Stuff You Should Know - Were U.S. citizens in Japanese internment camps?

Episode Date: March 1, 2011

During World War II, the U.S. interned more than 100,000 Japanese and Japanese-American citizens. In this episode, Chuck and Josh recount the events that led to these internments, along with the long-term consequences of these events. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner, the residue-free, fast-drying solution especially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like stone, tile, laminate, vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?

They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this Stuff You Should Know. Are you paranoid or something?

I just looked over my shoulder for Chuck Bryant. No, let's see that guy's coming after me. The real Chuck Bryant. Don't worry about him. Okay. Yeah. He's taken care of. Yeah. Good. I can go back to being Armonton's area. Supposedly that was the worst one ever. That's what Matt Groening said. I think he told me. Worst episode? So Matt, you told me once that Matt Groening, it was asked if there was one Simpsons that he could just take a mulligan on and just if not exist. You told me this. I don't think I did because I've never heard that. That's disappointing because I love that episode. That's the episode that I based my episode on. Yeah. We've had this conversation.

Oh, you know me. All right. Well, you just make up Matt Groening quotes, right? I guess so. Chuck. Yes. Speaking of TV. Do you ever see the season three episode of Magnum PI called 40 years from Sand Island? Yes. No, you haven't. I've seen them all, dude. Tell me what it was about and I'll verify that. But I've just said yes. Well, I mean, I saw every Magnum, so I assume I've seen it. Well, this one starts out in a Japanese internment camp in Oahu called Sand Island. Yeah. And there's a murder, a guard, one of the guards, murders this this internee, I guess. Intern. So I mean, she worked at the camp for free. Exactly. College credit. Although there are some similarities between internment camps and

internment. Yeah. But this this internee is murdered by this camp guard and Higgins is writing a book 40 years later about this incident and some mysterious things start to happen. Somebody's out to whack him. So Magnum's got to solve the case. Who was Higgins the guy who killed the person? Did it haunt him years later? No, I don't remember how he learned about it. Like maybe from hearsay or something like that and he was doing research on it. I don't know why he was writing a book on it. I don't remember the episode. Ta-da. So there. 40 years from Sand Island season three. It was a good one. Like they'd really hit their stride by them. Oh, yeah. But the crazy thing is

Sand Island really existed. Oh, okay. Really? It was a Japanese internment camp and it didn't make this list strangely enough. Where was it? Where was it? On Oahu. Yeah, that wasn't in here, was it? No, but it is. It was the main internment camp where Japanese and Japanese Americans were interned during World War II because something that I think probably especially a lot of our younger listeners haven't found out yet. The United States interned a number of its citizens unconstitutionally during World War II. Yeah. You know that one, Simpsons, where it's the soccer one? Give me more. Well, they go to see their professional soccer team or whatever and they're in the soccer stadium. Marge looks around and goes, I can't believe this used to

be an internment camp. True. Oh, that's good stuff. Yeah. There are a lot of shelters, temporary places set up and a lot of people were moved through them. There's a lot of misery and heartache. Let's talk about it. Two Simpsons and a Magnum in the first six minutes. That is stellar. Yes. All right. Let's talk about it. All right. Josh, on December 7th, 1941, very awful thing happened. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by surprise. Didn't know it was coming and Michael Bay ultimately made a pretty bad movie about it. I actually went to see that and left after the attack just because that's, you know, that's what I was there for. I didn't need to see the love story attached. Yeah. All right. Moving on. President FDR at the time said, we're going to relocate

about 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, put them in what he called concentration camps. Yeah. Which you wouldn't use that term today for these. No, they're associated with Nazis. Exactly. And Jane McGrath who wrote this went to a lot of length to differentiate the two things. A little unnecessarily. I mean, I don't think anyone thought of them as the same thing. It was a fine article, Jane. It was. But that was not how it started, is it, Josh? Josh, he started out a little slower and it sort of grew from there. Yeah. Well, there was apparently intelligence that even before the attack on Pearl Harbor in the, on the Pacific coast, especially in areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle,

there were spy rings of Japanese and Japanese Americans being set up. So right after the attack, they rounded up about 1500 aliens that they suspected of possibly being engaged in espionage. And not just Japanese, but also like Italians, Italian Americans, Germans and German Americans, the people who brought us liberty cabbage and stuff like that. So he reviews these people, finds out what they're all about. He has them paraded in front of his desk. His eyes and he's like, that guy looks okay. Not that one. Well, that's sort of what happened. And some of the aliens were released and some were sent to temporary detention camps. Canada, if you think you're off the hook, you're not.

