by Dean Hughes
And someone else said, “We got the machine gun.”
“We have men down,” Sergeant Koba shouted. “We gotta get back to ’em and get ’em off that hill.”
Some of the men got up and ran down the hill. Yuki still didn’t move.
Shig showed up after a few minutes. He dropped down next to Yuki. “Are you okay?” he asked.
Yuki didn’t know. What had come into his head was that he was a coward. He had panicked. He had felt the way he had when he was a little kid and had fallen into an irrigation ditch. He had clung to a tree limb and screamed for his father. And Father had dragged him out. But he hadn’t known what to do in that water, couldn’t think how to save himself. He had felt the fear like a sickness, like that out-of-control moment when he was about to vomit and his body just did what it wanted to do.
“I couldn’t move,” Yuki told Shig.
“I know.”
“But you got up.”
“Not at first. Sergeant Oshira grabbed me and pulled me up. I couldn’t get myself to do it.”
“I didn’t know it was like this.”
That was all Yuki could say. He felt sure he couldn’t face this kind of fear day after day. He couldn’t run toward bullets and explosions. He couldn’t hear a man drown, breathing in his own blood. He wanted to go home.
He stayed by the wall, and after a time he looked around and saw that a lot of other men were looking the way he must look—their faces dirty and their eyes full of wonder and confusion. Had they fired their rifles? Yuki hadn’t fired his. Had they fought the Germans, or had they thought only of saving themselves, the way he had?
Down the hill, medics were taking care of the wounded, and some of the soldiers were carrying limp men—dead men, maybe—back to the bottom of the hill. They were doing what they had to do. Yuki wanted to be part of that, not part of the fear. He spotted Sergeant Oshira and Billy Yamada, his fire team leader, working together to carry a man on a litter. He finally got himself up, but Sergeant Koba said, “That’s okay, Nakahara. They’ve got things handled down there. Stay where you are for now.”
After a time, Sergeant Koba stood before the men who had gathered at the farmhouse, maybe three or four dozen of them. But it wasn’t a full platoon. It was a mix of men who had charged helter-skelter, having lost all sense of organization. Other groups were scattered in various directions, and a good many had been hit by the shells or the machine-gun fire. “Take a rest,” Koba told them. “Drink some water. Sit tight and get some food in you.” He didn’t sound tough or angry. In fact, he seemed concerned about his men. Yuki knew in an instant that he wanted to be like that, wanted to have that much control, that kind of attitude.
Sergeant Koba walked away, and Yuki pulled his canteen from the pouch on his belt. He took a big drink of the lukewarm water. It tasted bad, but he took three long tugs on it and realized how thirsty he had been. But he couldn’t eat, didn’t try. He shut his eyes and tried to rest. What he found, however, was that his head was full of pictures—dirt flying, men scattering, smoke, Fukumoto’s body rising, turning over in the air. It seemed to Yuki that an hour or two ago he had been himself and now he was someone else.
No one was talking. Yuki knew the other soldiers were processing their own thoughts—the new pictures they had in their own heads.
Finally, word came from the officers of the company to fall back to an assembly point near a little stream lower in the valley. Once they were there, Lieutenant Freeman gathered all the men in the platoon around him. They had started with four squads, more than thirty men, but it was obvious to Yuki that a good many were missing now. He tried to think who was gone. He could see Corporal Billy Yamada and Shig and Oki. His fire team had survived. Corporal Don Fujii, the other fire team leader in his squad, was sitting on the ground nearby. Fujii was another Hawaiian, a guy who loved to laugh, loved to play dice or poker and bet all he had, but right now he looked solemn.
Next to Fujii were Ted Tanna and Yoshi Higa, members of Fujii’s team. They were friends from high school, like Yuki and Shig, both from Portland, Oregon. They had been distance runners in school, and they could march all day without a problem. But they were leaning forward, their elbows on their raised knees. And Yuki realized why. Shiro Tahara—a boy they called Ty—was not with them. Tahara had been part of their squad since basic training. He was Hawaiian, a college student before he joined up. He came from a big family, talked about his brothers and sisters all the time.
