Hooper’s War

by Peter Van Buren

  “I knew we saw eye-for-an-eye on all this. Top-notch work so far, son. You’ll get the hang of this, road to success is always under construction and all that, right? And oh, yes, one more thing, Harper, I’m telling all the men, be careful with the local ladies. Every one’s a looker.”

  “You really think I’ll get to know any Japanese girls out here?” I said.

  Major Moreland smiled. “Who knows, Hoover, you may even meet the girl of your dreams.”

  Chapter 25: Come Hell or High Water, Invading Japan

  Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Pacific Coast of Japan, American Landing Craft, 1946

  THERE IS NOWHERE TO go in a landing craft except where it takes you. I was in that oily half light of dawn, under a sky dug in so low I felt I had to stoop. The cold was a hammer. Chunks of steel destroyed boys. Gear scraped against buckles. Cellophane crinkled as soldiers pulled rifles from waterproof bags. I watched someone I didn’t know torn apart.

  “Lieutenant Hooper, who was that? Who the hell was that?”

  “The Corporal, he fell on me, oh God, Lieutenant Hooper.”

  “Lieutenant Hooper, get down or you’re in the soup with him.”

  The soup—the mix of seawater, vomit, and now warm blood around my ankles. I saw the face, first a red blur, then the color of school chalk, everything and his last sound grabbed away. The torso stood upright in our landing craft, then tried to fall, a leaning drunk on a crowded bus. I couldn’t tell who was shouting. Their helmets made them look like identical mushrooms.

  Aboard ship they told me it was my job to lead boys I didn’t know into a kind of combat I’d never experienced. Don’t worry, they said, you’ll get to know them like brothers. Years from now you’ll still be saying those names at reunions and weddings.

  “He said he wanted his mother.”

  “He’s still bleeding, Lieutenant Hooper.”

  “Give him water.”

  “No water, no water. Morphine.”

  “Don’t you understand, he’s already dead.”

  “Lieutenant Hooper, you’re in charge.”

  “The guy from Indiana, the back of his head—”

  Jesus, his head snapped back like one of those red rubber balls attached to a paddle, stopping only when his spine held. Someone’s severed arm was loose in the bottom of the boat now. I crouched to keep my own head below the rusted sides of the boat. Aboard the transport ship I wondered if I’d see much fighting, while all along my war was waiting. I reached to steady myself touching something too wet and soft.

  A kamikaze in a steep dive, scream of the damned over a fierce whistle. Missed, breaking apart on impact and showering the boat. I saw the pilot’s face above the water, his mouth open in a pantomime scream as the fuel on the water’s surface burned his flesh even as the ocean swallowed him. People back in Ohio were buried wearing suits after they died quietly in their beds.

  “Sergeant, I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “Don’t say that, never, sir, that’s quicksand,” the Sergeant said.

  “Stop the boat, make the Lieutenant stop the boat, we’re all gonna die,” a soldier said.

  “Lieutenant can’t stop the boat, nobody can stop the boat. Boat can’t stop the boat,” another of them said.

  Screeching metal-on-metal, the ramp dropped and everyone ran forward, the only direction they could. The near-freezing water pushed my balls up into my belly, and my uniform turned wet-black. Minus a Corporal whose name no one knew and whoever the guy from Indiana had been, we went ashore, the Sergeant ordering us to take cover in the dirty sand behind the seawall to our right. That was all I could hear, the sounds pulled away by the wind, except the sing-song of “Lieutenant! Lieutenant! Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” hitting me in the face like well water.

  I pressed myself into that seawall like it was my pillow back home during a wicked dream. The wall held apart the sand on the beach and me, and the sand inland and them. We needed to cross over that wall, move a few miles and then link up at the Ashiya Beachhead with the rest of the American forces. All I could see of Japan out there from under my helmet were the tops of scorched trees that looked like black licorice stuck into the ground. Nearby what I saw were boys hugging each other with the empty joy of still being alive.

  “Look, Lieutenant, out the other way,” the Sergeant said. “Those dots? More ships, just off shore. We’re gonna be okay, no dirt nap for us.” We watched two kamikazes lance from the sky, just missing a troop ship. “Probably.”

