We Are Not Free

by Traci Chee

  We cross the river. We cross a minefield with the help of some Italian partisans. We occupy San Mauro, where I’m on guard duty with Bill, who went AWOL from the hospital to get back to us, and split a tube of Limburger cheese as we watch the sun go down on the river, turning the waters red.

  NAPLES

  SEPTEMBER 27

  As soon as we’re relieved, there’s talk of sending us to France. For a while, we’re shuffled around. Castiglioncello, the 88th Division, Piombio, the Seventh Army, Naples again.

  Naples is different, somehow. There’s still the sunken destroyer in the harbor. There’s still weeds in the rubble. But it’s dirtier, more crowded, replacements yakking and patting their rifles, saying shit like, “Berlin by Christmas,” guys with their legs blown off getting wheeled over the cobbles, everything looted and stripped down, the fountains clogged with dead leaves. I dunno if it’s me or the city or both that’s changed, but when we finally board the assault boats that’ll take us out to the navy transports, I watch the collapsed buildings and cathedrals and palaces and piazzas disappear, and all I can think is I’m glad to be leaving them behind.

  FRANCE

  LYON

  OCTOBER 11

  Once we get to France, most of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team departs for the line in a bunch of old trucks, but us suckers in 3rd Battalion have to wait another couple days before we’re crammed into ancient 40x8 boxcars—that’s forty guys or eight horses—and sent by railroad like cargo.

  We’re chugging up the Rhone Valley in these rickety old trains and we pull to a stop in Lyon, where we hop out to stretch our legs. It’s a rail yard, so there’s not much to see, just some woodland and some tracks, but I’m poking around the other cars when I slide open this door and find crates upon crates of C rations, all those beautiful cans, ham, turkey, stew, franks and beans, powdered coffee, graham crackers, and it may not seem like much, but we’ve been on a steady diet of pork loaves and fighting biscuits from our K rations and whatever we can scavenge, so right now a can of stew is a real sight to behold.

  I whistle. “Hey, Kaz, Bill, c’mon!”

  And we just start taking stuff. We’re carrying boxes back to our 40x8 by the armful, and as soon as Sgt. Tamura catches on, he organizes a supply party and before you know it, the whistle’s blowing and we’re all clambering back into the boxcar with twenty new cases of nutritious combat meals.

  There’s things I’m never gonna forget, like the sight of the Japantown boys running down Buchanan Street or the first time I saw Keiko laughing in the snow, and I know this is gonna be one of ’em.

  The whole squad’s perched on the C rations, all of them, Kaz and Bill and Sgt. Tamura and the rest, and they look damn good up there, laughing and talking and passing around a pack of cigarettes.

  These guys, I’m telling you. These tough sons of bitches, these Nisei warriors. Some of us have been together since Shelby, and that means we’re real fucking close. We can recognize a guy by the way he walks in the dark, by the way he breathes. We’re in the shit together when the shit hits the fan and there’s no one in the world we’d rather be in the shit with ’cause there’s no better bunch of guys in this or any other army.

  No wonder they call us King Company, huh? We’re like goddamn royalty out here.

  I’m just scrambling into the car when this colonel appears. He’s a hairy guy, he’s got so much hair, you can see it sticking out his nostrils when he looks up at us and starts yelling.

  “What do you think you’re doing? Put those crates back!”

  The whistle’s blowing again and the train’s starting to roll and we’re all waving from our C-ration thrones. Someone tosses him a packet of instant coffee that lands inches from his polished boots.

  “You’re all going to be court-martialed for this!” he’s saying. “I’m a colonel!”

  Laughing, Kaz salutes him as we roll the door shut. “Thanks for the grub, Colonel!”

  BRUYÈRES

  OCTOBER 18–24

  And that’s a lot of fun, but it’s the last bit of real fun we’re gonna have for a while, because as soon as we get to the assembly area at Charmois-devant-Bruyères, it starts raining, and it doesn’t let up. After an hour it doesn’t even matter that it’s raining ’cause we’re already soaked through, and then it’s the cold that gets you, the cold that’s almost freezing but not quite, and you’re shaking so much, you don’t even notice it until you’re trying to hold your rifle and you can’t keep the damn thing still long enough to shoot.

