Combat chaplain

by Israel A. S. Yost

"In October 1943, twenty-seven-year-old combat infantry chaplain Israel Yost arrived in Italy with the 100th Battalion, a little-known National Guard unit of mostly Japanese Americans from Hawaii. Yost was apprehensive when he learned of his assignment to this unusual unit composed of soldiers with whom he felt he had little in common and who were mostly Buddhists. But this would soon change. Before long Yost found himself living and working shoulder to shoulder with these men under enemy fire in freezing temperatures and mountainous terrain. In the midst of the difficulties and dangers, he had many opportunities to experience and observe the generosity of the soldiers toward himself and others, including the Italian peasants they encountered. He wrote to his wife of their obsession with finding fresh food to supplement their C-rations, their largely unintelligible Island pidgin, and his friendships with Captain Katsumi Kometani, the battalion's morale officer and dentist; Captain Jack