486 Purple Hearts.

Could Tamotsu Ono have been part of that unit?

A quick Internet search found two references to Ono. A Honolulu newspaper had photographed a homeless man on an electric scooter seeking shelter from rain. It sure looked like our guy.

The other took us to a Web site, www.goforbroke.org which includes detailed history of the units. A monument in Little Tokyo near downtown Los Angeles includes the names of 16,000 troops who served - including Tamotsu Ono.

I set out to find him. Records indicated he was staying at a house just off Grand Boulevard in New Port Richey. I called there, but the woman who answered could not speak English. I drove down and knocked on the door. Ono came out, holding a sweater I had given him that cold evening at our office. He thanked me, and we set out on one of the most frustrating interviews of my career. I had to write every question, sometimes twice because my printing is so sloppy.

He often railed about being a victim of prejudice and thought having a newspaper reporter around might help him get some attention from authorities he said were ignoring him. But he acknowledged he can be difficult.

"I'm deaf. I talk loud," he said. "They call security to throw me out."

We almost did the same. I'm glad we didn't.

Ono, 82, said his parents moved from northern Japan to Hawaii, and the entire family worked on a sugar plantation in Maui. After President Roosevelt decided to allow second-generation Japanese-Americans to enlist in 1943, Ono joined the 442nd and trained in field artillery. Nobody in his family was interned.

Ono recalled his combat.

"It was so cold. We had frostbite. We dug foxholes, and mortars came down and exploded all around us. Sometimes I was paralyzed with fear that I couldn't walk."

He described the 442nd troops singing as they entered Rome, "but we were quickly moved out of the way, because nobody wanted Japs to get any credit."

Ono's unit, the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, separated from the 442nd in March 1945 to join the 7th Army as it crossed the Rhine River. His unit liberated several of the smaller work camps near the Dachau concentration camp and opened the main gate at Dachau on April 29.

"We rescued Jews," he said. "The smell was terrible. They were nothing but bones."

Ono escaped serious injury in the war.

In the late 1950s, Ono said he and some buddies earned money by retrieving equipment on Johnston Island in the Pacific after the United States conducted nuclear bomb tests. "I carried a Geiger counter" to measure radioactivity, he said. "All my friends are dead. I am like a cat with nine lives."

Later he worked as a civilian technician at an electrical power plant in Vietnam. In 1970 he met Phuc Thi Nguyen, who was serving drinks and food and washing dishes in a restaurant. They had great difficulty communicating, but they fell in love and married after a year. She gave birth to a daughter, Anh, in 1972. The war forced Ono back to Hawaii two years later, and his wife figured they would reunite soon. But when the communists took over the country, she feared they would harm anyone who had associated with Americans. She burned all references to Ono, except for their marriage certificate, which included their photographs. She kept the certificate folded in a small plastic bag, tucked in her bra. When it got wet, she ironed it.

In 2000, Ms. Nguyen and her family came to America and settled in Florida. She showed social workers the certificate and somebody tracked Ono down in Hawaii. He flew to Florida immediately.

By then, Ono said, he had given up on finding her and had remarried and fathered other children. He did not give specifics about his family in Hawaii, but Ms. Nguyen said he stays here for part of the year and then leaves for Hawaii.

The only way I know this part of the story is because St. Petersburg Times reporter Phuong Nguyen (no relation) was gracious enough to interview her for me. Phuong said Ms. Nguyen told her she sticks by Ono because he was so nice to her all those years ago, but he is often very angry and frustrated. He can hear the telephone ring and insists on answering it, but then he can't hear who is on the other end.

For a while, it didn't seem that I would be able to tell Ono's story. I couldn't confirm that he was indeed the same Ono on the 442nd monument. I did find an obituary in the Honolulu newspaper of a Tamotsu "Barney" Ono and tracked down his son, a doctor in Hawaii, who confirmed that his father served in the 442nd. Given the behavior of our Mr. Ono, I wondered if maybe he made u p his story. I decided not to write.

Then came a phone call from Hawaii. Claire Mitani, who works in archives for the 442nd Veterans Club, confirmed that there were two Tamotsu Onos who had fought and that she was quite familiar with our guy. The club president, she said, had helped him get benefits and a hearing aid. He had been living in assisted housing, but when he started getting higher benefits from the government, he no longer qualified to stay there.

"They kicked him out," Ms. Mitani said.

Ono sold newspapers and did some light cleaning at a mall, she said. Ono had told me the same, describing how he would use a shortened broom and dustpan while sitting in his wheelchair. Merchants gave him fruits and vegetables as payment.

On the day I visited Ono, he was waiting for a van to pick him up and take him to the VA hospital in Tampa for an operation. He said he suffers from the effects of an accident in which he was struck by a drunken driver.

As 1 o'clock arrived, he became angry.

"See, they no pick me up - again," he snapped. He cussed and blamed it on his race.

He handed me a paper with the name of a Disabled American Veterans chapter that delivers veterans to the hospital, so I called. The volunteer had not heard of Ono.

So I called the local clinic and got a social worker who refused to talk to me about Ono. She said he would have to call her.

"You see?" Ono told me. "This is what I get."

Given his anger and difficulty with communication, I'm not ready to condemn the actions of anybody who has dealt with Mr. Ono. But after this much time and trouble, I am ready to say this: Just because somebody seems to be howling at the moon, it does not mean he's crazy. Indeed, he might just be a hero.

Take some time to find out.

[Last modified January 15, 2006, 01:47:20]