  Thanks to the 100th and the 2nd Battalions, who’ve been fighting it out on the hills around Bruyères, it only takes a day and an artillery barrage to clear the town. By evening, we’re going house to house with the 143rd Infantry, rounding up prisoners, and me and Bill are marching a German out of a blown-out townhouse, and one of the boys from the 143rd says to me, “I wanna ask you something.”

  I glance at Bill, who shrugs. “Yeah?” I say.

  “How is it you 442nd boys don’t got an ounce of fear?”

  “Oh, we’re afraid, just like you and anybody else and this guy here.” With a laugh, I poke the prisoner, who kinda glances back at me over his shoulder. He doesn’t look much older than Minnow. Jesus.

  “You’re shitting me,” the guy from the 143rd says. “What’s your secret? Some kinda Oriental meditation thing?”

  I wanna say, Hai, hai. It ancient Bushido technique called kusottare. You want know how?

  But then I think of Ma and Pa and my siblings back in Topaz and I wanna say there is no secret. There is no secret, you just gotta do the job, you just gotta get out there and do the thing you were trained for, the thing you volunteered for, because there’s a bunch of people back in America counting on you, and they’re in camps, they’re in fucking camps, they were forced outta their homes, they were put in stables like goddamn animals, they had their jobs taken, their families, their liberties, and you’re here as evidence that all that shit was wrong because the ketos won’t see they’ve fucked up until they see Nisei boys spilling blood over it.

  I think of Shig and his origami and I wanna say, Gaman.

  Instead I say, “Yeah, and it takes a year of silence to master, so you better start now.” And me and Bill walk away with that prisoner who reminds me of Minnow.

  * * *

  That night, I’m jarred out of a dream when the 232nd Engineers blow a roadblock, and all the windows in Bruyères are shattered. My ears are ringing for a long time afterward, and I dunno why, but in that ringing, I keep thinking I hear the distant sound of a piano. Some faint melody like when you’d walk past Yum-yum’s block and you’d hear her practicing, the notes floating like soap bubbles down the street.

  * * *

  In the morning, we jump off against Hill D east of Bruyères, and it’s like we’re fighting in a dream, in a nightmare, with a cold fog on the slopes and the pines breaking under enemy fire, crashing all around us.

  The Germans are all dug in here and they’ve got such good cover, we pass ’em right by and don’t even know they’re there until they pop up behind us.

  We hit the ground. We try to find some cover. A fallen tree. A broken stump. A low place in the terrain with the rainwater pooling in it.

  Me and Bill are trapped behind a log with a few limbs for cover. There’s a machine-gun nest only twenty-five yards off, and they’re peppering us with fire, splitting the log, breaking the branches, making the air smell stronger and stronger of pine, and me and Bill are doing our best to return fire when my rifle jams.

  We can’t stay here, but there’s a dead German nearby and he’s got a weapon he isn’t using, so I lunge for him. Dirt sprays up around me as I take his weapon and roll into a little divot of earth that’s not much cover but it’s some. Even better, I’ve got that machine-gun nest in my sights and as Bill gets their attention with his Thompson, I shoot. It’s a German rifle, but it’s not that different from my M1. Aim and fire. Aim and fire. I get four of them with their own bullets,
and me and Bill continue the advance.

  * * *

  By noon, we’ve taken Hill D and we’ve got orders to move on to the railway embankment near La Broquaine, so we go dig ourselves in a hundred yards from the German line. Only problem is, and we don’t find this out till we get there, that us suckers in King and Item Companies are bivouacking in the middle of a goddamn minefield.

  The Germans got all sorts of mines—teller mines to take out tanks, S-mines or “Bouncing Betties” that pop twice, once to jump into the air and a second time to blast you with shrapnel—and until the 232nd Engineers can get here to sweep the place, we gotta clear our own paths.

  So it’s near dark and it’s still raining and my job is to find a way to the observation post so we can relieve the forward observers, and I’m belly-down in the mud, poking around with my bayonet, hoping not to trigger a tripwire or a shoe mine, ’cause one of those can be set off by the pressure of a single step, and my face is so close to the ground right now, it wouldn’t be a pretty sight for the folks back home if I got hit.

