by Dean Hughes
“G Company is going with us, and we’re going to work our way off this hill and swing around to the side of Hill 140. That’s the one straight ahead of us where the Germans fired from today. We’ll climb that hill and then attack before the sun comes up. We’ve got to bust them off the high ground. If we do this right, we won’t take many casualties. Move in silence, and then, when we attack, go after the Germans with everything you’ve got. Attack like samurai.” He stopped and nodded, and Yuki liked that he knew about those ancient warriors. “First Platoon will make the initial charge, and they’re going to fix their bayonets in case they catch men still sacked out. If we pull this off, the enemy will be rousted out of their sleep and won’t put up much resistance.”
Yuki wondered whether two companies of fighters—around two hundred men—could move that quietly and catch seasoned troops off guard in the night. But he reminded himself not to think too much, just to do what he had to do. He tried to laugh when he told Oki, “Don’t play your ukulele when we’re sneaking up that mountain.”
“I won’t. But I sing ‘Aloha Oi’ so they know the buddhaheads comin’. Dey know we warriors—like lutenan’ say.”
The men in Yuki’s squad laughed a little, but nervously, and then they settled down in their foxholes and tried to sleep. At 0130, Sergeant Koba awakened the platoon. Those who weren’t too nervous managed to eat a little, but Yuki couldn’t stand to look at food. He merely got his pack and rifle ready, and then lined up when Sergeant Oshira called his squad together with the rest of the platoon. When the men moved out, they were in double columns, but in the dark, each concentrated on staying close to the backpack in front of him.
The pace was slow and careful, but the troops descended the hill in less than half an hour, and then they took about that long again to swing to the east of Hill 140. They worked their way up for a time, then made a switchback and continued the slow climb. No one spoke, but Yuki could hear the steps, the slips, equipment and weapons clicking and rattling as they walked. He felt sure they would be heard before much longer, and then they would have to make an all-out charge the rest of the way.
The column stopped, and everyone paused. Yuki assumed that the soldiers in First Platoon were fixing their bayonets and waiting for the signal to attack. But then the column moved again, and Lieutenant Freeman directed his soldiers to slip in behind the men of First Platoon, who had fanned out, prepared to start their assault. Yuki could see the silhouettes of the soldiers in front. They were hunched, ready, their rifles at their hips. He could hear his own heart pounding in his ears.
First Platoon set out, not running, but walking hard. Less than a minute went by before Yuki’s platoon lined up and headed out on an angle to the left. But they had not gone far before he heard the first report of a German machine pistol, and then the sound of American M1 rifles.
“Let’s go,” Sergeant Koba called out, and his platoon charged straight up the hill. Yuki heard bullets buzzing in the air and saw bright tracer bullets flying overhead, but the Germans were firing at sounds, not soldiers, and they were aiming too high.
Then Yuki saw flashes of gunfire and he knew that a German machine-gun emplacement was now in operation off to their left, maybe a hundred yards up the hill. He could see Sergeant Oshira moving next to him, and he knew Billy Yamada was on his other side, with Shig and Oki farther to the right. But they were too close to each other. They could all go down if a mortar struck in the middle of them. Sergeant Oshira was obviously thinking the same thing. “Spread out!” he yelled. But just as the men did so, the machine-gun bullets started striking the ground ahead of them.
Yuki fought the desire to veer away or to hit the ground. Lieutenant Freeman had told them that to drop down was only to wait to get hit, so he kept going even as bullets whooshed through the air, making a sharp cracking noise as they passed him.
Sergeant Oshira yelled, “Yamada, take your fire team and go after that machine gun!”
“Let’s go!” Yamada shouted, and Yuki chased after him. He could hear Shig and Oki running with him.
“Cover me!” Corporal Yamada yelled.
Yuki understood. He slowed a little, took aim, and shot directly at the muzzle fire of the machine gun. It seemed wrong to slow down, to stand erect before the gunfire. What he wanted to do was to get far away from that machine gun. But he and Shig and Oki were all shooting now, and the machine-gun fire had become sporadic.
