When bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese American college students were among many young men enrolled in ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) called upon to defend the islands against invasion immediately after the attack. In a matter of weeks, however, the government questioned their loyalty and disarmed them.

In No Sword to Bury, Franklin Odo places the largely untold story of these young men in the context of the community created by their immigrant families and its relationship to the larger, white-dominated society. Vivid oral histories recall the young men's service on the home front in the Varsity Victory Volunteers, a non-military group dedicated to public works, the Military Intelligence Service, and the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team that fought in Europe. Odo shows how their wartime experiences and their post-war successes in business and politics contributed to the simplistic view of Japanese Americans as a model minority in Hawai'i.