Written by Alex Apple for CNN
Daniel J. Inouye.
This two-star admiral , one of the three most decorated war heroes in US military history , got his start as a lifeguard in Hawaii.
The World War II battleship USS Arizona (BB-73) was built on Japantown to commemorate the deaths of more than 2,500 sailors and Marines aboard the battleship USS Arizona in the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
Inouye was also a Japanese-American. The admiral, then 24 years old, was one of two Japanese-American Navy officers — along with Vice Adm. Fred Shorett — living in Hawaii during World War II.
Daniel J. Inouye, the Navy’s 21st admiral. Credit: Carl Court/Getty Images North America/Getty Images
He saw himself as “an employee of the United States,” who was enlisted to fight for the country. At first, he was afraid to tell anyone of his ancestry, because he wanted to stay hidden.
“I was afraid that maybe if the whole world knew that I was of Japanese descent, and had been deployed to an island in the Pacific where there were long-range attack cruisers and destroyers, that it might become a very black mark against the United States,” he said at his commissioning ceremony.
Inouye wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 about the discrimination he faced as an African-American. And he met with President Lyndon B. Johnson after he submitted a Congressional Medal of Honor nomination in 1960. Johnson would later refer to Inouye as “an American hero.”
Japanese-American patriots: 9 Japanese-Americans who fought for the US in World War II during the brutal occupation of America by Japan from 1942-45 Credit: Ivan
The admiral received the nation’s highest military honor in December 1963 — the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1971, he served as the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1986 to 1993.