Hooper’s War

by Peter Van Buren

  All 18-year-old girls are beautiful, but this one was even more so, with a roundness to her, pear bottomed, pretty as young Ohio sweet corn. The photo was gentle, the line of a summer dress, the light showing through the thin fabric, the shape of her body, Laabs’ hand on the small of her back. If the good Lord ever had made anything more beautiful, He’d kept it to Himself. I looked for a long time until I saw it all. The photo insisted.

  Chapter 13: The Battle for Nishinomiya

  Former Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Retirement Home, Kailua, Hawaii, 2017

  IN MY BED AT home it always starts with a thunk.

  In Nishinomiya in 1946 that night fell hard enough to dent a car hood. Just before the fight started I watched some of the men splayed outside their holes, some slumped over inside snoring, some curled up, some so relaxed they looked like a thrown rope. It was a horrific image if you knew what came next.

  After you’ve heard that thunk, you always know it.

  Your chest goes trapped tight, like childhood asthma. It’s not around you, or in you, it is you. Once you know that sound, being mortared is like a sneeze coming on. It’s going to happen and there is nothing you can do about it but wonder if the shell is marked with your name or only To Whom It May Concern. The angle of the mortar tube and how much kick is behind the detonation says how far the shell goes. High school math: a Japanese soldier has a four-pound shell, with the tube at 56 degrees elevation. How many men will he kill?

  Thunk. That’s fear.

  Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, American Lines, Nishinomiya, 1946

  MEN WERE DYING ALL around me in Nishinomiya. Each mortar shell exploded into light so I could see who was being killed, the explosions walking across the battlefield like giants. I was just a spectator to the deaths, because there was no one to shoot back at. About the only thing I could do was roll into a hole and pull my knees up to my chin and try and dig out the dirt and snow blown up my nose. The pressure on my eardrums first emptied the world of sound and then pinched out tears. So much gunpowder residue was in the air it was like I was breathing paint. I wanted to pull the ground over me and hide. My mouth dried to a whisper. There was nowhere to hide; I was inside it.

  The Japanese were using impact and air burst shells on me.

  The impact ones exploded only after they hit the ground, sending white-hot shards of themselves flying upward and outward in an inverted cone. The shell casings were etched to make the breaking into shards part work well, the engineers who designed them knowing the madness was in the details. But because I wasn’t standing, and didn’t have my head up above the rim of my hole, and hadn’t been too lazy to dig my hole deep—shallow hole, deep grave—these kinds of shells only killed others, and usually only if they landed on or near a soldier. Some did, luck on the Japanese part, but if you fire off enough of them, you make your own luck.

  The impact concussion was violent enough to crush and splatter, and the shards sliced and shredded, tearing the breath out of lungs, sucking out a last scream, with much of the body disintegrating into tiny fragments that returned to the earth as fleshy snow. The sound, the moving air, the concussive effect, punched and squeezed your lungs.

  But for the men who dug their holes deep, stayed in them with their heads down and had not yet used up all their luck (I knew one officer who wouldn’t play poker, believing he was born with only so much luck and he didn’t want to waste it winning money), these impact shells did not kill them. If they didn’t know better, it seemed the craters appeared by magic around them, the beginning of Judgment Day.

  We had been taught that scientists studied the problem of impact shells being so inefficient at killing, and came up with a solution to those lives. The new air burst shells sensed when they were still a few yards off the ground and blew themselves up in the air.

  Because the concussion was less, men screamed, louder and louder, because they were made deaf by the explosion, and needed to hear themselves dying. And because the shards spread out more, death was less complete. Soldiers’ limbs were severed, and they saw their arms lying separate from their body as their last pulpy vision. I listened, waiting for someone, please God, someone, to crawl over and shove morphine sticker after morphine sticker in until the torso was sedated or dead and it was quiet again. The morphine wasn’t for him, it was for me.

  Until the next thunk. Then I screamed my own screams. Nobody but the dead were safe from the hollow demands of shouted prayer.

