They were barefoot nisei Japanese-American plantation kids growing up next door to Marine Corps Air Station Ewa who would witness the attacks of Dec. 7, 1941, and their parents’ concerns about Japan, and then go on to serve the United States.

The route to veteran status for Yoshinobu Oshiro, Kazuto Tomoyasu and Shoso Yasui — who as youths watched the diving attack planes from the Ewa Hongwanji Mission — came via a Japanese background midway in the Pacific, but as Americans in Hawaii who volunteered to do their part when they were older.

“We grew up as Americans,” said Tomoyasu, 84, who nevertheless experienced racial taunts after the war started. He later went on to become a B-57 bomber navigator and spend 28 years in the Air Force.

“We didn’t grow up as Japanese kids, even though we were influenced a lot by our parents’ philosophy, like honor, duty, country,” the Aiea resident said.

Life lived between the Ewa Plantation and the Marine Corps Air Station meant community bathhouses with big redwood tubs where kids used to listen to their elders’ stories while soaking, and chasing errant fighter tow targets made of pure silk that were highly prized by the women of the camps.

“I cannot find the exact words, but I’m thankful for the country that I served in, and especially the military. The military was the key to my success, I think,” said Oshiro, 87, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who was part of the Military Intelligence Service.

Yasui, meanwhile, who used to make model airplanes, recalled the Battle of Britain — “I was really interested in the war in Europe,” he said — and taking note of the early biplanes and sleeker Wildcat fighters that would ply the sky over Ewa Field.

Like the other two, Yasui, now 87, would serve in post-World War II Japan, in his case in an Air Force supply squadron.

Their lives converged at the Hongwanji Mission on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese planes appeared overhead, and the church provided a good vantage point.

Oshiro said he and some others were playing football, and “suddenly we see planes swooping down, 50 feet above and strafing, just tat! tat! tat! tat! tat! We hear that.” A man named Mr. Hanzawa came out and said, “Eh, go home! Go home!” the Pearl City man recalled. “You see that ‘hinomaru’ (sun flag insignia)? That Japanese plane. Go home!”

Japanese aircraft that day attacked Ewa Field in three waves, and four Marines were killed. Nearly 50 aircraft on the ground were damaged or destroyed.

Oshiro’s father had come to Hawaii from Okinawa in 1905 and would work at the plantation for about 50 years. After the attack he gathered the family at home and said, “It’s not good. It’s wartime,” Oshiro said.

Tomoyasu remembered the days before the attack, when plantation kids would be on the lookout for the aerial gunnery targets trailed by some of the Marine Corps planes at Ewa.

“Sometimes they’d drop the tow target off the field,” he said. “And that tow target was about 4-1/2 feet in diameter and about 30 feet long. It’s pure silk. Anytime we’d get hold of that sleeve target, the ladies in the plantation would be able to wear silk underwear.”

On Dec. 7 he was bicycling home when a Nakajima Type 97 came “down low over the cane fields and the rear gunner was shooting at anything that moved on the road,” he said.

Afterward the Japanese-American boys would sometimes be taunted by others because they were the race of the enemy, he said.

“When we’d go to school, on the way back they’d be waiting, and sometimes we’d get into scuffles,” he recalled.

Tomoyasu said he always wanted to fly, “so I was already pointed towards the military.” At the University of Hawaii, he joined the new Air Force ROTC program, which provided a deferment until the shooting stopped in the Korean War, he said.

“When finished, I promised the U.S. government I would serve three years,” he said. He ended up with 28 years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

“Loved every minute,” Tomoyasu said.

In 1946 Oshiro was on draft notice but instead volunteered for the Army with the understanding that he’d get a better assignment. He said he was sent to Japan and became part of the Military Intelligence Service, using his limited Japanese to interview community members in postwar Japan.

“They wanted us to get the pulse of the community,” he said.

He moved around Japan, interviewing Japanese who returned to the country from abroad and processing former Japanese prisoners while he was in the country from 1946 to 1950, Oshiro said.

He said he later switched to the Air Force Reserve before retiring in 1985.

The country that he was born into later gave the boy who wanted to be a flier the opportunity that seemed impossible after the Dec. 7, 1941, attacks, Tomoyasu said.

“When we were kids, you couldn’t imagine a nisei getting into the Air Force because of the war. Japan was the enemy,” he said.