by Dean Hughes
“I know what you’re saying. I don’t belong here.”
“No. I’m just–”
“It’s stupid, what happened. I didn’t have to go into the service at all.” Howie crossed his arms and tucked his hands, in woolen mittens, under his arms. “When I was coming up for the draft, I got a job with the railroad. That was one of them war-effort jobs that could keep you out of the service. At first I liked that, but then all the guys I knew were signing up, and they started telling me I was a coward.”
That was something Alex could understand. He had felt some of that kind of pressure himself.
“So I was thinking about joining the navy. But I was at a dance on a Saturday night, and this paratrooper from the 101st was home on leave. He walked into this little dancehall we have back home, and he had his pants stuck down in his boots and that Screaming Eagle patch on his shoulder. I watched how all the girls looked at him.” Howie shook his head. “I guess I just wanted to be a big shot like that.”
“Was it one particular girl you wanted to impress?”
“Yeah. I guess it was.” Howie nodded several times, and then his eyes drifted away. “But that was stupid. This girl’s old man owned about half the town. And me, I lived in this rundown little old rented house on the wrong side of the tracks. My mom worked mostly as a waitress after my old man ran out on us. This girl kind of liked me, in a way, but nothing was going to come of it.”
“So did she ever see you in your paratrooper uniform?”
Howie shook his head. “Nope. I had a seven-day leave when I finished jump school, but I couldn’t afford the bus ride home. I wanted to go back, even if I only had a day, and just walk into that dance hall one time. But I never got the chance.”
“That’s all right. When you go back, you’ll be a war hero.”
“Yeah, sure. A war hero who didn’t dare shoot his rifle.”
“You’ll shoot it.”
Howie nodded, resolutely. “You’re right about that. I don’t care if I get shot next time; I’m pulling the trigger. I ain’t going home knowing I never fired a bullet.”
“Okay. But don’t do anything stupid. All right?”
“Sure.” He sat for a time. And then he said, softer than before, “I can take the bullets. It’s just those big guns, the way they pound the dirt and everything, and suck all the air away. I always think I’ll deal with it next time, but when the noise starts, I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“We all feel that way, Howie. Every one of us.”
“You guys don’t show it much.”
“Everyone has his own way of hanging on. Most guys just don’t admit what they’re feeling.”
Howie shrugged. “All I know is, I gotta shoot next time.”
“Don’t worry. You will.”
But Alex saw more irony in that than he wanted to. Since the day of this last battle, Alex had been trying hard not to see those Germans, huddled together, falling, splotches of blood soaking through their wool coats. He found himself wishing now that he, like Howie, had not been able to shoot.
Chapter 17
One morning, at the entrance to the mine, Wally was surprised to be called out by a supervisor he hadn’t seen before. The man seemed less menacing than most, older, and in fact, rather gentlemanly. He was a civilian, not a soldier. He gave Wally a little bow and said something in Japanese that had the ring of politeness.
“Sonbu San,” the man said, and he touched his own chest.
Never before had Wally seen a guard or supervisor introduce himself to a prisoner. “Go-ju ichi,” Wally said, stating the shortened number he was known by, and he nodded in response.
But the man shook his head, pointed to Wally, and then pointed to himself again. “Sonbu San,” he repeated.
Wally understood. “Thomas San,” he said. Again the man bowed. And this time Wally bowed too.
As Wally walked to the train, he glanced at the other men on the crew–four besides Wally–and he could tell that all of them were wondering what was going on. The cold train ride was longer than usual. By the time the men got off the train, Wally could see they were in a section of the mine that hadn’t been worked for a long time, apparently never by prisoners.
Sonbu San stood before the men and pointed into the depths of the mineshaft. “Rocks. Fall down,” he said, and he motioned with his hand. Certainly Wally understood what he meant by that. The shaft had collapsed at some point and had been abandoned. “We dig,” Sonbu added.