But as the bullets let up, mortar fire began to hit the hill. Explosions were going off everywhere. In one flash of light, Yuki saw a Nisei soldier get blown off his feet, his arms flailing, his rifle flying from his grip.
Everything was chaos, and Yuki felt something close to panic again. But he continued to fire and to work his way forward. Halfway across the open area in front of him, he found that he had used up a clip of ammo. He grabbed for a new clip, jerked it from his belt, and stopped long enough to click it into place. At the same time, an explosion burst at the spot where the muzzle of the machine gun had been flashing. Someone had thrown a hand grenade into the machine-gun nest.
Yuki ran toward the emplacement. He had to make sure no Germans had survived to start firing again. A mortar shell struck behind him, and the explosion illuminated everything for a moment. Yuki saw a silhouette: a German with his distinctive helmet, the rim turned upward. He aimed and fired, but the light was already gone and he had no idea whether he had hit the man.
Fire from that emplacement had stopped entirely, and another machine gun, off to the right, had also gone silent. More Americans were making it to the ridge. Mortar shells were still dropping onto the hill, but most of the fire was hitting behind the Nisei troops now. The Germans were probably trying to avoid hitting their own men.
Yuki was not quite sure what to do, but he wanted to find the men in his squad, so he ran on to the spot where the machine gun had been firing.
“We got ’em all,” Corporal Yamada said between gasps.
Sergeant Oshira was also there. “Stay here,” he barked. “We’re supposed to hold this ridge.”
“Where’s Shig?” Yuki asked.
“Right here.” Shig was running toward Yuki, apparently unhurt.
Shells were still exploding on the lower part of the hillside, but the battle seemed over. The Germans were retreating down the opposite side of Hill 140. The Four-Four-Two had completed its objective, won the battle.
Yuki sat down, realized how hard he was breathing, how crazily his heart was pounding. But he was relieved, even a little proud of himself.
“We pushed the Germans off the hill,” Shig said. Yuki heard the satisfaction in his voice.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Sergeant Oshira said. “Just stay ready. We’ll see what the lieutenant tells us to do.”
But time passed, and when Lieutenant Freeman did reach the men, he told them, “We’re staying put for now. Rest up a little and get some food in you. Then dig in.”
Yuki was still not ready to eat, so he decided to start digging. He was glad to have something to do. He and Shig went to work shoveling the hard earth. It was almost morning now and exhaustion was setting in, but Yuki knew he was too nervous to sleep.
After an hour or so, the digging got easier and Yuki and Shig were able to get fairly deep into the ground. The sun began to create a line of light across the horizon, and then the whole sky lightened. Yuki waited until he could see quite well, and then he did what he had been wanting to do. He looked over the pile of rocks that had guarded the machine-gun emplacement. The gun was on its side, a German soldier draped over the top of it. Another man was flat on his back, blood running from his mouth and nose. A third man was off to the side in the spot where Yuki had seen the silhouette. That man was down too, but Yuki couldn’t see anything wrong with him. He was lying on his side like a child taking a nap, his legs pulled up toward his chest. Yuki stepped over the rocks and took a closer look. When he saw the soldier’s face, he realized it was the face of a boy, not a man. The soldier looked no
more than fourteen or fifteen.
Blood had pooled under the boy’s head. Yuki couldn’t see where the bullet had hit him, but he didn’t want to see. He stepped back, shut his eyes. Earlier, he had felt some satisfaction for a moment. He had made a great shot; he had taken out an enemy. But the soldier didn’t look like a Nazi, like the brutal Krauts he had always imagined. He was a kid. He should have been home playing soccer with his friends, or sitting in a schoolroom. And he was not just young; he was . . . a person. Or at least he had been.
A question came to mind. Yuki stepped away, didn’t ask it. He tried to think of anything else. He talked to the other men, looked down the hill to see how many of his own brothers might have gone down. He wanted his company’s casualties to make him mad again, make him feel justified.
But the question was still hovering, too close to ignore: Who was the boy?
And another: When would his family find out that he was dead?
