Harry Shinichi Iida was taking a break on his family's farm in Walnut Grove, Calif., when his brother brought him lunch and told him that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Months later, when Executive Order 9066 evicted his family from their farm, they moved to Waleriga Assembly Center and then in May 1942 left for Tule Lake Detention Camp.
After several months in Tule Lake, recruiters from the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) visited the camp. Iida, with 37 other Nisei, volunteered. They started school in December 1942 and he studied for six months at Camp Savage, Minn.
At the end of the language course, he took basic training at Camp Shelby, Miss., and then left for the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) near Brisbane, Australia.
From January 1944 to June 1945, he worked in the translation pool and enjoyed eating Chinese food and going to the beach on the weekends in Australia--a rather luxurious life compared to other linguists on the front lines. Right before the war ended, ATIS transferred most of their linguists, including Iida, to the Santa Ana Racetrack in Manila, Philippines.
He worked at a POW compound and held casual conversations with the inmates. Cigarettes or candy helped him elicit basic information from the soldiers before their formal interrogations. With these small offerings of friendship, the Japanese soldiers became cordial. On the other hand, other U.S. soldiers treated Iida differently:

> Well, there was always two kinds. Two extremes. Those who looked down upon us, and those that really believed that we were short-changed but then we were doing a good job, you know. That without us a lot of those things couldn't be done... [Oral History]

Some of these soldiers still questioned his loyalty. One even believed that Japanese submarines had waited on the coast to give sabotage instructions to Japanese Americans:

> They still think we kind of ... had we been given a chance, we would have struck for the cause of the Japanese. Bakatare ga. [Stupid] [Oral History]

In August 1945, Iida and many U.S. Forces had already begun preparations for the invasion of Kyushu. Then, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his assignment quickly changed. He boarded a ship headed for Osaka Bay and became part of the surrender and Occupation Forces. Once in Japan he helped disarm the Japanese Army and interpreted for the Occupation Forces. The following year he visited his mother and father's families in Kumamoto Prefecture. He met his grandfather and grandmother, both of whom he had never seen, and also met half-sisters who considered him a close relative. The Army assigned him to duty in Maizuru, the port through which Japanese POWs passed. Most of them had been in labor camps in Siberia, and Iida worked with an interrogation team that tried to weed out potential spies.
When the Korean War broke out, Iida decided to volunteer again and joined the 24th Regiment. He fought alongside the Buffalo Soldiers, an all-African-American unit, and received a Silver Star for his bravery in the field. He transferred to the 9th Army Headquarters and became the Commanding Officer of the Language Detachment whose job was to pick up Chinese Communists for interrogation. Iida received a Bronze Star for his work. During the Korean War, he decided to join the airborne unit. While he trained he broke his leg on a practice jump, and returned to the continental United States and continued to serve with the 6th Army. He requested a move to Germany and spent three years patrolling the Berlin Wall.
In 1962 Iida retired from the Army and started his own insurance company in Salinas, Calif., and helped local Japanese-American flower growers develop a small cooperative supply organization.