In the end there were only three ways to spend a night in a foxhole: cold, scared, or cold and scared. Sometimes it took all night for the sun to come up, leaving me so exhausted I was wide awake, demanded to know why God made night. Four a.m. was a place, not a time. Every hour was a week, every night was a month, all in a weird state of sleeping but not sleeping. The hole was about as comfortable as a front-row church pew. Sleep, when it came, came without warning and hit like a heavyweight. Some nights the moon tried to hide behind the trees and there was not a crack of light, dark as the inside of a cow’s ass, some nights it was bright. Some nights the stars were sharp and I listened for the Japanese. Some nights it was cloudy and peaceful and I listened for Ohio.
I knew the other soldiers were out there, in their holes, but we could not see each other. We were close enough to touch but could not. Night was a room, and morning wasn’t inevitable. By a certain hour, any fear was real. I could feel the darkness and taste metal even as my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.
Just before when I knew dawn was coming to forgive me, time slowed down even more, like it did back in geometry class, when it took forever to get from 11:12 to 11:14. It’s a helluva thing to wake up pushed into a day where you might be crippled, or blinded, or worse, have your balls blown off.
It was a primitive way to live, putting us in the dirt, moving us to a new hole like mole nomads every night. In those holes we all experienced the most common emotions of war: loneliness, littleness and boredom, puckered with seconds of fear. You’d hear a leaf brush against a tree branch and it became a tack in your heel and you’d hold on to your rifle just that much tighter.
I thanked God back then for my M-1 Garand rifle. It was heavy at nine pounds, though I think the thick wood stock made it seem even heavier. It was definitely heavier at the end of the day. But the damn thing could fight. It was easy to clean and nearly indestructible. You could fire .30-06 rounds off as fast as you could pull the trigger, eight shots in a row, then a metallic spring would eject the empty magazine and you could shove in another. Had to watch that ejection spring, though; if the enemy was smart enough, that twang would announce to any and all you were out of rounds for the moment.
People collect M-1s now. Some old soldiers have one mounted over the fireplace at home. I loved that rifle. I never want to see another one ever again.
Chapter 17: Please Sir, More Sake
Sergeant Eichi Nakagawa: Inside an Abandoned Warehouse, 1946
I WAS GIVEN COMMAND of Japanese soldiers, real soldiers, to lead into the fight against the American invaders. I was proud of this, even though my command consisted of only two men, Corporal Takagi and Private Otokita. I did not yet know them well. Nonetheless, we set off. Because our army’s resources were scarce, we were largely left on our own to procure, find, or in a pinch, take, what food and shelter we could. It was war and normal rules did not apply.
We quickly ran across the bodies of several dead Americans. Each had been overburdened with enough food to feed several men, and we gathered as much as we could. Our next bit of luck was to stumble on a warehouse just as dusk was closing in. It was a fine place for us to rest overnight, having thick walls and clear fields of fire. In the morning we could move out towards Nishinomiya.
“Sergeant Nakagawa, this is a sake warehouse,” Takagi said. Had he had access to more food, he probably would have been the heavy boy we teased in high school. “It is full of large barrels.”
“Of sake,” Otokita said. He was lean, but not tough. The uniform may have weighed him down.
“You see, it is just that Private Otokita and I were wondering, given the calamities of the day…” Takagi said.
“…That perhaps it would be best for all of us to have a drink. Against the cold,” Otokita said. “Just a sip, for the war effort, as if it were medicine. Sir.”
“HAS IT BEEN JUST a sip since you, no, I, then we, started, my good, old friends?” I said.
“I am also not certain, my dear Sergeant-san. Alcohol does not know time, my father would always say,” Takagi said.
“My father would always say the fastest way to become drunk was to open the bottle,” Otokita said. He belched heartily. “Or the barrel.”
“I think our fathers knew each other,” Takagi said.
“Should we be drinking so much?” I said.
“Why not, this is a warehouse, they have more.”
We were in a room heavy with vats of the drink, big barrels upended, made from oak. I would be wrong to say you could not bathe inside one if you wished. Diving perhaps would not have worked, but indeed it was for the best that no one suggested it.