  There was another sound. Sharper, closer, our mortars replying. We had the same kinds of shells, and I knew they were creating the same hellscape among the Japanese. But I truly did not care. I wanted them to all die in as horrible and painful a way as I was watching happen to us. I was on my knees in my hole now like every other man, thanking a no doubt horrified Baby Jesus for the American mortars.

  Only as my vision and hearing movie-faded back in after a new explosion, so much louder and brighter than the mortars, did I see Sergeant Laabs in my hole, an inch from my face, shouting that Japanese suicide teams with explosives strapped to their bodies had crawled under the two Shermans that had moved up to support our assault, and blown themselves up with the tanks.

  The battle became a living thing that ate men. We had no air cover because of the weather. We had no tanks left. We had no element of surprise. We had already lost maybe, I didn’t really know, half of our men, and the living were scar tissue. It had become harvest time in our field. Then we heard whistles and shouts. Whoever was still alive on our side ordered the final assault on the Nishinomiya rail junction to begin.

  People who have not experienced this level of madness cannot understand why men like us left our holes and advanced. People will say “Why didn’t you refuse?” or “Why didn’t you surrender, or quit, or run away, or hide?” Any man who tells you he did not consider each and every one of those choices is a coward for not telling the truth.

  But if you can’t understand how guys who spent all of a few weeks together 70 years ago can greet each other like brothers today, then you can’t understand why we ran forward. The best I can do for you is say time out there is dog years, a place where we gained and lost significant things, our one minute of combat together worth seven of your suburban existence. We were 18-year-olds facing things even most 90-year-olds don’t understand. You learn what’s private and secret about a man whose first name you don’t know, because out there you don’t talk about honor or duty, you talk like goober poets about girlfriends and baseball games you screwed up in high school and dads, and sometimes about the dark.

  And so if love at first sight is possible at home, then love after a week in war is also possible, because the opposite of fear out there isn’t safety, it’s love. And you do insane things for those you love, including die for them. The brotherhood you hear about isn’t friendship. It’s about knowing what happens to you depends fully on what happens to all of you. It works that way, and always has, and the people who start wars depend on it. So do the soldiers in those wars.

  I did not refuse or surrender or run away or quit or hide because I saw Sergeant Laabs move forward like dying wasn’t a possibility. There are no medals for things like that, Laabs just acting like sergeants leading men in combat have done since Julius Caesar’s time. I don’t know why he did that just then, maybe he saw someone else advance, but once I saw him move I knew I had to move. Then someone saw me and stepped out, and someone saw that man, and we advanced, all that were left in our group—Smitty, Polanski, Marino, the new guy Hermann, and Jones. I was no longer a man but one finger on a hand.

  Star shells from our mortars, illumination rounds, big firecrackers really, whooshed up and then trailed a spiral of smoke on the way down, casting all the world in a dancing green light before they hissed and burned out. In the space of their dark we stumbled over arms and legs trying to advance. Then the next star shell would came up and we looked around for each other, shouting, “over here Polanski, this way Marino, move Jones, somebody find th
e new guy, shit, where the hell are you,” and thus regroup and move ahead until the next blackout. Smitty had the idea of grabbing his white handkerchief and stuffing it into the back of his trousers like a signal flag so we could follow him easier through the dark, and then Hermann pulled out his flashlight and cupped his hand over the end to make a weird red glow through his palm. We ended up holding each other’s belts and making a long chain that stretched and contracted to stay together.

  Tracer rounds from Japanese machine guns tore blue-white streaks, while our mounted weapons’ tracers cut bright orange lines. A mortar shell crayoned the snow red with someone’s blood. One side fired off yellow smoke to hide something.

  It was more like the blurry photos from Antietam or Gettysburg than anything I imagined belonged in a modern war. Years later, when I saw the first pictures of craters on the moon, the views were familiar. The battle had been handed to us on the ground. Men would pay for yards with their lives.

  WE REACHED A CLUMP of trees.

