No Surrender Soldier

by Christine Kohler

  The last letter he received from his father, before Seto transferred to Guam, said Eiji had enlisted into the Imperial Navy. His father had held Eiji up as a national hero. His father wrote in his chicken-scrawled script from too many years of gripping a needle, “I am confident Eiji will never shame his country. A true hero would rather die for his emperor than return unvictorious, shaming his family name forever.”

  Seto touched his dead comrade’s talisman, made with a thousand stitches, and whispered, “May the gods grant Eiji long life.” Yet, he wondered, did Eiji make it home?

  Seto stretched both arms in front of him, cupping his hands around an imaginary ball. There was no room in his cave to pull back his arms into a proper pitch. There was no freedom of movement for play. His arms dropped to his sides. Yearning burned in his chest to join the boys who played at the edge of the jungle by the cow pasture. Many a day he listened for their laughter and shouting as they played baseball.

  But the boys had stopped shouting what must have been hours ago. And there he sat sweating in the dark, waiting for nightfall so he could see if he snared a doe. My stomach will not let me sleep tonight.

  He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around himself. “Shh, shh, be still my body,” he whispered. “A little while and I can rise from this grave, then eat.” He breathed deep—as deep as he could stand to inhale the stench of his latrine and burnt coconut oil—and shuddered one last time, then stilled.

  “I wait. It is all I can do. Wait.”

  Silence filled his cave.

  Sirens wailed in the distance. Sirens! Loud, screaming sirens. One, two, three, all cacophonies at different pitches. Wailing, wailing, louder, closer, wailing like air raid sirens warning of bombs dropping.

  Seto flattened his body to the ground and covered his head with his arms. His body shook and shook, until it convulsed uncontrollably.

  But no bombs fell.

  Have they come for me? Is this the end?

  CHAPTER 7

  BOMBS

  JANUARY 4, 1972—DUSK

  “Tata! Nana!” I’d never been so glad to see my parents. I ran toward them but a fireman grabbed me and held me back. A bunch of neighbors had already come over to our house to see what was going on. I stood between Tomas and Tihu Gabe, my tata’s brother.

  “Stand back!” the fire chief ordered my parents through a bullhorn.

  A navy demolition team lifted a dull metal object from a huge hole in our yard. One navy man in a heavy space-looking suit yelled to the crowd, “We got it! She’s unarmed now!”

  The fire chief raised his bullhorn again. “Stay put! We need to sweep the area.”

  Two men hauled the land mine away in a lead bucket to a dark blue van with white lettering that read, “US Naval Magazine Bomb Disposal Team.”

  My tata paced back and forth. Nana wrung her hands and twisted her ring. I wished I could be over there with her. Not sure if it’d have made her worry any less, but I would have felt a whole lot better hanging with my parents. My nana was saying, “What’s with all the holes in our yard? Are mines in all of them? What’s he mean ‘unarmed now’? We’ve got live World War II land mines in our yard?” Her voice rose higher and shriller with each question.

  “Lord, I hope not,” Tata put his arm around her shoulders. “Or we’re moving.”

  Several navy men swept the entire yard with metal detectors.

  “All clear,” one finally yelled.

  “All clear!” the fire chief bellowed through the bullhorn.

  The chief nodded at me so I ran to my parents and called, “Tata! Nana!”

  My nana hugged me and I wasn’t even embarrassed. She felt warm and safe. Both my parents’ questions spilled out, one on top of the other. “Are you all right?” “Where’s Tatan?” “What happened?” “What’s with all the holes?”

  By this time Tomas and the neighbor men had joined us. Word had spread there was trouble at the Chargalauf’s house. Neighbor women came over and set up makeshift tables to spread out their dinners for potluck.

  My answers tumbled out, and Tomas filled in the gaps, “Tatan dug all these holes, see.”

  “Bobo helped,” Tomas said.

  “Tatan wouldn’t stop,” I said. “Even though I told him to.”

  “But he listened to me,” Tomas said, “when I spoke Japanese.”

  Tomas’s tata, Rudy Tanaka, asked, “What you say?”

  “I don’t remember. Just simple stuff,” Tomas said. “But he paid attention. Whatever I said.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like Tomas was a soldier.”

