No Surrender Soldier

by Christine Kohler

  “Oh, but it’ll be worth it.” Tomas panted like a dog. “Tell me again what Tatan says about bikinis.”

  I rolled my eyes. Tatan said it so many times it was annoying.

  “Come on. Once more.” Tomas laughed.

  “Kay-o. Kay-o. Tatan says…” I lowered my voice to imitate Tatan’s baritone voice, “Why call bikini? Bikini an atoll in Micronesia.”

  Tomas joined me in making exploding bomb noises—Kaboom! Kaboom! We wouldn’t have dared make these sounds in front of Tatan. He saw nothing funny about the US military testing hydrogen bombs, or any other explosives, on Bikini Atoll.

  When Tomas quit laughing, I imitated Tatan again. “Those swimsuits disgraceful. Look more like four hankies tied together. For shame. Put clothes on those girls before the priest sees them.”

  Tomas laughed as if this were the first time he’d heard it. He laughed all the way to the shaved ice truck to buy us blue and cherry swirled cones.

  I laughed too. Laughed so hard I ran to take a whiz in the ocean.

  As I peed I dug my toes into the crushed coral on the bottom of the bay and looked beyond the reef where I snorkeled. I breathed in the salt air and watched fishermen cast their seine nets. I wished Sammy was there and we could go fishing for manahac again. That’d be the life. Sammy and me fishing for rabbit fish instead of him flying over Vietnam and me stuck stocking shelves.

  While I was thinking about the last time Sammy and I went fishing, someone knocked me on my butt. I was pushing myself up out of the warm water when the man surfaced and screamed, “Yee-ooww!” Blood oozed out from under the Japanese man’s hands where he held his thigh.

  I rolled over and tried to ignore coral stabbing my knees. The guy was bleeding bad. Not good. Fresh blood draws sharks.

  “I’ll banzai you!” my tatan yelled from the beach.

  I squinted against the sun, trying to see him. Rainbows of water droplets bounced off a machete blade Tatan was holding. He sliced it back and forth as he waded into the ocean. “Banzai! Banzai! Take that, you Jap!”

  Sheesh. He’s really gone loco this time.

  I started wading toward the injured man, straining to see if he was badly hurt. Tomas got to him first, took off his shirt and handed it to the man to tie on his leg. Tomas gave me a thumbs-up, then formed his hands like a megaphone and hollered, “Get Tatan.”

  I was in waist-deep water so I couldn’t run. “Tatan! Tatan!” I called.

  He ignored me and plunged farther into the ocean after the Japanese man. “Aye, you Nip!” my tatan bihu shouted, slicing air and water with his machete. Tomas swam out farther, trying to get out of Tatan’s way. I didn’t blame him.

  “Aiee, policeman! Policeman!” the Japanese man shouted in English as he tried to get around Tatan. “He crazy! Old man crazy!”

  Officer Perez, who patrolled the beach, dropped his bicycle on the sidewalk and raced toward Tatan.

  The Japanese man was finally able to get closer to shore. But Tatan kept blocking his way. It was lucky for him that Tatan is an old man, ’cause he was slogging in slow motion even in the shallow water.

  I splashed toward him. “Tatan! Tatan, it’s me, Kiko! Come with me before you get hurt.”

  The policeman waded into the water. When Officer Perez reached Tatan, he came up from behind my grandfather and drew his night stick.

  “Don’t hurt my tatan!”

  “Looks like he’s not the one getting hurt,” Officer Perez said.

  The Japanese man held his thigh and looked trapped. Tatan lunged toward him. The man ran backward into the water, turned and half crawled, half dog-paddled out toward the reef where Tomas was bobbing up and down.

  I bet the man would have swam back to Japan if he could have.

  “Mister San Nicolas, sir. Put the machete down, easy like.” The officer bent his stocky body until his seat skimmed water, showing with his hands how he wanted the machete dropped.

  Officer Perez stood in front of my grandfather and held out both arms. “Easy. Easy,” he said, as if warning Tatan a poisonous crown-of-thorns starfish lurked near his feet. One misstep meant certain death.

  “Don’t hurt him,” I pleaded. “He’s got lytico-bodig. He’s not dangerous. Just confused, that’s all.”