  Every time I find something, I wrap a bit of toilet paper around a rock and place it so the guys behind me know where not to step, and I think about how something you use to wipe your ass is the only thing keeping you alive, and I can just picture Shig laughing over that in some dinky room in Chicago, good old Shig, who writes pages of nothing ’cause he knows anything written in his chicken scratch is better than anything here, descriptions of the hostel where he’s been staying, the crummy all-nihonjin dances that’re no fun without Yum-yum, the shit jobs he gets and quits ’cause he’s always been a lazy bum and he’s not gonna change now, and I wonder if I’ll still be alive when he gets my letter, or if I’ll have been taken out because the toilet paper disintegrated in this goddamn rain and I didn’t step carefully enough.

  * * *

  The next morning, me, Bill, and Kaz are crouched in a foxhole when Sgt. Tamura comes to tell us we’ve been attacked from the rear. “Germans on Hill D,” he says grimly.

  “We just took Hill D,” Kaz says, poking at the layer of ice that’s formed on the puddle at the bottom of the foxhole.

  “Guess they took it back,” Bill says.

  With his finger, Kaz submerges a chip of ice, which bobs to the surface again as soon as he’s released it. “Why’d we take it in the first place if we couldn’t keep it?”

  Three companies are sent back to retake Hill D, and the rest of us push on. It takes us all day to cross the embankment, but once we’re on the other side, it’s another long fight to push the Germans back to the Belmont forest.

  The fighting seems like it’s dying down when we stumble onto a German squad in their slit trench. The sudden fire. The scramble for cover. We’re ducking behind trees and returning fire, and Sgt. Tamura gets ’em with a rifle grenade. There’s an explosion of earth and wood, and in the smoke, we’re shooting at silhouettes, which fall one by one until there are no more.

  I’m breathing hard. I’ve got my rifle to my shoulder. I’m blinking rain out of my eyes.

  A guy gets up, gray uniform almost black in the downpour.

  I shoot him straight through the helmet.

  He falls.

  We move forward. If those Germans are alive, we’ve gotta capture ’em. “Shit, Twitchy,” Kaz says, starting forward, “I think you got an officer!”

  I’m so close, I hear the first explosion of the S-mine, that soft boom of the Bouncing Betty as she takes off into the air, and I fling myself face-down in the dirt as the second charge detonates, and it’s deafening this time, so loud it knocks the sound outta the world, and for a second I’m lying on the ground and my ears are ringing again with that piano song I can’t quite remember, but then the ringing fades, and someone’s groaning. Someone’s gibbering and whimpering.

  “Bill?” I call.

  “Doing fine,” he says. “I’m doing fine.”

  “Kaz?”

  No answer. Just a moan. Just a cry. He’s ten yards away from me and his uniform’s all ripped to hell and I’m running to him even though there could be another mine around here. I’m turning him over and he’s bleeding from so many places, I can’t count ’em all. Sgt. Tamura is shouting for a medic, and Kaz is looking up at me, and half his face looks like pulp.

  “I got you,” I say. “I got you, Kaz. It’s gonna be okay.”

  He gulps and looks up at me out of the one good eye he’s got left. “We got an officer, huh?”

  I have no idea, but I’ll say anything to keep him calm at this point, so I say, “Yeah, we got him.” I’m trying to apply pressure, but I’ve only got two hands and there’s just so many holes in him.

  He grins. Kinda crooked. I dunno why he’s grinning, but he’s still got that dumb look on his face when the medics take him away on a stretcher.

  Turns out we did get an officer, and he had plans for the defense of the whole sector on him. They make a task force. They send ’em out in the dead of night to outflank the Germans on Hill 505. I wonder if Kaz knew if it would happen like that. If that’s why he was grinning like a damn fool.

