Gwendolyn Mugliston was born in October 1939 in Suyoc, Luzon, Philippines. Her father was a gold mining engineer. Her mother came to the Philippines from Nevada. The trip from the United States took three months. Her parents were married there. Mugliston remembers banana trees and a nanny but not much more as a child. She does remember her dad receiving information from some Chinese workers six weeks before the attack at Pearl Harbor that the Japanese were launching a fleet to carry out attacks at Pearl Harbor and Clark Field [Annotator's Note: now Clark Air Base, Luzon, Philippines]. The United States Government was denying this was true. Her parents knew they had to leave because they knew how the Japanese treated the Chinese in the war there. Her father carried her on his shoulders, and they walked most of the way to Manila. Her mother was pregnant and got an apartment once there. Her parents never talked about the war to her. The American Embassy refused to give them papers to leave. They did not even let them buy tickets to leave and said that it would show a lack of faith between the Japanese and American governments. After the attacks at Pearl Harbor and Clark Field her family was sent to Santo Tomas [Annotator's Note: Santo Tomas Internment Camp, or, Manila Internment Camp, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines]. Her father went into the camp first and Mugliston stayed with her mother. Once her mother gave birth to her brother, they all joined her father at the camp. About a year later they were transferred to Los Baños [Annotator's Note: Los Baños Internment Camp, Los Baños, Philippines]. She thought it was very chaotic and she lost hold of her mother's hand and she panicked because she was lost. They reunited later at the camp. After that, the time there became about endurance. [Annotator's Note: Mugliston begins to talk about a man named Frank Buckles, but does not finish the thought. Frank Woodruff Buckles, US Army corporal and last military veteran of World War 1 to die, was interred in Manila, Philippines during World War 2.]

There were a lot of dead people being taken out of the camp [Annotator's Note: Los Baños Internment Camp] and Gwendolyn Mugliston remembers nobody wanting to talk to her about it. She had a lot of questions and was very frustrated and did not understand what was happening. The Filipino kids would tease them from outside the fence. She recalls how awful lugaw [Annotator's Note: rice porridge] was to eat. She did get a Red Cross package once that had chocolate. Frank Buckles [Annotator's Note: Frank Woodruff Buckles, US Army corporal and last military veteran of World War 1 to die, was interred in Manila, Philippines during World War 2] collected chocolate for the kids and told the parents that they needed to feed them, or they were going to die. Mugliston says that they came very close to that happening near the end. She remembers that her father would carry her on his shoulders so he would not have to bow to the Japanese. Her father was adamantly against the Japanese and felt it was the family's responsibility to escape the camp. He helped develop small radios in the camp to keep track of MacArthur [Annotator's Note: US Army General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area]. They were in their barracks room when the liberation of the camp was happening and there was a lot of shooting going on. Her father was leaning into the walkway and her mother was trying to pull him back in. She and her brother were under the beds. Her parents told her the Americans had come and it was like Christmas and New Year's all in one. She learned later in life that the Japanese had planned to exterminate them all the very morning that the Americans came in. They were then placed onto ducks [Annotator's Note: DUKW, six-wheel-drive amphibious truck] to be taken across the lake to Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa, Philippines. She loved being in the boat. Once they reached the prison they got to eat, were deloused, and given physicals. She had her first ice cream ever in life and it has remained her favorite dessert.

Gwendolyn Mugliston and her family were liberated from the Los Baños Internment Camp and taken to Bilibid Prison for some time. They were later put on a ship to the United States and went through a bad storm. She had to hold onto the frames of the bunk to keep from being thrown out of bed. The smell of vomit was awful. They went to her grandparent's home in Alameda, California. She recalls being overwhelmed by how solid everything was and it all seemed like a miracle. She rode in a car for the first time. She also loved the food. Her parents had been emotionally devastated and had lost their faith in God and the American Government, so they got some bicycles and left Mugliston and her brother with their grandparents. Her grandmother was very strict. Later in life Mugliston learned that she had been an out-of-control child. If she heard loud noises or people screaming or yelling, she became very unruly. Her grandparents thought she was mentally unstable. She was disruptive at school and could not focus enough to read. When her parents returned, they took her brother and moved away but left her with her grandmother. Her grandparents tried unsuccessfully to get her to finish the first grade. Her grandmother would take her to church but Mugliston could not understand a God that loved everybody because she did not love anybody. Her parents finally took her to the high desert in northeastern California. They lived in a small house there and she just loved being outdoors. She was allowed to roam on her own. She was very unhappy though because she felt she was not loved and she did not know what to do about it. She felt suicidal. She started beating on a large rock and ranting about God and she suddenly was very calm. She heard a voice telling her that all was love and all is love. It went away and never came back like that. Her behavior did change some after that.

