“Sir, come with me, please.” The PFC sounded close to tears. “There’s something you need to see.”
“What is it?” Fletch asked.
The soldier shook his head. “You got to see it, sir. Christ almighty!” He gulped as if fighting his stomach.
Fletch had already seen much more than he ever wanted to. War was nothing like the sanitized version the Army had got ready for in the drills on the mainland and around Schofield Barracks. People didn’t just get killed. They got blown to pieces. They got chopped to shreds. They got holes punched through them—not neat, tidy holes but ones that poured—often gushed—blood. Fletch had smelled shit and burnt meat, sometimes from the same wounded man. He’d heard shrieks that would haunt him as long as he lived—which didn’t look like being long.
By the PFC’s grime and the stubble on his chin, he’d been fighting from the very beginning of this mess. How could he not have seen and smelled and heard the same kinds of things as Fletch had? How could he not be getting hardened to what war did? What he’d seen just now, though, had shaken him to the core.
Which meant that either he was shell-shocked or that it was going to shake Fletch to the core, too. For his own sake, Fletch rooted for shell shock. But he went into the cane field with the soldier. Stalks rustled. Bugs chirped. One of them lit on him. He brushed it away, trying to walk as softly as he could.
“Eddie?” the PFC called, cradling his Springfield. “You there, Eddie?”
“Wish to hell I wasn’t,” another soldier answered from not far ahead. “You find an officer, Bill?”
“A lieutenant,” the PFC—Bill—said, damning with faint praise.
“Bring him on.” Eddie didn’t seem inclined to be fussy. “I’m with poor goddamn Wilbur. Ain’t no Japs around—now.”
Following Bill, Fletch pushed the last little way through the cane. Eddie was a stocky, swarthy private who looked straight out of Hell’s Kitchen or some other equally charming slum. He stood guard over a corpse. The dead man’s hands were tied behind his back, which Fletch saw first. Bill said, “Jap bastards caught poor Wilbur alive. Go on around, sir. Take a look at what they done to him.”
I don’t want to do this. I really don’t want to do this went through Fletch’s mind eight or ten thousand times as he took the four or five steps that let him see what the Japanese had done to the American soldier they’d captured. And he was right. He was righter even than he’d imagined. “Fuck,” he said softly, the most reverent, prayerful obscenity he’d ever heard.
They’d bayoneted Wilbur again and again, in the chest and in the belly—but not in the left side of the chest, because that might have pierced his heart and killed him faster than they wanted to. And after he was dead (Fletch hoped like hell it was after he was dead) they’d yanked down his trousers, cut off his penis, and stuffed it into his mouth. And they must have been proud of their handiwork, too, because they’d stuck a piece of cardboard by his head. On it, one of them had written, in English, HE TAKE LONG TIME DIE.
“Fuck,” Fletch said again. “What do you need me for?”
“What do we do with him, sir?” Eddie sounded like a lost kid, not at all like a tough guy.
“Bury him,” Fletch answered at once, his mouth running ahead of his brain. His wits caught up a moment later: “Bury him, and for Christ’s sake don’t tell anybody just what happened to him. But spread the word: you really don’t want the Japs to take you alive.”
Eddie and Bill both nodded. “Yes, sir,” they said together, seeming relieved somebody was telling them what to do. Then Bill asked, “What about the Geneva Convention, sir?”
“I don’t know. What about it?” Fletch pointed to the mutilated, degraded remnant of what had been a man. “How much do you think the Japs care about it? Why don’t you ask Wilbur here?”
They both flinched. “What do we do if we catch one of them?” That was Eddie.
Fletch looked down at the dead American soldier again. He knew what he was supposed to say. What came out of his mouth was, “Whatever you do, don’t come asking an officer beforehand, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir!” Where nothing else had, that got Bill and Eddie’s enthusiastic approval.
IV
WHILE AT ANNAPOLIS, Lieutenant Jim Peterson had taken a lot of military history. Back around the time of Christ, he remembered, the Roman Empire had tried to conquer the Germans. (That looked like a damn good idea nowadays; too bad it hadn’t worked.) Augustus sent three legions into the middle of Germany under a bungling general, and they didn’t come back. The Emperor howled, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”
Peterson felt like howling, “General Short, give me back my airplanes!”
