The Bridges at Toko-ri

by James A. Michener

  “You must ask him about those bridges.”

  Weakly she asked, “Is he involved with the bridges?”

  “Yes. When we go back to sea, your husband must bomb those bridges.”

  In a whisper she asked, “Why do you tell me this?”

  He replied, “In 1942 I had a daughter as sweet as you. She was my daughter-in-law, really. Then my son was killed at Midway trying to torpedo a Jap carrier. She never recovered. For a while she tried to make love with every man in uniform. Thought he might die one day. Then she grew to loathe herself and attempted suicide. What she’s doing now or where she is I don’t know, but once she was my daughter.”

  Nancy Brubaker could hardly force herself to speak but in an ashen voice she asked, “You think that ... well, if things went wrong at the bridges ... I’d be like. ...”

  “Perhaps. If we refuse to acknowledge what we’re involved in, terrible consequences sometimes follow.”

  A strange man was telling her that war meant the death of people and that if she were not prepared, her courage might fall apart and instinctively she knew this to be true. “I understand what you mean,” she said hoarsely.

  “Let’s get your little girls and we’ll have dinner,” Tarrant said.

  But Nancy was too agitated to see her daughters just then. She pointed to the end of the bar where Beer Barrel lay at last sprawled upon his arms, his face pressed against the polished wood. Will he fly against the bridges, too?” she asked.

  When the admiral turned to survey the mammoth Texan his lean, Maine face broke into a relaxed smile. “That one?” he said reflectively. “He flies against his bridges every day.”

  When Brubaker and Gamidge reached Tokyo, night had already fallen and there was slush upon the wintry streets that lined the black moat of the emperor’s palace. At the provost marshal’s office a major asked sourly, “Why you interested in a troublemaker like Forney?”

  “He’s from my ship.”

  “Not any more.”

  “Major,” Brubaker asked directly, “couldn’t you please let me handle this?”

  “A mad Irishman? Who wrecks a dance hall?”

  “But this man has saved the lives of four pilots.”

  “Look, lieutenant! I got nineteen monsters in the bird cage. Every one of them was a hero in Korea. But in Tokyo they’re monsters.”

  Patiently Brubaker said, “Mike’s a helicopter pilot. The other night Mike and this sailor. ...”

  The major got a good look at Nestor and shouted to a sergeant, “Is this the runt who slugged you?”

  “Listen, major!” Harry pleaded. “The other night I ditched my plane at sea. These two men saved my life. This runt, as you called him, jumped into the ocean.”

  The major was completely unimpressed. Staring at Nestor he said scornfully, “I suppose the ocean tore his clothes. Did he get his face all chopped up jumping into a wave?”

  “All right, there was a brawl.”

  “A brawl! A brawl is when maybe six guys throw punches. These two monsters took on all of Tokyo.”

  It was apparent to Brubaker that pleading along normal lines would get nowhere, so he asked bluntly, “You married, major?”

  “Yep.”

  “Tonight’s the second night in eight months that I’ve seen my wife and kids. I left them at Fuji-san to get Mike out of jail. That’s what I think of these two men.”

  The major stared at the docket listing Mike’s behavior. “You willin’ to cough up $80 for the damage he did?”

  “I’d pay $800.”

  “He’s yours, but you ain’t gettin’ no prize.”

  A guard produced Mike Forney, his face a nauseating blue in contrast to the green scarf. “She’s marryin’ an ape from the Essex,” he said pitifully.

  “I suppose you tried to stop her.”

  “I would of stopped the ape, but he had helpers.”

  When they reached the narrow streets where hundreds of Japanese civilians hurried past, Mike begged, “Talk with her, please, lieutenant. She might listen to you.”

  He led Brubaker to one of the weirdest dance halls in the world. A war profiteer had cornered a bunch of steel girders and had built a Chinese junk in the middle of Tokyo. He called it the Pirates’ Den and installed an open elevator which endlessly traveled from the first floor to the fifth bearing an eleven-piece jazz band whose blazing noise supplied five different dance floors. The strangest adornment of the place was a mock airplane, piloted by an almost nude girl who flew from floor to floor delivering cold beer.