  “Lieutenant,” Sergeant Laabs said, “We are in the asshole of the world. If we wait for a gap between the flares, we might be able to run and get right up alongside the station wall, outta the Jap fire, we’ll be too close, and they won’t see us. Smitty, try to raise someone on that radio and see if they’ll hold off on the goddamn star shells for a few minutes.”

  It was suicide to stand up, but we were certainly going to die lying down. Me, Laabs, Smitty, Polanski, Marino, Hermann, and Jones.

  Sergeant Eichi Nakagawa: Japanese Lines, Nishinomiya, 1946

  THE THUNK OF OUR mortars was a comforting sound, because it meant our side was going after the Americans with aggressiveness. It soon became apparent that the struggle for Nishinomiya station was going well. We ate cold stew while our scouts spotted the Americans early on by their cooking fires, and our mortars had already chewed through their ranks, a magnificent display. A cheer went up when we heard the big explosions, and word was passed the American tanks were now gone. Without their airplanes and tanks, the Americans were just men again. Men die easily.

  Our officers positioned us correctly. Several on our side grew up in this area, giving us a tactical advantage. It was our chessboard. The Americans only thought they would be here forever. We will.

  As the fight continued, we did as we were told and assembled inside the station, behind cover and thus invisible to the Americans. We were situated perfectly to destroy them from the flank.

  “Nakagawa, take your men and set up fire across the field, low and steady,” the Major said. “The Americans are remembering they are soldiers and coming out of their holes. Our mortars will drive the sons of whores past you. Take lives.”

  Then like the leader said they would, all at once there came the Americans, running from their holes first in ones and twos, then in great numbers, a suicide charge, weak as it was, we all recognized. Sometimes their own flares would fall on the other side of the charge, and the Americans would silhouette themselves for us.

  “Over there, Otokita, several bunched up,” Takagi said.

  “Hey, Takagi, watch me kill one, that one, the one with the big radio. He has got a white handkerchief sticking out of his pants. It looks like a rabbit tail.”

  Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, Inside Nishinomiya Rail Station, 1946

  MARINO RAN RIGHT INTO the station wall, bouncing off it. Laabs dropped and rolled the last few feet, moving like he was a piece of the night. I was close behind. I counted off the men as they grouped around us, Polanski, Hermann and Jones. Smitty was still trying to run as the next star shell burst overhead, spotlighting him. He’d been weighed down by the engineers who designed his SRC-300 radio, the damn thing now killing him with its thirty pounds and its two ten-pound spare batteries. That radio was the deadliest weapon the Japs had to use against Smitty.

  Smitty obediently began the process of disintegrating.

  He didn’t say “I’m hit, Sarge,” or get shot and belly crawl to safety, or strike a heroic pose. He twisted in pain and rage in impossible ways and screamed in pantomime amid the noise as he bled out. Smitty fell apart in front of us like cardboard in the rain.

  As the rounds stopped his forward progress, other Jap gunners swiveled to the stationary target. What was left of Smitty’s body was held vertical for some part of a second by the force of the bullets, before he gave in and fell forward with the greatest possible violence and the least possible grace. Polanski demanded someone save Smitty, but Laabs shook his head enough to show he’d heard the question so Polanski wouldn’t ask it a second time.

  Watching Smitty die, my brain squeezed down to a lump that pushed everything aside I thought only moments before. We’d gotten this far, proven ourselves; why did we have to go forward again? Couldn’t some other outfit do that, men I didn’t know? What if we stopped shooting at the Japanese, wouldn’t they figure it out and stop shooting at us? Two male pitbulls snarling at each other, who in the end back away, deciding the bitch wasn’t worth it?

  I unbuckled my web belt and was ready to throw away my weapon. It was only Sergeant Laabs, again, who pulled me back into his landscape, deciding for all of us.

  I was a coward because I didn’t quit.

  Sergeant Laabs led us—me, Polanski, Marino, Hermann, and Jones—crawling, pressed as tightly as we could against the foundation of the building, away from the Japs, their weapons still picking at Smitty’s corpse, or aiming at other soldiers trapped like light looking to hide in the sanctuary of shadow. The wall near me had whole constellations of bullet holes violated into it.

