by Alan Gratz
“What story does the picture tell?” Lieutenant Tanaka had said to Hideki. “That’s what I’m always asking myself. Not just what’s happening in the photograph I take, but what happened before it was taken, and what will happen afterward. How you frame a photo says everything about the story you’re trying to tell.”
Hideki framed a shot of the battleships at sea through his fingers. The story it told wasn’t a good one for Okinawa. “We’ll never hold out against all those ships,” he whispered to himself.
“What’s the matter, Hideki? Chicken?”
Hideki hadn’t thought anyone could hear him, but of course Yoshio had. He punched Hideki in the shoulder, hard, making him flinch.
“Hideki thinks we’re going to lose!” Yoshio announced, and all the other boys laughed.
“No,” Hideki protested, his face hot. “I just—”
“The Yamato will be here soon, and it’ll smash those American ships!” Yoshio said. The Yamato was the biggest battleship ever constructed, and the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy. If the Yamato did come, the Americans would have a real battle on their hands. But wherever the Yamato was, it wasn’t here.
“Hey. I just realized,” Yoshio said. “Hideki’s never been through the Gauntlet of Fists!”
Hideki blanched. No. Not here. Not now! The Gauntlet of Fists was a tradition at his middle school—a brutal tradition. The fifth-years would line up in two rows and send one fourth-year running down the lane between them, punching him with their fists as he went. Fourth-years who made it through the Gauntlet came out bruised and bleeding. Those who didn’t were sent to the nurse’s station with broken arms and legs. Hideki thought that he had escaped his trip through the Gauntlet, but Yoshio had other ideas. He grabbed Hideki by the arm and told the other fifth-years to line up.
“You—you can’t!” Hideki cried. “We’re not in school anymore. There aren’t any more fifth-years and fourth-years. We’re all members of the Blood and Iron Student Corps.”
“What does that matter?” Yoshio said. “We’re still bigger and older than you.”
Hideki closed his eyes and braced for the first punch.
“Look!” another fourth-year cried. “Kamikazes!”
Hideki opened his eyes and looked up. A squadron of Japanese planes had emerged from the clouds. Yoshio let go of Hideki, and together all the boys ran to the edge of the cliff to watch. The Japanese kamikazes waited until they were right on top of the American fleet and then dive-bombed straight for the battleships.
“Kamikaze” meant “Divine Wind” in Japanese. Hideki remembered learning about it in school. Hundreds of years ago, the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan sent a huge armada of ships to attack the Japanese mainland. There was no way the Japanese could have defeated them, and it looked like China would conquer Japan forever. But then a vicious typhoon had risen up in the Sea of Japan. The storm wrecked most of the ships and scattered the rest, and Kublai Khan was defeated. The Japanese believed their emperor was divine, and that heaven had saved them. They called the typhoon the Kamikaze, the Divine Wind, and they believed even now that Japan could never be conquered—even if they were losing, at the last minute a Divine Wind would come along and save them.
Just like these kamikazes had saved Hideki here and now.
Not quite willing to wait on the heavens to save them, the Imperial Japanese Army had organized a last-ditch Divine Wind of their own. Today’s kamikazes were special attack planes that flew missions from Japanese air bases, never intending to return. They were loaded down with as many bombs and explosives as they could carry, and a kamikaze pilot’s only mission was to crash his plane into an Allied ship in a suicide attack.
Hideki’s heart swelled at the sight of the planes dropping out of the sky into the withering antiaircraft fire of the giant American ships. This was true bravery, he thought. To fight in the face of overwhelming odds. Not like him, cowering and hiding from Yoshio, hoping for a battle to spare him from a beating.
Hideki thought about his cowardly ancestor, Shigetomo. Centuries ago, Shigetomo had surrendered without a fight when Japanese samurai had invaded Okinawa. His family had been spared, but the samurai cut off Shigetomo’s head even though he hadn’t fought back.