Yeah. Because you did the same thing. Yeah. 20,000 people. And I wonder how much, how much has that had to do with Canada bowing to pressure from the US? I wonder. I wonder, which makes it even more shameful on us. On both parties, but yeah. So a couple of months after Pearl Harbor, and this was, I guess, after the review of the 1500, right? Yes. That's when he issued the executive order 9066, which gave the military the power to create zones. And what it says here is zones in which any or all persons may be excluded. So that means they did it like really indirectly. Okay. Yeah. That's what I thought.

They basically said, like, you can't live here. You can't own property here. At the very least, you can't be here right now. But you happen to live here. Right. Oops. The military has designated this like as an exclusionary zone. But we have this free housing over here that you can come take advantage of. And I think that's how it was kind of sold at first. But it became very obvious that the Japanese didn't have a choice in moving to these camps. That's the impression I have. That's the impression I have too. So let's talk about them. They set up first assembly areas, which were temporary camps from February until the summer, right?

Yeah. First generation and second generation Japanese Americans. East say, which is first generation and Nisei, which is second generation. Yeah. And they actually got folks from both coasts, although it was largely West Coast. Yeah. It was almost, yeah, it was mostly West Coast because it's much closer to Japan than the East Coast. Of course. And that's what the Intel supposedly said that they were living anyway. And they were also, I saw a government propaganda film from when they started this. Camps were being built. So it would have been made in like 1942. And basically they were, they were saying like, we just, you know, there's just too many Japanese

and these, you know, large populations, they're not spread out because they left people alone in Atlanta and Dallas and New York generally because they were diffuse. One of the reasons they went after the West Coast is because there were huge concentrations of Japanese Americans and Japanese that they were just worried about, you know, them coming up with problems. Sure. That's, that's what the propaganda film said. All right. They said problems. They didn't say problems. That was what they were conveying. One of the problems here with how this went down was they only got a couple of weeks notice at most. They had to leave their homes with whatever they could carry and go to these assembly centers.

Can I, can I tell you one more thing from the propaganda film? Oh yeah. So when they're, they show them putting up signs that might as well say like, you didn't get out. Right. It was basically like, if you're, if you are Japanese or second generation Japanese, you can't be here. You have to go meet here at this time and we'll process you. And basically processing meant here are some government enlisted lawyers and they're going to, they're going to help you basically sell your home and business and whatever for a loss in most cases. Right.

You don't have a choice. Now, did they force all that or strongly encourage them as far as like selling their, they forced it, but this propaganda film, which I recommend anybody seeing on camera, what it's called, but it's only like 10 minutes long, but man, they pack a lot into it. Really? They say like the Japanese and Japanese Americans are happy to help out. They're happy to prove their loyalty by selling their possessions. Basically they're doing their part by getting off of the West Coast. That's how this propaganda film made it seem. It's very interesting. But yeah, a lot of them were forced to sell their stuff, often less than market value.

Right. So they're starting off on a bad note to begin with. Yes. And this is just with the temporary housing. Then in late summer, 1942, they had finally set up 10 of these internment camps ready, open for business. The WRA, the war relocation authority put up places in California, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Arkansas, and it gets Hawaii. In Hawaii, yeah. Even though that didn't make this list.

The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff.

Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being

robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jordan Klepper, Daily Show contributor, Trump Rally Passholder, and as of today, my most daring title yet, Podcast Host. This is Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy, an all new limited series podcast from The Daily Show.

Now, normally when I hear Trump supporters bring up these, let's just call them what they are, 100% unverified banana gram conspiracy theories. We grab the sound bites, pack them in the segment for The Daily Show, and move on to the next person. I feel like cult is such a native word. We are not a cult. If you go online, there's a whole list of pedophile symbols. Really? Yes.

What's on your back? Uh, Q-flag. Q and A. What are those crazy people? Now, we're doing it differently. I'm finally diving into some of the most incredible conspiracy theories that have been pitched to me at Trump rallies. Like, did you know that Osama bin Laden is a guy named Tim?

