The war was now between Laabs and the Japanese.
I knew hundreds of other American soldiers were fighting somewhere around us, opposed by hundreds of Japanese. I heard distant mortaring. I heard far off screams.
I saw only Laabs.
“Oh hey, Lieutenant, you wanna hear a story?” Laabs said.
“Laabs, what the hell are you talking about?” I barely recognized his voice.
“On Okinawa. We’re clearing caves with flamethrowers, a day before that bullshit I did saving those kids. I never talked to anyone before now about this other cave I ran into, where all I found alongside the smoked up bodies were pencil boxes and schoolbooks. Two minutes later the Doc was giving first aid to one school kid that somehow was still alive. Two minutes between one thing and the other. Go figure. And you know the worst part? It didn’t even bother me until now.”
“Laabs, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Nothing more to say. That was the whole story. Now get into position with Jones,” Laabs said. He smiled. “Got something I need to do.”
I scrambled to join Jones and Polanski. Gunfire flashed from deep inside the station, as if the Japs were taking photos at a wedding. I watched Hermann get shot through the head. Two minutes between one thing and the other.
And there stood Laabs. What was left of Hermann’s body lay nearby. There is a lot of blood inside a man, and it looked as if some naughty boy had spilled two full cans of red paint on the garage floor while his father stood there scolding him, “You’ve just wasted perfectly good things for no reason. I have a mind to make you clean this up all by yourself right now.”
Everyone who’d been in the field long enough heard of a guy who one day under enemy fire just stood up and took off his helmet. Laabs left it up to us to figure out the difference between self-sacrifice and self-destruction.
I actually think he was dead before he stood up, the Jap bullets unnecessary even as they tore him apart. That’s how Jones, Polanski, and I watched Sergeant Jason Laabs die inside the Nishinomiya train station the day before his 18th birthday in 1946.
JUST ME, POLANSKI, AND Jones left.
How the next wave of incoming rounds did not hit me is one of those decisions God, or nature, or fate or physics just makes. Jones and Polanski crawled forward like the rodents we’d now had to become to survive. They were both hit more or less at the same time.
“Lieutenant,” Polanski said as he bled onto the concrete.
“Lieutenant?” Jones said as he bled onto the concrete.
I had three choices, but not having the guts to run away, belly crawled forward to try and save the other two. The floor was slippery. It wasn’t oil.
“Lieutenant?” Polanski said. But I grabbed Jones, closer to me by a yard.
I watched Polanski’s head come apart even as I heard a Jap who must have shot him laughing at, I don’t know, God, or nature, or fate or physics or me. I saw the white bone pieces, and the gray, and the pink. I wanted to believe it hadn’t hurt because it was so quick, but why pain even mattered with death as the end I couldn’t answer. He could’ve been killed a year earlier at home in a car accident, or fifty years later by cancer, but Polanski died instead just beyond arm’s reach.
“Lieutenant, we gonna die?” Jones said. His legs were bloody.
Deep breath. Calm, waiting for my turn. An explosion, and a bright flash.
Sergeant Eichi Nakagawa: Inside Nishinomiya Rail Station, 1946
I SAW THE CRAZY American stand up and throw off his helmet so I killed him. I did not see the American bullet hit Otokita at almost the same moment. His helmet clattering across the floor happened in slow motion. His blood seeped out from under him. I crawled over, bloodying my own uniform. Otokita was dead.
Takagi had also been shot. I reached him, his last strength devoted to curling up inside my arms. His eyes were open, but not clear, and the gurgling from his lungs at every breath was plain. Amid the dust and noise he said okaachan, mother. Was he hallucinating, thinking somehow he was with her? Was he calling out, hoping she would come to him?
Takagi’s eyes closed. He was sucking at the air, drowning in his own fluids. A large explosion rocked us, and he reacted to the sound; he was still alive. With blood following it out of his mouth, he said the word again, okaachan. I knew what my obligation was, and I said “This is mommy. I am here with you.” He smiled.