  I knew about the ships. From the landing craft at sea level below them you had to bend your neck all the way back to see the tops, like looking up at buildings. The ships had their bellies full of former county clerks and farmers and car salesmen and butchers and other boys like me from Ohio and New York and Oklahoma playing at being what we hoped to be. The ships didn’t even have names, just APA-101, painted in white numbers on their hulls.

  “Sergeant, you know much about these men?” I said. I was almost afraid to talk with him, his tough as jerky voice and me sounding like a student asking questions to kill time. In a crowd, this was the guy you noticed first and then looked nowhere else.

  “No, sir, about the same as I know about you. I got assigned to your landing craft after my first one was blown out of the water,” the Sergeant said. Laabs dropped his voice and the war silenced around us. “You haven’t done this before, have you, Lieutenant?”

  “No. Sort of. Well, I came ashore on the southern island, Kyushu, five days after the first part of the invasion back in November. No Japanese anywhere near us then. You been out before, right?”

  “Saw a little action on Okinawa.”

  “You… shoot anyone?” I said.

  Laabs nodded. That was it. I think he could tell I wanted something else.

  “Nothing more worth saying. You won’t understand. You’re still thinking of them as people.”

  “Sergeant, I’m Lieutenant Hooper, Nathaniel Hooper. Nate sometimes.”

  “Sergeant Laabs, sir.”

  Machine gun rounds skimming overhead, I stuck my hand out to shake like back home. Sergeant Laabs reached out to me, but his eyes never stopped scanning the beach, the seawall, flicking like a lizard, on guard, searching for a fight.

  “How old’re you, Sergeant Laabs?”

  “Sir, I was a stray who lied about his age to join up. I’m only 17. Believe that?”

  His face already had the first thousand lines of a story. He didn’t smile; those kinds of lines were missing.

  “Me, I’ll turn 19 in a few months,” I said. “Already feeling too old for this.”

  “I know what you mean, sir. My birthday’s in a week.”

  “Helluva day, Sergeant, and it’s only 6 a.m.”

  “Yes, sir. Should’ve slept in.”

  WE STAYED CROUCHED BEHIND the seawall playing hide and seek with the war. The Japanese machine gun rounds overhead were accomplishing nothing for all the noise but to remind me of the size of the mistake I’d made coming here. Their weapon was up above us, on ground we couldn’t see, over the seawall. I could spot other squads of our guys on the beach, and I could see the dead sprawled out like they were napping. But for me, all that mattered were these few yards of sand I was occupying. It made no sense to move left or right. I couldn’t go forward and the ocean made sure I couldn’t go back. That was the world. Plus that Jap machine gun.

  Laabs said how the Japs were fighting harder than a hair stuck in a biscuit, and it was only a matter of time before some Japanese officer got the idea of sending infantry around to flank us, drawing in the sand with his finger how the attack would look. Laabs explained what our next move should be, but I desperately wanted to show him I had a handle on this. I ordered the nearest three men who would listen to go over the seawall with me. Sergeant Laabs and the others would stay where they were to provide covering fire while the four of us rushed the machine gun.

  It surprised me when the men I’d selected threw themselves up and over the wall to
attack the machine gun head-on. When I tried to imitate them, my boot failed to catch hold, me tied up in wet web gear, a soaked knapsack, a raincoat, a first-aid kit, shaving gear, 60 rounds of pistol ammunition, a shelter half, tent pegs, and a nine pound rifle. Jesus, I had tent pegs. My knees buckled, my legs went light, I fell backwards, my glasses flew off, and I landed on my ass right about where I started.

  Grenades thrown by Sergeant Laabs and guys whose name tapes said they were Marino and Steiner exploded far over the seawall, but instead of the sounds of dying Japanese, I heard shrapnel ping off concrete; the machine gun was inside something solid none of us could’ve seen from behind the wall. I couldn’t watch the three anonymous men I’d ordered over the wall die.