Yeah, we're doing a whole episode on that one. JFK Jr., coming back from the dead, that's an episode. The deep state, that too. We're going way down the rabbit hole. Listen to Jordan Klepper fingers the conspiracy on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sand Island. Sand Island.

And they were guarded. They were barbed wired. They had hospitals. They had basically everything you need to live. Schools, little forms of government. Yeah, there was no, there was no, basically they put them in the camps, guarded them, so they couldn't, they weren't allowed to leave or come in and out freely. Yeah.

But inside the camps, it was up to the Japanese to form their own democratic self-government. And they did, it's kind of like block captains and things like that. Subpar conditions. Yeah, definitely. Even the WRA said that at the time. Kind of like Army Barracks, one family per room. You got your cot, you got your mattress, you got a stove and a light, you got some blankets. Right, the problem was, or one of the problems was that these barracks, let's say there were

five apartments in the barracks. They were separated by four walls and the walls didn't go all the way to the ceiling. So there was like no privacy in a very private culture. Oh yeah, sure. So they started wrecking their cultural heritage right off the bat, basically. Pretty much. The public laundry, public bathroom facilities, mess hall. So they got a small allowance of money, foreclothes, personal expenditures and the like.

Right. But it was pretty dang low. And so if they wanted a more comfortable life in there, they would dip into your personal savings. Right. So that started wrecking them on the financial front as well. Yeah, and the low wages also had this strange indirect effect, Chuck, in that the parents and the kids who were old enough to work were making the same amount of money.

Yeah. One of the things that, you know, one of the ways parents exert control over their children is like, I make more than you. Yeah, yeah. Not, we make the exact same amount of money. So that wrecked the family home front a little bit more. It definitely eroded authority among parents. Sure.

And you know, I mentioned that they could dip into their savings, not the case with first generation Japanese because their assets were actually frozen. Yeah. So they didn't have the option to spend their own money. That you say. That they earned and put in the bank. Right. Okay.

So like you said, they tried their best to do normal things set up like baseball leagues, evidently. It's no Japanese love baseball. Yeah, I saw an art exhibit at a Smithsonian, why is it the Renwick Gallery in DC? They had, it was called Garmin, the art of the internment camps. Really? And a couple of things they had were some like handmade baseball jerseys for the leagues that they set up there.

Wow. Yeah. That's pretty cool. It was very cool. There's a lot of really interesting stuff there. Yeah, I bet. Is that, was that still in display right now or? It just in the January 30th, I looked it up.

I was going to tell everybody to go. Everyone in DC at least. Well, I bet it'll set up somewhere else. So keep it out for it. Fingers crossed. One of the other ways it sort of wrecked the cultural family front was that Japanese traditionally ate together as a family, family time, meal time. And now that the little boys and girls were living close to their friends,

they like were really hot to go over and eat dinner with their friends. Sure. So that fractured the family even more. Yeah. Plus also, if you didn't want people to know you were arguing with your wife, you better not do it in the barracks because again, the walls didn't go all the way to the top. That's right. There was just a lot more insight into your neighbor's private life than the Japanese

were ever comfortable with. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think any culture would be fully comfortable with those conditions. Right. I agree. But yeah. So let's move forward to 1943 when the WROA says, you know what, maybe we should let

some of these folks out to go to school and work and let's make a questionnaire and base their release on the results of this. Yeah. So you have that questionnaire. Well, there's a lot of personal information like where you're born, can you give five character references, five work references. Right. And there's some other kind of odd questions like name some newspapers that you subscribe

to or regularly read. What are your hobbies and interests? Would you volunteer for the Army Nurse Corps? Would you denounce the Emperor of Japan? What are some other hobbies of your interest to you? They just slipped that denouncing Emperor of Japan in there. Yeah. And a lot of people hopped at this opportunity.

They saw what it was and they said, sure, totally. I'm an American citizen anyway. So yeah, that's fine. I'll denounce the Emperor of Japan. One thing I don't think we really touched on, Chuck. There was 112,000 people who were relocated to these internment camps. 7,000 of them were no doubt about it, American citizens. So yeah, there were a lot of people who were happy to sign this

pledge of allegiance, basically, or pledge of loyalty. And those who did were released. There were a lot of people who took it the opposite way. Well, they were released just to go to work in school at the time, right? They weren't released, were they? I think that they gained them early release or release before other people. Oh, OK. Yeah.