Yes, the Japs had sunk the Enterprise and the Lexington, but they’d both gone down swinging. They’d shot down enemy planes. A couple of surviving pilots claimed the Lexington’s aircraft had nailed an enemy carrier, maybe even two.
But the Army? Before the Japs struck, the Army had lined up its fighters and bombers wingtip-to-wingtip. Scuttlebutt said the illustrious General Short had been scared of saboteurs. Peterson didn’t give a damn about scuttlebutt. What Short had done was set up the bowling pins. And when the Japs did show up, they knocked just about every one of them down.
Not that the Navy came off smelling like a rose. There was plenty of blame to go around, as far as Peterson could tell. Looking back on it, Admiral Kimmel’s decision to have most of the Pacific Fleet in port every weekend seemed something less than brilliant. If Hirohito’s boys had somebody keeping an eye on Pearl Harbor—and anybody with two brain cells to rub together would have—they’d spot the pattern lickety-split. And, again, the USA paid because the Japanese were on the ball when its own top officers weren’t.
Peterson also wondered why the hell neither the Army nor the Navy had spotted the enemy carriers before they launched their planes. Someone should have been looking off to the north. That was the logical direction for the Japs to pick if they were crazy enough to attack the United States at all. Peterson hadn’t thought they would be.
Crazy? The slant-eyed bastards were raking in the chips. “Shows how goddamn smart I am,” he muttered inside the Pearl Harbor BOQ, where he’d gone from Ewa. It was, at the moment, a tent city. Japanese bombs had blown the original structure to hell and gone.
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Peterson had taken English Lit, too. Lines like that stuck in the mind as firmly as Augustus’ anguished cry. This one was a pretty good description of what things were like at Pearl Harbor right now. Everybody wore gauze of some sort over his nose and mouth. Despite the Americans’ best efforts to douse the flames, the fuel-tank farm still burned a week after it was bombed. Noxious smoke filled the air. It got on everything and everybody, and made men look as if they were in blackface for a minstrel show.
Distant thunder came from off to the north. The only trouble was, that wasn’t thunder. It was an artillery duel, the Japs versus the U.S. Army. Again, scuttlebutt was the only way to get a handle on what was happening if you weren’t at the front. On the rare occasions the radio said anything, it belched out optimistic twaddle that made Peterson want to puke. He knew bullshit when he heard it.
Gossip and rumor said the Americans were falling back. The way the distant thunder didn’t seem quite so distant argued that gossip and rumor knew what they were talking about. They also said you didn’t want to try to surrender to the Japs. Peterson didn’t know about that. He’d talked to people who’d talked to people who’d talked to people who said they’d seen this, that, and the other thing. Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t. There were party games where you passed a sentence around the room from mouth to mouth. It always came back to the person who’d started it garbled beyond recognition. The rumor just didn’t make any sense to Peterson. If the Japanese abused American prisoners of war, wouldn’t the USA declare open season on captured Japs? Who’d want to start anything like that?
His doubts weren’t what propell
ed him out of BOQ. Nobody had yet figured out how to get him into action. He’d been patient as long as he could stand. Now he intended to start pounding on desks and shouting at people till he got what he wanted. That was the strategy of a four-year-old throwing a tantrum, but it often worked. The squeaky wheel got the grease. Peterson wouldn’t just squeak. He’d scream.
He winced when he emerged from the tent. Hawaii had always struck him as paradise on earth, or as close as anybody was likely to come. The thought was profoundly unoriginal, which made it no less true. Here, hell had visited itself on paradise. The noxious smoke swirled everywhere, now thicker, now thinner, depending on the vagaries of the breeze. Maybe the gauze mask Peterson wore helped some, but he still had a permanent nasty taste in the back of his throat, while his eyes felt as if somebody’d thrown ground glass into them.