  “Hey, Lieutenant, Lieutenant, it’s me, Sergeant Laabs. Look, I know you’re in charge and all, but we gotta try something else. We are well into this and it’s turning into a real shit show. I was thinking, maybe with all those ships out there, one of them might want to kill that Nambu machine gun, you know, let the Navy do a little work for us.” Laabs waited for me to say something. “Lieutenant, you need to call out to the ships, sir. Sorta now or we’re likely to die right here. We gotta get off this beach.”

  “Okay, okay, I got it. What’s your name, Private?” I said to the kid closest to me.

  “Jones, Alden Jones. People at home call me Alden, Lieutenant.” He stretched it out, “Lew-ten-naut,” like he was leaning against the side of a barn somewhere. Christ.

  “Nobody here wants to know your goddamn first name, Jones. Go find the radioman,” I said.

  “Over here, sir. Smith—Smitty—radioman. Here’s Burke and Polanski with me.”

  “Smitty, gimme the handset, I’m going to call in Navy fire on that machine gun,” I said. Our SCR-300 Galvin radios were monsters, over 30 pounds, plus the extra lead batteries, and, like everything else in my life now, olive drab. It took most of Smitty’s not-inconsiderable strength—he was what we called back home “country strong”—to horse the thing alongside all his other gear. Even so, it nearly bent him in two as he scuttled closer. I realized I hadn’t even fired my own rifle yet, so I thought this was the way to do something more than worry about where my glasses were.

  Smitty crouched over the radio, one hand holding his helmet from slipping forward, the other at the end of an arm hanging over the radio, making him look like an elephant adjusting the settings with his trunk. He held out the handset. My hands were shaking, and somehow all I could focus on was the line of black dirt under each of my nails. We all heard the empty hiss coming through the speaker.

  “Oh, for the love of Christ, we gotta move this right along now before we really shit the bed,” Laabs said. He reached across me for the handset.

  “Lieutenant?” Smitty said.

  “Sergeant Laabs, I’m making the decisions on this beach.” But I didn’t reach for the radio.

  “We’ll sort it out later, sir, decisions are easy, it’s the consequences what’re hard,” Laabs said. He grabbed the handset: “Break, break. Inferno, Inferno, this is Lancer Six, hell, Lancer Six Actual. Fire mission, priority, Ashiya Beach, Sector Packard, grid NF3 QXF3. Between us and the tree line, I got eyeballs on him. Aim well, my friend, we’re danger close. Light ’em up.”

  “Naval gunnery on the cruiser Alaska here. Roger that, Lancer Six, we aim to please. This one’s gonna be a fastball DiMaggio couldn’t touch, so heads down. Over.”

  “Joltin’ Joe can kiss my ass, I’m a Dodgers fan. Out,” Sergeant Laabs said. He threw down the black plastic handset, with a quick glance at me. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d bitten the end off it instead, but he said, “It’s that easy, Lieutenant, kid could do it.”

  For a moment there was nothing but that last burst of static. Then real sound cracked the sky. It was that easy; you said a few words into the radio and shells were summoned to blow away all to hell somebody you couldn’t even see. It was black magic.

  Something stood me on my head and almost shook all the fillings out of my teeth as the naval gunfire tore apart the machine gun emplacement, concrete that might as well have been flesh, leaving that smell of cordite in the air Laabs called war perfume. The sound of the shells deafened me for a long moment. I dug a finger into my ear to try and clear the ringing. My hearing fuzzed in as the heat from the explosion came and slapped me back onto that beach.

  “Smells sorta like meat on the grill,” Burke said. It was hot and sticky for a smell.

  I asked Laabs how many we’d killed, and he said later we’d count up the arms and legs and divide by four. It was that kind of day.

  “I told you boys, I’d kill more Japanese with this here radio than I ever would with a rifle,” Smitty said, patting his gear. “Most dangerous weapon we got. Oh, and hey, Lieutenant, here’s your glasses. Found ’em in the sand.”

  Child’s Play

  Chapter 26: Memories of Naoko

  Eichi Nakagawa: Rural Japan, Before the American Invasion

  NAOKO WAS OUR NEIGHBOR’S daughter. We played together. We ran through the woods and pretended there were ghosts at the old temple near our homes. There was morning, after lunch, and then night. No sense of time was our silent friend.

