Warren’s calculated optimism paid off that spring, as he still sat in Tanforan, when sugar beet farmers in Idaho came looking for stoop labor. “The thing I missed most was freedom, so I was one of twelve to volunteer, first thinning the beets, then putting up hay during the summer months, and then harvesting beets and potatoes in the fall.” After losing his last fifteen-dollar stake at poker, he opted to join his family at Heart Mountain.

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The American Friends Service Committee opened the way to Warren’s final exit from the camps. On May 29, 1942, in Philadelphia, Quaker leader Clarence E. Pickett and University of Washington dean Robert W. O’Brien formed the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, which placed 4,300 Nisei in college by 1945. (This was Quaker humanitarian practicality at its finest: the draft had half-emptied college classrooms.) After talking to the Quaker representative visiting Heart Mountain, Warren entered Syracuse University in January 1943.

Just one month later, the army about-faced its Nisei policy, calling for volunteers and forming the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. This sparked demonstrations and unrest in the camps. “Some people naturally questioned why we should die for a country that put us there,” Warren explains. The questioning didn’t cease. In fact, after the draft for Nisei was restored in January 1944, Heart Mountain’s Fair Play Committee became a center of passive resistance, persevering despite dozens of arrests and subsequent convictions for its activities.

But Warren the Yankee Doodle Dandy still wanted to serve his country: “I wanted to prove myself, even with bad eyesight and flat feet.” At Syracuse, he got that letter from older brother Hughes. So when he graduated from the accelerated degree program in August 1943, he immediately volunteered for the Military Intelligence Service Language School. In utter contrast to the fanfare during the war surrounding the Nisei fighting units, this was a program few Americans even knew existed, and it yielded far-ranging results they rarely if ever heard about.

The army had opened the first MIS Japanese-language school in November 1941 in San Francisco, near General DeWitt’s headquarters. It had sixty students—fifty-eight of them Nisei. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the school moved to Minnesota, first to Camp Savage then to Fort Snelling. The move to Minnesota was necessary because all the teachers were Japanese Americans and could have been “excluded” from the West Coast—although they were also the key to the program’s ultimate success, since their cultural as well as linguistic fluency provided vital insights into Japanese thinking. By 1945, 5,700 Nisei and 780 Caucasian students graduated. Among their many duties were translating captured documents, monitoring Japanese radio, spying and eavesdropping, preparing propaganda leaflets and broadcasts, and making surrender appeals over loudspeakers to cornered Japanese troops—who were often about to banzai.

Many of these interpreters, historian Stanley Falk notes, “had relatives in Japan, subject to possible enemy retaliation. Many, indeed, had cousins or even brothers serving in the Japanese military. The Nisei themselves faced almost certain torture or execution if captured…while on the other hand there always remained the possibility that, in the heat of battle, American troops might mistake them for enemy soldiers and open fire.”

At Fort Snelling, Warren underwent six months of “total immersion” in Japanese; bemused locals watched student-soldiers like him wander around town drawing Japanese characters in the air, to help memorize them. He smiles, “It made me constantly regret that I had not been a better student of it as a kid. It was very difficult.” The alternative, for those who washed out, was reassignment to the infantry—hardly an alluring prospect.

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