CHAPTER 9
After the shelling had stopped, the hillside had become eerily still. But Yuki heard birds singing, as though they were enjoying the rising sun in spite of the turmoil that must have shaken them in the night. There were no tall trees on Hill 140, only pockets of brush and grass, but everything was now scarred with craters, especially farther down the hill. When a ground squirrel ran to the edge of a patch of grass and poked its nose out, Yuki wondered what the poor thing had done while the shells had been falling.
Shig was also watching the squirrel. “The world keeps going, no matter what we do to it,” he said.
It was a strange thought to Yuki. It was not just the birds and squirrels who were going about their day. His mother was too, and she had no idea what Yuki had seen in the last couple of weeks. Keiko was going to school, doing her homework, probably dancing on Saturday nights. He had written to his family and to Keiko after arriving in Italy, but no mail had caught up to him yet. He wanted so much to hear from them, to know that the home front was still there, that in some spot in the world no bullets were violating summer days.
“We need to be more like Oki,” Yuki said. “He doesn’t let anything bother him.”
Oki was lying on the ground with his backpack under his head. He was breathing deeply, seemingly asleep. Without opening his eyes, he said, “You got dat wrong. Army food make me sick. Dat bodder me.”
Billy Yamada laughed with Yuki and Shig. But Yuki saw something in the men’s eyes—and in the eyes of all the other men around him. They were tired, no doubt, and relieved that the battle had ended well, but there was a kind of detachment in their faces, in the way they sat and stared. They had heard bullets burrow through the air, pass over their heads, and now it was starkly clear how much luck it took to get through a battle. Their numbers were smaller again, but Yuki didn’t want to think who was missing.
Shig looked especially weary. “Are you okay?” Yuki asked him.
“Sure.”
“No, really. Are you?”
Shig raised his head, looked at Yuki straight on, but his eyes still seemed distant. “I did better this time,” he said.
“Maybe we’re getting used to things—at least a little.”
“I don’t want to get used to it,” Shig said. “I don’t like what we’re doing.”
Yuki understood. It was what he was feeling too. But he was pretty sure he had even more on his mind than Shig did. He didn’t tell Shig that he had killed a boy, that the boy was curled up on his side, not far away. Who could get used to that?
Suddenly Yuki didn’t want to sit still, didn’t want to think. He wondered whether he could find the soldier who had been knocked off his feet during the charge up the hill. Someone had probably helped him by now, but he wanted to be sure. So he got up and walked down the hill, but in the daylight he couldn’t figure out where things had happened. As he was returning to the top of the hill, he saw a man on the ground and a medic on his knees, leaning over him. And then he realized it was Corporal Fujii. Yuki could see a crater where an artillery shell had exploded close to him, saw that shrapnel had torn up his leg and hip and mangled one of his hands. His jaw was also bandaged.
Fujii had obviously received a shot of morphine and was lying still now; the medic was preparing him to be moved. “Is he going to be okay?” Yuki asked.
“I don’t think he’ll make it,” the medic whispered. “It’s probably better if he doesn’t. His jaw was almost torn off. I don’t see how the docs can put him back together.”
Yuki looked away, took a long breath. He listened for the birds, watched some long grass riffle as a breeze came up. Without responding to the medic, he walked back to his squad.
Yuki didn’t want to talk about Fujii, but Shig had begun to wonder what had happened to him, and he asked whether Yuki had seen him. “Yeah. I saw him. He’s hurt bad” was all Yuki could manage to say.
“We gotta get even with some Krauts for that one,” Sergeant Oshira said.
“That’s right,” Yuki said. But the sergeant had sounded brash, and Yuki couldn’t match his tone. A picture was back in his head: the German boy at the gun emplacement, one arm bent at the elbow, his hand almost touching his cheek—as though his last act had been to reach for the place where the bullet had struck. His cheek had been smooth, like a baby’s, the boy still too young to shave.
Yuki decided to deepen his foxhole. He needed to do something. He also knew this calm couldn’t last much longer. There were still German guns in the area. Artillery fire would surely start again.