  Tomas stood at attention and saluted. Any other time I might have laughed. But I was still scared. What if that mine had gone off while Tatan was digging? What if there were more mines in our yard?

  Tihu Gabe said, “Hey, Tatan San Nicolas thinks the Japanese are still occupying Guam like during the war.”

  “Yeah.” Juan Cruz chugged his beer, then raised the bottle. “Yeah, that’s it. The lytico-bodig’s put him back thirty years in forced labor. Remember? The men had to dig those holes for the Japanese, and build the airstrip.”

  “I remember. We all did it,” my tihu said. “Even though we were just young bucks barely out of high school. How could we ever forget… all that bowing to the Japanese. Me? I never bow again.”

  Juan Cruz interrupted. “Young bucks is right, that’s why we dug the tunnels, hauled the rocks…” Cruz kept pointing his beer bottle at the holes Tatan dug in our yard. “Hell, we dug a whole canyon for those Japs… Sorry, Tanaka, I didn’t mean you.”

  Tomas scowled until his tata patted Cruz’s shoulder. “No offense taken. My tata was one of the first beaten and locked up. Japanese t’ought he was a traitor to their Motherland the way he helped American G.I.s who hid.”

  “Stop!” Nana shouted. “Stop talking about when we were prisoners! Some of us don’t want to remember!… Kiko, where’s Tatan? I told you watch him!”

  I’d forgotten about Tatan. And I’d forgotten my nana stood there listening. Was it true? Did something awful happen to Nana during the war? Could what Tatan told Officer Perez about Nana being raped be true? I’d never heard her and Tata talk about being prisoners before. I looked down at my feet so I didn’t have to look her in the eye.

  “In the house, Nana.” Warmth crept up my neck and head. I was just glad it’d gotten too dark for the men to see my shamed face. “I locked Tatan in with Bobo.”

  “With Bobo,” she muttered. “I told you not to let that flea-bitten boonie dog in the house.” She ran to the house, not even stopping when some of the women called to her as she passed them.

  Tata eyeballed the other men. “Best let sleeping dogs lie. No more talking about war, you hear? It’s hard enough Sammy being away at war. It’s giving her nightmares again.”

  “Yeah. Yeah,” all the men agreed. Then someone said, “Let’s eat!” so they headed over toward the tables. Cruz grabbed another beer. He offered it to Tata, but my father shook his head and went inside with Nana instead.

  Neighbor women brought lots of food—fish, rice, beans, pancit, tortillas, and for dessert baked plantains, papayas, mangoes, and coconuts. That’s what I like about Guam; people party for no reason.

  Tomas nudged me with his elbow, pointed at Daphne shaking out a tablecloth, and giggled like a schoolgirl. “Remember when Daphne played Mother Mary? Bet she got an eyeful, especially being the Virgin Mary.”

  I flushed even deeper thinking about how at Christmas when the Las Posadas procession visited my house in search of shelter for Mary and Joseph—Tatan had stripped naked, crawled out of the bathroom window, and ran past Daphne. How much had she seen?

  “Get it?” he persisted. “Virgin Mary?” Tomas giggled again.

  Daphne smoothed the tablecloth over an old door lying across two wooden saw-horses. She looked up, caught me watching her, and smiled. “You okay?” she called over to me.

  I didn’t know I could get any redder. Pretty soon I’d be a
blinking Christmas light. I had it bad for her. But I didn’t want anyone to know. Should I go over and talk to her?

  Before I moved or said anything, Tomas was already hustling over to talk to Daphne. “Yeah, we’re okay. You should have seen it…”

  By the time I joined them Tomas was talking a mile a minute to Daphne about what happened, as if she hadn’t already heard. I just stood there, trying not to stare at how beautiful Daphne was. She’s like watching a doe at dusk. Her tan skin looks so smooth, and her lips are like pink hibiscus flowers in full blossom. If I forget myself and stare at her too long, she gets shy and her lashes brush her cheeks like moth wings.

  “Won’t be long until Confirmation, eh, Kiko?”

  Startled at hearing her say my name, I said something pretty lame, “Yeah, not long at all. April be here plenty soon.”