  As we neared a door, Laabs shouted, “They’re in there, I can smell the bastards. We’ll break through and scare the shit out of them, catch them by surprise. Follow me.”

  How the man could think clearly, I can never know. He could squeeze away everything else and what was left was not what was desirable or nice, but what was necessary. That’s what makes war such a terrible thing for an otherwise decent society, because you don’t want monsters like that teaching in your schools or working in your hospitals, but you need them for a time here before you want them to go away until the next war. You’re looking for a man mad enough to commit murder, with enough conscience to come home feeling a little guilty.

  Laabs.

  The group of us burst through the door, screaming prayers and curses, and hid behind a busted slab of office wall. I heard men scuttling across the floor. The Japs had moved to the other side of the office, our two groups separated only by that wall. We heard the clink of metal against metal. They were loading a heavy machine gun, like the Nambu we faced on Day One on the beach.

  “You two, Marino and Jones, job opportunity for you, around that side, throw your grenades and make as much clatter as you can pulling back to distract the yellow scum,” Laabs said. “Polanski and Hermann, you shoot any Japs that come around after them. I’m going alone around this other side. Lieutenant, watch it, because I don’t intend to let any of ’em past me and if you shoot me by accident running back I will return from the grave and kill you myself. If this works, I’ll get most of them, and the four of you will take apart any of the others.”

  “American, you dung man.” The Japs were calling at us in broken English from the other side of the wall. “You surrender, you no die tonight, GI.”

  “Gentlemen, I’ll see you all on the other side,” Laabs moved up to his corner. “Marino, Jones, on my count.”

  “American, you die tonight.”

  Laabs, loud: “One.”

  Jones mouthed the word alongside Laabs.

  “You no never see your mama home.”

  Laabs, louder: “Two.”

  Jones made a low sound.

  “You die here, American.”

  Laabs, a whisper: “Three.”

  Marino and Jones turned their corner. Laabs stepped forward, me leaning to watch him.

  The Jap Nambu opened up, spraying bullets perpendicular to the corner. Laabs would run right into them. Marino came back fi
rst, screaming, followed by Jones. Those two flopped on their bellies on our side of the wall, with Polanski and Hermann crouched above them. They rolled another grenade around the corner just far enough to miss Laabs on the other side.

  Marino fired around his corner, and a Jap went down, shot in the face just below his right eye. Marino rose and fired again, into the now prone target, all eight rounds his M-1 held. As the magazine emptied with that metallic sound the spring inside made, a second Japanese soldier rounded the corner and shot Marino twice in the chest. The bullets blew out the whole of his back. I heard Marino’s skull connect with the concrete floor with a soft crack, a sound people who’d never a heard a rifle shot or a skull break think sounds like a rifle shot. Jones shot the man who shot Marino who earlier had grenaded the first Jap to die.

  Me, Laabs, Polanski, Hermann, and Jones left.

  Sergeant Laabs stepped tight around his corner, between the wall and the stream of rounds coming out of the Nambu. He grabbed the red-hot barrel of the machine gun, screaming as it hissed against his bare hand, and swung it aside.

  His hand had fused to the hot metal. He tore it off, leaving a mitten of flesh on the weapon, and fell on the one Jap left. With bloody fingers he stabbed at the man’s eyes, spitting and snarling as he slammed the head over and over against the concrete.

  Laabs could not stop, the head now in both hands, the blood in the cold air. We—me, Polanski, Hermann, and Jones—had come around the other corner. Laabs had, in the most violent way possible, beheaded the man.

  Sergeant Laabs stood up, using his boot to nudge at the disembodied head in front of him, as if there could be any doubt the man was dead. Panting, he glanced at me, and then looked to Polanski, Hermann, and Jones.

  “Jones,” Laabs said. “You, Polanski, and take the Lieutenant, get into position on the right, find something to get behind. Hermann, cover my left. Keep low. Standing around here can get a man killed.”