Bridges at Toko-Ri

by James A. Michener

  But Brubaker had a special significance, for on recent cruises Admiral Tarrant had adopted the trick of selecting some young man of about the age and rank his older son would have attained had the Japs not shot him down while he was trying to launch a navy fighter plane on the morning of Pearl Harbor. Tarrant found satisfaction in watching the behavior of such pilots, for they added meaning to his otherwise lonely life. But in the case of Harry Brubaker the trick had come close to reality. The Banshee pilot had the quick temper of his sons, the abiding resentments, the courage.

  Admiral Tarrant therefore desperately wanted to leave flag plot and go down into the ship and talk with Brubaker, but custom of the sea forbade this, for the captain of any ship must be supreme upon that ship, and even the flag admiral who chances to make his quarters aboard is a guest. So Admiral Tarrant was cooped up in flag plot, a tiny bedroom and a special bridge reserved for his use. That was his country and there he must stay.

  There was a knock upon the door and the aide said, “Sir, it’s Brubaker!”

  The good-looking young man who stuck his head in was obviously a civilian. He wore two big bathrobes and heavy woolen socks but even if he had worn dress uniform he would have been a civilian. He was a little overweight, his hair was a bit too long and he wasn’t scared enough of the admiral. Indelibly, he was a young lawyer from Denver, Colorado, and the quicker he got out of the navy and back into a courtroom, the happier he’d be.

  “You can scram now,” he told the medical corpsman who had brought him up to the admiral’s country.

  “Come in, Brubaker,” the admiral said stiffly. “Cup of coffee?” As he reached for the cup Brubaker didn’t exactly stand at attention but the admiral said quickly, “Sit down, son. How’s the Banshee take the water?”

  “All right, if you fly her in.”

  “You keep the tail down?”

  “I tried to. But as you approach the water every inclination is to land nose first. Then from way back in the past I remembered an October night when our family was burning leaves and at the end my mother pitched a bucket of water on the bonfire. I can still recall the ugly smell. Came back to me tonight. I said, ‘If I let water get into the engines I’ll smell it again.’ So I edged the plane lower and lower. Kept the engines up and the tail way down. When the nose finally hit I was nearly stopped. But I was right. There was that same ugly smell.”

  “How was the helicopter?”

  “’That kind in back deserves a medal.”

  “They handle the rescue OK?”

  “This man Forney. When I looked up and saw that crazy hat I knew I had it knocked.”

  Admiral Tarrant took a deep gulp of coffee and studied Brubaker across the rim of his cup. He knew he oughtn’t to discuss this next point with a junior officer but he had to talk with someone. “You say the green hat gave you a little extra fight?”

  “You’re scared. Then you see an opera hat coming at you out of nowhere. You relax.”

  “I would. Forney was in here a few minutes ago. Put me right at ease. Implied I was doing a fair job. You’ve got to respect a character like that. But the funny thing is ...” He looked into his cup and said casually, “Captain of the ship’s going to get rid of Forney. Says the hat’s an outrage.”

  Brubaker knew the admiral was out of line so he didn’t want to press for more details but he did say, “The pilots’d be unhappy.”

  The admiral, far back in his corner of the davenport, studied the bundled-up young man and jabbed his coffee cup at him. “Harry, you’re one of the finest pilots we have. You go in low, you do the job.”

  Brubaker grinned. He had a generous mouth and even teeth. His grin was attractive. “From you, sir, I appreciate that.”

  “Then why don’t you stay in the navy? Great future here for you.”

  The grin vanished. “You know what I think of the navy, sir.”

  “Still bitter?”

  “Still. I was unattached. The organized units were drawing pay. They were left home. I was called. Sometimes I’m so bitter I could bitch up the works on purpose.”

  “Why don’t you?” Tarrant asked evenly.

  “You know why I don’t, sir. The catapult fires. There’s that terrific moment and you’re out front. On your way to Korea. So you say, ‘What the heck? I’m here. Might as well do the job.’ ”

  “Exactly. The President once rebuked me publicly. I’d had that big fight with the battleship boys because they didn’t think aviation was important. Then the brawl with the air force, who thought it too important. I know I’ll never get promoted again. But you’re here and you do the job.”

