by Dean Hughes
“But that guy was mad. He wanted to blow my head off.”
“ ‘Blow’ just means ‘punch,’ but yeah, he was sort of mad. That’s what’s going on all over the camp. Fights break out pretty much every day—the buddhaheads and katonks going after each other.”
The sergeant sounded smart, and he looked sharp—his uniform neatly pressed and his hair cut short. At the same time, he wasn’t like the officers and sergeants who had processed Yuki and Shig at the headquarters building. He didn’t seem to care about establishing his authority over them.
“So are all the Nisei in camp in the same regiment?”
“That’s what they tell us. We’ll have to see whether we can ever fight anyone besides each other.” But he was smiling, and he didn’t seem all that worried. “The Hawaiians don’t like me much either. I was already in the army when the war broke out and the army didn’t know what to do with guys like me. When they formed the “Four-Four-Two”—that’s what the buddhaheads call the 442nd—a lot of us Nisei soldiers got assigned here to form the leadership cadre. We’re the noncommissioned officers. We’ll be the platoon sergeants and squad leaders. To the Hawaiians, the officers are too much like the white men who own the pineapple plantations where a lot of them worked at home. And they certainly don’t like having katonks for their sergeants.”
“How’s all that going to work out when we go into battle?”
“We’ll be fine. I’ll tell you something. Muki Shimuzu—all the Hawaiians—are good guys. Don’t pay too much attention to the pidgin English they speak; a lot of them are well educated. And they’re bighearted people. They look after each other, and once a buddhahead is your brudda, he’ll do anything for you.”
“If he doesn’t blow my head first.”
Sergeant Matsumoto stepped to the door of the hutment and set down the duffel bags. “I won’t see you much during your basic training, but we will be brothers when we go to war. For now, though, you’re recruits. Don’t expect the next sergeant you meet to treat you like human beings.”
Yuki didn’t like the sound of that. But he was glad he and Shig had met someone who had been around for a while and knew what was going on—and had come along just when they needed him.
• • •
As it turned out, the buddhaheads were the least of Yuki’s worries. Sergeant Dexter, the drill sergeant for Yuki and Shig’s unit, stood before their platoon on the first morning of training. With his chest thrown out, he bellowed: “A lot of people don’t believe that you men can be soldiers. Some say that the government just stuck you in the army so the big shots can say they’ve got nothing against you. But I’ll tell you what. If you can be soldiers—which I seriously doubt from the looks of you—you will be soldiers.” He cursed and spat on the ground. He was not a big man, but he had shoulders like a weightlifter’s, and steady blue eyes that didn’t blink.
“The next eight weeks will be the worst of your lives. I expect most of you to break down and cry like little boys before I’m finished with you. I’ll make you or I’ll break you. And I’ll tell you why. If you want to get to the battlefront, and want to show you’re actually men, you cannot be ‘as good’ as the white troops. You’ve got to be a whole lot better.”
The tough talk was something right out of movies, and it was all Yuki could do not to smile. Sergeant Dexter seemed to notice this. He walked straight to Yuki, pointed a finger in his face, and shouted, “Don’t look so pleased with yourself, little man. I’ll break you first.”
And then he set out to do it.
He worked the men brutally hard, and he zeroed in on Yuki every chance he got. He called him names, cursed him, told him how worthless he was. Along with all the weapons training and physical workouts, the recruits had to make long, hard marches in the humid heat, not only with heavy packs but with rifles slung over their shoulders. Like Shig, most of the recruits had been issued boots that were too big for them. Everyone had blisters by the end of the first march. All the while, they had to listen to Sergeant Dexter telling them they weren’t men enough to be soldiers. He never called them “Japs,” but all the talk about their size amounted to the same thing.
Yuki had never gone through anything so difficult. He came back each day sapped and weary. He would shower and dry off but feel wet again immediately. The hutment never cooled at night; Yuki only slept because he was exhausted. And then Dexter would crash through the door shouting and blowing his whistle, and everything would start again.