Heavy black fuel oil fouled the turquoise waters of the harbor. The floating fires were finally out. That helped a little, but only a little. The Navy’s proud battlewagons lay shattered and broken, their terrible grace and beauty turned to trash: Oklahoma capsized; West Virginia and California sunk; Arizona not just sunk but with her back broken, too, her bridge and foremast all twisted and askew and blackened by the conflagration that had raced over her. And Nevada, or what was left of her. Yet another armor-piercing bomb had struck her in the third wave of the attack, after she beached herself near Hospital Point, and started fires that still smoldered. She might be salvageable, but it would be a long, slow job.
Bombs had savaged the lush greenery on Ford Island, too, toppling palm trees and showing the earth all naked and torn. This is what war looks like. This is what war feels like. This is what war smells like, Peterson thought. It wasn’t the way he’d imagined it at Annapolis. It wasn’t even the way he’d imagined it when that goddamn Jap shot him down. That had been a duel in the air, a fair fight—except that his Wildcat was a lumbering pig when measured against the machine the Jap flew. This . . . Nothing even remotely fair about this. Japan had kicked the USA right in the nuts, and this was the aftermath.
Peterson wanted with all his heart to visit the same devastation on Tokyo. He couldn’t. His country couldn’t. He was painfully aware of that. But Japanese soldiers were within reach on Oahu, and getting closer all the time. He could pay them back for some of what they’d done to Hawaii.
That they might do the same to him never crossed his mind. He’d spent his whole military career training as a pilot. Ground combat was a closed book to him, though one he wanted to open.
If they tell me no, goddammit, I can steal a Springfield and a bike and head for the fighting myself, he thought. Hell, I don’t even need a bike. I can hoof it. This isn’t what anybody’d call a big island. Being ready to contemplate ignoring orders spoke strongly about how frazzled he was.
Bombs had hit the dispatching office, too. Is there anything around here bombs haven’t hit? But the clerks—the pen-pushers and rubber-stamp stampers and typewriter jockeys without whom the military couldn’t function but who often thought themselves the be-all and end-all instead of the men who did the fighting and dying—the clerks persisted, even if they had to go to tents, too. Some of them had died here. Some of them might even have fought here.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. No chance for a plane. We haven’t got any planes to give you right now,” a yeoman said through his own muffling of gauze.
Peterson knew nobody had any planes. He’d heard nothing but how nobody had any planes since those gray-haired geezers from the golf course got him to Ewa. “Let me have a rifle, then,” he said. “Let me have a rifle and a helmet and permission to go north. There’s a war on up there.”
Unlike the Marine captain over at Ewa, the yeoman shook his head. “We don’t want to do that, sir. If we get planes, we don’t want to find out that all the people trained to fly them have turned into casualties in the meantime.”
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Peterson exploded. “Where the hell are you going to get more planes from? Pull ’em out of your asshole? Everybody and his mother-in-law says the Japs have blown all the planes in Hawaii to hell and gone. What did I join the Navy for if you won’t even let me fight?”
The yeoman turned red. “Sir, I have my orders,” he said stolidly. “And if you don’t mind my saying so, sending you to the front with a rifle is about like putting a doughboy into a fighter cockpit and expecting him to shoot down Japs.”
“My balls!” To Peterson, ground combat looked simple. You aimed at a Jap, you shot the son of a bitch, and then you aimed at the next one. What was so complicated about that? Flying a plane, now, was a whole different business. That took skill and training.
With a shrug, the yeoman said, “However you want it, sir. If you like, I’ll bump you on to Lieutenant Commander McAndrews. I don’t have the authority to change orders like that. He does.”
“Bring him on!” Peterson said eagerly.
Lieutenant Commander McAndrews still had an office in a real building to call his own. As it did everywhere, rank had its privileges. McAndrews, a jowly man in his late forties, looked at Peterson as if he were a cockroach in the salad. “So you want to go off and be a hero, do you?” he said in a voice like ice.
“No, sir. I want to serve my country, sir.” Peterson could yell and cuss at the yeoman—he outranked him. The shoe was on the other foot here. He had to move carefully. “They won’t let me get back into an airplane. If they would, I’d gladly fly. But the enemy is here. I want to fight him.”