We were filling and refilling our cups from a small spigot at the bottom of the nearest barrel. There was plenty to drink inside even one, and so no need to move around to any other station. Our tidiness with the spigot grew less cautious by the cup, and soon we were sitting in cold puddles of sake. But not small puddles. No, these began that way, but soon grew, refill by refill, aided by spills, into small lakes. Our clothing grew sticky. The rich smell from creeping whiffs of the sake soon was inside of each of us. The smell cleared our heads in rhythm with the alcohol dulling them.
“I am certainly sure the sake has sneaked through my belly and into my legs. I cannot stand up, Sergeant,” Otokita said.
“When did we last eat?” Takagi said.
“We had something, I think,” Otokita said. “That old man’s goddamn yams. Was that yesterday already?”
“Let us see what that American food is we took from the dead ones. Open it,” I said. “The canned thing. Try your knife on it.”
“Here you go. First bite to the boss,” Takagi said.
“What is this? It might taste like pork under all that salt. And it seems to be similar to the right color.” Takagi and Otokita took slices off the knife for themselves.
“It tastes more like the can than food we know. I think I am licking a coin,” Takagi said.
“It is just pink mush. And it smells terrible. Perhaps the letters S-P-A-M mean ‘shit’ in their language,” Otokita said.
“You are funny. And drunk. And also funny. But even the Americans do not eat shit. Do they? Still, I have never known meat to be this way,” I said. “It may just be they have different animals in America.”
“Yes, but my God, it is surely meat of some sort. It has been a long time,” Takagi said.
“And this? Brown hard candy crumbs?” I said. “Eat it, Otokita. See.”
“It tastes like coffee,” Otokita said.
“How do you even know? You never had coffee before,” I said.
“No, no, once my father took me to Kyoto, before the war. He bought coffee at one of the new shops. It came in a cup, like for tea, but bigger and with a curved handle. He said I should know the modern world better, and let me taste it. Like this, it was so bitter. I remember it…” Otokita said, and then passed out.
“WAKE UP, MAGGOT BOY, and talk when spoken about. Do you even remember where we are?” I said to Otokita.
“The last thing I remember was being awake. Maybe I just had too much to dream, um, to drink,” Otokita said. He wiped his mouth after every other word and burped more than I could count.
“What did she look like? In your dream?” Takagi said.
“She had beautiful shoulders, pale, soft skin. I was kissing the back of her neck. That is as far as I got before you two bastards woke me,” Otokita said.
“That is as far as you will ever get. Not even a girlfriend to hold hands with at home, right? Are you wearing a senninbari, a thousand-stitch belt, under your shirt, Otokita?” Takagi said.
“Of course. It brings luck.”
“Did you have a girlfriend to make it for you?” Takagi said.
“My mother made it,” Otokita said.
“So did mine,” Takagi said.
“So did mine,” I said. “But I had, well, I thought about having, a girlfriend. Naoko. Her name was Naoko Matsumoto. I have a photo of us f
rom the temple festival here with me, but I will not show you two. You will only think impure thoughts. Get your own girls for that.”
“Did you ever kiss her, Sergeant?” Takagi said.
“Did you ever kiss anyone?” I said.
“No,” Takagi said.
“No, not ever,” Otokita said.
“Well, not me either,” I said.
“Oops, what was that, Takagi, you little piggy,” Otokita said.
“I let off some gas, I think from the American meat,” Takagi said.
“Do you not know poison gas is outlawed in this war?” I said. “Give me more to drink.”
“Yes, more to drink, and let us have a toast now, to winning the war,” Takagi said. “But I worry if I will have a hangover once I sober up.”
“My grandfather always said ‘If you cannot drink all night, do not start so early,’” Otokita said.
“Bah, drunk is fine at first, but then I get bitter, I can see that now,” I said. “I will be in the loft, keeping watch and nursing my anger. We will still leave for Nishinomiya train station or rail junction or wherever the hell we are going before sun up. Dawn. We must kill them. Do you know what they call us? Japs. Nips. Slopes. Bastards.”