  The steel ship was so ugly, so noisy and so crammed with chattering girls that Brubaker wondered how anyone had known a riot was under way and then he met Kimiko, Mike’s one-time love. She was the first Japanese girl he had ever spoken to and he was unprepared for her dazzling beauty. Her teeth were remarkably white and her smile was warm. He understood at once why Mike wanted her, and when she rose to extend her hand and he saw her slim perfect figure in a princess evening dress which Mike had ordered from New York, he concluded that she warranted a riot.

  “I very sorry, lieutenant,” she explained softly, “but while Mike at sea I lose my heart to Essex man. Essex not at sea.”

  “But Mike’s a fine man,” Brubaker argued. “No girl could do better than Mike.”

  Kimiko smiled in a way to make Brubaker dizzy and plaintively insisted, “I know Mike good man. But I lose my heart.”

  Things started to go black for Mike again and he shouted, “Not in my dress, you don’t lose it!” And he clawed at the dress which represented more than two months’ pay.

  Kimiko began to scream and the owner of the Pirates’ Den blew a shrill whistle and prudent Nestor Gamidge said, “We better start runnin’ now.”

  “Not without this dress!” Mike bellowed. Nestor handled that by clouting Mike a withering blow to the chin, under which the tough Irishman crumpled. Then Nestor grabbed him by the arms and grunted, “Lieutenant, sir. Ask the girls to push.”

  In this way they worked Mike out a back door before the M.P.’s could get to him, but in the alley Nestor saw that Mike still clutched part of Kimiko’s dress. He pried this loose from the stiff hand and returned it to Kimiko, saying, “You can sew it back on.” Upon returning to Brubaker he reported, “Japanese girls are sure pretty.” But when Mike woke up, sitting in one of the gutters west of the Ginza, he said mournfully, “Without Kimiko I want to die.”

  Gently they took him to the enlisted men’s quarters, where Gamidge put the rocky Irishman to bed. When this was done, the little Kentuckian laboriously scratched a note and tucked it into the lieutenant’s fist: “We owe you $80. Mike and Nestor.” Then Brubaker started the long trip back to Fuji-san, where his wife waited.

  It was nearly three in the morning when he reached the Fuji-san, but Nancy was awake and when he climbed into bed she clutched him to her and whispered, “I’m ashamed of the way I behaved. Admiral Tarrant told me about Mike Forney.”

  “I wish he hadn’t. But don’t worry. Nobody ever crashes twice.”

  There was a long silence and she kissed him as if to use up all the kisses of a lifetime. Then she controlled her voice to make it sound casual and asked, “What are the bridges at Toko-ri?” She felt him grow tense.

  “Where’d you hear about them?”

  “The admiral.” There was no comment from the darkness so she added, “He had good reason, Harry. His daughter-in-law had no conception of war and went to shreds. He said if I had the courage to come all the way out here I ought to have the courage to know. Harry, what are the bridges?”

  And suddenly, in the dark room, he wanted to share with his wife his exact feelings about the bridges. “I haven’t really seen them,” he whispered in hurried syllables. “But I’ve studied pictures. There are four bridges, two for railroads, two for trucks, and they’re vital. Big hills protect them and lots of guns. Every hill has lots of Russian guns.”

  “Are Russians fighting in Korea?”

  “Yes. They do all th
e radar work. We have only two approaches to the bridges. The valley has one opening to the east, another to the west. When we bomb the bridges we must dive in one end and climb out the other.” He hesitated and added quickly, “At Toko-ri there is more flak than anywhere in Germany last time. Because the communists know where you have to come in from. And where you have to go out. So they sit and wait for you.”

  They whispered until dawn, a man and wife in a strange land talking of a war so terrible that for them it equaled any in history. Not the wars of Caesar nor the invasions of Napoleon nor the river bank at Vicksburg nor the sands of Iwo were worse than the Korean war if your husband had to bomb the bridges, and toward morning Nancy could control her courage no longer and began to cry. In her despondency she whispered, “What eats my heart away is that back home there is no war. Harry, do you remember where we were when we decided to get married?”

  “Sure I remember. Cheyenne.”

