This account begins with recollections of early childhood in pre-war Japan, and festive activities shared with her adoptive mother. Her teenage years fell under the shadow of war. A young soldier with whom she had a budding romance did not return from the fighting. She gives a harrowing account of her survival of the Atomic Bomb attack on Nagasaki. A chance encounter with the U.S. Marines in late 1945 led to her employment by the Occupation Forces. In 1953 she married a career army soldier and became an "Army Wife" in tours of duty in Germany, the United States and Puerto Rico. A return visit to Nagasaki in 1995 brought back a flood of memories of her childhood visit to the Okunchi Festival (Dragon Dance)