Michael Doi was a Nisei soldier asked to perform some of the toughest feats of World War II
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. -- When a battalion of the 36th Infantry Division was pinned down on top of a mountain at the French-Italian border, Michael Doi's unit was sent in to pull them out.
Doi knew why, and he also knew what it meant.
Doi, a second-generation Japanese American, served in a segregated unit in World War II. He was a Nisei. It was no accident they were sent on some of the war's riskiest missions.
As a tank fired down the mountain at Vosges, Doi's outfit suffered heavy casualties, crawling under cover of trees.
When they finally got to the top, they found the "Lost Battalion", hiding in foxholes, including Bruce Estes of Dallas, Ga.
"He was in a foxhole. We gave them cigarettes. They were all out of cigarettes. They had nothing. And [Bruce and I] became good friends," Doi said.
The campaign was just part of a deadly march through France. When it concluded after 34 days, the dead and wounded outnumbered the living.
The 100th had rescued 211 Texans. 216 of their own were dead.
Now 91-years-old, Doi and 264 other members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team will receive the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian honor.
Doi says he is one of two Japanese Americans to serve in World War II in the state of Georgia. The other is his younger brother, Jimmy.
'NOW YOU'RE A RIFLEMAN'
Doi was drafted not long after he graduated high school in California.
Few Japanese were given infantry assignments with distrust high after Pearl Harbor. Doi was staffed at a medical training camp in Illinois.
He was in training when his family was sent to internment camps. Weeks would go by as he waited for letters from them.
Eventually, replacements were needed in Europe and the Pacific for the depleted American ranks.
"They got all the Japanese out of the medical training camp, they gave them a rifle, and said 'now you're a rifleman."
Doi was placed in the 100th Infantry Battalion of the 442nd, made entirely of Japanese. Many of them were from Hawaii, dubbed by other servicemen "Buddhaheads".
Doi deployed to Italy in 1944, then France, slogging through Marseilles and Vosges.
Destiny and questionable military strategy sent them headlong into one of the war's greatest pyrrhic battles.
It was a "Go For Broke" mission, a gambling term popular with the Hawaiian members of the outfit, that would later be immortalized in the movie of the same name starring Audie Murphy and Van Johnson.
A LONG ROAD TO GLORY
"You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice--and you have won," President Harry Truman said as he awarded the 442nd the Presidential Unit Citation.
It was 1946 and raining. Despite proving the full measure of their devotion to their country, it would be years before they received the decorations to match.
Though Nisei units were some of the most decorated in the war, only one member was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Most were merely given Distinguished Service Crosses.
Finally in 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded 20 Nisei veterans with Medals of Honor.
Now there are many ceremonies: in Houston, at Fort Gordon, at the National Archives in Atlanta, even monuments in Los Angeles and at Fort Benning.
Doi is far from bitter. He and his brother fly to Washington, D.C. Monday with his daughter, Sam. They will join 2,000 other Japanese veterans, their family and friends.