Well, I think they were allowed to leave for work or school, but they weren't released released. Oh, OK. At that time, at least. OK. There were some other people who took great offense to these questionnaires and refused to sign them. And there was actually a big protest at Tool Lake in even if they were citizens,

American citizens refused to. Yeah, there are actually people who renounced their citizenship in the face of being forced to sign this loyalty oath on top of already being a citizen. Right. Sure. So they actually verbally renounced their citizenship at Tool Lake. There was a mass protest. And there was a guy named Jimmy Miracatani who had a pretty cool

documentary made about him, the Catholic Miracatani. He was at Tool Lake. He denounced his citizenship. He was finally released from the camps when they were closed and basically went to be homeless. And he didn't realize that his citizenship had been restored in 1959. And as recently as like 2002, he still thought he was like an illegal alien living on the streets. Almost like a Japanese straggler.

Kind of, yes. Yeah, he was. That's exactly what he was like. Was a Japanese straggler of the camps, basically. Right. Wow. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's worth seeing.

But he stayed in the United States though. In New York. He's actually, he was a master artist. Really? He was really good. Yeah, you should check it out. I will. But yeah, most if not all of the people who were in this protest at Tool Lake

and renounced their citizenship, there was this one lawyer who went back and said, dude, they did this under duress. They shouldn't have been in the camps in the first place. Right. Let's restore their citizenship. And I think most if not all had their citizenship restored. Years later. Yeah.

Wow. All right, Josh, let's go to 1944, December. This finally comes to an end after a lot of public outcry. They were allowed to leave. But they couldn't exactly just jump back into their regular life in many cases because a lot of times their business or property was taken over or neglected in shambles at this point. Yeah, an alarming amount of money.

Yeah, $400 million in financial losses by the Japanese internees. And in 2009, that's about 5.2 billion. Yeah. But I think lower now because I looked up a different calculator and it said 4.8. So maybe it went down since 2009. I don't know. Deflation. Deflation.

Good. So what's the problem here? Why is this a big deal? Why should I care? Is this constitutional? Well, yeah, it was extremely unconstitutional. A panel later found out, right? And of course I was being facetious with that, by the way.

Of course. There was this girl named Mitsui Endo who was a 22-year-old. She was born and raised in Sacramento. Had never been to Japan. I don't think she could speak or read Japanese. And she was interned at one of these camps. Unbelievable. And she basically appealed for a writ of habeas corpus, which we've talked about before.

Smart lady. It got denied. She started appealing up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court got a hold of it and was like, this woman should be granted unconditional release immediately. And that opened the floodgates for every other U.S. citizen who was interned there. And then eventually, that couple with the popular outcry against it. Because people, even while it was going on, Americans, every day Americans were saying,

this is horribly wrong. Yeah, it was pretty controversial. And so finally, even before the war ended, the camps were shut down. But this wasn't before some people died. Oh, well, are you talking about on the island? That's different. Okay. Well, we can talk about that.

Well, let's talk about both. At the art exhibit I was telling you about at the Renwick Gallery, there was this guy named Shura Obata. And he did some really cool ink illustrations. But one of the ones he did was an old man doubled over and there's a dog nearby. And there's the fence and then the mountains in the background. And if you read the caption beneath of the explanation, it's of an actual event that took place.

An old man who was deaf was chasing a stray dog trying to catch it. And apparently a guard was shouting at him to get away from the fence. Old man was deaf. Didn't hear it. The guard shot him to death. This is in one of the camps? Yeah. And I mean, if this is unconstitutional, it never should have happened.

Then just that alone makes it horrific, you know? Yeah, murder. But then there were a lot of other people who died of just deplorable conditions in the Aleutian Islands, right? Yeah, I mean, it wasn't just rounded up in the United States as we found out when we read this. Japan was apparently, we got word that Japan was going to attack the Aleutian Islands, Kiska and Atu. So before they did so, we said, let's get in there and round up.