  I inched closer to my grandfather. “Come on, Tatan. It’s me, Kiko. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”

  Tatan’s eyes darted from Officer Perez to me, then gazed toward the outer reef for the Japanese man floundering in the surf. Water lapped calmly around Tatan’s legs and half-submerged machete. He stood dazed, but with a crazed look in his brown eyes.

  “Come on, Tatan.” I reached for his hand not holding the machete. A glint of fear and confusion flashed in his eyes. I’d never seen Tatan like that before.

  Officer Perez reached for the machete’s wooden handle.

  Tatan tightened his grip and jutted his jaw. His eyes turned fiery. “No!” Tatan jerked his machete chest-high. “He violated Roselina. He raped my Rosie.”

  What? I froze. My mother?

  Officer Perez pulled his gun out of his hip holster. “Put the machete down and step back, Mister San Nicolas.”

  “No!” I stepped between Tatan and Officer Perez. “Tatan,” I begged. “Give me the machete. We’ll go see Nana. You’ll see, not’ing bad happened to her. Just give me the machete and it’ll be all right.”

  Tatan blinked, confusion clouded his eyes again. I held out my hand for the machete. “I’ll carry it, Tatan. It’s a long way to Sammy’s.”

  Tatan’s chest deflated as his anger left him. He hung his head and handed me the machete.

  “Can you keep him at your store while I get this other man to the hospital?” Officer Perez asked. “I’ll be back to talk to your parents as soon as possible.”

  I nodded, took Tatan’s hand, and walked him back to our tourist shop, as if leading a lost boy home. But my heart raced, worried about Nana. Was it true what Tatan said? Was my mother raped?

  CHAPTER 2

  NO SURRENDER SOLDIER

  JANUARY 3, 1972

  “If I was samurai, I would commit hara-kiri.” The naked Japanese soldier fingered the hand grenade pin. He sighed, then put the grenade back on a bamboo shelf beside his only other grenade.

  “Alas, I am not samurai. For if I am samurai I would not be talking to a rat.”

  The rat twitched its whiskers between steel cage bars as if it understood.

  “I am not samurai. I am Isamu Seto, lance corporal of the Japanese Imperial Army. I am not even a good soldier. I have shamed the emperor. I did not die the way the cherry blossoms go. I was afraid. Afraid! Do you understand, Rat? Do you understand fear?”

  Seto shook the tiny cage. The rat recoiled.

  “Yes, hide. For tonight you die with honor, Rat. Tonight you die as my dinner to keep these old bones alive another day. These bones of Isamu Seto, who is not samurai, not soldier, but a frightened old tailor hiding in an underground cave.”

  Seto laughed a stiff laugh, as rusty as his unusable World War II rifle. His laughter sounded muffled in the hollow one-yard-tall by ten-feet-long tunnel. Seto had dug it with a cannon shell eight feet beneath a bamboo patch in Guam’s jungle.

  It had been twenty-eight years since he hid on Guam. For fifteen years Seto lived underground. The last eight years had been long, lonely years of solitude since Privates Nakamura and Hayato died in their cave nearby.

  His laughter turned sour. I liked it better when I lived above ground in my bamboo hut, he thought. Why did the natives have to build houses closer to the river?

  He sighed, then pounded his fist on the dirt ceiling and cursed the rat. “I hate living underground like a rat! Fear drove me here!”

  Seto had feared he would be sent back to Japan, and could not face having shamed his emperor and family. Worse, he feared what the Amerikans would do to him if he had surrendered.

  He knew Japan had lost the war. About one year after he hid, according to his calculation of the moo
n and constellations, fliers dropped like bombs from airplanes informing Seto and comrades the war had ended.

  At first he did not believe his beloved country could suffer defeat. Even though the leaflets showed Japan’s divine emperor meeting with General MacArthur, he thought, it is a trick.

  Over and over he read the words:

  The war is over. The Japanese Army has surrendered unconditionally and a meeting has taken place between the Supreme Commander, General MacArthur, and the Emperor of Japan. This is no deception and no trap. Japanese military personnel should assemble without anxiety or concern at the Reception Centre at Agana, on the west coast of Guam, where arrangements will be made to facilitate their early return to Japan.

  Deception and trap, indeed, Seto had thought at the time. Ha! Japan could not lose with its kamikaze—divine wind—Buddha’s blessings, and the divine emperor himself ordering the war.