  “Well, when I was explaining to the girls about the birds and the bees Jackie looked up at me with that quizzical grin of hers and asked, ‘Where did all this stuff start?’ and I said, ‘All right, smarty, I’ll take you up and show you.’ And I took them to the Frontier Days where you proposed and I almost screamed with agony because everything was exactly the way it was in 1946. Nobody gave a damn about Korea. In all America nobody gives a damn.”

  When the morning sun was bright and the girls had risen, Harry Brubaker and his wife still had no explanation of why they had been chosen to bear the burden of the war. Heartsick, they led their daughters down to one of the hotel’s private sulphur baths, where they locked the door, undressed and plunged into the bubbling pool. The girls loved it and splashed nakedly back and forth, teasing shy Nancy because she wouldn’t take off all her clothes, so she slipped out of her underthings and joined them.

  They were cavorting in this manner when the locked door opened and a Japanese man entered. He bowed low to both Nancy and Harry, smiled at the girls and started to undress. “Hey!” Harry cried. “We reserved this!” But the man understood little English and bowed to accept Harry’s greeting. When he was quite undressed he opened the door and admitted his wife and two teen-age daughters, who laid aside their kimonos. Soon the Japanese family stood naked by the pool and dipped their toes in. Harry, blushing madly, tried to protest again but the man said with painstaking care, “Number one! Good morning!” and each of his pretty daughters smiled and said musically, “Good morning, sir!”

  “Ohio gozaimasu!” shouted the Brubaker girls, using a phrase they had acquired from their nurse. This pleased the Japanese family and everyone laughed gaily and then the man bowed again. Ceremoniously, father first, the family entered the pool.

  By now Harry and Nancy were more or less numb with astonishment, but the pleasant warmth of the room, the quiet beauty of the surroundings and the charm of the Japanese family were too persuasive to resist. Harry, trying not to stare at the pretty girls, smiled at the Japanese man, who swam leisurely over, pointed to one of the Brubaker girls and asked, “Belong you?”

  Harry nodded, whereupon the man called his own daughters who came over to be introduced. “Teiko, Takako,” the man said. They smiled and held out their hands and somehow the bitterness of the long night’s talking died away. The two families intermingled and the soft waters of the bath united them. In 1944 Harry had hated the Japanese and had fought valiantly against them, destroying their ships and bombing their troops, but the years had passed, the hatreds had dissolved and on this wintry morning he caught some sense in the twisted and conflicting things men are required to do.

  Then he sort of cracked his neck, for he saw Nancy. His shy wife had paddled to the other side of the pool and was talking with the Japanese man. “We better hurry or we’ll miss breakfast,” Harry said, and for the rest of his stay they became like the spectators at the Cheyenne Frontier Days and they enjoyed themselves and never spoke of Korea.

  Then shore leave ended in one of those improbable incidents which made everyone proud he served aboard a good ship like the Savo. Admiral Tarrant went aboard at noon and toward four Beer Barrel staggered up the gangplank with his two golf bags. Brubaker had obtained permission for Nancy to see his quarters but when she found how astonishingly small the room was and how her husband slept with his face jammed under two steam pipes she said she felt penned in and would rather stay on deck.

  In the meantime hundreds of sailors and their Japanese girls had crowded into Yokosuka and in the lead were Mike Forney and Nestor Gamidge, accompanied by seven girls from the dance halls of Tokyo, Yokohama and Yokosuka. “I never knew there were so many girls,” Nestor said to one of the plane captains. “Best thing ever happened to Mike was losing Kimiko to that ape from the Essex.”

  Mike agreed. When he had kissed his girls goodbye he swung onto the quay, elbows out, and pointed to the Savo: “Greatest flattop in the fleet.” Then he stopped dead for he saw that the Essex was alongside and there stood beautiful Kimiko, wearing the expensive plaid he had bought her. She was kissing her ape from the Essex and things went black. Clenching his fists, Mike lunged toward the lovers but little Nestor grabbed him.

  Mike stopped, slapped himself on the head and muttered, “Sure, what’s one girl?” With grandiloquent charm he approached Kimiko, kissed her hand and said loudly, “The flower of Japan.” Then he grabbed the Essex man warmly and proclaimed, “The flower of the fleet. The best man won. Bless you, my children.”

  Then everything fell apart. For some loud mouth in the Essex yelled derisively, “And we could lick you bums in everything else, too.”