  I jumped when a wet tongue slurped my leg. Daphne laughed. It was Bobo. “Good boy.” I rubbed Bobo’s head and scratched his ears. “Nana let you out, eh?” Bobo nuzzled my arm.

  Tomas rubbed his hands together. “Let’s eat. Defusing bombs makes me hungry,” Tomas said as if he disarmed and removed the mine himself, and not the navy bomb squad. Yeah, right. Tomas tried to make himself look like the hero, and then he led Daphne to a picnic table to sit down beside him. Bobo crawled under the table.

  Daphne looked as if she was about to ask me to sit down on the other side of her, but her nana sat beside her instead. I wasn’t about to sit with the cross-eyed lion. I can imagine that conversation. Aren’t you the heavy-breather who called? Stay away from my Daphne, you pervert! Then Missus DeLeon might kick me under the table for good measure.

  While I stood there trying to decide what to do, someone handed me a plate heaped with food. But my stomach was still jittery. I picked at it, then took the leftovers down to Simon in the pig pen.

  Thank goodness no one mentioned the holes for the rest of the night.

  Until after the neighbors all went home. My parents must have thought Tatan and I were asleep.

  Only I couldn’t sleep. For the first time in my life my parents yelled at each other. I lay in the dark and listened to them through the bedroom walls.

  “I don’t think we can handle Tatan no more.” Tata sounded worried.

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Tatan’s going to be okay. Kiko will help. We can do it.”

  “Tatan is not okay. He’s not going to be okay. He’s only going to get worse.”

  “Don’t say that! That’s my tata you’re talking about! He’s got to get better. He’s got to, you hear?” It wasn’t like Nana to yell. She must have been really mad.

  “We can’t pretend anymore. Tatan does have lytico-bodig. It’s getting worse. How can we take care of him and run the store, too? And Kiko…” I pressed my head to the wall when Tata said my name. “Kiko has to go to school. Roselina, listen to me, I t’ink maybe… maybe we should send Tatan to live with your brother on Oahu, or the other one in California. They got more money and better, you know, doctors and hospitals and places to help them with this… this dementia t’ing Tatan has.”

  “How can you say that? Send Tatan to California with Tony? His wife’s haole! She’ll make my brother put Tatan in a nursing home. I won’t stand for it! We’re family. Family doesn’t lock away family.” It sounded like drum beats. I bet Nana was pounding her fist against something.

  “Nursing homes are better equipped. It’s not prison. It’s a hospital, with nurses and—”

  “As for Joaquin on Oahu, his Hawaiian wife is kind enough, but… but, Honolulu is too crowded! He’ll get lost and not be found.”

  “You’re being unreasonable. Joaquin doesn’t live in Honolulu. He lives leeward side. Joaquin and Leala were good to Sammy the two years he lived with them during graduate school.”

  “And look where that got our Sammy—in the military! He goes to graduate school to study engineering and he comes back enlisted in the air force,” Nana said.

  “That wasn’t Joaquin and Leala’s fault. Sammy made up his mind on his own.”

  “No matter,” Nana insisted. “Oahu’s not Guam. Tatan will be lost forever if he can’t live, and die, on Guam.”

  “But what are we going to do? When Kiko goes to school?”

  The yelling stopped. I strained to hear Nana’s reply. I got out of bed and pressed my ear near the crack where my door doesn’t meet the floor.

  Nana was crying. I wanted to go hug her like I did when I was a little boy. Tell her Tatan would get better. Sammy would come home. That everything would be all right. Nothing bad would happen. Not now. Not ever.

  It’d be a lie, though. A big fat lie. Just like how I’d been lied to my entire life, thinking nothing bad ever happened to Nana before.

  CHAPTER 8

  GHOSTS

  JANUARY 5, 1972

  Seto lay sealed in his cave, listening.

  Leaves raining on bamboo slats sounded like bones clacking.

  Woo. Woo. Wind whistled through bamboo like flutes.

  Gong. Gong. One large bamboo shoot drummed against smaller, weaker ones.

  Seto could not sleep.

  Planes droned overhead, muffled by dirt packed on top of him. Buried alive. Burrowed in his sepulcher. Still, Seto did not need to be above ground, nor at the apex of the mountain behind his Omiya Jima cave, to know bombers overhead wore no Rising Sun.

