Bad guard - good guard

We had one guy, he had various names - Pistol Pete, Cyclone Pete, the Japanese name escapes me but Cyclone Pete had gone to Tokyo the day before and when he was on duty we always were searched when we came in from work. And he was away so we each had a loot bag full of raw soy beans and we got in and lined up to bango, to number off for roll call and who out of the office comes but Cyclone Pete and he got up on his hill, his little mound because he was so short he had a hill, he could look over the men and we knew what was going to happen and he had a fellow with him. Taffy Richards was in the rank behind me, well when the guard searched his bag and found the soy beans and “Nonda canaro (sp)” I won’t use, interpret it but “What’s this you s.o.b.? ” And he backed up and when he backed up he hit me and I went ahead and my jacket fell off and the guard was searching the guy next to me and he pulled my haversack around and pulled my beans out. Well, I say now we looked at Cyclone Pete, he was clapping because here he was going to show his friend from Tokyo how he handled prisoners of war. He stood us at attention and he went to work on Taffy Richards first. As I say I was lucky in that sense, with his fists and we stood there and took it. If you fell to the ground they put the boots to you so you braced yourself and you took those blows. Then he went and got some black ink or paint or whatever they use to do their writing with and in Japanese characters he wrote stealers on our foreheads. And we stood at attention in front of the guard house all night long. The dockyard gang came out the next morning to go to work and we figured oh we’re going to stay, they’ll put us in the guard house. No, “Line up!” We lined up, march out to work, no breakfast. March out to work and Sibiason when we got out there; Mack Haws had learned to speak Japanese pretty good and he was one of our sergeants and thank God he did. He saved us a lot over the length of time we were in Japan. Sibiason looked at our foreheads, “stealer” and he said, “Mack, anunda? ” (Mack, what happened? ) And Mack told him that we got caught stealing soy beans and old Sibiason laughed. You know what he did, he told Richards and I to go in the mess shack and go to sleep. Mack told him we hadn’t had any breakfast and had been up all night so that’s what I say. Sibiason was a good guard, a good civilian.