  The shops were full of special things to eat. My father told me that because Japan had freed Korea and China from the west, our markets were flooded with new goods from those far away places. Mother especially loved the Korean plums, quietly insisting they were juicier than the Japanese ones, even as my father would shush her for fear a neighbor might overhear her being what he said was disloyal.

  There was a traditional Japanese sweet maker in town, but his candy was not so tasty. The candy we liked best was made somewhere else by a factory. It was called Sakuma, fruit drops that came in a metal tin. Naoko and I fought over the red ones, but neither of us liked the green ones that burned our tongues. Some days Naoko’s mother shook out a drop at random into our hands, some days she put some out into her own palm and let us choose. We would beg Naoko’s mother to send us off to the store with a few coins to buy another full tin.

  The thing we looked forward to all year was the summer festival at the old temple. Everyone would dress up in summer kimono, yukata. The men would wear ones all of one color, while the women would have designs of flowers on theirs. We would all wear our clog shoes, geta, and the sound they made clomping on the stone streets called us to summer, same as the night noises of the cicadas and the soft wind chimes everyone hung by their doors. At the festival, the men would gather off to the side and drink sake, turning beet red. I do not think I remember my father ever laughing except then.

  Naoko and I would say we wanted to drink sake, too, because whatever was in it made people happy. We never got to try it, well, I had a small sip every New Year’s Day for tradition, but it burned my throat more than it made me laugh. Still, the sake would somehow make my father reach inside his yukata and pull out money for us to buy the things children buy, like shaved ice with flavored syrup. We also liked to play the catch the goldfish game, kingyosukui. Everyone knew it. A man with bushy eyebrows we pretended to be afraid of would set up a low tank with tiny goldfish swimming around. For a few sen, he gave you a tissue paper scoop. If you could scoop up a fish and transfer it to a cup, you could keep the fish. But almost always the paper scoop would dissolve and fall apart before you could catch a fish, and you would have to pay to try again and again until you ran out of money. Only one time I did get a fish, but I forgot to add water to the cup the next day. Naoko laughed at me for that, but I did not like that it died.

  A special thing that last summer was that a photographer came to the festival, and set up a little booth. No one we knew had a camera of their own, but people could get their picture taken for not much money. That summer, Naoko’s mother had our picture taken together, just Naoko and me. We stood very close.

  After that photo was taken, Naoko’s father Professor Matsumoto would spend a lot of time looking at me closely. Sometimes when we were
together he would look just as closely at Naoko. He was like my father in a way, not warm, but unlike father he did not become warm even after sake. He was always serious, wiping his little glasses with a handkerchief when he explained things to us about the world. There would be a big war, he said, maybe with England. Naoko knew a few of the foreign words. When she said them, that was the only time her father smiled.

  On warm days through the spring and summer Naoko and I would tug off our clothes down to our underwear and wade out into the Kamogawa River. The water was always cool, because of the willow trees that shaded it. I knew I wanted to hold her hand. But I did not understand the day I felt a stirring and had to stay with the water over my waist for a long time before I could leave the river. Naoko had already gone to the bank to sun herself while I stood in the river looking at the drops of water drying on her skin. I think my lips turned blue even with an unfamiliar warmth inside the rest of me.

  Naoko’s father, until the bombing made the rail lines dangerous, took a long trip from where we lived to his work. But they eventually moved. That was the last I ever saw of her before I was sent away.

  The best I can do to remember how I was when she left was when my father took me and my friends to a warehouse near his job. Fathers like to scare their children, so once inside he turned off all the lights. We knew others were there, but we could not see each other.

  When I stepped back outside the sky was blue, cloudless, with no airplanes.

  Chapter 27: A Hunger

  Eichi Nakagawa: Rural Area in Japan, Before the American Invasion

  THE FIRST FOOD SHORTAGE everyone noticed was white rice. To be able to eat white rice was a sign of prosperity; before the war, only poor people could not afford it. Before the war, we were sometimes served brown rice for our school lunches as an example, accompanied by a lecture from teacher on how our ancestors had to eat this every day until they worked hard enough to afford white rice.