Q.	Tell me about Bataan.
A.	Frank: When the word came from headquarters that we were supposed to give up, we just couldn’t believe it. But when we saw those Japanese tanks coming across the field, we didn’t have any artillery ammo to fire at them with our half-tracks. We were told to open the breech of our rifles, tie a rag to it, and hold it up where the enemy could see it. We laid down all our small arms ammo and everything. I kept my canteen, my harmonica, and my raincoat—that was all. When they told us to surrender our rifles, I took my Springfield and flung it down against a huge rock. I said to myself, “Oh God, this will be my last breath,” because I had bent the darn thing.
Q.	Tell us about the death march.
A.	Frank: We actually had to walk rapidly most of the time. And if we were hurt and couldn’t walk fast, they beat us severely. My time in the death march was about two and a half days. We were forced to march for so many hours without food or drink. And their excuse was to get us out of harm’s way. That was their excuse for the death march. It was a horrible sight. Every time you’d look up, there was someone bleeding to death. And you couldn’t do a thing for them. You could not stop. I had malaria, too, during the march. You could not escape the death march because the Japanese were on the left side and the ocean was on the other side. You just had to keep going.
Q.	What helped you get through it?
A.	Frank: My religious convictions. The Blessed Virgin Mary and Our Lady of Guadalupe. I prayed not just for myself but also for my friends. I knew I had to have a plan to keep me focused. My plan was to make it through and wait for our troops to liberate us. I would return to America so I could see my parents again; gain the rank I was promised [sergeant]; meet my wife, Evangeline; and have four kids—two boys and two girls. And that’s exactly what happened: two boys and two girls. And my wife turned out to be just like I pictured her to be, an angel. She helped me a lot to get through the awful memories of life and death in the Japanese POW camps.
Q.	What was it like to return home?
A.	Frank: It was just a beautiful dream come true. It was just like a dream. I said to myself, “I used to think about this”: how the ship would swing around to the dock, and I would hope that I would see my parents. And that’s exactly what happened. My ship pulled around, into the dock, and who was there right at the end of the dock? My mother and sister. And I looked closer and there was my other sister and my dad. They were waving. It was just a great feeling. You can’t use words to describe it.
Q.	How did you cope with the effects from the war?
A.	Frank: My plan. I had my plan ahead of me. I was going to re-enlist as soon as I could. Then I had to prove the rank that I had made in the Philippines fighting the Japanese. That was part of my plan. They gave us six months of paid leave. During that time I met my wife and was married soon thereafter. Francisco: He was promised in the battlefield that he would go from a private to a sergeant. It was promised by his captain, who had died on the infamous “hell ship” [vessels that transported POWs to Japan] Oryoku Maru. He knew he needed to get his rank so he could have the money and security to marry my mother and make a life for our family. I guess the answer there really is that he got fully, positively involved in his life and in carrying out his duties, staying in the service, and creating a world at peace.
Q.	What was biggest challenge of writing this book?
A.	Francisco: I would say the most challenging thing was that Dad is very detail-oriented. As I listened, wrote, and rewrote every incident and detail, it was like living it all over again with him. I lived his story in my life for ten years. As we reviewed it again and again, those stories were burned into my soul. It was emotionally painful for me to hear and relive his and all the other men’s pain. The more he talked, the more he talked about the horribleness and the conditions, I felt the pain for those men—his buddies—who died, and all the pain they endured. I didn’t want to leave anything out, so that when readers finally eventually read the story, they too would empathize, understand, and feel the whole experience.
Q.	Why do you feel it’s important for veterans to tell their story?
A.	Frank: I think it helps us to talk about it. It’s helped me. I was told by a psychiatrist who interviewed me through the years at the VA that they enjoyed listening to me and the details I’d go into and what it was like. They had never heard anything like that before. Francisco:  One of the things that Dad said was that in Bataan, they ran out of everything—food, ammunition, medicine, everything. That’s why they got stranded and could not wage a winning battle strategy. Dad vowed that if he ever got back to the U.S., he would do everything to see that our military never got so weak that it would happen again, like in Bataan.

Q.	You survived the Bataan Death March and then nearly four years in Japanese POW camps. Tell me about your experience.
A.	Carlos: When we got to the first camp, Camp O’Donnell [the end point of the Bataan Death March in Capas Tarlac, the Philippines], I figured that everybody was going to die then. They encircled 9,000 men in an area that was an old Filipino camp that had been abandoned for I don’t know how many years. The roof was made out of palm fronds and was pretty deteriorated, and we were sleeping on the floor. We had one spigot, and the water was barely dripping out of this faucet. They wouldn’t give us any more water than what was coming out of the spigot. They were giving us three meals a day, but the food they were giving to us would hardly cover the bottom of our mess kits. So we started getting malaria, dysentery. People were dying like crazy—300 to 450 men per day.  I made a vow that if the Japanese ever asked for a detail, I was going to volunteer and get out of this camp. Which is exactly what happened. I went on a 300-man detail. We were gone from the end of May and by the 10th of August there were only 48 men left.
Q.	Your book details months of slave labor in Japan. How did you end up there?
A.	Carlos: From Cabanatuan [a temporary camp north of Camp O’Donnell], there was a shipment to Japan on the ships called the “hell ships.” I went on another 300-man detail and I ended up in Niigata, Japan. We were unloading coal ships coming in from Manchuria. In Niigata, we had three months of summer and nine months of winter. We were on a trestle that was 40 feet up in the air, and there was a river on one side and the bay on the other. The wind would hit us from all directions, and a lot of the people were freezing to death or got frostbite. I was frostbitten on my legs..
Q.	What helped you get through it?
A.	Carlos: I had a wife in Albuquerque, and that kept me going. The people that gave up died. They couldn’t survive. We lost too many men that way, because they gave up. I had a clear mind that the Japanese could not kill me. I said, “I know that prayers are coming in from my hometown [of Albuquerque], and I know they’re praying for me. And I’m going to get out of this hole.” And I did make it.
Q.	What was it like to return home?
A.	Carlos: It was a heck of a good feeling. We were the last ones to be evacuated from the camp.
Q.	How did you cope with the effects from the war?
A.	Carlos: It took me five years to recover. I started drinking. I’d go to the hospital, and the VA hospital wouldn’t pay attention to us. They said there was nothing wrong with us. I had a lot of anger in me, and I couldn’t control my anger.  My wife used to [ask] me, “Why can’t you stop drinking?” I said, “Well, I can’t. I’ve got to have something to stop all the turmoil in my mind. My mind is going haywire, and I need to drink to turn it off.” And one day, when they dragged me from the bar, and I looked at myself in the mirror the next morning, and I saw I was covered with sand from top to bottom, I said, “Carlos, you are an imbecile. You are a stupid man.” And I quit right there, I quit drinking. It took me another year or so to conquer my anger by going to a psychiatrist.
Q.	What was biggest challenge of writing this book?
A.	J.L.: Carlos is a hell of a storyteller. I was trying to make that same story come alive on the written page. We basically went through a lot of interviews over four years. It was a very intense time of his life.
Q.	Why do you feel it’s important for veterans to tell their story?
A.	Carlos: In my case, I was a prisoner for four years in a Japanese labor camp. We never got paid by the Japanese or by the United States, and I feel that we should be compensated for the labor that I had done for the Japanese. We filed suit in the U.S. District Court here in California—five times we filed suit in federal court and they turned us down, except one case went to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court wouldn’t even hear the case. J.L.:  Because of the history repeating itself. People need to know [war stories] not just on a factual basis, but on an emotional basis, so people can actually at least try to understand what it felt like, the conditions, and take that into mind when they’re thinking about starting other wars.