  “It would be easier to take if people back home were helping. But in Denver nobody even knew there was a war except my wife. Nobody supports this war.”

  At the mention of Brubaker’s wife the admiral unconsciously reached for the file of papers, but he stopped because what the young pilot said interested him. “Every war’s the wrong one,” he said. “Could anything have been stupider than choosing Guadalcanal for a battleground? And look at us today!” With his cup he indicated on the chart where the permanent snow line, heavy with blizzards and sleet, hung a few miles to the east, while to the west the mountains of Korea hemmed in the ships. “Imagine the United States navy tied down to a few square miles of ocean. The marines are worse. Dug into permanent trenches. And the poor air force is the most misused of all. Bombers flying close air support. Militarily this war is a tragedy.”

  “’Then why don’t we pull out?” Harry asked bluntly.

  Admiral Tarrant put his cup and saucer down firmly. “That’s rubbish, son, and you know it. All through history free men have had to fight the wrong war in the wrong place. But that’s the one they’re stuck with. That’s why, one of these days, we’ll knock out those bridges at Toko-ri.”

  Flag plot grew silent. The two men stared at each other. For in every war there is one target whose name stops conversation. You say that name and the men who must fly against the target sit mute and stare ahead. In Europe, during World War II it was Ploesti or Peenemunde. In the Pacific it was Truk or the Yawata steel works. Now, to the navy off Korea, it was the deadly concentration of mountains and narrow passes and festering gun emplacements that hemmed the vital bridges at Toko-ri. Here all communist supplies to the central and eastern front assembled. Here the communists were vulnerable.

  Finally Brubaker asked, “Do we have to knock out those particular bridges?”

  “Yes, we must. I believe without question that some morning a bunch of communist generals and commissars will beholding a meeting to discuss the future of the war. And a messenger will run in with news that the Americans have knocked out even the bridges at Toko-ri. And that little thing will convince the Reds that we’ll never stop ... never give in ... never weaken in our purpose.”

  Again the two men studied each other and the admiral asked, “More coffee?” As Brubaker held his cup the old man said gruffly, “But I didn’t call you here to discuss strategy. I’m supposed to chew you out.” With the coffee pot he indicated the file of papers.

  “They crying because I wrecked that wheel?”

  “No. Because of your wife.”

  The astonishment on Brubaker’s face was so real that Tarrant was convinced the young man was unaware his wife and two daughters were in Japan. Nevertheless he had a job to do so he asked, “You knew she was in Japan?”

  “She made it!” A look of such triumph and love captured Brubaker’s face that the admiral felt he ought to look away. Then quietly the young man said, “This is more than a guy dares hope for, sir.”

  “You better hope you don’t get a court martial.”

  “I didn’t tell her to come,” Brubaker protested, but such a huge grin captured his face that he proved himself a liar.

  Tarrant kept on being tough. “How’d she get here without your help?”

  “Politics. Her father used to be senator from Wyoming.”

  Brubaker closed his eyes. He didn’t care w
hat happened. Nancy had made it. In the jet ready rooms he had known many pilots and their women troubles but he kept out of the bull sessions. He loved one girl. He had loved her with letters all through the last war in New Guinea and Okinawa. The day he got home he married her and she’d never given him any trouble. Now she was in Japan. Quietly he said to the admiral, “If she’s broken a dozen rules to get here it’s all right by me.”

  The old man didn’t know what to say. “War’s no place for women,” he grunted.

  Then Brubaker explained. “If my wife really is in Japan, I know why. She couldn’t take America any longer. Watching people go on as if there were no war. We gave up our home, my job, the kids. Nobody else in Denver gave up anything.”

  This made the admiral angry. “Rubbish,” he growled. “Burdens always fall on a few. You know that. Look at this ship. Every man aboard thinks he’s a hero because he’s in Korea. But only a few of you ever really bomb the bridges.”

  “But why my wife and me?”

  “Nobody ever knows why he gets the dirty job. But any society is held together by the efforts ... yes, and the sacrifices of only a few.”