  * * *

  The next few days are senseless. They send us at this hill, at that hill, clear out that enemy pocket, flush those Germans from cover. We do what they say, we take our objectives, but a day later, the areas we just cleared have been taken again. Take Biffontaine. Defend Biffontaine. Get supplies to the 100th at Biffontaine ’cause now they’re cut off. I write home. I write to Keiko. I tell Shig about that toilet paper stuff. I hope that in writing, things will make sense again.

  They don’t.

  BELMONT

  OCTOBER 25–26

  When we’re finally pulled back to Belmont for some rest, I find out that Kaz is gonna live. They’re sending him to a hospital, then back home, and it’s funny because I know he’s lying on a cot somewhere with a roof over his head and some nurses checking his bandages or whatever, waiting to get well enough for the ship back to America, but to me it’s like he’s dead because—home? Thinking of home? It’s like thinking of heaven. Some place you hope you’ll end up one day, but good luck, buddy, because you’re a soldier, not a saint.

  I dunno what happened. Two months ago, three months ago, home seemed so close. A little fighting, and the war would be over. A little fighting, and we’d be sent back to our families. A little fighting, and we’d all be reunited in San Francisco, with those beautiful red towers rising out of the fog. Me, Shig, Keiko, my folks, my siblings, Minnow and Mas and Frankie and Stan Katsumoto and Tommy and Yum-yum and Bette Nakano and all their kid brothers and sisters . . .

  Now I’m in this little village in the Vosges Mountains, stripping off my clothes in a shower tent with the sounds of shells falling on the main road junction, and my skin is white and wrinkled from the rain and cold to the touch and I look like a corpse, and home is like one of those dreams that seem so real when you’re asleep, but when you wake, you can barely remember them. Because in the dream, things made sense, they had that dream logic, only when you wake to this, to the chatter of a machine pistol, to a guy crying for a medic, to new orders, Take this hill, take that hill, keep moving forward, keep pushing ’em back, nothing makes sense anymore. What’s peace? you wonder. What’s it like to walk down the street, to walk from one building to another and not run for cover at the sound of a German howitzer? What’s it like, you wonder, to dance to the sound of the radio? To eat rice out of a bowl with a pair of hashi? To close your eyes and get some shuteye and not be afraid of waking?

  Tossing everything but my dog tags, I stand under the hot water and wait to thaw.

  FORÊT DOMANIALE DE CHAMP

  OCTOBER 27–29

  We’re hoping for a week of rest at Belmont, but of course we don’t get it. They’ve got something that needs doing, another objective that needs taking, and who’re they gonna send in but the boys in the 442nd? 2nd Battalion is ordered out on the 26th. Us and the 100th follow the next morning at 0400.

  There’s no light,
no light at all, just us and the rain and the dark. We’re marching in columns, but it’s so black out here, I can’t see the guy in front of me, the only way I know he’s even there is by the sound of his footsteps and the creaking of his gear. I feel like I’m marching into nothing, we’re gone, we’re going nowhere, we’re dead already.

  Then the guy behind me grabs onto my pack, this heavy tug, like a weight, like an anchor, and all of a sudden I’m connected to something. I grab the guy in front of me, the strap of his pack in my fist, and I feel him grab the guy in front of him, and we’re all links in this long chain, and we’re walking through the darkness, but we’re not walking alone.

  * * *

  I dunno what to tell you. We lose a lot of guys in those woods.

  Their legs are blown off by mortars. Their bodies are undone by machine-gun nests. Their skulls are punctured by sniper fire. A tank takes out our platoon leader and all the guys that are with him.

  Still, we move forward. A yard at a time. A tree at a time. We move forward.

  Guys get wounded, little wounds our medic patches up, ’cause there’s no going back. If you can walk, you stay on the line. Part of it’s ’cause we have to. Part of it’s ’cause our supply lines are in danger and half the stuff we ask for, ammo, supplies, replacements, doesn’t make it to us, so even if we wanted to go back, we couldn’t.

  But we don’t wanna go back.

  I dunno why. It’s like a compulsion now. It’s not just our duty. It’s not just our orders. It’s like we’re detached from reality somehow, like we’re a thread that’s come loose, and the only thing we’ve got to hold us together is the mission. The moving forward. The next yard. The next tree. We dunno why. We don’t have to know why. We just keep moving forward.