“You may not be doing yourself any favors, you know,” McAndrews said. “Things aren’t going so well. The Army may have promised more than it can deliver.” He sniffed, as if to say one couldn’t expect anything else from the Army. By all the signs, the rivalry between Navy blue and Army khaki counted for more with him than the war against Japan.
Maybe that made sense in peacetime. Peterson had had plenty of rude things to say about the Army, too. What Navy man didn’t? But you could take it too far. “Good God, sir!” he said. “In that case, they need all the help they can get.”
McAndrews eyed him curiously. “Are you really so eager to get yourself killed, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir,” Peterson answered. “What I’m eager for is killing those little yellow bastards who jumped on our backs when we weren’t looking.”
“Your spirit does you credit,” McAndrews said, but not in a way that made it sound like a compliment. “It is policy not to risk those men who have skills that may be valuable in the future. . . .”
“How? Where? We haven’t got any airplanes to speak of, and we have got more pilots than we know what to do with,” Peterson said. “Sir.”
“If I have more money than I know what to do with, Lieutenant, I don’t throw some of it in the fire,” McAndrews said coldly. “Do you?”
“I don’t know, sir. I never had more money than I knew what to do with.” As a matter of fact, Peterson had done the equivalent of throwing his money in the fire plenty of times. When he was in port, he spent it on booze and broads and bright lights. What else was it good for?
“I was speaking metaphorically.” Lieutenant Commander McAndrews’ tone declared that Peterson wouldn’t recognize a metaphor if it bit him in the leg. He might have accused the younger man of eating with the wrong fork. “But if you are mad enough to want to go . . .”
“If somebody doesn’t go stop the Japs up there, sir, don’t you think they’ll come down here?” Peterson asked. “What happens if—no, when—they do?”
By the horrified expression that washed across McAndrews’ face, he hadn’t even imagined that. A lot of possibilities about the Japanese hadn’t occurred to Americans till too late. Peterson knew all about that; he was one of the Americans those possibilities hadn’t occurred to. Maybe McAndrews hadn’t let himself think about this one. He looked as if he hated Peterson for making him think about it.
Five minutes later, Peterson had in his possession an order releasing him for ground combat “in th
e best interest of the Navy and the United States of America.” McAndrews’ eyes said he hoped Peterson stopped a bullet with his teeth. Peterson didn’t care. Regardless of what McAndrews thought, he had what he wanted.
WHEN THE AMERICANS pulled out of Haleiwa, they’d done their best to wreck the airstrip near the little town on the north shore of Oahu. They’d dynamited the runways to try to make sure planes couldn’t land or take off on them. A lot of pick-and-shovel men would have needed a long time to get the airstrip ready for operations again, and the Japanese Army didn’t have that kind of manpower to spare.
As Lieutenant Saburo Shindo took off from that airstrip, a smile wreathed his usually impassive features. The Americans hadn’t been as smart as they thought they had. When they pulled out of Haleiwa, they’d left behind a couple of bulldozers and a steamroller. With those, Japanese military engineers had been able to repair the airstrip in a couple of days, not several weeks.
The smile faded a little as he gained altitude. There sat one of the dozers, painted a friendly civilian yellow, by the side of a runway. Such a casual display of U.S. wealth bothered Shindo a little, or more than a little. That wealth of earth-moving equipment wouldn’t have been casually available in a Japanese small town. His countrymen had been able to take advantage of it, yes. But they couldn’t come close to producing it themselves. Attacking a nation that could was worrying.
With a shrug, Shindo dismissed such worries from his mind. They were things to keep an admiral or a cabinet minister up in the wee small hours, not a lieutenant. As a matter of fact, nothing much kept Shindo awake at night. He looked forward, not back.
Forward lay the American positions. U.S. forces were trying to form a line between Oahu’s two mountain ranges, the Waianae in the west and the Koolau in the east. They seemed to assume the land outside the mountain ranges didn’t matter much. So far, they hadn’t managed to stop the Japanese advance, but they had slowed it down.
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