Norley Hall, Springville, Utah: an interview by Benjamin Bahlmann, December 6, 2001: Saving the legacy oral history project

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0 upply hip. And th fighting wa very int ns nd lm d il kamikaze flights that would come over. When th y did th y ould fill th phosphorous smoke to try and mask the ships. It wasn t very effectiv if th r was difficult to get it high enough to hide all the smoke stacks and everything. 1 ind. It several ships sunk in our area while we were there. We were never personally under attack that I know of while we were on that ship. One interesting thing to me on that particular ship was that they not only used this as a supply ship, but they used it for soldiers who had been wounded who were not so serious that they needed hospitalization. And one of the soldiers I become very well acquainted with, very friendly, and I let him use my bunk when I was on watch. There, again they were all camped out on deck. And he could use the bunk, and the restroom facilities, and the shower, and things like that. And he was a checker player, and I liked checkers, and we played some very intense checker games. BB: Uhhuh. NH: Well, the day that they took him off of the ship ... BB: Was he regular army, you said? NH: Yeah, he was regular army. He had been wounded slightly, and he was on there to work on his wounds. Anyway, the day that they took him back off the ship, to take him to duty, he handed me this little package. And he says, "I want you to have this." No explanation, no nothing-and then he left. When I opened it it was a Japanese personal body flag, a big one. It was about that big (demonstrating). I kept that for many years. One year our neighbor down the street here had a Japanese exchange student, a little girl named, Junko. She was in my wife s Mutual class that she was teaching, and she was in our home very often. And I got out this flag 76