I stood, towering over the two boys on the floor. The room was moving under me a bit, but my anger helped steady me.
“Did you know two months ago I was living with Auntie and Uncle? I had not ever had more than a sip of alcohol then, and now as our senior member I have achieved drunkenness. What the hell kind of soldiers are we anyway? This is all no longer a joke, is it? What do you say to that, Takagi, you, um, Jap bastard?”
“May we have some more sake please?”
First Shots in the Battle for Nowhere
Chapter 18: A Fine Day for Everyone to Meet
Sergeant Eichi Nakagawa: In a Foxhole, 1946
“I AM CERTAIN MY testicles are frozen. I want to be in a warm futon far from here,” Otokita said.
“Well, you are not. We are in this damn foxhole, waiting for the Americans to come kill us,” Takagi said. “Why is night so dark here? Wait—I just heard a branch snap.”
“Me too. I mean, I think so. After you said it, I mean. Should we shoot at them? They have to be over that way. We should shoot,” Otokita said.
I heard my two men from the other side of the small cope of trees we were set up in. Indeed, their voices might have been heard as far away as Kyoto. Had there been any Americans within a kilometer of us we would certainly already be under attack.
“Takagi? Otokita? What the hell are you doing?” I said, crawling over from my own hole. My two soldiers then let loose dozens of rounds in nearly a dozen directions. It was clear no one was shooting back. I was lucky not to have been hit myself there was so much lead in the air.
“We must have killed them all,” Takagi said.
“Yes, yes, you two, I am sure you did. The war is over. Or maybe your have given away our position. Now, one of you get some rest and the other keep watch before you really kill someone. Do not worry, you will soon get a chance to shoot at real Americans instead of shadows, I promise.”
Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, Later the Same Day, 1946
WE’D BEEN WALKING ALL day without seeing much but different forms of sameness and accomplishing nothing but walking all day. I had heard some random shooting, sounded like about a dozen quick shots, around dawn, maybe some loud Japanese voices, but nothing came of it and we moved out.
There really wasn’t a front line. The war was everywhere and nowhere as we walked in a general direction we thought might bring us closer to home in several months. It wasn’t like my Dad’s war, with enemy lines you could see. Here we sort of wandered around hoping to run into the Japanese and hoping not to run into the Japanese.
I wasn’t sure if the quiet parts of war weren’t worse on me than the noisy parts. Quiet meant I had time to think, and I didn’t like that much. I’d drift back home, wondering what my folks might be doing at that same moment, then I’d wonder how that world and this world could exist at the same time, then I’d wonder if they really did, or whether Ohio got put on hold like in some science fiction story while Japan played on.
To pass the time I tried to imagine what the oddest thing from home would be to have here, to let me fool myself I wasn’t homesick. I settled on a tablecloth. Mom always made a little ritual out of folding the tablecloth, so I remembered that. Then my boot would catch on something and I’d realize if I didn’t pay more attention it wouldn’t matter about Ohio.
It’d been raining and then clearing and then snowing and then sleeting, as if nature too couldn’t make up its own mind whether being busy was better than doing nothing. Laabs had some bad news. At our last linkup, he’d heard that one of the guys from B Company had been sent back to base camp for court martial. Rumor was he jumped some farmer’s wife or daughter or something, burned down the house to try and hide what he’d done, and set off a shitstorm among the local civilians. It left me wondering whose sins I might end up dying for.
It was at that point that something hard and cold hit me in the back of the neck, that vulnerable space between the bottom of my helmet and the top of my field jacket. I heard Jones shout, then Steiner cry out “Dammit, me too.” We were under attack. By snowballs.
There was Polanski and Smitty, hurling one after another at us, packing them tight with the wet snow. Laabs was off closer to the tree line, half in cover, but he was watching with maybe a smile. I packed a tight one of my own, pulling my gloves off so my hands melted the slushy snow a bit more so it’d freeze into an ice ball.