After returning to the United States, Gwendolyn Mugliston's father decided to return as a family to the Philippines. He began mining again. Mugliston had difficulty in school and still had a very hard time reading. She was put in a Catholic school. A nun there sat across from her and told her to read a book. The nun noticed that Mugliston's eyes were not tracking the words but realized she knew what was in the book. This helped immensely and they now knew how to teach her. She named this nun "Shasta Daisy". She had terrible nightmares when she lived in the United States. She was watching the movie "Bambi," and in the fire scene she became out of control and had to leave the theater. They lived in Quezon City, Philippines. She was nine years old and her amah [Annotator's Note: nanny] came the house and found her smoking a cigarette and drinking wine. The amah asked her mother if she could take her home with her to the barrio, where she lived in a thatched hut that was raised off the ground. Mugliston joined the family in a meal right away. The amah began to teach her to live in the present moment instead of her head. She lived with them for some time and was taught to meditate. She then went back to live with her parents. They returned to the United States when she was in the fifth grade and she returned to being a problem student. Her sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Anderson, took a group of the brightest kids and gave them a difficult task to work on together. This taught her how to cooperate with others and she says this was the best teacher in her life. They lived in Mill Valley, California. Her parents did not allow her to bring friends home to visit. She did get to visit her friend's families and that was when she learned people lived in different ways. This was an absolute revelation to her, and it felt like being liberated.

After returning to the United States for the second time, Gwendolyn Mugliston's family did not play music in their home for years because it made her parents cry. Her parents had suffered a grievous loss due to what they called the betrayal of the Americans in the Philippines by the United States government. The saving grace for the family was the rapport her mother had with her own sisters who would visit them. There were people in the Philippine internment camps who cooperated with the Japanese and her parents would have nothing to do with those people. Some of the people who had not cooperated did come to visit her family, but they would not discuss their time in the camps in the Philippines. In school, Mugliston made a clear distinction between Japanese-Americans and native Japanese kids. Hearing of the Japanese internment camps in the United States was a shocking experience for her. She could not believe that Americans would do that, and it made her cry. Even now she feels it was despicable. She thinks most Americans were fine with the Japanese in the country and there were more anti-German people than anti-Japanese. Her high school in California in the 1950s was mixed race and the students never thought anything of it. Everyone was just seen as a person.

[Annotator's Note: There is an odd tape break which makes it hard to know what is being discussed at first.] Gwendolyn Mugliston's brother was three and she was six and a half when they were in the Los Baños Internment Camp. Her brother discounted a lot of her memories until he started reading about the camps from other sources. He had a PTSD [Annotator's Note: post traumatic stress disorder] episode and it shocked him to have one. He had been raised to think Mugliston was crazy and stupid because of her PTSD. Since the war, she has learned how the Japanese had raised their generations to feel superior and feels that they could not help that due to how they had been brought up. She taught deductive reasoning in schools and she feels it is being lost now. She went to veterinary school and then got her PhD in science. She started working in HIV [Annotator's Note: human immunodeficiency virus] clinics and moved into psycho-social work. She feels that her war experiences helped shape all of this.

Gwendolyn Mugliston became part of the BACEPOW [Annotator's Note: Bay Area Civilian Ex-Prisoners of War], while looking for other people who had been kids in the Philippine internment camps when she was. Angus [Annotator's Note: Angus Lorenzen, Commander of BACEPOW] asked her to become a member. She had books that listed the families and began searching. She wonders how they live and if they live like her. Her most memorable experience of World War 2 is the liberation of the Los Baños Internment Camp. The other one was when she was pounding a rock later in life and ranting at God. She had seen so many dead bodies by the time they were liberated. No one would explain death to her, and this caused her great anxiety. She feels World War 2 means nothing to Americans today. There is not a lot of discussion which saddens her, only an understanding of sorts with others who went through the war. She finds more people disbelieving of her experiences than understanding of them. The National WWII Museum is very important, and she is extremely pleased with how the stories are told. She feels it is critical that these stories be told.