Eyes of the Emperor

by Graham Salisbury

  “You don't understand,” I shouted. “We gotta get back to Schofield. We're soldiers. We need a ride.”

  The car sprang back to life.

  “Here,” I said, ripping my wallet out. “You don't believe the uniform, then check my ID, look!”

  The guy glanced at it and frowned.

  “We'll pay you,” I said. “Here, take all my money.” I yanked out all the bills I had, twenty-two dollars. “Cobra, Chik, give him everything you got!”

  The haole grabbed the bills, trying to shove them back out the window. “I can't take this. I have to go.”

  “Please, mister, we got to get to our post. We're at war. They need us at Schofield.”

  He glanced at the smoke rising from Pearl Harbor. “How do I know you're not one of…of them?”

  “Who?” I said.

  He pointed toward the planes out on the horizon. “Them!”

  I shoved my ID in his face. “You see where it says United States Army?”

  The guy jerked his head back. “All right, all right, get in.”

  We piled into the backseat.

  “Where was it you needed to go again?”

  “Schofield Barracks.”

  He frowned. Schofield was thirty-five miles away.

  Chik looked like he wanted to strangle the guy. Cobra ducked his head out the window, peeking up at the sky as we raced out of downtown Honolulu.

  The haole said, “I'm Jack. Sorry for being suspicious, it's just—”

  “ 'S okay,” Cobra said. “No worry about it.”

  “Yeah,” Chik added. “We all jumpy.”

  Boy, was that the truth.

  When we hit Kam Highway we gasped at the black dragons of smoke snaking up out of Pearl Harbor. Cobra, hanging halfway out the window, shouted, “Hang on, boys, they coming back!”

  A new squadron of fighters screamed down over the mountains. And then another swept in behind us, banking low around Diamond Head.

  The fighters swooped down in V formation, heading straight toward the fiery devastation.

  High above the fighters, bombers crawled across the sky over Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, each letting loose their belts of steel death. You could see the bombs falling, falling, disappearing into the smoke, then—Ka-boom!—buckling and obliterating the helpless parked planes and ships.

  We gaped at Pearl Harbor as we sped by just above it. The battleships were being eaten by flames that flicked out like lizard tongues. Some ships were underwater with their superstructures showing. Others leaned against the dock.

  “They coming to finish the job,” Chik said. “Those ships are sitting ducks.”

  Traffic came to a halt.

  Just ahead a group of SPs, the Navy police, were turning cars back or forcing them off the road.

  Fighters raced in overhead, and the SPs scattered into a ditch. When the planes had passed, they crawled back out.

  “Come on, come on,” I mumbled, pounding my fist on the back of the front seat.

  Even up at Schofield, miles away, I could see smoke. Above us, the sky was splattered with black puffs of navy antiaircraft fire.

  The SP glanced into our car.

  “I gotta get these guys to Schofield,” Jack said. We held up our IDs, and the SP waved us through.

  Just then, sweeping in from the mountains, a single fighter came down on us with snaps of flame flickering in its gunports. Dusty puffs of red dirt and weeds jumped out of the ground in twin trails racing straight toward us. The SP hit the dirt by the left front tire. Jack gaped at the machine-gun tracks. Cobra and Chik piled over me, all of us diving to the floor and covering our heads with our arms as bullets ripped across the hood—thwack-thwack-thwack!

  The engine died.

  The fighter boomed past and dropped down into Pearl. We inched up and watched it. Jack sat with his eyes frozen wide open.

  “Hey,” I said, shaking him. “Wake up. Start the car. We gotta get out of here! Wake up!”

  Jack shook his head and fumbled with the ignition, his fingers trembling wildly.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried again, and when the car coughed to life we cheered.

  Jack gunned it. The Packard jerked forward, but the engine sounded raspy. “We're never gonna make it,” he said.

  “We got to,” Cobra said.

  Something huge blew down in Pearl, so big it whoomped through the car. “Good Lord!” Jack said. “What was that?”

