Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

by Daniel James Brown

George Orwell wrote, “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

I sometimes refer to the facilities I mention above as “concentration camps.” Nobody should for a moment take this to mean that I equate them in any way with the horrific death camps and slave-labor camps of Nazi Germany, places like Auschwitz and Dachau. Nothing in modern history equates with the terrible reality of those places. But the fact remains that the “assembly centers” and “relocation centers” were indeed American concentration camps by any reasonable definition of that term.

But by the end of their lives almost all of them—whether they fought in courtrooms or in foxholes—would be counted American heroes.

“We have attacked, fired upon, and dropped depth charges on a submarine operating in defensive sea areas.”