I am not sure of the precise moment Takagi died, but I spoke gently to him anyway.
“Do you hear that sound, Takagi? The trains are passing through this junction. The Americans failed. The trains with our men are moving past us to Kyoto. We won.”
There was an explosion, and a bright flash.
Before The Battle for the Nishinomiya Rail Junction
Chapter 14: Who Really Deserves It?
Former Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Retirement Home, Kailua, Hawaii, 2017
I’M LUCKY ENOUGH TO have a friend with a boat. Sitting at the stern, I watch the boat create its wake, then as we speed away the wake fades just as quick. Thinking about the war doesn’t work that way. About the best I can hope for in real life is to be able to put what happened in a box. The box stays closed most of the time.
Some guys try and keep it shut by making life meaningless—liquor for the old ones, drugs for the young ones, a little of both for the handlestache Vietnam vets in the middle. The Friday nights drinking with the boys become Wednesday mornings drinking alone in the bathroom with the door shut. Some let that run its course and just tap out.
But absent a few orange plastic containers next to the bathroom sink, for me, I took my neighbor’s grandson out to the zoo, made dinner, went to work, all the time the curator of some secret museum. The memories don’t go away like the people do.
If the box pops open, some people try to push such thoughts away, stopping with just their toes in the water, thinking they’ve gone swimming. But after a while I knew I had to go into the deep end, because only there could I confront the real monster: the essence of war is not men dying, as Eichi Nakagawa did that day in 1946 at the temple north of Kyoto. The essence of war is killing, as I did that day at the temple when I called down artillery on him. War isn’t a place that makes men better. Flawed men turn bad, then bad men turn evil. So the darkest secret of my war wasn’t the visceral knowledge that people can be filthy and horrible. It was the visceral knowledge that I could be filthy and horrible.
MY PART OF HAWAII is very peaceful. Some tourists, but not too many, little of the tawdry spank of Waikiki. Sometimes I get lonely for some noise though, and find myself over there, enjoying a little ice cream and a walk.
For me the war is like a shirt I always know is there in my closet but don’t wear often. I’ll be absently out and step onto an unfamiliar path and it’ll be just the right crunch of gravel under my feet. My eyes will involuntarily lose focus for a second, and if I’m with someone they might ask, “Nate, everything okay?” and I’ll lie and smile, “Oh you know, just a senior moment.” But memory slaps me just the same way stirring up the ashes of barbecue coals turns them red. I’ve failed many times to remember a time when I had nothing particular on my mind.
The Honolulu end of Waikiki beach is anchored by a Department of Defense hotel, run on taxpayer money as a low-cost vacation destination just for service people. The military is comical about telling them to “keep a low profile,” supposedly so they don’t become targets of the terrorists presumed to haunt these beautiful beaches. But of course you can tell. The buff bodies stand out against the fleshy look of the regular tourists. The odd-patterned tans—all dark brown faces with pale white everywhere else—betray a recent trip to the Middle East.
I’ll sometimes nod to them, mostly out of politeness. I generally keep to myself the fact that we know a lot about each other. A few will nod back, maybe say a few words and leave you to fill in the silence, but I find the ones who talk too easily are generally part of what I call professional veterans, guys with lit
tle dirt under their nails who get a lot of free drinks and airline upgrades in a September 12 world. Some of these are the same assholes who quote Whitman poems they’ve never really read, or write horrid warrior-poet memoirs about the clash of truth and the beauty of brotherhood in a supply depot. Jesus. They’re immune to the guilt of action, or bad luck, or accident that settles into others. I’m grateful after meeting them for those portions of my stroll when there’s less time for my thoughts.
Once in a while someone who fought some of the same kind of war I did is obvious—a missing hand on a 20-year-old, some thick pink scars, a face that looks like bacon. It could’ve been a car wreck or a factory fire, I guess, but I know that wasn’t what it was. I wonder what his friends thought the first time they saw him, or what his ex-girlfriend said, or what he thought being as scared to come home as he was scared to go to war. This is the guy who, after Wolf Blitzer moves on to the next story, cries trying to touch his daughter’s hair, and knows just because he changed from cammies to beach shorts that’s not a shortcut back into normal life. If you see these guys on TV, you always see them young and still strong, showing courage learning to use their new robo-prosthetics. You never see anything that shows what their life is like ten or forty years down the road. Alive, sure, but not living.