  A hideous monster of smoke boiled up, red and orange and black, a volcanic fireball climbing into the sky. At its base, huge flames shot out like claws, reaching across to the ships nearby. The whole harbor was burning, even the water.

  “God bless their poor souls,” Jack said.

  I turned away, sick, trying not to think about the blood and pain and agony down there.

  Jack got the car moving again, a smoking, slowmoving target for the next fighter that dropped down out of the sky.

  At Schofield we gave Jack a thumbs-up and sprinted for the gate. Inside, jeeps raced around, swerving, jumping curbs to get past stopped vehicles. Men scurried like roaches, shouting and stacking equipment.

  We ran through the quad and headed across the parade grounds to our platoon down in Boom Town.

  When I burst into my tent, PeeWee was on his knees packing his equipment.

  “Hey!” he said. “You made it!”

  “Wasn't easy.”

  “Check this out,” he said, sticking his finger through a bullet hole in the tent right above my cot.

  I looked down and saw that there was also a hole in my pillow. “Yah! From the Japanese planes?”

  “Yep.”

  “Jeese! I could have been sleeping there!”

  “Make up your field pack,” PeeWee said. “We're moving out.”

  “To where?”

  “Who knows?”

  PeeWee dragged his pack and barracks bag out. I pulled off my suntans and put on my field gear, then packed up.

  I found my platoon out on the parade grounds, where everyone was waiting for orders.

  Up in the quad, men moved and trucks rumbled. I dropped down next to PeeWee, wondering why they weren't sending any trucks down to get us.

  “Who's in charge?” I said.

  “Nobody.”

  Chik came over, then Cobra, Shig, and Golden Boy.

  “Hey, Shig,” I said. “How you got back?”

  “Never went home. Stayed here for all the fun.”

  “What fun?” Chik said, probably thinking he'd missed a party.

  “We got strafed. They shot up the field. You dig in the grass, you going come up with lead. But those planes didn't care about us, no. They wanted those fighters all lined up over by Wheeler Field. All we got was the stray bullets. But we shot one plane down.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah, this one Zero was coming in so low I could hit it with a rock! I look up and see the pilot and he had on a white scarf, and he was grinning at us—grinning, I tell you. So this guy with a Browning came running out in the open and—babababababa!—he start blasting away—bullets flying up at the plane, the guy staggering around trying for hold on to that heavy gun. Pretty soon you see one small smoke coming from the back of the plane. Then the smoke got more big, and more big, and the plane tip to the side. Bugga going down, ah? Spooky, to see that, because right then you know the guy in that plane going die.”

  “Ho, man!” Chik said.

  I tried to picture it, but all I knew about war was how to do push-ups, dig foxholes, crawl around in the mud, and clean my Springfield.

  PeeWee squinted up at the trucks in the quad. “They not moving very fast up there. Maybe they going send us down to help out at Pearl.”

  “Naah,” Cobra said. “Got to be the beaches, ah? Because what if the Japanese try come ashore? Somebody gotta be there to stop them, and maybe that somebody going be us.”

  Us?

  A picture flashed in my mind: thousands of Japanese soldiers screaming ashore
with their silver bayonets gleaming in the moonlight.

  An hour later, the men up in the quad started making their way onto the trucks.

  But we just sat there, silent, watching as truck after truck after truck moved out.

  When they were all gone, Schofield fell silent.

  And six hundred island boys still sat waiting.

  Thirty minutes later a weapons carrier bounced across the parade grounds. It pulled up and stopped. Two men got out.

  The big guy was a lieutenant. He stood tall, his hat at a slight angle.

  The driver was smaller, a grunt, like us.

  While the grunt lowered the tailgate, the lieutenant studied us with tight, squinty eyes.

  “I'm Lieutenant Sweet,” he said, then waited, daring someone to mumble something about his name.

  He nodded toward the weapons carrier. “What we have here is a truck full of tools. We are going to use these tools to dig trenches across this field, trenches wide enough to jump into. When we're done with that, we'll find other locations to defend.”