Yuki had heard how tough basic training was, but he had told himself he could handle anything. He considered himself in good physical shape, and he wasn’t one to let any sort of harassment get the better of him. But this treatment was beyond anything he had expected. Along with that, the heat was overwhelming. Yuki longed for a day off, a chance to rest up. He didn’t want to believe that he could be “broken,” but Dexter never let him find a moment of peace, never failed to belittle him for whatever he didn’t do perfectly. Yuki had been talking for over a year about going off to war and proving himself, but for the first time he was doubting whether he could meet the demands. He had even started to wonder whether Japanese men actually were too small, or maybe too soft, to go up against a fierce enemy—big, powerful Germans who were seasoned fighters.
CHAPTER 6
One night, about three weeks into their training, and after a day that left the men in Second Platoon exhausted, they all returned to their barracks, showered, then dropped onto their cots. Some of the men fell asleep, but Yuki noticed more of them staring at the ceiling, as though they were too depleted even to settle down and rest.
“Can we do this?”
Yuki didn’t answer for a moment, but he turned his head enough to look at Shig, who was lying on the next cot. “What choice do we have?”
There was no answer to the question. The two just lay there for a time. Yuki felt himself reaching some sort of low point of discouragement. He thought of his mother, his family. He longed to see them. And he let an image come into his head: cute little Keiko in her red dress, standing straight, her feet together, giving him a quick wave.
And then Billy Yamada was leaning over him, between his cot and Shig’s. “We’re doing better,” he said, rather forcefully. “We made our march faster today, and not many broke down before we got to the end of it.”
Yuki had no idea what to say.
Yamada was no taller than Yuki, but he was muscular. He was a strawberry farmer from the state of Washington, and he’d been an athlete in high school, a halfback on his football team and a guard in basketball. He didn’t brag about any of that, but men from Washington said he was a big name in the Northwest, and he had been offered a sports scholarship to the University of Washington. All the same, he had been bused off with all the other AJA in the area, and stuck in the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. He had missed his chance to start college. When Yuki had asked him why he had volunteered for the army, he’d merely said, “I wanted to do something.”
Yamada wasn’t a guy who had all that much to say, so it was surprising to Yuki that he was looking rather fierce right now. “Let’s quit feeling sorry for ourselves,” he said. “We can do anything any other soldier can do.”
Yuki liked hearing that. He sat up. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s what I’ve always said.”
By now Yamada was looking at Shig. “I’ll put our fire team up against any team at this camp. It doesn’t matter how big you are, Omura. Quit worrying about that.”
Billy turned and looked at Makota Okida, a Hawaiian soldier whose cot was foot to foot with Yuki’s. Okida was sound asleep, his arms spread out on both sides of his cot, hanging down, and his mouth wide open. “Hey, Oki!” Yamada called out. When Okida didn’t respond, he stepped closer. “Oki, wake up.”
Okida’s mouth closed, and then after a second or two, his eyes opened. “Wha’ you say?”
“We’re the best fire team on this base. You got that?”
Okida stared at him fo
r a moment, as though the words hadn’t quite sunk in yet. But finally he said, “Sho’ thing, Billy. We got too many katonks. Thass all.”
Yuki laughed, and then so did Shig. There were only four men on the team, three of them mainlanders. Billy grinned and said, “We have too many buddhaheads, if you ask me.”
Okida began to smile, and then he broke into a long, deep laugh.
Yuki felt renewed. Like most men in an infantry platoon, the four were riflemen, and they were a fire team—one of two fire teams in the second squad. The four had trained together constantly, and Yuki felt a bond with them. He knew he would depend on them if they ever got to the war. Billy Yamada was only a year older than Yuki, but he was a natural leader, someone to trust.
“Okay,” Yuki said, “let’s not let anything stop us—not even Sergeant Dexter.”