Wally thought the crew would mine for coal. As it turned out, however, they were working to extract some conveyor machinery that had been buried by the cave-in. What the men could see as they peered down the shaft was that there were no timbers, and the ceiling was high. Wally knew that extracting the machinery would be a delicate, dangerous operation.
Wally was certainly not surprised that mine officials would put prisoners’ lives in danger for the sake of salvaging equipment. But the Japanese had to be getting desperate if they were willing to send a nice old man down into such danger. Wally had to hope that was a good sign, that the country was running out of resources to fight with. The POWs all liked to watch for such indications and then convince each other that the war was coming to an end.
All the same, life was difficult enough without working a collapsed shaft. There was some comfort in the idea that Sonbu San seemed to know what he was doing, but as Wally followed the man into the dark, he was still frightened.
What he learned over the next few days was that Sonbu was much smarter and more experienced than most of the supervisors. There was no way to timber this section of the mine. The ceiling, after the collapse, was too high. But Sonbu knew where to work and how to remove the fallen rock without disturbing weak areas. Still, there was no way to prevent the crumbling tunnel from letting rock fall at times–and that meant death was always just an instant away if a man were in the wrong place when a boulder crashed to the floor. After a couple of days, the other men on the crew were so frightened that they worked tentatively. And after work each day, they complained that they didn’t want to go back. Finally Sonbu released the others from the crew, but Wally said he would return. He was afraid, the same as the others, but he trusted Sonbu, and the man’s kindness was something he had never experienced from a supervisor before.
After the two had worked alone for a few days, Sonbu noticed that Wally had nothing to eat at lunchtime. And so the old man gave Wally some of his own rice, which was richly laced with meat and vegetables. After that he brought extra food every day and shared it with Wally. The nourishment was wonderful, and Wally felt stronger than he had in months. “Arigato,” he always told Sonbu San. He wished he knew something more to tell him.
One day as they were eating together, Sonbu pointed to Wally. “Fam-i-ry?” he asked.
At first Wally didn’t recognize the word. And then he realized, and he nodded. “Three sisters,” he said, holding up three fingers.
Sonbu smiled. “Yes,” he said, nodding to show he understood.
“Two brothers.”
“Ah,” Sonbu said, but then his face clouded. “Soldiers?” he asked.
Wally nodded.
Sonbu nodded too, and then he got up and walked to where he had folded and set aside his clothes that morning. Like Wally, he only wore a G-string in the mine, although he did keep his shirt on. He took from his jacket what appeared to be a billfold. He opened it and removed a photograph, which he brought to Wally.
Wally held his lamp so he could see better. There was Sonbu, looking serious and proper but appearing much younger than he did now. Next to him was a woman in a kimono–a pretty young woman with a pleasant smile. They were surrounded by three sons and a daughter, the daughter perhaps eighteen, and the sons all younger. It was a beautiful family. Wally nodded to Sonbu. “Very nice,” he said, and he was touched by Sonbu’s gentle act, this openness.
When Sonbu took the picture back, he held it close to the light and pointed to the oldest son. “Dead,�
�� he said. Then he pointed to the second one. “Dead,” he said again.
Wally was stunned. He saw the pain in Sonbu’s face. He pointed to the youngest boy. “Soldier?” he asked.
“Hai,” Sonbu said. Wally read the fear in the man’s face, and automatically, he wondered whether his own brothers were safe. He was kept alive, more than anything, by the desire to see his family again, and he hated even to address the possibility that something might have happened to his brothers.
After that day Wally felt a change between him and Sonbu. They couldn’t say much to each other, but they respected each other for their work, for facing danger together perhaps, and mostly for the bit of humanity they had shared with each other. It was strange to think that the supervisors he had known were probably children from some nice family like Sonbu’s.
One thing gradually became clear to Wally: the managers who roamed the mine and checked on all the work crews did not come into the shaft where he and Sonbu worked. They probably worried little about Sonbu’s skills, and no doubt they feared the danger. What that meant was that Sonbu seemed to feel no urgency to work terribly hard. One afternoon he sat down for a rest, and then he motioned for Wally to do the same. Sonbu was soon sound asleep. Wally was too nervous to sleep that first day, but he rested and waited, and the following day, when Sonbu took another nap, Wally lay back and drifted off himself. After that it was their daily ritual late in the work day to sleep an hour or two.