  Dig ditches? I thought, You got the whole Japanese imperial force dropping bombs on us, ready to invade by sea—and you want us to dig ditches?

  “Step out of line,” Lieutenant Sweet went on, “and we got that nice stockade down yonder just waiting for you. In case you don't know what a stockade is, it's a prison.”

  I glanced down the way at the white building with its green roof. A chain-link fence ran around it, with gun towers at the corners. The windows were barred.

  Lieutenant Sweet grinned when he saw us looking. “We just turned everyone in it loose so each of those good men could go do his fighting. You Japs look cross-eyed at anything but those trenches and you'll be taking up where they left off. Understand what I'm saying here?”

  Japs?

  “Form a line,” he spat.

  “Did he say Japs?” I whispered to Cobra.

  Cobra squinted, silent.

  The grunt driver tossed us picks and shovels.

  Lieutenant Sweet barked, “You and you, dig a trench from here to that tree. You men over there, get that pile of burlap sacks out of the truck and fill them with dirt.”

  “You call me a Jap,” I muttered to Chik, “I going laugh and shove you, because you a Jap, too, ah? But when somebody like him says it—”

  I spat, then wiped my mouth on my shoulder.

  “Shhh,” Chik said. “You want him to hear you?”

  “Fool think everybody here Japanese,” PeeWee said. “Can't even tell Hawaiian from Chinese from Filipino or what.”

  “Don't matter,” Shig said. “He don't trust any of us.”

  “We second-rate soldiers now?” Cobra said. “Only good for dig holes? Not good enough to fight for our own island?”

  “Shut up!” Chik said. “He going hear you.”

  “Look like I care?”

  “You heard what he said about that stockade.”

  Cobra spat.

  “They going get this straightened out,” Chik said. “You watch.”

  “They better,” I said.

  We dug ditches all afternoon.

  At five o'clock, Lieutenant Sweet ordered us back to our tents, where we unpacked everything we'd been told to pack.

  Soon three heavy trucks rolled down, one with water, the next with huge aluminum pots of stew and applesauce; the third was another weapons carrier. We dragged ourselves up and stood in line with our tin field plates. We ate in silence, then filled our canteens.

  Lieutenant Sweet climbed up onto the hood of a truck. “Listen up and listen good. This truck is a weapons carrier. There is a weapon aboard for each of you. You will be given two clips of ammunition. You are to load up, but under no circumstances are you to lever a round into the chamber of your rifle.”

  Sweet paused, glowering.

  “We've had reports of enemy paratroopers landing all over this island, including in these hills above us.”

  I glanced up at the clouds moving over a darkening sky. If there were paratroopers up in the hills, they'd be hard to find, because the jungle was dense, and when night falls in the islands it falls like a hammer.

  A mumble rippled through the platoons.

  Lieutenant Sweet grinned. “You grunts are going up there to find them … and kill them.”

  Lieutenant Sweet paired me up with Cobra.

  I was so tired from digging ditches I had to keep slapping my face to stay awake as we started out. But when I thought paratroopers, my eyes popped open.

  Night fell black as paint. The smell of burning rubber from the fires at Wheeler Field hung faintly in the air. The only sounds were our boots crunching into the bushes. When somebody stepped on a stick, it snapped like a firecracker.

  I glanced back. In daylight you could see all the way down to the ocean. But now the island was blacked out. All of it. Not even the smallest dot of light anywhere.

  Cobra was right in front of me, but I could hardly see him. “Wait,” I whispered, reaching out to touch the back of his field pack.

  He stopped with a jolt. “What?”

  “If I can't even see you, how we going see a paratrooper?”

  “What about our own guys?” he whispered. “We could shoot each other.”

  “No kidding.”

  We stumbled on into the darkness.

  I could follow Cobra's shape if I stayed close. But if he got too far ahead of me, he was gone.

  An hour passed.

  We had no idea where we were or how far we'd come. What if the paratroopers were hiding, waiting for us to walk into a trap?