I guess is it was it locals? Yeah, the UNENGAX. UNENGAX, UNENGAX? Yeah, what I don't understand is why, I mean, they weren't Japanese American, they weren't American. Why did we round them up? For their own protection supposedly. Well, I think not even supposedly, I think that was the whole thing, that we were pretty

sure the Japanese were going to capture this island, which they did. So we evacuated them from their home. Okay. Well, sadly, what happened though was, 881 of these UNENGAX were rounded up and they saw U.S. servicemen burning their houses in their villages down. So the Japanese couldn't use them? So the Japanese couldn't use them. And that was just when they were setting sail for their new home, where like, you can't stay here

and we're going to take you someplace where a lot of you are going to die, okay? So they took them further into Alaska and basically used an old fish cannery, an old fish salting place. Yeah, a herring saltery. And then an old mine of some sort. Yeah, a gold mine camp that was like riding out supposedly. That these were the temporary quarters for these people. And out of 881, Chuck, 54 people died of things like consumption, the damp,

TB, which are all, I think, the same thing. Well, they didn't have plumbing. They didn't have electricity. They had no toilets. They didn't have the food was poor. They didn't have winter clothes and the water was tainted. Yeah. And this is where they sent them.

Yeah. Unbelievable. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that.

And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting?

Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jordan Klepper, daily show contributor, Trump rally pass holder. And as of today, my most daring title yet, podcast host.

This is Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy, an all new limited series podcast from The Daily Show. Now normally when I hear Trump supporters bring up these, let's just call them what they are, 100% unverified banana gram conspiracy theories. We grab the sound bites, pack them in the segment for The Daily Show, and move on to the next person. I feel like cult is such a native word. We are not a cult. If you go online, there's a whole list of pedophile symbols.

Really? Yes. What's on your back? Uh, Q-Flex. QAnon. One of those crazy people. Now we're doing it differently. I'm finally diving into some of the most incredible conspiracy theories that have been pitched to me at Trump rallies.

Like did you know that Osama bin Laden is a guy named Tim? Yeah, we're doing a whole episode on that one. JFK Jr., coming back from the dead. That's an episode. The Deep State, that too. We're going way down the rabbit hole. Listen to Jordan Klepper fingers the conspiracy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the Indian Gags basically said, okay, well, we're just going to take matters into our own hands.

They built themselves their own quarters. They raised a church there. They, it was pretty inspiring. And again, this one wasn't like internment against, I guess it was against their will, but it was supposedly for their own safety. Well, that's what they said about the Japanese Americans too, we should point out. Right. And we should also say, let's talk about that panel in 1988 that found that that was not the case at all.

Yeah. Well, before we move on though, we should say that the Union, the Union Gags, 25 of the men actually joined the American armed forces despite the fact that they were rounded up and put in these camps and some of them died. They still supported America to the extent that they would fight and die for the country. Pretty amazing. That is very amazing. All right.

So now we flash forward once again through our little time machine to 1988 when redress payments were basically on the table. Right. In 1980, Congress created the commission on wartime relocation and internment of civilians and they came to their decision in 1988, right? And their decision or their judgment on whether or not it was constitutional or what was the motivation behind it was that it was racism, pure and simple. Racism and wartime hysteria, right?

Yeah. Basically, they said, yes, there was evidence that there was espionage networks on the West Coast among Japanese and Japanese Americans, but the people who were calling the shots about internment didn't know that at the time. So we owe these people a lot of money is what they came up with. Right. How much was it in reparations? So I got some stats for you.

Okay. Okay. 82,210 people got paid 20,000 a piece. Now remember when I said that the financial losses, let's go back to 1988 at least because that's when they were paid 1988. That would have been $2.6 billion lost. 1.2 billion was paid out. So less than half of what they lost, they ended up getting back. So in other words, the 20 grand didn't cover, you know, squat, didn't cover squat.

In 1992, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was put into effect. They released another 400,000 for payments. And part of the deal then was, and I think this was the first Bush signed this one, the 10 internment sites were made historical landmarks. Yeah. And in 1988, the official apology, that was part of the deal, was the money, an official apology, and then funds for an educational foundation is what they wanted. They got it.

