This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people.

Major General James Mukayama rose from his humble blue-collar Chicago roots to become

the first Asian American to command a U.S. Army Division.

General Mook, as he's known, amongst friends and people who know him, is the author of Faith,

family, and Flag, memoirs of an unlikely American samurai crusader.

General Mukayama served as a company commander under Colonel David Hackworth in Vietnam.

Hackworth was one of the most highly decorated infantry officers in the history of the United

States Army.

Here's the general with the story of Colonel David Hackworth.

When you're in the Army, when you leave an overseas assignment, they give you what's

called a dream sheet and you say where you like your next assignment to be, okay?

So here I am, I'm at Korea.

So I put in my dream sheet, and I said, I want to go to Fort Benning, Georgia.

I want to go to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

That's where all the airborne units were located, okay? And they send me to Fort Lewis,

Washington, about as far away as you could, and not in an airborne unit, and now at the training center,

and we are training advanced individual infantry soldiers to go to Vietnam. That was our

mission. And I had met Colonel David Hackworth, one of the most highly decorated and renowned

infantry soldiers in the history of the United States Army.

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