by J. E. Park
I knew which flashback came next. It was the one where I saved Rafaela Green and her son from her husband. Even though they both begged me not to, I beat Randy to the brink of death. Then I sent Rafaela and Manny back to the Philippines, where they would be safe. That was when the bogeyman of my episodes transformed from my father to Randy Green. It was he who stalked the jungle with my father’s shotgun, looking for his wife and stepson. He screamed as he searched for them, firing his weapon often but never running out of ammunition.
When Green gave up looking for his family, he sought out people that I cared about. Eventually, he found them all: Hannah, my mother, my siblings, and my friends. Raising his shotgun, he pulled the trigger time after time, intent on killing every one of them. As he fired, he laughed maniacally, turning toward me to show how much he enjoyed the carnage. This time the dream was a little different, though. When he showed his face, I realized that it was not Randy Green or my father slaughtering everyone I ever loved.
It was me.
In my dream that night and during the episode that followed, it was I who killed my family, not Randy or my old man. It was I that executed that girl in El Salvador. It was I who was now responsible for the misfortunes of Rafaela Green and her son. Until that moment, I blamed my father for most of the misery that landed upon my shoulders. It hit me that night that Liam Murphy had been dead for a very long time. He was no longer a threat to the people I loved.
I was. Falling to pieces on the floor of my radar dome, I was convinced that I would eventually destroy anyone I ever came to care about.
*****
When I opened my eyes, I was no longer in my hammock. I was on the deck covered in sweat, out of breath, and with tears streaming down my cheeks. Dixie was on the ground with me, holding me from behind, struggling to keep my arms pinned to my sides. “Come on, Doyle!” he begged. “Come on, man! It’s time to come back to us! Come on back, Doyle!”
I was trying to claw my way back to reality but was not quite there yet. I knew I was in the SPN-35 radar dome and that Dixie was there with me. I was still prepared to confront an apparition of myself holding that shotgun, though. “Oh fuck! Oh, f…It’s…it’s my fault, Dixie! It’s my fault!”
“Jesus Christ!” Kevin grunted as he tried to hold tighter. “What’s your fault?”
“Everything! That girl in El Salvador…”
“What?” If word got back to the US that Salvadoran soldiers held female prisoners as sex slaves, it would have devastated American efforts there. That was why my benign training mission ended up classified. For that reason, I never told Dixie about it. He had no idea what I was talking about.
“…and Randy Green…”
“Fuck Randy Green!” Kevin shot back. “He would have killed that woman and her kid if we hadn’t stopped him!”
“…and my family…I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but I somehow got them killed too.”
“Goddammit!” Dixie let go and pushed me away from him. “What else did you do? Are you responsible for the JFK assassination? The AIDS epidemic? How about Wham!?”
I was almost back. I felt safe again but disoriented. Looking at Dixie, I asked, “What are you doing here?”
“It’s too hot to sleep in the berthing area. I thought I’d check the dome to see if the AC was working and found you in here losing your fucking mind! Jesus Christ, Doyle! Put you in any kind of high-pressure situation, and you’re the coolest cat I know. Leave you alone with your own thoughts for any more than fifteen minutes, though, and you completely fall apart! Is this ever going to end?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Dixie. It’s been bad ever since we left San Diego. I thought I got it out of my system in Hawaii, but obviously, I didn’t.”
“I’ll say.” Dixie took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and threw them at me, hitting me in the face. Without apologizing, he then asked, “I thought you needed a trigger for these things.”
“I did too.” I pulled a cigarette out of the pack with shaking hands, then tossed it back. “It looks like they’re taking on a life of their own now.”
Kevin cursed. “Doyle, if people find out about this, you’re gone.”
“You know, everyone keeps saying I’m going to get thrown out of the service,” I replied, pausing to light my smoke. “Yet somehow, I’m still here. It sure doesn’t seem like it from my perspective lately, but I’m one lucky guy.”
“Whatever,” Dixie said. “I’ve seen luckier. I don’t usually count people whose entire family got murdered as particularly blessed.”
I dropped my head into my hands. “Yeah, me neither. I miss her, Kevin.”
“Who? Hannah?”
“Yeah, her too, but I was talking about my mother. Man, the things she did for me. You would not believe how much pain that woman would take to save me from it. My old man would come after me, and she would jump in his way and pop him in the jaw as hard as she could. She knew what would happen to her after that. She knew she couldn’t hurt him. But she did it anyway. Just so that my old man would take his demons out on her instead of me.”
Dixie looked mad. “Is that why you think her murder was your fault now?”
I shrugged. “He never hurt her unless she was trying to protect me. That never occurred to me until now. He never hurt my sister, well, not until the night he blew her brains out. He doted on my baby brother until he shot him too. And even though he hurt her so badly, I could tell he loved my mother. He seemed hurt by her more than anything, hurt that she defended me from him all the time. Hurt that she always chose me over him. It was me that man hated, not my mother. Not my sister. Not my brother. Me.”