Woohoo. Yeah. Well, I wish I could say that's a happy ending. I think probably the better legacy of it though is that we very sadly learned a really hard lesson. And that is that we can't get swept up in racial hysteria and profiling among our citizens. Yeah. And yeah, in the midst of an emergency. And I think that I wonder if that helped calm people, keep heads cooler following 9-11. Yeah.

I know one thing though is that they never found any Japanese American guilty of espionage and won't work too. Yeah. There you have it. There you have it, Japanese internment camps, probably one located near you, especially if you live in the western states or Arkansas or on Sand Island in Oahu, right? Or if you've ever been to Santa Anita racetrack. I have.

That was an assembly camp. Was it really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I want some money on some ponies there one time. Well, there were Japanese people who were kept there against their will. I didn't know that is true.

If you want to learn more about Japanese internment camps, type in internment. I-N-T-E-R-N-M-E-N-T in the search bar at havestuffworks.com. That means it's time for a listener mail. All right, Josh, we're going to catch people up on our Sergeant John Walker. Oh, yeah. Because we did all this on Facebook, but we didn't really do it on the show. So many people might not know that Staff Sergeant Walker was shot in the line of duty in Afghanistan pretty severely.

It was not a flesh wound, as they say. And I won't get into the details of how that went down. We'll pick up afterward with this email. Guys, the first couple of days after I was in my own coma from shell shock and a concussion, doctors put me on heavy meds due to surgeries in the pain when they went to test my brain functions on the Wonder Machine. Due to the meds, it basically showed me as brain dead as my body was not reacting to the stimuli. Don't worry, folks. He's clearly writing this email so things turned out okay, which we're

getting to. After I was out of the coma, I was in too much pain. So they put me in a medically induced coma, which basically meant just more meds. Afterwards, they tested the MRI again, showed some problems, but they said it was only temporary. Through this all, my brother-in-law sent me to your Facebook page. And if you remember, I posted this. Lots of people logged on. And regardless of political affiliation and how they feel about the war,

they were very concerned about Walker, which is pretty cool. I was not able to finish reading the comments on the post you guys made. I kept tearing up from all the heartwarming comments from the strangers who didn't even know me. It's really nice of you guys to do this, plus really nice of everyone who posted. I found it very kind that people posted outside of that post and kept asking for updates. So moving on, he's in the States now, recovering pretty well. He has just been promoted again from staff sergeant all the way to sergeant major. And he says he will be promoted to second lieutenant and will receive the Purple Heart,

the Army Distinguished Service Cross, the Soldiers Medal, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Army and Air Force Presidential Unit Citation, Army Good Conduct Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Army Overseas Service Ribbon, National Defense Service Medal. So he's getting loaded up on his chest here for being shot. This has been so dope. Exactly. I've been placed on medical leave. My family wants me to discharge as this is my fourth stint, but I will not do it. There's danger out there and people need protection. I will be providing protection. I plan on one more tour.

And then after the Army, I plan to join law enforcement. So he's doing awesome. He's on the Facebook page a lot. But if you remember from many months ago, he was the one who was teaching English to the kids who spoke Farsi through our podcast. And he said a lot of these children from the school came and visited him in the hospital and made them cards and stuff. And so pretty cool story. That is a great story. So we just want to catch everyone else out there who's not on the Facebook page up. He's all over the place too. He's on Twitter as well.

And he started actually a Stuff You Should Know Army page on Facebook as well. Yeah. He's poaching our peeps. No, he's a good guy. Yes, he is a very good guy. Thank you for keeping us up to date, Staff Sergeant Walker. And we're glad you pulled through. Sergeant Major. Thank you for keeping us up to date, Sergeant Major Walker. And we're glad you pulled through.

We were worried there for a little while, weren't we? It was pretty scary. It was like right around Christmas or New Year. No, it was after and his brother-in-law was emailing me the stuff. Yeah. Saying like we don't know if he's going to make it at one point. Yeah, it was scary. Yeah, it was.

Well, we're glad he's fine. Right. We're covering, yes. It's pretty bleak outside still these days, Chuck. So let's get some nice beach stories. Yeah. If you have a great story that takes place on a beach, we want to hear it. Send it to us in an email at stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political and social disruption,

and what we can learn from it. I'm Tim O'Brien. Every week on Crash Course, I'm going to bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur. And I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.