“Where’s Ty?” Yuki asked.
When Tanna and Yoshi looked up, Yuki saw the despair in their eyes. “He went down,” Yoshi said.
“Dead?”
Yoshi nodded, and then he and Tanna ducked their heads again.
The squad—eight friends—had been together from the beginning, and suddenly, in the first minutes of battle, one of them was gone. It seemed impossible. Yuki ducked his own head.
“The Krauts have fallen back,” the lieutenant told the men in the platoon. “This was just an outpost. Their MLR is still up ahead. But we’ve got to get better organized tomorrow.” He stood with his long legs spread wide, and he pulled off his helmet. He ran his fingers over his cropped blond hair. “Our communication system failed. We didn’t know where Companies E and G were, and we got out ahead of them. We need to regroup.”
He stood for a time, gazed around at the men. He looked as dirty as the others, but he didn’t look scared. Yuki was glad for that.
“You fell apart on me, men. You scattered.” He let that sink in, and then he said, “But don’t be too hard on yourselves. You were scared to get up and charge that hill, but you did it. And some of you figured out what we had to do. You knocked out the machine gun and saved the rest of us.”
“Sergeant Koba did that,” someone said.
“Not alone, he didn’t.” Lieutenant Freeman used his sleeve to wipe the sweat off his face. “You’ll do better in coming days. You faced the enemy today. You found out you could keep going no matter how scared you were. That’s what you had to learn.”
When he paused, the deep silence was obvious.
“What you learned today is that if you go down to the ground in the face of fire, you’re just waiting to be killed. When you keep moving ahead, you push the enemy back. It’s kill or be killed, and you can’t save yourselves if you allow them to shoot at a stationary target.”
Yuki had heard all this in training, but he hadn’t understood it until now.
“I’m sorry, but we had a lot of our men shot up today, and some were killed. Right now I’m not exactly sure how many. Fukumoto is dead. But I want you to know, he’s a hero. I’ll put him in for a medal. He saved our platoon—the whole company, really—from getting blown away by that tank. I want you to remember what he did and learn from it. But don’t look back too much. You need to concentrate on the next battle, not the last one, and you can’t dwell on some of the things you experienced today. You’ve seen blood now, and you’ve tasted fear. Use what you’ve learned and be better soldiers tomorrow.”
And then the lieutenant admitted something Yuki hadn’t expected. “We officers made mistakes too. We got you into a bad spot, staying on that open road and not knowing where the other companies were. We’ll all do better next time.”
Maybe so. But Yuki could only think that nothing had been what he had expected. It was hard to imagine that he would feel any better tomorrow.
“Dig in, men,” was the lieutenant’s last instruction. “We’ll camp right here tonight.”
CHAPTER 8
Yuki and Shig worked on a foxhole together that evening, but their exhaustion soon won out and they didn’t manage to dig very deep. Yuki had always wondered whether he would be able to sleep when he actually reached the battlefront, but he curled up on the hard ground at the bottom of the hole and fell asleep instantly. He didn’t wake until early the next morning, when he heard reverberations again—explosions from distant artillery shells.
He stirred then and realized that his
muscles were aching—surely from the running and diving to the ground the day before, but also from the cramped position he had been in all night. He was still tired and grimy, but once he got up and ate some canned ham and a couple of hard biscuits from his C-ration packet, he felt a kind of satisfaction that he hadn’t expected. The heat hadn’t come on yet, and the day seemed pleasant—no matter what had happened the day before. “Hey, Shig,” he said. “We made it. We got through our first battle.”
Shig took a long look at Yuki. He seemed mystified by Yuki’s attitude. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what we did. We got through.”
“Maybe it gets easier after a while.”
“I don’t see how, Yuki.” Shig was sitting on the edge of the foxhole staring at an open can of ham, as though he were building up his courage to eat it. But then he looked up at Yuki and added, “You always try to make the best of things, and I guess that’s good, but I don’t want to go through anything like that ever again.”
“I’m pretty sure it won’t be every day. And we won’t be quite so scared next time.”