  Mike whirled about, saw no one, then looked back at golden Kimiko and she was beautiful in that special way and she was his girl. Blood surged into his throat and he lunged at the Essex man standing with her and slugged him furiously, shouting, “You lousy ape!”

  Six Essex men leaped to defend their shipmate and stumpy Nestor Gamidge rallied Savo men and soon M.P. whistles were screeching like sparrows in spring and there was a growing melee with men in blue dropping all over the place. Mike, seeing himself about to be deluged by Essex reinforcements, grabbed a chunk of wood and let the ape have it across the ear, laying him flat. At this Kimiko started to scream in Japanese and Mike grabbed her hat and tried to pull off the pretty plaid jacket, bellowing, “Go ahead and marry him. But not in my clothes.” Three Essex men, gallant to the end, knocked him silly.

  The captain of the Savo witnessed this disgraceful riot and determined on the spot to get rid of Mike Forney, but Admiral Tarrant, surveying the brawl from flag bridge, thought, “I’d hate to see the day when men were afraid to mix it up for pretty girls.” He called for his glasses and studied Kimiko, who knelt over her Essex man and all the sailors aboard the Savo and the officers too were a little more proud of their ship.

  SKY

  THE SUN had to be well up or the photographs wouldn’t be any good, so it was nearly 0945 when Harry Brubaker’s jet catapulted violently across the prow of the Savo and far into the sky toward Korea. Ahead of him streaked a single Banshee with an extraordinary nose containing nine broad windows through which heavy cameras would record the bridges of Toko-ri.

  While the Savo was in Yokosuka, other carriers were supposed to photograph the target but they had failed. When Cag bent his bullet head over their muddy films he growled, “What’s the matter? They afraid to go down low? Well show ’em how to take pictures,” and he assigned himself the dangerous mission, choosing Brubaker to fly protective cover.

  Now, as the two Banshees streaked toward higher altitudes Brubaker concerned himself with trivial details: “Lay off those even altitudes. Use 25,300. Makes it just that much tougher for the anti-aircraft crews. And remember that when Cag goes down for the pictures, keep 3,000 feet above him.”

  Then, in the perpetually mysterious way, when he had climbed into the higher atmosphere, he experienced the singing beauty of a jet as it sped almost silently through the vast upper reaches of the world. Sea and sky fell a
way and he was aloft in the soaring realm. of the human spirit.

  It was terrible ad supreme to be there, whistling into the morning brilliance, streaking ahead so fast that the overwhelming scream of his engines never quite caught up. In this moment of exhilaration he peered into the limitless reaches of the upper void and felt the surging sensation that overtakes every jet pilot: “I’m out front.” Through the silent beauty of this cold February morning he soared through the blue-black upper sky and thought, “I’m out front.”

  Then, as his eyes swept the empty sky in casual patterns, he uttered a stunned cry, “My God! There it is!” But when he looked directly at what he had seen it vanished, so he returned to scanning and from the powerful corner of his eye he saw it again, tremendous and miraculously lovely, one of the supreme sights of creation: Fujiyama in morning sunlight towering above the islands of Japan. The cone was perfect, crowned in dazzling white, and the sides fell away like the soft ending of a sigh, and somewhere on the nether slope Nancy and the girls were waiting.

  He now looked at the majestic volcano with his full eye, but again it was the omniscient corner which startled him, for it detected the mountains of Korea. Dead ahead they lay, bold and blunt and ugly. Tortured and convoluted, they twisted up at the two fleeting jets, the terrible mountains of Korea. They were the mountains of pain, the hills of death. They were the scars of the world’s violent birth, the aftermath of upheavals and multitudes of storms. There was no sense to them and they ran in crazy directions. Their crests formed no significant pattern, their valleys led nowhere, and running through them there were no discernible watersheds or spacious plains. Hidden among them, somewhere to the west, cowered the bridges of Toko-ri, gun-rimmed and waiting.

  Brubaker knew the guns would be waiting, for as the Banshees crossed the coastline, a signal battery in Wonsan fired and he could follow the course of other gun bursts across Korea, for the communists announced impending danger exactly as the Cheyennes of Colorado had done two hundred years before.