  Time dragged on. Shellfire ceased. Bullet sniping silenced. Seto became disheartened; Japan must have lost the war.

  Still, he did not turn himself in. He was afraid.

  His commanding officer had warned troops repeatedly that the enemy would execute all prisoners of war.

  His father had warned Seto, “’Tis better to not come home at all and die a hero than to come home in shame.”

  Thinking about it twenty-eight years later, Seto felt renewed shame for having hid on Omiya Jima, the emperor’s name for Guam. He felt shame for not having gone honorably by way of the cherry blossoms.

  “Har. Har,” Seto laughed. “A tailor! Here I sit with not a stitch on. Har! Har! Oh, but, Rat…” Seto wiggled the tip of his finger through bars to prod Rat. Rat lunged to bite his finger. Seto withdrew it in time.

  “I wove cloth from pago bark that would have made Mama-san proud. I learned well as a child watching Mama-san, a weaver. I learned well from Papa-san, a fine tailor. Did you see my clothes I wove and sewed, Rat? Did you see my clothes I wore when I fetched you after sundown?”

  Seto only wore his clothes when he sneaked up through the bamboo hatch after dark. No sense wearing out my fine hand-woven clothes.

  Seto proudly showed Rat his suit of beaten hibiscus bark, as if Mister Rat were a potential customer in Seto’s tailor shop. He had long gotten over how rough the burlap-like fiber rubbed against his skin.

  “See? My two pairs of trousers have belt loops and button-down fly. Notice how I have sewn adjustable hooks and buttons on pant legs so I may run swiftly through the jungle. Not that I run much these days, mind you. Yet do you see outside pockets on my shirts? Are not these button holes works of art? And, aiee, real plastic buttons I carved from a flashlight! I’m afraid you only saw me in everyday shorts and shirt when I came to fetch you. If you like, I could dress for dinner, just this once. You like?”

  Rat gnawed at steel slats.

  Seto sank back on his haunches and folded his clothes neatly. Noticing a rip in the sleeve of his everyday shirt, he removed a brass needle from its bamboo case. He stripped a strand of rope thicker than his hair. By the light of a coconut oil lamp, he threaded a pago strand into the eye of a needle and mended his torn sleeve.

  Life had become routine. When Seto first hid in the jungle, he scavenged Japanese and Amerikan mess kits, bullets, tin cans, scissors, spoons, a tea kettle—anything metal he could take from dead soldiers, and later an Amerikan dump site, to make tools.

  After settling, he sewed by day, foraged for food in the evening, and slept at night.

  The only thing that changed was what he scrounged for dinner. Some nights it was fish, sometimes shrimp or crab. On less successful hunting trips, Seto brought home frogs and snails.

  Once he snared a deer. He gutted it with his butcher knife, then stuffed venison up his chimney in a bamboo basket to smoke slowly so it would last a good while. The chimney sat at the opposite end of Seto’s cave from the hatch in which he emerged above ground. The chimney allowed him to cook.

  Another time he trapped a wild boar. By the second day of eating it, Seto felt as if he had vomited his entrails out. That would have been no death of honor, to die in the jungle from eating pig. Seto vowed to the spirits of his dead ancestors not to eat swine again, even though he found a fat pig penned up beside a house built not far from the edge of the jungle.

  Seto was grateful for plenty of breadfruit, coconuts, nuts, papayas, and mangoes, in season. If not for the fruit of the trees, he was sure he would have starved. Although, he never developed a liking for breadfruit, so bland when fresh and sour when fermented.

  Most of all, having chosen his hiding place by a river saved him. The Talofofo tributary was the water of life to Seto.

  Seto clipped with scissors the thread of his last stitch in his mending. Then he snipped his hair.

  “You like, Mister Rat? Do I look handsome? Handsome enough for a wife?” Rat stopped chewing the bars, cocked his head, and scrunched his ears forward. He returned to gnawing at rusted slats. “Hai, I never marry. My intended is probably someone else’s wife, or dead. I am but an old man. An old, old man beyond my fifty-eight years. Too old to marry. I see myself in the river. I see how hunched my back has grown from stooping in this hovel. No woman would have me.”

  Seto pulled his shocks of black hair and chopped it short. He clipped the ends of his scraggly gray mustache and beard. Seto scooped up stray hairs and put them in a coconut shell. He wasted nothing.

