I had been rescued for this?
I couldn’t help asking myself: if it had been a Japanese gunboat that had arrived at Kokoro-Jima yesterday, would I have done what Isamu did, run and hidden? I know I would have.
I showered, reacquainted myself with soap for the first time in over two months. Then I stared into the mirror above the sink and imagined shaving. It wasn’t much of a mirror; it wasn’t much of a beard. It had come in red, though the ragged mop of my hair was the faded brown of barn wood. Under that scruffy beard was the skin of a boy who left his family farm in Plainfield, Vermont, to go to war. No, I liked my bearded self, for now at least. Sooner or later I would be ordered to shave. I would wait until then.
The day before, medical personnel had examined me, expressing astonishment at my health. “You ever think of going into medicine?” one of the doctors asked me, examining my stump. “Come and look at this, fellas,” he added, grabbing anyone around to see my amputation. “Neat as a pin.”
I stared at the stump of my left arm with a mixture of emotions. Loss, of course. Sadness. But also I marveled at how well it had healed. “Is there much work for one-armed surgeons?” I asked the doctor.
He shook his head. “A damn shame,” he said.
There had followed a lengthy debriefing that I have avoided attempting to write about here because it was hours long and full of military-type redundancy, the kind meant to catch you out in a lie. There were times when I felt as if I had been captured after going AWOL rather than rescued, an officer who had been shot down and survived. The Military Intelligence Division was not quick with compliments the way the medical staff had been. But thinking back on that day’s interrogation after a lifetime, I must admit that the hostility I sensed might have been more a product of my own guilty conscience. My narrative — my story — to these hardened inquisitors made no mention of another soul on my island. I owed Ōshiro at least that much: his secrecy. Enemy soldiers had to be rounded up and held somewhere safe. Sequestered. I understood that. I had seen what a lone sniper with nothing to lose could do. And everyone on Tinian knew about suicide attacks. What they didn’t know was Isamu. I justified my silence to myself this way: the man was in a prison camp already and not just due to the isolation of the island. A prison seemed to have materialized in Isamu’s head.
A knock on the door brought me back to the present, 0800 hours, Monday, December 11, 1944. I would have to get used to time again. Army time. Or in this case, marine time since they were the ones running the show.
It was Gunnery Sergeant “Griff” Griffin. I invited him to step inside. “Welcome to the Ritz,” I said.
“Officers’ quarters look pretty good to this leatherneck,” Griff said in a friendly enough fashion. “When was the last time you slept in barracks?”
I smiled. “What can I do for you, Griff?”
“Folks here are anxious about the armaments on that plane. They want to move on that right away. Today, if you’re up for it.”
The sooner the better, I thought. “I’m hunky-dory.”
“Good, then,” said Griff. “We’re lining up vehicular transportation. A chopper would have been best, but there isn’t a big-enough one we can free up, so we’ve lined up a half-track.”
I frowned. “I’m not sure even a half-track will get you down into that gully.”
Griff nodded. “We’ll get as near as we can, and then it’ll be grunt work. It won’t be the first we’ve encountered.”
“I bet,” I said.
“We’re scurrying around to get a lighter operational to transport the M3 over there. That and an LCVP for the troops.”
“Troops?”
“Yes, sir. I’m taking a platoon over.” His eyes firmed up their contact with mine. “We hope to get under way by twelve hundred hours.”
Troops? What was he planning? Suddenly I got cold feet.
“Why the urgency?” I said. “I mean those guns have been sitting there for over two months.”
“With all due respect, sir, we get a little jumpy knowing there’s a stash of rifles large enough to fuel an insurrection just off our port bow a few miles.”
There was no mistaking the guardedness in Griffin’s tone of voice. A day of debriefing had hardened me, and there was no way I wanted this discussion to go any further.
“Forgive me, Sergeant. I see your point. I’ve been out of commission for more than two and half months.” Stop apologizing, I told myself.
