move to Colorado. Among those who came east to Boulder with the program was student Donald Keene. Seidensticker, who had been seeking a way to manage through the war without being drafted, saw the Japanese Language School as a solution. He traveled to Washington, D.C. for a school-admittance interview, the first time he had been east of Chicago, and was accepted. Upon completion of the 14-month intensive program, he was able to read a Japanese language newspaper, albeit with some difficulty. The "Boulder Boys," as the men who attended the language school were fondly called (a handful of women later joined the program as well), were given the choice of becoming officers in the Navy or Marine Corps. Seidensticker selected the Marines due to an abundance of "boyish romanticism." War years Seidensticker received basic training with the Marines in North Carolina, after which he was shifted to Camp Pendleton on the West Coast. It was in California that he first encountered Japanese prisoners of war, with whom he was to practice his Japanese. Late in 1944 he and his language-officer colleagues were transferred to the Hawaiian Islands and Pearl Harbor. They were given duties to translate captured documents and to interrogate prisoners of war, a task Seidensticker found increasingly distasteful. In February 1945, Seidensticker was boarded on a ship bound for Iwo Jima. He was not among the first waves of troops to land during the battle, but before long, found himself on the beach "loaded down with dictionaries." By then the gunfire had ceased as the Japanese had retreated north to bunkers and caves. Later, he reminisced in his memoirs that while he may have been in danger a few times, he had little awareness of being afraid. Near the end of his deployment, after the island had been declared "secure," he climbed Mount Suribachi, the site of Joe Rosenthal's iconic flag-raising photograph. He was then rotated back to Hawaii. During that stay, the atomic bombs were dropped and the war with Japan came to an end. Although Seidensticker was deeply unsettled by the dropping of the bomb, he approved of Truman's decision. In his memoirs, he noted, "Had I been at Harry's Desk, I would have made the decision he made. The important things were to get the war over and to save lives; and that more lives, American and Japanese, were saved by the bombing than were