On Okinawa, you lived under the same roof with the spirits of your ancestors. The shadow of that decision—the 350-year-old ghost of their cowardly forefather—had haunted Hideki’s family for hundreds of years. It haunted Hideki still.
One of the kamikazes twisted through the hail of tracer fire and dove straight into the tail of an American destroyer. It hit with a fierce explosion that boomed across the water, and fire and black smoke poured from the deck of the ship.
“Banzai!” Hideki yelled with the other boys, and they danced and pumped their fists in the air.
But then Hideki quieted. Deep down, he knew the truth: The kamikaze plane that had hit the destroyer was the only one that had gotten through. Dozens more kamikaze planes were being shot down by American ships long before they ever got close to the armada. Again and again the kamikazes exploded into bright red balls of flame, and the pieces of their planes tumbled harmlessly to the sea. This was a battle the Divine Wind was not going to win.
Soon, the other boys quieted down as well. When the fifth-years tired of watching the kamikazes, Hideki knew they would turn on him again. Yoshio would turn on him again. Send him through the Gauntlet of Fists. He was sure of it. Unless Hideki could think of something else to distract them.
Hideki couldn’t see the beach where the American transports were landing, but it had to be close. He pulled one of the grenades from his jacket pocket and hefted it with bravado.
“The army probably has something special planned for the American monsters when they hit the beaches,” Hideki cried, “but let’s go kill the ones who get through!”
Hideki’s classmates cheered again, and he sighed with relief as they ran off ahead of him into the forest. Anything was better than facing the Gauntlet of Fists—even American guns.
Blood pounded in Ray’s ears as he staggered into the waist-high surf, his heart beating a thousand times a second. His helmet slid down over his eyes again, and he struggled to push it up. He plunged headlong through the waves and tried to keep his rifle out of the water. The pack on his back felt like it weighed ten tons and was going to drag him down with it.
Stay low, don’t bunch up, and run like hell, he repeated to himself. He high-stepped the waves when he could, separating himself from the other Marines so they wouldn’t make such easy targets. He crouched low, his whole body clenched in anticipation of the machine gun fire—
—which never came. Only after he’d scrambled over the broken remains of a seawall and lurched up onto the beach did Ray realize there was nobody to shoot—and nobody shooting at him. Besides the giant craters left by the navy’s artillery, it was just a white, sandy beach with low, rolling green hills beyond. No ten-foot seawall, no mines, no barbed wire, no machine gun nests. Nothing.
There’s got to be some mistake, thought Ray. Where were all the bodies? The wrecked vehicles? The machine guns and mortars everyone had promised would blow him apart?
One of the Sherman tanks fitted out with pontoons to help it through the surf clanked to a stop nearby. The tank commander popped up from the top hatch to see it with his own two eyes. He tipped his helmet back and scratched his head, clearly as perplexed as Ray and everyone else. Out at sea, Japanese kamikazes were buzzing the American and British battleships like flies, but here on the island the Japanese army wasn’t putting up any resistance at all.
The rest of Ray’s company splashed up around him.
“Where are the Japs?” someone asked.
“Looks like they’ve taken a powder!” said one of the new guys.
“Man, this is almost scarier than being shot at,” Big John said. He propped his big Browning Automatic Rifle on his shoulder. The Browning, what the others called a “BAR,” was so heavy it came with its own bipod to r
est the barrel on, but Big John was so strong he carried it the way Ray carried his much lighter rifle.
“Did the navy barrage kill them all?” Ray asked.
Big John shook his head. “That seawall we walked over, yeah. But there weren’t nobody defending it, or there’d be bodies all over the place.”
“Man, I’ve been on vacations tougher than this!” another Marine said with a laugh.
“Stay alert and don’t get cocky,” Sergeant Meredith said, cutting through the chatter. “You don’t want to die laughing.”
That shut them all up.
Up and down the beach, sergeants and lieutenants pulled squads and companies together out of the chaos. Ray and Big John and the sergeant were a part of “Easy Company,” the nickname for Company E. Ray’s squad came together, and they tiptoed their way up to the top of the dunes at the edge of the beach. There was nothing beyond that except for a patchwork of farms as far as the eye could see.
