The former Army chief of staff, retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, will be the keynote speaker Sept. 30 at the O'ahu Americans of Japanese Ancestry Veterans Council's second annual memorial service remembering those killed in World War II and conflicts since then.

The service will be at 9 a.m. at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

More than 600 people attended last year's memorial service, which was sponsored and hosted by the 100th Infantry Battalion Veterans Club.

Shinseki, a Kaua'i native, West Point graduate and Vietnam War vet who was twice wounded in action, served as the 34th chief of staff of the Army, from June 1999 until his retirement in June 2003.

Shinseki championed the Army's drive to become a lighter, more mobile force and the introduction of the Stryker armored vehicles.

He testified to Congress before the Iraq war began that any postwar occupying force would have to be big enough to maintain safety in a country with "ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."

Shinseki said that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed, a projection that was never followed but in hindsight many officials believe would have been a better course.

Shinseki is the spokesman for the Go For Broke National Education Center, which is dedicated to preserving and sharing the story of Japanese-American soldiers in World War II.

The O'ahu AJA Veterans Council chose to hold the memorial on the last Sunday in September in memory of the first casualty among the major units to which the veterans belonged.

Sgt. Joe Takata, 24, of the 100th Infantry Battalion, was mortally wounded on Sept. 29, 1943, while leading an attack on a German machine-gun nest in southern Italy.