Hank Gosho was born a middle son on February 4, 1921, in Seattle, Wash. His father wanted to open an import-export business and realized that his sons would have to learn Japanese to work for him. He sent Gosho and his younger brother to Japan with his younger brother in 1933.
In Japan he attended high school and college where the Reserve Officer Training Corps ROTC was compulsory:

> One of the things that I discovered in ROTC in Japan was it didn't do any good to say, "I am an American citizen and why am I going through with this?" because you only got hit on the head.... My attitude was, the best way for self-preservation was, number one, learn the language so well that you could speak like a native. And number two; go along with it to see how far you can get away from all this business of punishment. [Oral History]

As Japan's militarism grew, his father brought him back to the United States in August 1941. Gosho's brothers, who were studying at prestigious Japanese schools, stayed to finish their studies, and ended up being stuck in Japan during the war.
Gosho was preparing for entrance into a U.S. university when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor:

> We learned that there was an immediate curfew... No one knew what was going to happen or what was happening. I think almost immediately, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) swept through the city and picked up so called "key" Japanese leaders, community leaders. My father was not taken until the very last wave in February of '42. [Oral History]

A few months later, the War Department sent Gosho and his family to Minidoka Detention Camp in Idaho. He left the camp quickly to go work on the sugar beet and potato farms:

> We called it bucking the spuds. A truck would go five miles an hour between two rows of potatoes, sacks of potatoes. Each weighed approximately eighty pounds. The idea was to stack the potatoes on the back end of the truck. It seemed reasonable enough to me at the time. Five miles an hour wasn't much. Boy! Maybe that's why I volunteered for military intelligence! (Laughs) [Oral History]

Gosho's father assumed that all the Issei would be deported and doubted he would see his American son again. In that moment, Gosho remembered his father giving him a speech about honor:

> As long as I am an American citizen, he said that I must not be hesitant about doing whatever I can to serve the United States. He said, "After all, you were born here. This is your country." [Oral History]

The treatment Gosho received in Japan reinforced those sentiments:

> The discrimination I felt in Japan by the Japanese against Japanese Americans was far more subtle and fierce than the discrimination we met or might have met here in the West Coast. [Oral History]

In November 1942, the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) snuck him out of Minidoka Detention Camp early in the morning and brought him by train to Camp Savage, Minn. Six months later he had graduated from the first class. Recently married and with a young daughter on the way, Gosho put his name down for a special assignment that promised to bring him back to Camp Savage in half a year. He didn't know he would be going to Burma, and he did not know that it would take two years for him to return to the continental United States.
He arrived in India and began training for jungle warfare. Assigned to Merrill's Marauders, Gosho marched through the jungles of Burma and snuck up on Japanese soldiers for reconnaissance, sometimes hearing more than he bargained for:

> I could hear the Japanese officers giving their instructions on where to aim, to fire, and I knew, I understood they were firing at us in our particular location. Really scary. [Oral History]
> The Japanese patrol would come by and I could hear them saying, "What in the hell are we doing here?" My platoon officer, leader would say, "What did they say?" I'd say, "Never mind, I'll tell you later." When they left, I said to him, "They were saying the same thing I was thinking." "What's that?" "What in the hell am I doing here?" [Oral History]

The Marauders' mission was to try to cut off Japanese supply routes along the Burma Road and to help relieve the pressure on British troops fighting along the Burma-India border.
On the march Gosho suffered all types of jungle diseases: jungle rot, typhus, and malaria. A leech that had stuck itself to his eyeball almost blinded him, and he suffered from hunger that drove him to risk his life to steal rice and takuwan (pickled radish) from Japanese camps. When water became scarce, he squeezed elephant grass and bamboo trees for liquid. Once while Gosho snuck up to the Japanese frontlines to eavesdrop on their conversations the two sides began shooting at each other. He lay flat on the ground avoiding fire and later received the moniker "Horizontal" Hank for all the time he spent on the ground.
While the Marauders fought merely to survive, they also had to contend with the enemy:

> One of the ways we derived intelligence from the Japanese was, the Japanese had a mess kit, which they cooked their rice in. You could tell by the length of the groove they dug to put this mess kits in, how many men they had. [Oral History]

The Marauders respected and protected the Nisei linguists. One soldier told Gosho, "If you're ever captured by your ancestors, you've had it. I don't see why in hell you volunteered." [Oral History]. After months in the jungle, climbing up and down mountains, they finally reached their destination-Myitkyina airstrip.
The constant movement and jungle warfare made it impossible to catch POWs so it was not until they arrived at the airstrip did Gosho begin interrogations. One prisoner was a man who had been left in his hospital bed with a grenade and instructions to pull the pin if captured. Unconscious when captured, the Japanese soldier opened his eyes to the sight of Gosho, who gently explained how he had been caught. After the initial shock, Gosho remembered when the prisoner began to talk:

> The reason he opened up so much was, the more he thought about it, the more angry he got that he was abandoned there, and not only abandoned by the Japanese, but given a hand grenade and told to commit suicide... [Oral History]

After capturing the airstrip, Merrill's Marauders left Burma's jungles, but Gosho continued his work along the frontlines. With the idea that the Army could use his Japanese skills for propaganda, the Office of War Information (OWI) requested his service. Using a large speaker and microphone, he would call out to the Japanese soldiers to surrender, but all they gave him were some bullets shot at the speakers.
In May of 1945, two years after he left the West Coast by boat, Gosho was discharged. In 1950 he returned with his family to work in Occupied Japan worked in the Foreign Service.