At dinner one night Chuck noticed the change in Wally. “You’re looking stronger lately,” Chuck said. “You have some color in your face, too.”
Wally laughed, but he was hesitant to admit what was happening. He didn’t want to create jealousies with his friends, but above all, he didn’t want the word to get out and for Sonbu to get into trouble. But he took a chance with Chuck. The two of them were alone, and they were two of the last in the mess hall. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, “but Sonbu San brings me extra rice every day. Good rice, with vegetables and meat. And we take a nap every afternoon.”
Chuck looked astounded. “What do you mean? He just lets you lay down and go to sleep?”
“We both do. No one ever comes down there to check us.”
“No wonder you’re looking good,” Chuck said.
“I know. I keep wondering, maybe I’m as bad as Honeywell–getting in good with the Japs.”
“No. This is different. The guy is giving you a gift. There’s nothing wrong with accepting it.”
“I’d bring some rice back to you if there were any way to do it.”
“Oh, hey, don’t worry about it. Any of us would take some extra food if we got the chance. You don’t have to apologize.”
“Yeah, I know, but I’ve been eating my full portion in the morning, too. I’ll start splitting some of that with you. I should have been doing that all along. It just felt so good to have something close to three meals a day.”
“You don’t need to–”
“No. I’m going to. You fed me your own food when I was dying. I’ll always be in your debt for that.”
“I’ll tell you what you can do. When we get home, you can use some of your back pay to buy me some false teeth. Then I can eat something besides rice.”
“I hope it’s in ’45, Chuck. It seems like it has to be. We’re wearing out. Men are starting to die again.”
“I know. This work is grinding everyone down.” He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. Wally could see the bones in his forearms, his wrists. Chuck had been such a powerful young man in high school, such a great athlete, and now he looked fifty years old. “The worst thing of all is never having anything to look forward to,” he said.
“Cabanatuan was better than this,” Wally said, “and look how much we wanted to get out of there.”
“Maybe the Philippines are free by now. Maybe, if we’d stayed, we’d be liberated.”
“Yeah. Or maybe we’d be dead,” Wally said.
Chuck looked up at Wally. “They still might kill us here–when the end comes.”
Wally nodded. The terrible irony of all this drudgery was that it might be for nothing. “I wonder if Alan West stayed in the Philippines. Maybe he’s out now. Maybe he’s home.”
“I hope so. I hope some of the guys are home by now.”
Wally still thought about Alan often. He was one of the men, like Chuck, who had kept him alive. “Do you think the guards back in the Philippines really would kill the prisoners–rather than let them be liberated?”
“That’s what they always said. But . . . who knows?”
Wally glanced around the almost empty mess hall to see that no one was close, and then he whispered, “Sonbu San showed me a picture of his family. Two of his sons have been killed in the war. When he showed me, I thought he was going to cry.”
“I’ve never heard of a supervisor doing something like that.”
“He treats me like a regular guy–like one man to another. When I saw those sons–nice looking boys–I really felt sorry for him.”
“I wish I was down there with you. I’d like that.”
“Chuck, most of the time we’re like oxen. We plod back and forth to the mine, we wash in that filthy pool, we eat a little rice, and then we sleep again. When Sonbu showed me that picture, it was like a shock went through my system. I felt like a human being.”
Suddenly a guard was shouting, demanding that the stragglers in the mess hall move out. One guard was coming toward the table.
Wally got up and picked up his rice bowl. He was heading for the kitchen, where he would wash it out and put it away. But suddenly he felt a powerful blow in the middle of his back, and he was knocked to the floor. He hit hard on his shoulder and rolled onto his back to see what had happened. A guard was already kicking at him, striking him hard in the side, the ribs. “Get up! Get up!” the guard was shouting. “No sitting. Get out!”