Griff nodded. His blue eyes were full of accusation. Another commissioned officer might have told him to stand down, might have called him up on charges for looking at a superior officer that way, just on the edge of contempt. But this was a can of worms I was not about to open. Didn’t have the nerve for it. “Let’s get those arms off the island,” I said, wrapping up.
“Yes, sir,” he said, but I was pretty sure he had other plans in mind. And if I wasn’t careful, I might find myself facing a court-martial for willful stupidity.
We agreed on a time to meet, and I closed the door on him. I had a lot of thinking to do and fast. I wanted to get back to Fort Ōshiro one last time, but I was going to have to do it without tipping off its location any more than I already had. I also had to be prepared that this by-the-rules sergeant could probably find the place without any help from me. If he did, I’d have to tell one heck of a story about how I’d managed to build such a fine habitation all with one hand.
I led Sergeant Griffin and his men to the downed Gooney Bird. There was a full weapons platoon of thirty-nine men, plus me as the token O-2 in charge and Gunnery Sergeant Griffin as the real leader, as well as three bomb experts who monitored every step of the way, sweeping for mines and then checking out the downed plane for booby traps. With an armed guard, the transfer of materials got under way and would carry on through the rest of the day, racing against the clock, because it was getting on to mid-December and the sun would set before six. I slipped away as soon as I could.
“Not much good here,” I said, holding up my stump for inspection. If Griff was going to give me any trouble, I would pull rank on him, but he acknowledged the truth of what I was saying, and I made my way up out of the jungle to the beach, where a number of soldiers stood guard near the landing craft, patrolling the beach, having a smoke, waiting. I watched one of them blow smoke into the face of his nearest child ghost. The child only smiled, unaffected by the gesture or the smoke. For a moment its small head looked as if it were smoldering.
I sauntered back to Fort Ōshiro, snapping photographs with a borrowed camera and looking like a tourist. I wanted some kind of record of the place. I took a roll of snaps. Yet another thing that was difficult to do one-handed.
I had cadged a box of pencils and three ledger books from the camp quartermaster, all of which was stuffed in my shoulder bag. I did not expect Isamu to be at the camp, and so I was not too disappointed, or tried not to be, when I found the place empty. I told myself it was wisdom on his part to have made himself scarce.
It was eerie to be back. Only a couple of days had passed, and yet the place felt alien to me. I stood for a moment on the spot where we . . . well, where Isamu had dug the pit and I had badly filled it in. Down below me lay the charred skeleton of a monster. It seemed remarkable now. Being alive seemed remarkable, and I made a solemn promise to myself, there and then, that I would never forget how outstanding it was to be alive.
The compound.
If the suspicious sergeant I’d left back at the Gooney Bird was to take a gander at this place, my story would be sunk. Two hammocks gave the game away. I half thought about taking mine down and trying to give the camp the look of being a solo enterprise. But there wasn’t time. I would have to trust Griff would not come this way, and the best way to assure that was to not dawdle.
I left my presents in the shelter in Isamu’s hammock. There didn’t look to be any chance of rain, but I didn’t want to take a chance. Along with the box of pencils, I left my penknife. But there was more. I had procur
ed — stolen — two bottles of black ink, which I left along with my Eversharp fountain pen, the one I had been given for Christmas on my sixteenth birthday. I wasn’t sure if Isamu had ever seen a fountain pen, but I knew he’d figure out how it worked.
It was the best I could do. I was about to leave, when I opened the topmost ledger and wrote, with the Eversharp:
Arigatō gozaimasu. Thank you very much.
Then I wrote out my name and the date and my address back home in Vermont. The war would end. Isamu was endlessly resourceful. Maybe he would make it back to Saipan. Maybe he’d write one day. Maybe we would become friends. Right at that moment, the world was full of enormous possibilities.
I turned to go, and there was Isamu in the open doorway of the compound. He bowed, ceremoniously. I bowed back. Isamu entered the fort, his back straight, the little emperor of a little island. I waited as he approached. Saw the moment when his eyes fell upon the things weighing down his hammock. He looked at me.
