When Daniel K. Inouye was 17, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. An aspiring surgeon, he spent much of the next week helping care for the wounded at an elementary school in his native Honolulu.
He wanted to enlist immediately but couldn’t. Japanese Americans were classified as “enemy aliens.”
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Two years later, once restrictions were lifted in 1943, he joined the Army‘s 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose motto was “Go for broke.”
The Japanese American soldiers became the most decorated unit in U.S. history. Inouye fought in Italy and France, losing his right arm during a 1945 battle against the Germans. He would ultimately be awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest citation for combat heroics.
Inouye returned hometo become a towering figure in Hawaii politics, joining the first delegation that the new state sent toCongress in 1959, then winning election to the Senate in 1962.
When he died Monday of respiratory complications at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Inouye was the second-longest-serving senator in U.S. history. He was 88.