Shig finally protested that Yuki was making the hole so deep that he wouldn’t be able to climb out. That was an exaggeration, but Yuki got the point: It was deep enough. So he climbed out and looked around. He thought he might help someone else dig. He had noticed Mat Matsumoto digging a foxhole not too far away. Yuki walked over to see how his friend was doing. Mat was sitting with his legs dangling into his foxhole. “Do you think that’s deep enough?” he asked Yuki.
“I don’t know. I feel like I want to dig to the center of the earth before the Germans start shooting their eighty-eights at us.”
“They will, too. They’ll want this hill back.”
“Why does this hill matter more than any of the others?”
“It’s the highest ground around here, and it’s strategic. The road down below is the only one big enough for supply trucks to use. We can’t keep our push going unless we hold this ground.”
“How do you know all that? No one ever tells me anything except ‘Stop here and dig in again.’ ”
“I heard the lieutenant talking to Sergeant Koba. They were looking at a map and talking about the road. But anything Lieutenant Freeman knows, he’s getting from the company command post.”
“Where is the CP anyway?”
“They’re setting it up down off the ridge.” Mat laughed. “I guess the captain figures we make better cannon fodder than he does.”
Yuki nodded, wished he could think of something to say that sounded as knowing and ironic. But Mat looked as detached as the other men, and his voice had lost some of its life, as though it took all his concentration just to carry on a conversation.
“How did we do this time?” Yuki asked him.
“A lot better.” Mat looked at the shovel in his hands, then looked down into the foxhole. His partner, a guy named Del Hirinaka, was lying on a patch of grass nearby, his helmet pulled over his eyes.
Yuki knew the men had performed better this time and that he had done better himself, but he also knew how spent he was, and a loud, persistent ringing was filling his ears. Something in him kept saying, “I’ve done this. I passed a test last night. But I can’t do it again today and then again tomorrow.” He wanted to cling to all the resolutions he had made the last couple of days, but for now, he was just too deflated.
He also wondered whether anyone was going to get rid of the German bodies. Would someone bury them? Or would that boy be left to rot where he was?
Yuki hadn’t planned to talk about the German b
oy, but suddenly he found himself saying, “I killed someone last night, Mat. I saw him in a flash of light, and I shot him.”
Mat looked up, seemed to recognize what Yuki was feeling, but he only nodded.
“I had a chance to look at him. He was just a young boy.”
“That’s what’s happening now. The Germans have been fighting this war a long time and they’ve taken a beating from the Russians on the eastern front. They’re forcing boys thirteen and fourteen into the military. They fill them with propaganda in Hitler Youth and then they send them out to kill for the fatherland.”
“He just looked like, I don’t know, a nice kid.”
“Don’t talk about it. It just makes things worse.”
“I know. But he’s right there, on the other side of those rocks.” Yuki’s voice had begun to shake. He knew he had to stop talking.
“You didn’t think up this war, Yuki. We’re just doing what we have to do. We can’t dwell on stuff like that.”
Yuki nodded. He had to let it go. He understood that.
And then he heard that shrill sound in the air again. Two, three, all at once.
“Incoming!” someone yelled, and for a second Yuki forgot to run. The first shell struck beyond the troops, raising a cascade of black earth. By then Yuki was moving. He ran to his foxhole, didn’t bother to look in, just jumped, and came down with one foot on Shig’s hip. But he didn’t take time to apologize; he merely curled up next to Shig, pulled his helmet on tight, and then held onto it as the shells fell in a wild barrage, one explosion blending with another, the ground seeming to roll like waves. One shell struck close, and Yuki felt the compression actually lift him off the ground. Dirt rained into the hole, splattered all over him, and the sound of the explosion seemed to fill up his body—the vibration, the force.
And then a wicked, screaming noise began—a sound like screeching animals. Yuki had heard about this. Nebelwerfer, the Germans called the weapon. “Smoke thrower.” But Americans called it the “Screaming Mimi.” Multiple mortars could be fired from a single rack in a constant bombardment, each shell shrieking with the same ferocity.