  “Cobra,” I whispered. “Maybe we should stop and listen.”

  We huddled close and crouched in the blackness. I bolted a round into my Springfield. “If I hear anything I going yell ‘Halt!’ ” I whispered. “And I better like the answer.”

  There was a rustling sound. Somebody coming through the ferns, crushing leaves.

  We hit the ground, our rifles pointing toward the noise. I hooked my finger around the trigger.

  The rustling came closer, closer.

  Stopped.

  I peeked up, but nothing was there, not even the shape of something. I held my breath.

  A few seconds later the rustling started up again. Sweat dripped into my eyes.

  I heard a huffing sound. Then a grunt and hollow breathing.

  “Halt!” I shouted. “Identify yourself!”

  The rustling got louder, turning frantic. My heart leaped, slamming in my throat. This guy sounded big. And he wasn't answering. Maybe he was charging us, not stopping, not running away.

  Cobra and I shot at the same time.

  Bam! Boom!

  A moan jarred the night. Then a heavy thump, followed by the sound of escaping air.

  I bolted another round into my rifle, my hands shaking so bad I could hardly get my finger back inside the trigger guard.

  “I think we got him,” Cobra whispered.

  “We should wait till morning, when we can see,” I said. “He could be playing dead, waiting for us to make a noise so he can find us and shoot us.”

  Barely breathing, we waited.

  Dawn came on slowly, long hours later. My whole body ached from not moving. I squinted into the oily morning light, my mouth dry as chicken feathers.

  The jungle turned to shadows, then shapes—trees, vines, ferns.

  Pieces of sky.

  We peeked up over the weeds at the body.

  A cow.

  We'd shot a cow.

  Cobra groaned. We creaked up and walked over to it with our Springfields crossed over our chests. Its mouth was frozen in a gape, a purple tongue with dirt stuck to it sagging to one side. A dark puddle of blood soaked the earth just below its neck from a single bullet wound.

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  A half hour later we were back down in camp. All around us other soldiers emerged like ghosts out of the trees and bushes.

  Lieutenant Sweet sat in a truck, drinking coffee. />
  I threw down my field pack and took off my boots, keeping quiet about the cow, because Cobra thought we'd never hear the end of that.

  Lieutenant Sweet got out of the truck. “All right,” he said, hitching up his pants. “Looks like the paratrooper thing was only a rumor. Go back to your tents and eat. The mess truck will be coming down shortly. After that, try to get some sleep. You'll hear from me again at ten hundred hours.”

  Later that morning I stumbled into formation, foggy and confused.

  “Remember these?” Lieutenant Sweet said, sweeping his hand toward the tool truck. “Grab something.”

  We dug trenches.

  We carried sandbags.

  We strung barbed wire.

  After evening chow we staggered back to our tents and fell asleep in our own stink.

  On the afternoon of December 10, Sweet hit us with another bombshell.

  “Form up!”

  We scrambled into position. “All Japs move over to my right,” he said. “The rest of you stay where you are.”

  I hesitated, stunned again by how ugly that word sounded coming from his mouth.

  I glared at Sweet, getting angrier and angrier about how the army was treating us, like we couldn't be trusted. Just Japs. Burn their sampans. Separate them from the real soldiers, the loyal ones.

  “Now!” Sweet shouted.

  Slowly, I fell in with the rest.

  Sweet dismissed the other troops and turned back to us. “Get your rifles and bayonets and bring them and any ammunition you have over to these trucks. The supply sergeant will check them in. Then gather your belongings and take down your shelters and relocate them over there.”

  He turned and pointed to a weedy patch of red dirt on the other side of the field.

  “You are not to leave the immediate vicinity of your shelters for any reason without permission, not even to go to the latrine, is that understood?”

  No one answered. Not one man.

  “Is that understood?”

  For half the night I listened to men standing just outside the flaps of their tents relieving themselves. Never in all my life had I heard a sound as lonely as that.

  Reveille woke us at five the next morning.

  I stepped out into the warm air… and froze.