Shig continued to look into Yuki’s eyes, his own eyes full of questions, but then he ducked his head, stabbed the fork from his mess kit into the ham, and took a bite of it—resolutely, as though this were one more thing that had to be done. Yuki was worried about him. Shig stuck with things, kept trying even when he doubted himself, but Yuki had never seen him this discouraged. Yuki realized that was the main reason he had tried to sound optimistic: to bolster his own confidence, but mostly to raise Shig’s spirits.
It struck him now, however, that Lieutenant Freeman’s instruction not to look backward was probably right. What he was fighting back were thoughts of his mother, his family, Keiko. He had vowed to return to them, even bragged that he would. But now, after only one battle, he could see how arrogant he had been. His company had faced one tank and an outpost of soldiers. What would happen when they faced the full wrath of the German forces?
The seven men who were left in Yuki’s squad—along with their squad leader, Sergeant Oshira—had all dug in close to one another, and after breakfast they waited for further orders. No one mentioned Tahara, but Yuki knew he was on everyone’s mind. Ted Tanna and Yoshi Higa were talkative guys, but they were saying almost nothing today. Yuki heard Sergeant Oshira say, “I should have kept the squad together. But everything went crazy.” He wasn’t one to express much self-doubt, but Yuki could hear in his voice the sorrow he was feeling.
Before long, Sergeant Koba came by. “Lieutenant Freeman just told me we’re sitting tight today,” he said. “We won’t move out until tomorrow.”
“What’s going on?” Sergeant Oshira asked.
“They’re sending the 100th Battalion forward. They’re supposed to sweep around the hill we fought on yesterday and attack the Germans at the MLR.” The 100th Battalion had been attached to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and had taken the place of First Battalion, which had remained at Camp Shelby.
Private Okida had been resting, lying flat on his back, but he sat up now. He hadn’t been saying much that morning either, but now he asked, “How come da One Puka Puka go, an’ not us? Dey betta’n us?”
Yuki had learned that “puka” actually meant “hole” in Pidgin, but buddhaheads also used it to mean “zero,” so the 100th had become “One Puka Puka.”
Sergeant Koba smiled a little. He clearly liked Oki. But he wasn’t one to joke around. “Yeah, they’re better than we are,” he said. “Until we improve.” He stepped closer to Okida. “Have you got a smoke?”
“Sho, Sergeant. Sit down. Tek a rest.”
Koba didn’t sit down, but he took the cigarette that Oki handed him. He lit up, blew the smoke out through his nostrils, and said, “Those 100th boys are the best. They fought at Monte Cassino—a mountaintop they had to take from the Germans on their way to Rome. They lost more than half their men, but the Krauts know them, and know how tough they are. That’s what we have to do—let the Germans know that when they fight us, they might as well get ready to retreat.”
After Sergeant Koba walked away, the men talked about becoming the fighters they needed to be. Sergeant Oshira was more adamant than Koba. “I’m telling you, men, we’ll be like that. But we’ve got to catch on fast. We can’t keep taking losses the way we did yesterday.”
Yuki looked around, wondered whether the men in the squad could ever be as fierce as required. Billy Yamada had the guts to be a tough fighter; so did Don Fujii. But Yuki could sense that Tanna and Higa were still as overwhelmed as he and Shig were. And maybe Oki was too mellow. If the squad was going to be what it needed to be, Yuki knew he had to be more like his leaders. He had to show Shig and the others that a young soldier could grow up fast.
As it turned out, the 100th Battalion marched past Yuki’s battalion that morning. Yuki saw how confident they looked. They joked a little, the way the buddhaheads usually did, but Yuki could see how resolved they were. They did stop long enough to take a breather, however, and some of the men in the company greeted relatives or friends from Hawaii.
An older guy in the 100th, a first sergeant, spoke to Muki Shimuzu. Muki, the Hawaiian soldier Yuki and Shig had met on their first day at Camp Shelby, was in Mat Matsumoto’s squad. “Wha’ go down here yestaday?” the first sergeant asked.
Muki shrugged. “I dunno. We mess up.”