Out on the beach, some people won’t stop looking, like a 10-year-old’s focus on a a pile of Legos, and some won’t look at all, but either way this is all happening, like the wars did, simultaneously while other people are eating at Applebee’s and going shopping. It gets hard to keep it all in the same world. And you, sure, go ahead, you go on and use the term “unbearable pain” the next time you hit your thumb with a hammer.
Of course, there are also those you don’t see, the boys and girls who bought the long zipper, the one that closes a body bag. Yes, Mrs. Mom, we took your son, but look, we gave you back a neatly folded flag. See, it’s in a triangle shape, representing the hats of American Revolutionary War soldiers, isn’t that interesting. And if you have a second child, and you call now, we’ll double your order.
Me, we, they, you, I don’t know the right word to ever use, because it wasn’t just our side. I’d seen something on PBS saying that during the 1950s and early 1960s you could still see a few Japanese soldiers around the train stations, wearing bits of their old uniforms, some with crude prosthetics, begging, failed in the end by disregard. Young people, dressed in the latest western styles, passed by, eyes on the ground, embarrassed about men humiliating themselves in the midst of the post-war economic miracle. What if a visiting foreigner saw them, what would he think of Japan? Older people would slip the soldiers small bills, hoping if they had some money to buy rot gut or food they would go away.
A few guys like Private Garner ended worse off than the physically wounded, spending the weekends with their regular companions Samuel Adams, Johnnie Walker, and the cops. Get some sleep and have a drink, they were told, only don’t let it turn into too much of either one, or it’ll be suicide on the installment plan. Each bad thought seemed like a page that needed a twelve-ounce can of paperweight to hold it down. All we ever thought about was coming home; “If the army doesn’t kill me, I’ve got it made for life,” we said. We were naive; too many of us survived the war only to come back wanting to die every day.
You learn to be alone in crowded places, deep in your own head. Imagine being on this beautiful beach and not caring to even look up and watch a father try to make his way across the hot sand balancing four dripping ice cream cones.
They’d lost things whose importance they only recognized when they weren’t there. They’ve come to think today means nothing, tomorrow means nothing, and develop a sense that only things that already happened matter. Nothing has taste or color. Regrets swell when it takes all night for the mercy of dawn to come, but luckily, for me at least, not always on these beautiful Pacific days.
Me and Private Garner might find we often see the same face in the mirror. My generation had no counselors, no clinics, no support groups. In my Ohio hometown, before the wife and I retired to Hawaii, every Memorial Day there’d be little flags first made in Iowa, then Hong Kong, then Japan, then Korea and now China and Vietnam—Vietnam, for Christ’s sake—on every porch. Half the people my age watching the parade then were vets in wheelchairs. I had a nice welcome home party when I came back, and plenty of good Veteran’s Days to try and use to subtract things from the parts of the fight I dragged along with me. But the underlying message was the same as in every war, whether delivered nicely or crudely: deal with the real stuff in private, we don’t want to know. You pack out your own gear, trooper.
Drinking hurt, but for some it hurt less. Everyone learns it just sends your pain off to wait for you, but still it was something to look forward to, the first fizzy beer of the day tickling your nose, or the throat-burning shot of something stronger biting into an ulcer. Drinking wiped away hours when someone had too many of them, all the way back to 1946 sometimes. Pain can be patient, waiting for that one guy who had a little too much wine at a wedding and started talking about blood and brains in some alcoholic dialect until a couple of other vets walked him outside where he told stories from his knees for an hour which they alone could understand. A lot of this festers not out of what you saw and did, but the realization that what you saw and did really didn’t matter in any bigger picture and you had to make up some smaller picture to justify whatever. It should’ve had a reason, and go to hell ahead of us if you want to pretend burning down cities or blowing up wedding parties by remote control is patriotism, or protecting freedom, or defeating some tyrant we used to support. People say, “whatever you have to tell yourself,” but they forget you can’t lie to yourself alone at night. Imagine what it’s like to be my age and scared of the dark.