  Darkness shrouded Seto’s hiding place. This burial mound he called home. No matter which way he turned, side to side, front to back, he could not rest upon his mat. It itched. He scratched.

  Seto tried to sleep, but to no avail. It felt as if thousands upon thousands of lice and beetles, cockroaches and centipedes and all the insects earth bore scurried millions of legs across his corpse.

  Cold drafts drifted down his vault’s shaft.

  “No! No! I invoke the spirits, leave me alone tonight!” Seto cried. “Sleep, Sleep, I beg of you, bring me peace.”

  He shut his eyes tight. He tried to conjure up images of his mother, who smelled of spring cherry blossoms. He tried to see her steadfast fingers working threads upon her loom. He tried to feel her silky hair, faint silver wisps fallen around her face. He comforted himself by remembering her faded plum kimono, missing its obi she had embroidered and given to him to cherish her by.

  Yet, he could not summon his mother’s spirit, try as he did.

  For they were marching. Marching.

  Seto clasped hands over his ears.

  Not raining leaves, nor whistling wind, not gonging bamboo, nor droning airplanes—especially not the bombers—could drown out the sound of a thousand soldiers marching. Marching. Marching.

  It was the Japanese Imperial Army. His platoon marched through his chasm as if it were their purgatory. Tormented spirits caught between heaven and hell.

  Ghosts. Spirits. Specters.

  It mattered not what name they be called, Seto feared the ghastly ghouls who haunted him by night. Soldiers dressed in battle gear with missing limbs and open wounds reached for him in anguish.

  “Why do you come? Have I betrayed you?” Seto had screamed this out to them before.

  Still, no answer. Except for the sound of leaves raining overhead.

  The soldiers marched, marched, marched through Seto as if he were the shadow, and they, the host.

  Except for headless hara-kiri soldiers who placed grenades under their helmets, all other soldiers wore expressions of suffering.

  “Look, see what I offer.” Seto sat up on his tatami and showed them a paper under a sack that he filled with coconut fibers for a pillow. “See! See the letters! I have written your names. I shall return to the temple and ask Kannon for mercy!”

  Yet they took not his gift, nor slowed their pace. Except one. He turned to Seto, and gaped his mouth open. A voice squeezed out, “You are the only one left.” Then, he turned and marched away with the rest.

  Seto smoothed the memorial sheet and placed it back under his pillow.

  “Enough. Kannon,
goddess of mercy, let this appease the dead. And may you send me no more uninvited guests tonight.”

  But, alas, his greatest fear was that mercy was lost to the dead.

  For man is destined once to die, and after that, face judgment. There seemed no rest, nor rebirth, for these tormented spirits.

  Exhausted, Seto settled in bed.

  He breathed deep. Tossed and turned. And tried once more to shut out the horrors of war.

  He napped. But did he? Sleep and wake hazed into one. What mattered if a dream be day or night? His greatest nightmares haunted him awake. Seto prayed for deepest of sleep. So deep that neither phantom nor wraith appear. Deepest of sleep where no memory walks, but all is dark and empty of voice. Seto welcomed that sleep. Yet feared the sleep of souls so deep that there be no waking evermore.

  It was to that sleep of death that Seto and two comrade stragglers hidden in the heart of darkness sent two unsuspecting Chamorros. These young men appeared again to judge Seto’s hand in their deaths.

  Woo. Woo.…. Woo. Woo.

  It is but Wind playing her flute, Seto thought. He stirred, then settled on his back.

  Woo. Woo.

  Seto gazed up at his bamboo earth ceiling. Coconut oil coated it black. Iridescent pearl traces of the natives appeared. Seto wiped his eyes, then focused again to see if the outlines were but bamboo joints.

  Woo. Woo. Wind blew her bamboo flutes. Woooo. Woooo.

  “Remember us?” the traces said. “We checked our traps in Talofofo boonies.” Seto recognized familiar voices, though in life he gave them no chance to speak. “And looked for betel nut,” one disembodied spirit said.

  Seto knew who they were, though he had seen them alive only once. The night he and his two companions murdered the young men because the stragglers feared they would be found.