I bowed again. Isamu was changed. His ghostly crew stuck very close to him. One of them, the eldest of the children, held his hand. Would any of them appear in a photograph? From my pocket I drew the camera. With my eyes I asked if I could photograph him. Isamu backed up toward the compound gates. But then he stopped and bowed, dropped the hand of the ghost child and stood at attention, like a soldier. I snapped two pictures. Then just as I was about to snap a third, I started singing “Skidimarink.” Isamu’s stern face cracked, and I pushed the shutter. I wanted that smile. Where or when I would dare to get this roll of film developed was a problem for another day. I would have to keep it well hidden for now. The photos, with or without ghosts, amounted to proof of treason. I hadn’t quite finished the roll, but I wound it up and removed it from the camera.
I bowed again. I would have liked to shake hands with the man, embrace him, but I sensed sadly that there was no chance. It was not his custom, in any case.
Then he left, without a word, trailing his ghosts behind him. I wasted no more time. I was glad for the chance to see him once again. For, although I didn’t know it then, he would never write to me, would never leave Kokoro-Jima.
I made my way down to the beach. I stopped on the trail and looked back up toward the headland. You could just make out the coral tree. I caught the glint from a set of field glasses. I almost went back to warn him that the man who had brought me here had the eyes of a hawk. But there wasn’t time. I could see soldiers milling down by the landing craft. I hurried and met up with the gunnery sergeant marching along the shore toward me.
I watched him as the distance between us narrowed. His eyes were everywhere, and I tried to see the place the way he did. Without the Stars and Stripes flapping in the wind on a flagpole, he could only assume this was enemy territory. It was on islands like this that the brunt of the fighting got done. Down here on terra firma. The Army Air Force played a huge role in warfare by then,1 but, when you thought about it, war was always about land — who had it and who wanted it — and so it made sense that this was where the line was drawn and the killing started.
This was not one of those islands, I wanted to tell him. Surely the ghosts that trailed behind him were proof that this was somewhere altogether different. But he ignored the ghosts. He had probably assessed their potential danger to him or his men upon first laying eyes on them and, finding no weapons on their flimsy bodies, did not let himself be distracted by their fawning, the way they followed, any more than a sailor pays attention to the wake of his boat. But I will tell you, it was quite a sight to see the platoon gathered together on that beach with all those spirits hovering nearby like a vast human-shaped fog.
I didn’t talk about the ghosts to anyone. In a war, sanity is a difficult thing to hold on to. And you didn’t want to give the other fellow any sense that you might be losing yours. I had loaded more film in the camera by then and took the sergeant’s picture. When I finally got the pictures developed, stateside, there were no ghosts.
1 The U.S. Air Force wouldn’t come into existence until 1947.
I watched Derwood leave from the watchtower. Leave for the second time. I knew they would return, if only for the arms. Derwood had not betrayed me, nor did I expect that he would. Watching them load those crates of rifles into the landing craft, though, I felt so sick at heart that it bent me over double. The two of us managed somehow to live here on the island with no further thought to the arms in the plane. That is what I assumed. Had it been me who was rescued, would I not have done the same thing? I fear I would have. Now they are in the hands of soldiers. Hisako, I found myself shaking with self-loathing. I even cried out. It is a wonder they did not hear me all the way down at the shore.
The war must still be going strong, if what is happening on Tinian is any indication. So those rifles will end up killing my people, and it is only in seeing them leave the island that I fully understand what my failure to act will bring about. Perhaps you would ask me, Hisako, in your wisdom, what could I have done? Could I have blown the rifles up, somehow? Overnight, could I have single-handedly hidden all those crates in caves? Where? How? Or perhaps you would say to me, Hisako, that the enemy was well supplied in any case. That nothing could stop them. That we are finished. This is what I feel in my bones. I fear it must be true. Great bombers now fly from Tinian on regular missions. Bombers that, by the enormous size of them, might fly even as far as our homeland. I watch them load the bombers, I watch the mighty planes go and watch them return, day in, day out. What are five hundred rifles in such a conflict? But no, I cannot reconcile myself to any of these excuses. I am wretched.