  He ignored the rumblings of his stomach beneath his protruding ribs. Seto learned early if he ate when he was hungry, then he would never have enough food. He waited for nightfall.

  Mended and groomed, Seto dressed, then climbed his ladder of bamboo tied together with rope. He removed a bamboo covering and burrowed like a rat out of his hole in the ground. That first whiff of night air smacked Seto in the face and reminded him that he was alive. He took a deeper breath. If only he could clear the rattle from his chest caused by soot from the underground chamber.

  Tonight I shall treat myself to a bath. Seto brushed off chunks of cut hair stuck to his oily neck and back.

  Seto searched deep into the twilight, deep into the mango groves and tangantangan vines, deep into the thicket of reeds and pandanus trees. He listened. He dared not speak, not even to himself, once he stepped beyond his hidden home. Other than familiar mosquitoes buzzing, frogs croaking, and geckos chirping, he heard nothing alarming to send him scurrying back down his hole. He ventured to the river to bathe.

  He usually checked shrimp traps first. Tonight he rested in knowing he had rat for dinner.

  Besides, he itched.

  Seto took off his clothes and laid them at the trunk of a tree, where they blended in. The water was a cool relief from the muggy air. He bathed like a crocodile dragging its belly near the bottom, eyes peering up cautiously, nostrils skimming above water. He rubbed his scaly hands roughly against his skin in place of washcloth and soap. He emerged from the water and dressed. His cave was so damp, drying off was a waste of time.

  Seto checked his palm-woven shrimp traps. Nothing. He reached into a sack and pulled out grated coconut to refill the bait pouches that dangled below the traps.

  Next he checked his snare. If only I could catch me a dog. What a delicacy and reminder of home. Or, the unthinkable, to toss my snare over one of those well-fed cows in the pasture. Seto shuddered. Too dangerous. Houses too close to my cave. He reminded himself to stay focused. About a yard in, just about here… aiee, as I thought, nothing…

  A twig snapped. Seto squatted down amongst the roots and ferns. Dead leaves rustled. Seto could see no person or animal so he stared at the ground.

  A brown tree snake slithered down the tree his snare was tied to and across the jungle floor. Brown tree snakes were the reason there were no birds for Seto to catch and eat. Seto and snakes competed for rats, too. He often thought it odd he saw no snakes on this island when first he made it his home.

  The snake slithered over Seto’s net and advanced toward his leg. Thwak. With one swift stroke of his kn
ife Seto chopped the snake in half. Seto took no chances on being poisoned. He didn’t take the snake to his den to eat.

  Always the tailor, he noticed two holes in his net.

  No wonder I do not catch anything. He cut down his net, and stuffed it in his sack.

  Concerned he was taking too long, and causing too much noise, Seto plucked snails off a tree trunk. He tossed into his sack a few coconuts that had fallen to the ground, and a breadfruit he pulled from a tree.

  Like a hunched-over peddler with a knapsack on his back, Seto carried his treasures home. He lifted his bamboo trap door, and lowered himself rung by rung down his ladder. At the bottom he removed his shorts and shirt, then crawled through the tunnel to the slightly enlarged cooking chamber.

  “Hai, Mister Rat, see what I brought home for dinner? And you, my friend, shall be the main course.”

  Rat had gotten nowhere for all his gnawing at the steel trap. He scurried around with interest at the sound of Seto’s voice again.

  Seto rubbed two sticks together to ignite a rope wick in coconut oil on the stove. “Fire was much easier when I still had a flashlight lens,” he said more to himself than to Rat. It had been so long ago since he owned the lens that he couldn’t remember when he lost it. All that lingered were memories of anger upon discovering it gone. Some days he wished to trade anger for this numbing fear.

  He rubbed from top to bottom, top to bottom until the sticks finally ignited the wick. Content the oil would burn, Seto diced breadfruit to cook with snails in coconut milk.

  He unlatched the trap door and pinched Rat behind its head with two fingers. He grabbed its tail with his other hand.

  “Sorry, my friend. It is you or me.”

  Seto cut off Mister Rat’s head, tail, and feet with a rusty butcher knife. He drained its warm blood into a coconut shell. He sliced its belly and peeled off its furry skin like shucking the shell of a crawfish. Seto gutted Rat’s belly to boil its innards in coconut milk. He fried the paltry meat in a skillet made by cutting his military canteen in half.