“We gotta go fix yo mess now,” the man said. “You betta do betta—an’ fast.”
Yuki felt the reproof. He thought of himself the day before, flat on the ground and wanting never to get up. He told himself he would never do that again, no matter what happened to him.
The men rested that day. By evening, word was spreading through the troops that the 100th had attacked the MLR and wiped out the German forces, taking lots of prisoners, destroying equipment, and forcing a retreat.
The Second and Third Battalions marched forward the next morning. They met little resistance. By the following day, however, Yuki could once again hear the sounds of war getting closer. He watched the troop in front of him, saw their watchfulness in surveying their surroundings. They were changed men from the ones who had strolled into battle that first day. They were thinking—and moving—like soldiers.
Another day passed, and another, and still, except for some sporadic fire, the men faced no actual battle, but tension was growing. Yuki knew the quiet couldn’t last much longer.
Then on July 4, Second Battalion was ordered to lead the way in taking the high ground at a site the army had designated as Hill 277. Companies E and G were commanded forward, with Yuki’s Company F following in reserve. Yuki found himself relieved not to be out in front, but he told himself he wasn’t going to fall apart today.
Yuki’s platoon, along with all of Fox Company, hunkered down as the advance companies attacked and came under fire. Yuki watched as the troops drove forward to the crest of the hill. The fire didn’t seem as heavy as it had been that first day, but he saw medics carrying Nisei soldiers on stretchers down the hill—guys with bloody bandages, some shot in the gut or chest, one with his face entirely bandaged. It was chilling to see what bullets or shrapnel could do to men’s bodies.
Fox Company moved up when the shooting stopped, and the men in Sergeant Oshira’s squad, along with the rest of the platoon, dug in for the night just below the crest of the hill. But the following morning, the entire battalion was ordered to cross over the ridge and attack the next hill, with E Company leading the way. Before F Company moved out to follow, a bombardment opened. Yuki couldn’t see the men descending the hill, but the Germans had the high ground on a facing hill, and the sound of artillery and rifle fire from across the valley was thunderous. The dust and smoke rose in a grimy cloud. Mortars and big artillery guns were spreading their destruction everywhere, and machine-gun fire was targeted on the soldiers from all angles. Yuki had gotten to know a lot of the men in E Company, and it made him sick to think that some of them were dying right now, and that he was about to follow
them down that hill.
It wasn’t long, however, before men began retreating back over the top. Yuki could see them charging toward him, their faces full of terror. Once out of the line of fire of the German guns, they dropped down, gasping, panting. Some of them had been hit and were bleeding. Yuki, Shig, and a lot of F Company men hurried to them to offer what help they could give. Yuki found one man down on his chest with blood pumping from a gash in his leg. “Hang on! I’ll get the bleeding stopped!” he shouted to the man, who was moaning and cursing. But a medic arrived and took over, and Yuki was only needed to help carry the soldier to an aid station.
That evening, Sergeant Koba told his men that all four platoon leaders in E Company had been killed or wounded during their attack. It was hard for Yuki to imagine the company going forward with all their experienced leaders wiped out. Some of his new resolve was seeping away. But he also felt something else for the first time: a bitter anger. The first battle had left him scared, but this time he had watched the slaughter and had had the chance to think about what it meant. Those German soldiers were fighting for everything that was wrong. They had probably celebrated as they blasted all his AJA brothers. He wanted some revenge for that. He had talked about Krauts in training, and he opposed everything the Nazis stood for: their hatred of all races other than white, their brutal control and mistreatment of civilians in the countries they had defeated. But all that was an idea, an abstraction. Today, German soldiers had rained down fire on his friends and had ripped their bodies open. He wanted to make them pay for that.
Later that night, Lieutenant Freeman called the platoon together. “All right, men,” he said, “Fox Company takes the lead tomorrow. But we won’t move off this ridge in the daytime again. Get some rest now because we’re moving out in the night—oh two hundred hours.”
Two in the morning. It wasn’t the early hour that bothered Yuki; it was moving out in the dark. He wondered what would happen if the troops took fire and couldn’t see anything.