I am so lonely. Lonelier than before. I almost hate Derwood Kraft for crashing into my life! By the scratches on the bamboo pole I have been here now one hundred and forty-six days.1 I am weak with longing for you, Hisako-chan. But I carry on. I fish and bathe and bury or burn the dead. There is no end of them. The jikininki rail at me, and I ignore their pleas.
It will be New Year’s Day in just a few days. Akemashite omedetō. Happy New Year, Hisako-chan. I can remember the feast we had a year ago to welcome in the New Year. How strange it seems that it was our one and only holiday together. We knew then — or I did, for sure — that we would be married before the year was up. Then the world speeded up, and we were married even more quickly than we would have expected. I wonder if you regret our decision? Had we not married, would losing me like this have been easier or harder? I can only say for myself that it would have made no difference whether we were married or not, for I intended to spend the rest of my life with you. I hope you know that. And I hope if you read this and I am not there, that you will be happy to know this.
I failed to tell you that I am now writing out my thoughts, as few as they are, in the sketch pad Derwood gave to me. I tried to use the ink-loaded pen he left me, but you will see that I have badly blotched my effort and have reverted to pencil. The other pen that he told me was called a “ballu-pointo” ran out of ink and none can be added, though I tried.
Such great generosity Derwood has shown to me. There are these other lined books he left, enough for me to write a novel of great length had I but the talent. I certainly have the time. But I seem to be running out of steam.
I think about Derwood. How if Emperor Hirohito himself landed on my island and demanded that I give up my prisoner, I would not have done so. Now, on the other hand, had you arrived, I would have led you straight to him. I know you, my Hisako-chan. You would not have been frightened, not as long as I was there. You like people — all kinds of people. Maybe it is because of working in your father’s noodle shop. You have met so many! You are not quick to judge. Why, you even liked me when I would come in for my lunch and tease you. Do you remember? I would ask you to sing, and you would blush and then your father would sing, and we would all laugh.
I am smiling to think of those days.
I worry that the pencil marks I make will fade over time, for I have no idea how long it will be before you see this, or if yo
u will see it. Or if you will see me again. This is a sad thought that I banished from my mind, but I can no longer pretend that it is not a possibility. Some days I feel as if I did truly die on that day on Tinian when I saw the puppet battle. Three times I awoke and who is to say whether one of those awakenings was into a new world? If this is it, then it is a good one. The air is clean; the food is plentiful. But it is now a lonely place. It wasn’t before Derwood arrived. Just surviving seemed a miraculous thing in those times. Then he came and reminded me of what it is to be with people. Then Tengu came and reminded me of what it is to be at war. And so now what is it? Some unquiet part of me asks what is there left to learn? And there is a darker voice inside me that asks what is there left to live for? Ah, but the reason for living is before me in these words scratched onto a snow-white page. You. There is you to live for and, in your place, there are these words. How I pray that you are well. But to whom do I pray? Are there gods anymore in the world?
1 I marked my own stay on the island (which amounted to approximately fifty-seven days). I say approximately, because, like Ōshiro’s, my first day or two were lost in a feverish and drug-induced haze. By my estimation, this entry of Isamu’s dates from around Christmas Day, 1944.
Ōshiro made only three more entries despite the extra writing material I left him. Indeed, the three ledger books I purloined from the quartermaster were sent to me, by Griff, along with the flight journal and the sketch pad. The sketch pad contained several pages of writing, but the ledgers were untouched, empty. Apparently, Griff wanted me to understand that he had sent me all the writing left behind by Isamu Ōshiro and had not withheld any of it. This, I decided, was just the thoroughness of a well-trained soldier. But it interested me, nonetheless. At that point the sergeant — or I should say the sergeant major — would have had no idea what the books contained, as I mentioned in the prologue. The writing was all in Japanese. He would have no reason to suppose there might be evidence in Ōshiro’s writing that would incriminate him.
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