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15
There was a general, a Japanese general, and we had a Japanese interpreter. He said that
the general would like to have dinner with us. And they cooked all our food and brought
it over, and we were in, it wasn't, it was just a big room is what it was. The general ate
with us one night, he and his aide and the interpreter.
I'm gonna regress here a little bit. I told you I'd never had anything to drink. On Okinawa
when it was over, I think it was once a week, they would issue us four or five cans of beer. I
drank, tasted a can of it, it wasn't good. It was hot and I didn't like it, so I sold mine. I
smoked, so I sold mine and bought cigarettes with it. When we went to China they told
us-now, one of the fellows at Okinawa went down to the shore and took some bayonets
and some Japanese stuff down there and traded it for a bottle of whiskey. And I got it, that
was the first whiskey I tasted in my life, was on Okinawa, and he said he paid fifty
dollars for it, he sold the stuff and then bought it.
We went to China and they told us the water wasn't good, so we had to drink beer. Well, I
developed a good taste for beer and it was good there (chuckles), really. They'd serve wine,
or saki, when we had this dinner, and I could tell when I'd drunk so much saki and my
head would get to feel like it had a string around it. I knew when to quit.
I liked the Japanese general's chopsticks, so the next morning he calls me over and I went
in there, and he presented me with a pair, a set of chopsticks and a nice case, ivory case,
which was fine. They still had all their weapons and so we then, one time, I was stationed
there at different times. So I went back, I took with me, they gave us some, I had a
Japanese saber, Japanese rifle, Mauser pistol, and a Nambu pistol. And I remember
taking those back to Tangu to the headquarters, battalion headquarters, and I had a
Chinese make a box big enough to send this, and a shotgun, it was a thirty-six inch ten
gauge shotgun, and I mailed all that stuff home, if you can imagine, except the two
pistols. Can you imagine sending all that stuff back home?
Mr. Morris: You'd be in prison.
Mr. Dixon: The mail carrier brought it right to the house, I mean it was out in the country. When I
got back, one of the fellows who was an old timer, Goldie was his name, and he said why
don't you give him that Nambu pistol, he's going home. So I did, I gave it to him, and I
kept the Mauser. I went back out there and served out there on two or three different
occasions.
Then went back and stayed at Tangu and then went out on railroad duty, guarding
railroad bridges. At Bridge Twenty-One. And we had an officer, and I think there was
around thirty or thirty-five of us out there. We had a barracks that had been built, it was
a wooden deal, is what it was. It wasn't a building. And it had all around it sandbags, so
we could get down in case-well, the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists
were fighting all the time.