Oki had shut his eyes again, but he said in his mellow voice, “He jussa white guy from da mainland. He don know no betta.”
“He’s trying to make men out of us,” Billy said. “I don’t like the way he goes about it, but I gotta say, we’re tougher than we were a month ago.”
“I tough ’nough,” Oki said. “You katonks betta do betta.” He laid his arm across his eyes, still smiling, but after a few seconds he was breathing deeply, asleep again.
Yuki glanced at Shig, and they nodded to each other. Yuki felt a little better, and he thought Shig did too.
But life didn’t get easier. In the fifth week, the recruits were introduced to an obstacle course. They had to crawl on their stomachs with live ammunition firing over their heads, jump across muddy ditches, climb ropes, and scale a high wall. This last was hard enough for anyone to do, but for such small men, the wall was a trial. They leaped and grabbed at the top to swing themselves up and over, but most failed and then had to take second and third runs at it—and a lot of them still failed. Poor Shig was entirely too short. Dexter swore at him, used filthy language, and then shouted, “You’re a pygmy, Omura. You’ve got no place in this man’s army. I’m sending you home to your mama.”
This was the kind of stuff Shig had been hearing all his life. Yuki knew how hard he took such things. Shig ran at the wall for the fourth time, leaped and hit his knee hard, then grabbed at the top of the wall but didn’t come close to reaching it. When he dropped onto the dirt, he stayed down for a moment. Yuki was afraid he had broken his kneecap. But he got himself up and limped back to make another try. Dexter yelled at him, “Stop, Omura! Let the others go on by. You’re holding everyone up.”
Yuki made it over the wall on his second try, and then he pushed himself through the rest of the course. At the end he dropped to the ground with the other recruits, all of them out of breath and exhausted. He kept watching for Shig, who took quite a while to catch up. He was clearly out of gas when he finally made it to the finish line. He dropped on the ground and clutched the knee he had injured.
“Are you okay?” Yuki asked, still gasping for breath himself.
Shig lay there on the hard red clay, drawing in all the air he could. He didn’t try to speak for some time, but eventually he said, “I can’t get over that wall. There’s no way I ever will.”
“They said we have to make it.”
“I know. Dexter told me. I have to make it or I wash out.”
“When? Next time?”
“I don’t know. That’s all he said.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Yuki said. “We’ll get you over that thing some way.”
But it didn’t happen the next day or the day after that. And the more Shig tried, the more he battered his hands and knees. Then one day in the mess hall, Sergeant Matsumoto showed up at their table just as they were about to head back to the training ground. “Omura, you have to run up the wall,” he said. “They won’t tell you that. They want you to figure it out. But it’s the only way someone your size can do it.”
Shig was staring at the sergeant. “How did you know that I couldn’t do it?”
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter how I know. Run at the wall and then keep right on running. It might take you three steps before you can jump up and grab the top.”
“I don’t think I can do that. How do you—”
“Just do it. It works. Big guys can’t do it that way, but you’re quick, and your short legs are actually an advantage.”
Yuki could see the doubt in Shig’s eyes. He had seen the same thing back on the baseball diamond when Shig made errors. Shig never wanted to call attention to himself, never wanted people to think he couldn’t do as well as anyone else. If he dropped a ground ball or made a bad throw, he usually messed up again, the doubt seeming to get into his head. “Shig, don’t worry,” Yuki told him. “Think how quick you are. Just show the big guys what you can do. We’ll go out there tonight and you can try it—when no one else is around.”
“We’re not allowed to be out on the course at night.”
“I don’t care. We’ll do it. We’ll figure it out.”
So at the end of the day, when Yuki and Shig hardly felt like taking another step, they slipped out of their hutment as the sun was almost gone, and Shig tried what Sergeant Matsumoto had told him. His knee was still bothering him, and his first few tries didn’t go well, but Yuki tried it himself, got the idea, and then showed Shig not to leap too high, but to hit the wall running.
