LITTLE ROCK — Daniel K. Inouye’s death was appropriately noteworthy last week in Washington. Inouye was a giant in Hawaiian politics. He served the islands in Congress since statehood in 1959, the first Japanese American in the House and Senate.
A moderate-to-liberal Democrat, he gained and enjoyed the influence befitting more than five decades in the Senate. He played key roles in congressional investigations of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals. At his death, at age 88, he chaired the powerful Appropriations Committee and was the longest-serving senator and president pro tempore of the Senate, third in succession to the presidency.
Obituaries also made reference to an earlier time that transcended partisan politics, the part that truly made Dan Inouye an American hero.
Inouye was one of the last members of Congress who served in World War II. He did it for a nation, still suspicious after Pearl Harbor, that didn’t want him in uniform. Instead, it jailed thousands of Americans of his nationality in makeshift shacks behind barbed wire.
Still, Inouye and other young Japanese Americans longed to prove they were as American as anyone else. Finally allowed to enlist, he volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit made up mostly of secondgeneration Nisei.
In the fall of 1944, Inouye’s unit was sent to the French Vosges Mountains and spent two bloody weeks rescuing a Texas battalion—“The Lost Battalion”—surrounded by German forces. Inouye’s valor earned him a promotion to platoon leader, a Bronze Star and a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant.
In April of 1945, he led an assault on a heavily defended hill near San Terenzo, Italy. Three German machine guns pinned his unit, and one bullet pierced his abdomen and went out his back, barely missing his spine. Still, he fought, subduing two machine-gun nests with grenades. Crawling toward the third, a German rifle grenade shattered his right arm, leaving his final grenade “clenched in a fist that suddenly didn’t belong to me anymore.” Waving his unit back, he pried it loose, tossed it left-handed and destroyed the third bunker.
He fought on until a bullet in his leg left him unconscious. His mutilated right arm was amputated in a field hospital, without anesthetic. He spent 20 months in Army hospitals and was honorably discharged as a captain in May of 1947.
The Army awarded him a Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award for valor—not until 2000 was it upgraded to the Medal of Honor—along with the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart with cluster and 12 other medals and citations. For its size and length of service, the 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd RCT is considered the most-decorated unit in Army history.
And not to dismiss a consequential career in Congress, this is the Dan Inouye we’ll remember, the one who found exceptional heroism within himself and gave it selflessly to a nation that didn’t appreciate it until years later.
Editorial, Pages 78 on 12/23/2012