Chuck grabbed Wally, pulled him up. Wally was desperately trying to get his breath, get his legs under him, before the guard attacked again. But there was no surprise in any of this. Sometimes the guards would allow the prisoners to stay in the mess hall as long as they chose, but a sudden show of force, however unnecessary, was always a possibility.
Wally, still gasping for breath, clung to Chuck and made his way to his barracks. Chuck helped him onto his mat, where Wally curled up and hoped for the pain to subside.
Most of the men were already asleep, but Ray Vernon had awakened when Chuck and Wally had come into the room. “What happened?” he asked.
“Flat Face knocked him down and kicked him–because we sat too long in the mess hall.”
Ray called him a filthy name. Wally didn’t use that kind of language, not out loud, but he grabbed onto Ray’s words, savored the hatred in them. He wished he could, just once, have a chance to strike back. Then he would like to see whether one of these guards could knock him around that way.
***
In Hawaii, Bobbi was keeping up the best way she knew how. She went through her schedule because it was required of her, but she didn’t feel part of the here and now. She had cried a great deal when she heard that Richard was missing in action, but since then she had made up her mind to keep under control, to deal with the problem with some courage and some of that pioneer stoicism her father always spoke of. The only trouble was, she wasn’t trudging forward with a song in her heart. She was sometimes angry, sometimes resentful, but mostly just disheartened and hopeless–no matter how hard she tried to tell herself she wasn’t going to give up.
The nurses knew what Bobbi was going through, and they didn’t try to console her. Everyone knew that an MIA usually turned into a KIA–“killed in action”–so there was little that anyone could say to reassure her. Besides, Bobbi was all business right now, and her expression seemed to say, “Don’t try to tell me that everything is going to be all right.”
Afton clearly had no idea what to do. She didn’t laugh and joke, as she had always done, and she avoided q
uestions. Bobbi felt the tension between the two of them, but she couldn’t help what she was feeling. It was probably just as well that Afton was spending most of her off-duty hours with Sam. Bobbi knew that Afton was still struggling to make a decision, but the truth was, Bobbi felt more jealousy than sympathy. Afton had what Bobbi wanted–and no courage to take it. Bobbi hated herself for resenting that, but she did all the same.
Bobbi knew she had to get herself together and stop acting this way, but nothing she tried seemed to work. When she attempted to believe that Richard was alive, her emotions only came alive, and her sadness deepened as she admitted what she really believed. When she told herself to accept reality and deal with it, she felt the loss so deeply that she could hardly get out of bed. What she found most helpful was a sort of cynicism. She told herself that life was miserable, that her own destiny was never to have what she wanted, and that she should expect nothing good from the future. She knew there was self-pity in that attitude, but there was also anger and bitterness, and they filled her with a tough kind of spitefulness that provided a bit of perverse pleasure.
Bobbi had recently received a letter from David Stinson, the man she had fallen in love with back when she was in college. The letter was full of David’s usual irreverence and wit, but there was a new undertone. He was in the military himself now, and of all things, he had joined the marines. Bobbi just couldn’t imagine him carrying a rifle, taking orders from some young officer, adhering to all the military rules. He joked about that, and he joked a little about Richard, whom Bobbi had mentioned in her last letter to David. “What is it about this guy you like?” he asked, and then he had added, quite seriously it seemed:
Bobbi, I’m not sure that I didn’t make a mistake when I told you that we were wrong for each other. Some things that mattered then don’t seem important now. I’ve never felt for anyone what I felt for you, and now, facing some harsh new realities, I wonder whether I threw away my best chance for happiness. I suppose you are in love–although you didn’t quite admit to that–and I’m out of the running. But if that’s not so, maybe it would be possible for us to think, once again–if this stupid war ever ends–about a future together. Or maybe you don’t want to do that. If not, I understand of course. I suppose I just want you to add that to your considerations, as you decide about this Richard fellow and as I go off to do what I have to do. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find God in a foxhole–that’s supposed to happen, you know–and I can become religious enough for you.
