Boston (CNN) -- Out of sheer boredom, Susumu Ito, in World War II, became a forward artillery observer, one of the most dangerous jobs available.





"I lied to my mom and told her it was assigned," he recalled. "I didn't want to tell her I thought it was exciting."





Forward artillery observers are among the first to go behind enemy lines, scouting for enemy installations and troop formations, targeting them for artillery strikes. In combat, he used an artillery periscope to spot enemy positions and direct cannon fire.





Ito had been in the Army since 1940, but after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many Japanese-American soldiers were discharged, and even those kept on were disarmed and reassigned.





"They took our rifles away, they didn't know what to do with us," Ito said.





At first, the Army made him a mechanic, a job he found tedious.





"Except for reveille at 6 o'clock in the morning, we had duties that were entirely like civilians."





In 1943, the creation of the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team allowed Japanese-Americans to prove their loyalty to the United States. Ito and thousands of other Asian-Americans welcomed the chance to demonstrate their courage in combat.





"The majority got into the infantry, and that's what I expected, but I was happy to be in the artillery," he said.





On Wednesday, Ito, along with more than 1,000 members of the 100th Battalion, 442nd RCT, will be honored on Capitol Hill with a Congressional Gold Medal for their extraordinary accomplishments in World War II. The Congressional Gold Medal is the nation's highest civilian award.





Japanese-American WWII vets awarded special medal





During World War II, Ito watched as hundreds of men, including dozens of his friends, fell in battle. He witnessed prisoners in striped uniforms look back at their liberators with sunken eyes. He even got to walk around the Berghof, Adolf Hitler's residence near his famed "Eagle's Nest" retreat in the Alps.





Before deploying to Europe, Ito had seen and been behind the barbed wire that surrounded his family's barracks at Rohwer Relocation Center in southeast Arkansas. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans were labeled "enemy aliens," and more than 110,000 were sent to internment camps across the United States. Though he was concerned, Ito says that he and his family accepted this as something that had to be done.





"It was a strange feeling to have an armed guard give me a pass in order to be let in," he said.





Ito captured many of his wartime experiences with his small Argus camera. Under orders not to bring cameras, he brought one anyway, as he wanted to keep a record.





"It was quite unique because no one to my knowledge had a camera, they all obeyed orders. I bent them whenever possible."





Ito is now 92 years old, a retired Harvard Medical Emeritus professor who spends his days inside a laboratory using high-tech microscopy equipment to view his cell specimens.





His photographs still generate a range of emotions. Many are group shots of smiling war buddies, posing near their howitzers or against scenic backdrops. Some feature the capture of German soldiers or the damaged buildings of the Berghof, and others contain more solemn reminders of the concentration camps, which evoke a sense of indignation.





Ito's unit, the 522nd Field Artillery, liberated concentration camp prisoners from a subcamp of Dachau, a town in southern Germany.





"It was an awful feeling, hearing a Lithuanian teenager, in his gray uniform, translate what had happened," he recalled.





As he snapped photos of the survivors, he thought of his parents and the stark difference in treatment between the German and American camps.





"I have objected to Americans calling the U.S. relocation centers 'concentration camps,' because in my mind, they were nothing compared to the emaciated bodies and crematoria we found in Germany," he said.





The 442nd motto was "Go for
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