We Didn’t Know What They Wanted.

They seemed like they were happy when they were slapping somebody around. There was, you know, there was one there, we called him slap happy. He was always having to be slapping people around. Because we didn’t know what was going to happen to us … whether we were going to live, whether they were going to let us live or what. We had to be careful all the way through. And for three years and eight months, we had to be careful of what we were doing. Of course, the Japs were right there. They were, you know … had a very close watch on us. They talked Japanese and we talked English. So we didn’t talk to each other. It was very hard on us ‘cause we couldn’t understand what they were saying. When they wanted us to do something, we didn’t know what they wanted us to do. I remember one time I was, see, I was a batman in there for five officers. And I used to go down to the beach there and they had them patios and we used to put the clothes on top there and scrub them. I was a batman for Colonel (inaudible). He had his tools there. I remember one time I went down there to go and a Jap came around. He used to guard us right around. Came and he pointed down at ... I didn’t know what he wanted and there was a long pole there so I pointed at it. And he done like this, so I picked it up and I handed it to him. He turned around and he hit me right across the back and knocked me down so I started crawling. I got up on my hands and then I walked right away from him. He was standing there with a rifle. I didn’t know whether he was going to shoot me or what he was going to do, but I was going to get out of the road anyway.