“Looks like you’re getting that nickname after all, kid,” Big John said, and Ray smiled in spite of himself. What was supposed to have been a meat grinder had been a cake walk instead. His pack was suddenly light as air, and he felt like he could march for days.
“Well heck, I already lived longer than I thought I would, so I’m happy!” said Private First Class Billy Lineker, a redheaded nineteen-year-old from Fort Mill, South Carolina. Everybody called him “Hard-luck” Lineker because he’d been shot in the butt at Peleliu and recovered just in time to get himself sent to Okinawa.
“I never heard of this Okinawa place until a couple of weeks ago,” said Private Francisco Gonzalez. He hailed from Visalia, California, and, though he wasn’t as big and burly as Big John, he was the squad’s other BAR gunner. Like Ray, he was a new recruit. “Why we even want it?”
“We’ve been playing leapfrog through the Pacific,” explained Corporal Travis Starks. Everybody called Starks “The Old Man” because he was twenty-four and married with twin daughters back home in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. “Island to island to island. This is the last rock before the jump to Japan. We take Okinawa, and it’s next stop Tokyo.”
“This is Japan, technically speaking,” said Sergeant Meredith. “Even though it’s its own island, with its own people, it’s still a prefecture of Japan. Like one of our states back home. And don’t think the Japs are gonna give it up without a fight.”
Everyone nodded, and Ray’s pack started to feel a little heavier.
“All right, we gotta hump half a click east by nightfall to secure the area around the landing beach,” Sergeant Meredith said. Ray knew that this meant they had to march east with all their gear for half a kilometer.
“Half a click by nightfall?” the Old Man said. “That’s crazy. If Okinawa is anything like Peleliu, there’ll be caves full of Japanese soldiers all over the place. We won’t get a hundred yards before we’re pinned down.”
“Our orders are half a click by nightfall, so we make it half a click by nightfall,” Sergeant Meredith said firmly. He showed them a map of the immediate area. “Easy Company will spread out here, along this road, heading east. The rest of the First Marines will hump it north above us, and the Army’s 96th Division will flank us on the right and then make a hard right turn south. Time’s a-wasting. Let’s move out.”
Ray’s squad got walking down a dirt road through some of the prettiest countryside he’d ever seen. Neat little fields grew rice and beans and sweet potatoes and sugarcane. Thatch-roofed farmhouses sat nestled among forests of pine and bamboo and some kind of strange tree that Ray had never seen before. It had a dozen trunks instead of one, and a big round canopy on top with vines growing straight down like the stingers on a jellyfish.
In the distance, the farms rolled up into bright green hills and mountains. All in all, it could have been paradise if they hadn’t been there to fight the Japanese. But there was something else wrong with it too, and finally Ray put his finger on it.
There weren’t any people. Yes, he could see other rifle squads from Easy Company to the left and right, working their way cautiously through fields and forests. But there wasn’t a single Okinawan around. Where had they all gone? Had they all been evacuated by the Japanese?
“Hey, look here!” Hard-luck Lineker cried, breaking the silence. They were passing by another farm and he pointed. “A pig!”
Sure enough, whoever had worked this farm had gone so quickly they’d left behind what looked like a year-old pig. Ray’s squad collected at the fence to its pen to watch it snuffling around in the muck.
“Man, I ain’t had a good pork chop in ages,” Big John moaned.
“We ought to kill it and cook it up!” said Gonzalez.
They all looked to the sergeant, expecting a no, but he was licking his lips. “I’m right there with you, boys, but I’m a plumber. I don’t know nothing about slaughtering any pig. Anybody else?”
They all shook their heads except for Ray. A horrible moment from a few years ago on the farm flashed through his mind, and he looked away, trying to forget. Slaughtering this pig would bring up a lot of bad memories for him. But the boys wanted it so bad, and Ray was so eager to earn their friendship.
“I do,” Ray said at last. “We used to do it every year back on the farm.”