“You know what the buddhaheads say: ‘Go for broke,’ ” Yuki told Shig. The Hawaiian soldiers loved to play dice, and when they put every cent they had on the line, that’s what they called it: going for broke.
Shig didn’t answer, just nodded. And he still didn’t make it on the next try. But he came close, and Yuki could see that he was getting the idea. “Okay, that’s enough for tonight,” he told Shig. “You’re too tired. But you’ll make it tomorrow, no question.”
When the time came for the obstacle course the next day, Yuki made sure that Shig was ahead of him. Shig didn’t make it on the first try, but his hand did touch the top, and he clearly had the technique figured out. He dropped well back and ran again, this time not jumping so high but keeping his legs pumping. He clambered up the wall and grabbed the top, then with a mighty pull, made it over.
A lot of men cheered for him, and several others made it over the wall for the first time that day. It seemed to Yuki that the Nisei soldiers were beginning to believe in themselves—and each other. He felt it in himself.
• • •
New recruits received no days of leave for the first six weeks, but when they finally got a pass to get off the base for a day, Yuki and Shig walked into Hattiesburg. They ran into Sergeant Matsumoto, and he told them about a good little diner, so they walked there with him. Yuki loved the place. It was like the diners where he had eaten in California. He ordered a hamburger and french fries and a chocolate malt. A jukebox was playing songs like “For Me and My Gal” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” It all seemed just a little too good to be true.
A family—a husband and wife, an older son, and a teenage daughter—came into the diner and sat down at the next table. Yuki knew farmers when he saw them, and he liked the down-home look of these people. He nodded and smiled. But he heard the young man whisper to his dad. The only words he heard clearly were “those Japs.” And the father said something like “more and more of them.”
Something about exerting himself in training, being part of the war effort, had made Yuki feel that he no longer had to deal with the old prejudices. He looked at Sergeant Matsumoto, who nodded and said softly, “I know. I heard it. Don’t let it bother you.”
The three talked about their training, laughed about Shig having become the star of the recruits by showing the others how to climb the wall.
“Thanks for letting me in on the secret,” Shig told the sergeant.
“That’s all right. I’m not supposed to help you out, but to tell the truth, I get tired of how the army does things. I don’t think the way most NCOs do. I only joined the army because I had a college degree and cou
ldn’t find a job. I thought the military would let me use my education and work as an engineer. I never expected to lead anyone into battle.”
“So what do you want to do when the war’s finally over?” Yuki asked.
“First, we gotta be sure we win.”
“We will. But then what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t require much to be happy. I’d like to have a family, a nice little house, books to read, some good music to listen to. That would be enough for me.”
“Where do you want to live? In Hawaii?”
“Probably. I have four pretty sisters, and they’re all still there. So are my parents. I’d like to be close to them. But a lot of it depends on finding a job.”
“Things will be different when we come home, don’t you think, Sergeant?”
“You can call me Mat when we’re away from the base. That’s what most people call me.” He leaned back in his chair. “I hope you’re right, Yuki. But I don’t ever expect people to treat me like I’m just another guy. I’m caught more in the middle than you two are, with parents of different races. But that’s another reason to go back to Hawaii. It’s less of a problem over there.”
“So what about these sisters of yours?” Shig asked Mat. “Just how pretty are they?”
This was something new for Shig, and it surprised Yuki. Shig seemed to have gained a little confidence lately. Maybe it was getting over that wall—and having people notice him for it.
“They’re all beautiful, if you ask me,” Mat said, “and one is about your age. She’s the youngest. The other three are older than I am.”
“How tall is the young one?” Shig asked with a smile.
“I’d say she’s about your size. You’re six feet tall, aren’t you?”
“More or less.”
“That’s what I thought. I’ll tell you this much. She’s as nice a person as I know, and she’d like you. You’re a good guy, Shig. And that’s what matters to her.”
“Well, maybe I’ll look her up after the war. I’ve always wanted to see Hawaii.”