I was trying to keep my composure but failing. My voice cracked as I tried to explain to Kevin what I was finally figuring out. “Dixie, if I had never been born, they could have been happy. If it had not been for me, they would all still be alive. Christ, if I had been there instead of running the streets with my friends, he probably would have killed me instead of them. They would…”
“That’s bullshit, Doyle! It’s survivor’s guilt!” Kevin sounded exasperated. “There’s only one person responsible for what happened to your family, and it’s your old man. Look, I’ve never lost anyone close to me. I’m no idiot, though. This path you’re trying to take yourself down right now? It isn’t helpful. It ain’t going to lead to anything but trouble. You need to figure out a way to get this shit put behind you. Now!”
From an intellectual perspective, everything Dixie said was right. On an intuitive level, though, I knew what the truth was. There was something about me, and only me, that fueled my father’s rages. I might not have pulled the trigger, but I could feel that my family's death was still a sin I needed to atone for one day.
*****
CHAPTER 5
T hey say time heals all wounds. It took twenty-one days for the USS Belleau Wood to cover the distance between Hawaii and Japan. I would not claim all that ailed me worked itself out during that time, but at least I stopped hemorrhaging my sanity.
The trick was to keep busy. I spent our journey working at an almost manic pace all day. Then, after everyone went to bed, I studied Japanese most of the night. If I stayed awake, I could not have any nightmares. With fewer nightmares came fewer episodes.
I learned to get by on only a few hours of sleep a night until it all caught up with me about a week before we made landfall. Spent and exhausted, I collapsed in my rack instead of in my radar dome and slept the whole night through. I did it again the next night, and then the night after that. Normalcy became routine once again, and my episodes were kept at bay.
Hannah was still on my mind a lot, but so was the exhilaration of starting over in Japan. This was what I signed on to do, to travel the world, to see exotic new places. I had reached a tipping point. The excitement of this new adventure canceled out my mourning over what I had left behind. It was not only me, either. The entire crew was electric with anticipation. I could tell by the banter I he
ard around me on our final day at sea.
For once, nobody was complaining about having to man the rails as we changed into our dress whites. We all wanted to be the first to see the land of the rising sun emerge from over the horizon. There was a lot of speculation about what Japan was going to look like. We wondered how the food was going to taste and how pretty the girls were going to be. We were full of optimism, which lasted right up until we were topside and saw what was blocking our way into port.
To be fair, there were Americans who received far worse welcomes while approaching Japan. The one that Joint Expeditionary Force TF 51 received off the coast of Okinawa in 1945 comes to mind. Taking that into consideration, we did not have a lot of room to complain. Judging by the flotilla of protest vessels blocking our approach to Sasebo, though, we were only slightly less unpopular than the leathernecks who landed at Hagushi during World War II.
The protest boats blared Japanese nationalist music. They waved long flags and shouted angry speeches our way that few of us could understand. I had been studying Japanese from the moment I found out we were going there but had no one to practice it on. I spoke it poorly. I understood it even worse. At first, I thought all those boats were there to welcome us. I did not realize my mistake until I heard someone with a bull horn screaming, “YANKEE GO HOME!!!”
It looked like the boats blocking our way into Sasebo Bay were on a suicide mission and had no intention of moving. Displacing something in the neighborhood of 40,000 tons, the USS Belleau Wood was a slave to its own inertia. We could not change course to avoid a collision even if we wanted to and to be honest, we didn’t want to. It would have set a bad precedent.
Our ship blasted the whistle three times to let the protesters know that we were coming through. Not thinking there was any real danger of actually hitting them, though, the captain kept us on the rails. He turned out to be right.
No sooner had the ship’s whistle stopped than the wail of several sirens rose from the group of protest boats. Vessels from the Japanese harbor patrol emerged from the mob and started herding watercraft out of our way. I saw some of the protesters make angry displays of defiance toward the authorities, but the Japanese generally did what they were told. As we passed through the protesters, I noticed that they all wore uwagi tops. These looked like the jacket of a karate uniform, except they were blue and covered with kanji script. Their headbands were of similar design.
Along the rail, I was standing next to an OS seaman apprentice, Nick Budd, who was half-Japanese. His mother was from Nagasaki, which was not very far from Sasebo. “Can you understand any of this?” I asked him.
Budd shook his head. “Dude,” he answered. “You speak more Japanese than I do.”
Our new home was a facility that we shared with the Japanese Navy. We had half of the pier, which we split with another American ship, the USS Dubuque. Behind us, separated by a chain-link fence, were two cruisers of Japan’s Maritime Defense Force. We were still at the rails as we docked, and a small army of Japanese civilians ran out to secure our mooring lines. Though none of them were military, they could have fooled us. They all had the same haircuts, wore the same coveralls, and moved with more precision than we did during basic training.
“Shit!” I heard Budd exclaim as he took in the scene below us.
“What?” I asked.
“We Japanese people really do all look alike.”
*****
Typically, the captain excused us from manning the rails shortly after the ship was moored. This time, we had to sit through the welcoming ceremony and several speeches from government officials. Once cut loose, though, seven hundred men who had not had a drink in three weeks were unleashed upon the town.
