My history class is doing a World War II project.  We are trying to preserve all of the veteran's stories from when they were in the war.  Every member of my class was assigned a World War II veteran.  I was assigned to interview Tony Madrid. 

Question:  Were you enlisted in the war, or were you drafted into the war?
Answer:  I was drafted into the war.

Question:  How old were you when you were drafted into the war?
Answer:  I was 18 years old.

Question: Before you entered the war, what school did you attend?
Answer: Savannah Jr. High, Garden Grove, California

Question: Were you married when you entered the war?
Answer: Yes, I was.

Question: What kind of an assignment did you have in the war?
Answer: The assignment I received, was the infantry (foot soldier).  That's the assignment that they gave practically everybody at that particular time.  You became an infantryman in the infantry.  Unless you had a specialized field before you came in, they selected you and said that they needed cannon powder.  They needed somebody to do the fighting.  They didn't particular care who it was, they just needed a body that they can train to help in the war.

Question: Could you tell me about some experiences or an experience you had during the war?
Answer: The experience that was most exciting to me was my first time overseas.  After taking the basic training and completing that, with the idea in my head, and everybody else we were training and completing with, thought, we were going to Europe.  Then that was changed and we went to advanced jungle training.  So then I knew once we start taking the jungle training, I knew we were not going to Europe, we were going to the Far East.  The experience I remember from that was after we boarded the ship, we left to convoy of troops ships.  After a few days out at sea the convoys seemed to have dissipated.  So to speak we found ourselves by ourselves.  In other words, during the night, they must have scattered or changed course, because we were no longer a large convoy like we started out with.  We were just by ourselves.

Then the ship started maneuvering, what I thought was erratic maneuvers.  We weren't any longer sailing a straight line, we were zigzagging and going all around in a large circle.  I can remember, that, we were all wondering, what was going on because we were the only ship out on the ocean.  We figured, well maybe we were changing destinations.  Maybe we were going somewhere else.  They assured us that everything was okay.  Then we started to have these particular drills.  They would sound the alarm and everybody would go down into their hole.  They would close all the doors.  Then we had to wait in there for a little while.  Sometimes we waited a couple of hours before they'd let us back up on deck to breath, so to speak, clean air.

The troop ship was pretty crowded.  The bunk beds, were just a mattress and a spring hooked on these chains like a shelf.  Some of the plumbing on our ship got plugged up.  It was a little bit messy for a while until the seas calmed, and then they seemed to have repaired that part of the plumbing.  Then we figured, well one drill is natural, just in case of an emergency.  It wasn't too long that another day we had another drill.  Another day went by and we had another drill.  Word got out that we were being chased by an unknown submarine.  They had to take all these precautions in the event we got hit.

Later on, I started to think that I'm not in a very good position here, where we were at.   We were below the ship's water line.  When you get below a water line, they close all the doors.  They lock the doors if they happen to hit that part of the ship.  There's nowhere to go, it'll save the ship, but it won't save the people in that particular compartment.

Out of all the ships that were going over there, ours was most expendable.  After a few days, we found that the submarine had got around, it was more or less in the area.  I don't know if the ship had any equipment to detect the movement of the submarine or something like that.  Since we were a surface vessel, we might have been a ship that was a little more faster than the other ships.  So they left us and figured that we could outrun the submarine if the submarine remains submerged all the time.  After about five days, we either lost the submarine, or we out distanced it.  When we got to Lantange, Philippine, by then, the majority of the battle was all over.  When we got there, it was more of getting into the land barges to land.

After we landed, right then and there, there would be some sergeants from different units.  They would just pick us off as we came off the barges.  They said to come around into the trucks, and from there they took us to wherever we needed to go.  My particular group was picked to stay in Lantange.  The rest of the people, was to mop up the area or to go elsewhere on Lantange.  We stayed there on Lantange and later on, we were equipped with weapons.  Then we were put on guard duty to guard this particular compound.  Pretty well the war was over by then.

I was shipped to Lausanne, Manilla.  There I got into a unit that processed this war crime investigation detachment.  They processed all these Japanese prisoners.  They were interrogated by Japanese Americans.  They tried to get all the people that we classified as war criminals. 

In the Philippines, the war was over.  They celebrated some sort of Philippine Independence.  After that, my time was up.  I was rotated back to the United States and went back to civilian life.

In conclusion, I have learned that the life as a soldier is very hard, but we owe a great debt of gratitude to those courageous men and women, who fought and died to give us the freedoms that we have now