The Admiral’s ‘Firecracker’ of an Identity (8:21)

Harry B. Harris Jr.

Admiral Harry Harris spent his boyhood in rural Tennessee, son of a Japanese mother and American father. He says he was a typical American boy. He did not think much, or at all, about being half-Japanese. But that began to change when his family moved to Pensacola, Florida and he enrolled in a recently integrated high school. And his mother’s heritage played a bigger role as he rose through the ranks in the U.S. Navy.