Being electronics technicians with nothing to lock down, we were some of the first men off the ship. We rushed toward the city but paused at the main gate, confronted by an angry mob dressed the same way as the protesters we had seen at sea. A dozen police officers in full riot gear kept them at bay, but they seemed wholly inadequate for the task. They were ridiculously outnumbered. If that angry mass of humanity wanted to tear us limb from limb as it appeared they wanted to, there was little the cops would have been able to do about it.
The Japanese gate guard sensed our hesitation and smiled at us, looking embarrassed by the situation. In halting English, he said, “Is okay. No hurt. You go. Irassharimase.”
I understood irassharimase. It meant welcome. “Domo arigato,” I answered, thanking him. Then Dixie, Metaire, and Tony Bard walked through the gate with me.
The protesters looked pissed. They shook their fists, hurled insults at us, and pressed against the riot shields of the police officers holding them back. I sensed it was all for show, though. No one threw anything. No one spit at us, and there was no real effort to get past the cops, which they could have done by just walking around them. As it was, we strolled past the chaos without incident and tried to figure out where to go next.
The military base in Sasebo is not directly connected to the town. Once you exit the main gate, you have to cross Nimitz Park, a stretch of space maintained by the US military but available to the Japanese. It encouraged American interaction with the locals. It was a beautiful park, very green and open. It also boasted a baseball diamond and a field suitable for both American football or soccer, depending on who was using it. The park was also popular because it possessed a set of restrooms one could use without feeling obliged to buy anything.
From the park, you had to cross the Albuquerque Bridge to get to town. This was a pedestrian walkway over a small river, named after Sasebo’s sister city in New Mexico. After you reached the eastern bank, you were at the beginning of Alba Kaki Street. A block from there, it intersected with Sakaemachi to form the place the Americans called “Four Corners.”
Speaking in generalities, Sasebo was not a city that catered to visitors. Once you got away from the vicinity of the base, it was common to see plaques outside of establishments reading, “No Foreigners Allowed.” This was something not found at Four Corners, where the bars catered to American service members. Unfortunately, the taverns were small and quickly overwhelmed. Despite being among the first groups of people to leave the ship, we could barely fit into any of these places. Getting served was even more challenging.
We ended up at Shooters, a bar owned by an American expatriate named Steve Morgan. He was a former sailor who had landed in Sasebo a couple of decades before and just never got around to leaving. His tavern was a local landmark, and Steve himself an institution among the 7th Fleet. We would not get to meet him that day, however. His place was so packed that we could not even get to the bar.
After colliding with several locals and excusing myself with a curt, “Sumimasen!” one of the hostesses ask me if I spoke Japanese. I told her I knew a little, then had an excruciating conversation about how insane it was to have such a small area overrun with so many sailors at once. After switching to English, she suggested, “You need get away from crowd. Go to ginza, up street two blocks. Find department store. Take erevator to roof — that beer garden. You rike. Very nice up there!”
“Domo arigato,” I said. Thank you very much.
She threw me an adorable smile, bowed, and told me I was welcome. “Do itachimashita!”
Back on the street, I marveled at how putting a little effort toward learning the language could open up so much more opportunity. Most of my shipmates were fighting for a position at one of the Four Corners bars. The four of us, however, ended up on the roof of a five-story building, drinking beer for a quarter of the price that everyone else was paying. We were also enjoying an incredible view of our new home.
If I stood in that beer garden and walked due east for six thousand miles, I would have made landfall in the US somewhere between San Diego and Los Angeles. We were on the same line of latitude that we had left. Geographically speaking, though, the two places could not have been more different. Southern California was a desert. Japan was very green. It was n
ot the bright, vibrant green of Hawaii, but more of the deeper hue you would find in the Pacific Northwest. There were few palm trees in Sasebo, but more evergreens than I had seen since leaving Michigan.
By population, Sasebo was less than a quarter of the size of San Diego, but by land area, it was even less so. The city was packed. It was not as bad as Tokyo, but walking through the ginza, personal space was pretty hard to come by.
Looking at the people, I had to agree with Nick Budd. For those of us who just arrived, the Japanese did seem to look alike. If you studied their faces, of course, you could tell them apart, but they seemed to put a lot of stock in uniformity. Everyone plodded about in business attire, and there was little personal expression. All the men wore blue suits, white shirts, and solid ties. Women showed a little bit more variation in color, but not in style.
The school kids wore outright uniforms. Girls were in tops that matched our Navy dress blues, though they wore them with skirts instead of trousers. Boys dressed in black tunics and pants that looked like World War I era military uniforms. Even the criminals had their own style. The yakuza by the pachinko parlors wore suits of dark red or green and covered their eyes with narrow sunglasses.
Japan was an alien place, with new things to discover everywhere we turned. One of those was Japanese beer. We were quite impressed. We also found a delicious noodle dish called yakisoba. That was what Metaire was eating when I saw him look at something behind me, drop a mouthful of noodles back into his bowl, and say, “Merde.”