What is being proposed is a “Taking” pure and simple. NPS encroaching onto the Tule Lake airport and the advocation group involved are an overreach on the part of NPS

letter to KBC News by Werner Hoyt 1/18/17

The issues with respect to these the NPS encroaching onto the Tule Lake airport and the advocating group involved are an overreach on the part of NPS.  The airport is essential to being able to provide

1.       staging for fire fighting support

2.       agriculture support

3.       feeder air link

4.       medivac capability to the area.  I assume any visitor that has a medical emergency while visiting would prefer air medivac rather than a 2-4 hour ambulance ride to qualified care facilities.

5.       Civil aviation

We have a reality perception problem.  Both my father and grandfather served in the Pacific theater. WWII was a “TOTAL WAR”.  We were all in.  Decisions were made in the interests of winning that war.  There was no time to vet each and every person.  If you weren’t born here and wouldn’t swear allegiance you were a threat.  Yes rights were violated but the USA was in a knock down drag-out fight where anything goes.  Early in the war after Pearl Harbor there was a very real belief of a likely invasion on the West Coast by Japan.  Japanese military behavior in Asia was well known. No quarter was given to the areas they invaded – China, Korea, SE Asia, Philippines, and Pacific Islands. They were not an adherent to the Geneva Convention.

Truman ended up utilizing the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  This decision ended up saving the lives of upwards of a million or so of our servicemen and the lives of 7 million plus Japanese in Japan.  My father recalled seeing his counter parts go ghost white when they received orders to the Pacific Theater after V.E. day before the bomb was used. He was a Spec 5 – Medic with the 101^st Airborne.  Those men consider their orders a death sentence based on our experience at Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu, Nasau, Bellawood, & Okinawa.  Japan itself was going to be worse.  We cannot use the filter of our time to judge the decisions which were made.  You have to look at the events and perceptions of the time.  The calculus of war dictated the use of the Bomb.  The casualties incurred were a fraction of those which would have taken place if we would have had to invade Japan to end the war.

We are again in another war.  This one we are at the beginning of with an adversary who is every bit as ruthless as Imperial Japan.  Maybe more so.  They will not accept our constitution as primary law and will use any means at their disposal to achieve a caliphate.   If we look back at WWII the decision process was much the same as we are currently being forced into by this new adversary and we are slow to acknowledge it to our detriment.

In this over reach there is no appreciation for what drove the decisions.  The government perceived a problem and dealt with it utilizing resources available.  Those decisions do not justify a “taking” on the part of the descendants of those interred to accomplish a taking in obstructing the necessary security requirements for air transport at the Tulelake Airport.  A representative section of the original camp should more than suffice. Pursuing placing the entire of the old camp facilities into a special park is wrong if it at the expense of the local populace who had no say in the original decision to create the detention facility.

We have a new administration.  It is time to push these overreach issues to the new Secretary of Interior.

Werner Hoyt
Lake Shastina