That morning, the day of the attack, I had just gone down the stairs for breakfast and I heard machine gun fire. I couldn't see any machine guns but about that time I looked up and were a whole bunch of planes. I wondered, "What are they doing here?" I could see the red rising sun on the wings and I noticed that their wheels were down. At that time we had a circle on our planes also, but it the circle was red, white and blue. I still couldn't figure out why they hadn't folded their wheels up and why they were shooting.

I just sat down, I didn't eat. Nobody ate. They started bombing Wheeler Field which was about 300 yards from us, the bugler was blowing "Call to Arms." "What in the world is going on?" Everybody running everywhere, all the commotion-about that time I looked up and there were two Japanese planes one of them was on fire already, it crashed. We couldn't shoot at them because our ammunition was in the supply room and it was locked up. The only ones that had a key to get in were the company commander and the supply sergeant, but they weren't there. So we had to break the door down to get the ammunition and machine guns. But by that time the Japanese had already left.

Even after the company commander showed up and they brought trucks in so we could load ammunition and machine guns and finally told us we were under attack, we still really didn't know what was going on.

So then we had to rebuild, our full field packs this time adding live ammunition. We had to go out in the field after that, no breakfast, no dinner no nothing. We had to go to a place they called Dog in the Tree Gulch. This place was near the sugar cane fields. We were told that the Japanese knew where our lines were and that they had landed. We were told that the Japanese wore gray uniforms with a red stripe on the legs. That's all the information that we had.

The sugar cane fields were ready to burned and we set up our machine gun near them. I was the gunner. All of the leaves on the sugar cane were dry and with all the mongoose' walking around on the dry leaves, we didn't know whether we were listening to Japanese footsteps or not. I sat on that machine gun all night long.