A couple of years on the baseball team had given me a practiced eye, and I threw that ice ball as hard as I could at Smitty, catching him square on the nose. When it started to bleed, everybody stopped and went over to him. Nose bleeds can be a mess, even small ones, and Smitty laughing at how stupid he felt standing there flinging teardrops of blood in a half-circle around him. They melted little holes in the snow.
THE WEATHER HAD FINALLY given up and cleared a bit, and we were only about another day’s stroll out of our objective, Nishinomiya. We took a short rest, but the thing to do was to keep us moving as much as possible, out of these open areas. The Japs had snowballs, too.
“Alright, buttercups, pipe down,” Laabs said. “Steiner, point. Marino, you and your mouth behind him and Smitty, you and your radio with the Lieutenant, and wipe your goddamn nose. Everybody else, fall in. Jones, lace up your boots and get up. We all good? The plan of the day is mobile, agile, and hostile, gents. I’ll have the back door. Heads on swivel, watch your spacing, this doesn’t feel right.”
“Hey Steiner, you scared up front? Don’t lie,” Jones said.
“Back home nothing much ever happened, nothing like this,” Steiner said. “Kinda exciting, you know?”
“This guy I knew from high school, he got a medal and they sent him home to talk at war bond rallies and he met Betty Grable,” Polanski said. “He told us after you kill someone, you don’t want to hunt anything with four legs again.”
“How much further, Sergeant? I need my beauty sleep,” Steiner said.
“Stop dogging it. You can sleep when you’re dead,” Laabs said.
“And my feet are hurting,” Steiner said.
“Yeah, and guess what,” Laabs said. “I got a big pain in my ass right now. Move.”
Eichi Nakagawa: Japanese Lines, the Same Day, 1946
“TAKAGI, OTOKITA,” I SAID. “I have been alerted by our superiors that a farmer whose daughter was defiled by these American animals told us the bastards are patrolling now in our area. We will soon retaliate as part of an L-shaped ambush ahead of Nishinomiya. A full platoon will lead the charge on the long side, and we three will wait on the short side of the L, behind the trees, to begin the crossfire. An excellent day for an attack. A fine day for death.”
Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, American Lines, 1946
IT WARMED ME A bit that time had passed wi
thout me stumbling someone into their death. It was also less surprising now than even a day ago that a field in Japan looked pretty much like a field in Ohio, at least in the winter when everything was covered with ice covered with snow. We’d been passing through lines of trees grown like fences between each open area. Once clear, I could sort of see to the next tree line. We were exposed, especially with our long shadows, but we also had a good field of vision, a nasty trade off. “Not knowing” was a familiar condition. History books talk about the bigger picture. For an infantryman, it was hard enough to keep 50 yards in focus. We knew as much about what was happening 20 miles away as we did about what was happening on the moon. From my mother’s letters I was definitely better informed about the people back home in Ohio.
Ugly dusk was racing for the ground, that time when the horizon is painted the color of a burning cigarette. The men had been doing okay, though they were getting tired. Polanski, with the heavy BAR machine gun, had taken to carrying it across his shoulders, making him look like a Sunday school Jesus.
It was Steiner, up front, who thought he saw something, maybe a little twinge of movement. He hit the ground.
When no shots were fired at us, I ordered Steiner forward to investigate. He got up on one knee, and as he moved to stand, there was the first shot. Then two more. Then another. Had I not seen the rounds slap into him and then the pink mist that hung in the air for just that long, I would have thought he’d just slipped on the ice, the way his legs flew out from under him. His body didn’t convulse from the rounds hitting him as much as it looked like it absorbed them.
Steiner went down without grace, clutching his chest and screaming way past his size, trying to shout away the pain. Even from the distance I could see the bald end of his leg bone, the blood coming out around it as the big artery down there pulsed and twisted like a loose garden hose.
It was Jones alone who ran forward, nobody told him to, flopping on the ground next to Steiner. You’ve been looking at the world one way, then you see a person do something like that. Everyone else, me included, followed Sergeant Laabs’ shouts to retreat back into the tree line and lay down suppressing fire against whoever shot at us.
Hooper’s War Page 12