His squad mates’ eyes went wide, and suddenly Ray was the most popular guy on all of Okinawa.
“What do you say, Sergeant?”
“Can we do it?”
Sergeant Meredith thought on it. “Well, we’re already way ahead of schedule. And I’d sure like me some ribs.”
The other men of Ray’s squad hooted and hollered and slapped him and the sergeant on their backs. “All right, all right,” Sergeant Meredith said. “Don’t make too much noise about it, or the other squads’ll hear and want a taste.”
Hard-luck climbed up on the fence to go over into the pen after the pig.
Pak! Something popped in the distance, and suddenly Hard-luck Lineker looked confused. His head dropped to his chest, where a dark liquid was spreading across the front of his uniform. He wobbled and fell over forward. Ray didn’t understand what was going on until Big John tackled him.
“Get down! Get down!” Sergeant Meredith cried. “Sniper!”
THOOM.
Hideki flinched, but he didn’t run. He sat in the safety of a cave, watching through its entrance as American shells exploded over the next hill. He could feel the vibrations deep inside the island’s bedrock.
Hideki and the other boys had made their way down to the beaches, intending to seek out the Americans. But the constant shelling from the ships in the harbor had driven them away, and they’d sought shelter inside one of Okinawa’s many natural caves.
The rest of the boys were deeper inside, talking and laughing. Hideki would have joined them, but Yoshio was there, and it always paid to stay as far away from Yoshio as possible—even if that meant being closer to the American bombs.
Hideki sucked on a piece of kanpan, a tough dried biscuit. He hated to already eat what little food the army had given him, but he was hungry. And besides, the Imperial Japanese Army was going to drive the Americans from the island in a matter of days, weren’t they? If everything went the way the IJA promised, the battle would be over soon. Then Hideki’s mother and brother would come home from Japan, and his father and sister would come home from the front lines. The whole family would be together again.
It had been almost eight months since his mother and little brother, Isamu, went away. Since Hideki too was supposed to go away. He still remembered that day as though he had a picture of it. The hot August sun, the narrow docks, the throngs of Okinawans pressing toward the big black passenger ships waiting to take them north to mainland Japan.
Hideki’s mother carried Isamu in her arms, and Isamu clutched his little papier-mâché lion-dog. Hideki followed behind with his father and his older sister, Kimiko.
“You’ll be safe in Japan. Yes, much safer than on Okinawa,” Hideki’s father said, as
though he was trying to convince himself too. Otō was short, like Hideki, but stocky, with a mustache and a trim black beard. He stood next to Hideki’s sister, who was already taller than both their mother and father. Kimiko was thin and elegant, with a white streak in her long black hair that had marked her since she was little as a yuta—a person who could see and speak to the dead. Otō and Kimiko were there to say good-bye, not go with them. Otō had already been drafted into the IJA to fight, and Kimiko had been taken from her school and pressed into service as a nurse in an army hospital.
Hideki hugged his sister and his father, his heart aching. His family had never been apart before. He hated to leave them, but he hurried to join his mother and little brother so Kimiko and his father couldn’t see his tears.
He was almost on board the ship when someone grabbed him roughly by the arm.
“Here, what’s this?” demanded a scowling Japanese soldier. He held Hideki back. “Just where do you think you’re going? How old are you?”
“Thirteen,” Hideki said, surprised. “Almost fourteen.”
“Fourteen is old enough to fight!” the soldier barked.
Kimiko stepped between them. “You don’t understand,” she told the soldier. “Hideki’s a scaredy-cat. Three hundred and fifty years ago, one of our ancestors died like a coward, and now every third generation the oldest boy is born afraid. This time around it’s Hideki. Until our ancestor’s spirit finds peace, he’s worthless in a fight.”
Hideki’s face burned red with embarrassment, but everything his sister said was true.
“Superstitious dojin,” the soldier muttered, and Hideki heard his father gasp. Dojin was a rude way of saying “primitive natives.” The soldier was basically calling them animals.