I came to think of it like taking apart a jigsaw puzzle. You couldn’t say exactly when, but at some point you couldn’t see the picture anymore. It’s the last drop of water hanging swollen on the end of a faucet.
Well-meaning people would say, “open the wound, let it out.” The problem was those wounds had never closed in the first place. Other people get it a little better, knowing it’s not about overcoming as much as coping. They tell us, “You’ve got to fight as hard at home to beat this as you did over there to get home,” except we’re not sure what we’re fighting for. Our lives? Uh huh. That’s a big part of what caused all this in the first place. You want to know what it’s like to have a breakdown in the meat aisle at Safeway, buying steak? We can tell you. Even so, we don’t want to be called victims and disabled out, and we’re not seeking some third party’s moral redemption. We just want to get this shit out of our heads.
IN ADDITION TO THE beach side strolls, I’ve found myself at Pearl Harbor a few times, just curious, you know. It’s fashionable to talk about forgiving one’s enemies if everyone is old enough, and here in Hawaii the reunions between old men from Japan and old men from the U.S. who once fought each other are set-pieces. As you’d suppose, everybody says the right things to the 26-year-old third generation Japanese-American newscaster who comes out for an easy feel-good story on a slow day.
In private, however, I hear the old vets say the Japs deserved it. That kind of thinking bothers me, especially when it starts to thicken like a callous in my own head. We feel our side’s barbarism is occasional and mistaken, or individual and deviant, while their side’s was part of some evil culture. Nobody personally knew more than a handful of people killed, but we all wanted to see as many on the other side die as possible. Somehow war can be both personally vengeful and impersonal at the same time. Emotions like that make complete sense to a scared young man who thanks God for saving his personal sad ass by burning down a whole city. The thing of course is, after the smoke clears, we should hope important decisions about war are not being made by scared young men.
We were told mine was the last war where right and wrong were clear. I’ve seen a history book that makes quite a point of being shocked
that when the Japanese captured shot-down B-29 crewmen from firebombing missions, the fliers were often burned alive by civilians on the ground. Another book described how elsewhere bodies on fire sizzled and smoke came out of the eye sockets, making hissing noises. Did that description of the sizzling and hissing come from the firebombing of Japanese civilians, or from the burning alive of American prisoners? It was one of the two, though it describes both.
People talk a lot about moral ambiguities, the tough calls policymakers face in the middle of the night, what historians have insight into only from the safe black and white of home. But evil isn’t an opinion, and you can’t squint hard enough to make it gray. Everything else is just backstory created to allow us to feel better about what was done. If what happened in my war wasn’t wrong, then nothing can be wrong. And if after knowing that, you still insist this was the Good War and we were the Greatest Generation, well, only people who are moving their lips reading this think things like that.
Chapter 15: Teach a Man to Fish
Sergeant Eichi Nakagawa: En Route to Nishinomiya Train Station, 1946
“WHY IS THERE NO more food?” Otokita said.
“Because it was only a small dog, you idiot,” I said. “And what the hell are you laughing about, Takagi?”
“One of my chores back home was to feed the dogs our kitchen scraps out,” Takagi said.
“And now they are repaying you,” Otokita said.
We were crossing a frozen area, and I noticed the ground under the snow was a regular pattern, small mounds separated by low troughs: farmland. The people in this area, we knew, traditionally grew yams and other root vegetables. Those things not only kept well through the cold weather, but could also be raised in the troughs, hidden from foragers, human or animal. We would need to break the ice over the low areas, then dig into the frozen ground using our mess kits as scoops. We were not doing much else with them. It was as I was giving the order that an old man came running out of the nearby village, shouting at us to stop.
Hooper’s War Page 10