  Brubaker couldn’t accept this, Tarrant realized, and he was getting mad in the way that had characterized the admiral’s sons. The old man had learned to respect this attitude, so he waited for the young pilot to speak but Brubaker happened to think of his wife waiting in Japan and his anger left. “Look,” he said. “It’s sleeting.” The two men went to the dark window and looked down upon the silent carrier, her decks fast with ice, her planes locked down by sleet.

  “It’ll be all right by dawn,” the old man said.

  “You ever hear what the pilots say about you and the weather? ‘At midnight he runs into storms but at take-off the deck’s always clear, damn him.’ ”

  The admiral laughed and said, “Three days you’ll be in Japan. No more worry about takeoffs for a while.” He slapped the papers into a basket. “I’ll tell Tokyo you had nothing to do with bringing your wife out here.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Quickly the admiral resumed his austere ways. Shaking Brubaker’s hand he said stiffly, “Mighty glad you were rescued promptly. Why don’t you see if the surgeon can spare a little extra nightcap.”

  As soon as Brubaker left, Tarrant thought, “His wife did right. If mine had come to Hawaii when our oldest son was killed, maybe things would have been different.” But she had stayed home, as navy wives are expected to, and somewhere between the bombing of Pearl Harbor, where she lost one son, and the battle of Midway, where her second was killed trying to torpedo a Japanese carrier, her mind lost focus and she started to drink a lot and forget people’s names until slowly, like petals of apple blossoms in spring, fragments of her gentle personality fell away and she would sit for hours staring at a wall.

  Therefore it angered Tarrant when civilians like Brubaker suggested that he, a professional military man, could not understand war. Quite the contrary, he knew no civilian who understood war as thoroughly as he. Two sons and a home he had given to war. He had sacrificed the promotion of his career by insisting that America have the right weapons in case war came. And now in Korea, of the 272 pilots who had initially served with him in his task force, 31 had been killed by communist gunfire. Tonight he had come within two minutes of losing Brubaker, the best of the lot. No one need tell him what war was.

  He was therefore doubly distressed when the people of the United States reacted like Brubaker: “Hold back the enemy but let someone else do it.” He felt that his nation did not realize it was engaged in an unending war of many generations against resolute foes who were determined to pull it down. Some of the phases of this war would no doubt be fought without military battles. Whole decades might pass in some kind of peace but more likely the desultory battles would stagger on and from each community some young men would be summoned to do the fighting. They would be like Brubaker, unwilling to join up but tough adversaries when there was no alternative. And no matter where they might be sent to serve, Tarrant was positive that they would hate that spot the way he and Brubaker hated Korea. It would always be the wrong place.

  As if to demonstrate afresh how ridiculous Korea was, the aerologist appeared with the midnight weather reports from Siberia and China. Since these nations were not officially at war, their weather stations were required to broadcast their customary summaries, just as American and Japanese stations broadcast theirs. But since Korean weather was determined by what had happened in Siberia and China two days before, the admiral always had the tip-off and the enemy gained nothing.

  “All wars are stupid,” the old man grunted as he filed the Siberian reports. “But we’d better learn to handle the stupidity.” He recalled England and France, dragging through their Korean wars for more than two hundred years. They had avoided panicky general mobilization and millions of citizens must have spent their lives without worrying about war until something flared up like Crimea, South Africa or Khartoum.

  “And their wars weren’t even forced upon them,” he growled. Secretly he was frightened. Could America stick it out when dangers multiplied? If Englishmen and Frenchmen, and before them Athenians and the men of Spain, had been willing to support their civilizations through centuries of difficulty when often those difficulties were self-generated, what would happen to the United States if her citizenry abandoned the honorable responsibilities forced upon her by the relentless press of history?

  He went up on the bridge to check the rolling sea for the last time. “What would they have us abandon to the enemy?” he asked. “Korea? Then Japan and the Philippines? Sooner or later Hawaii?” He walked back and forth pondering this problem of where abandonment would end, and as the sleet howled upon him he could not fix that line: “Maybe California, Colorado. Perhaps we’d stabilize at the Mississippi.” He could not say. Instead he held to one unwavering conviction: “A messenger will run in and tell the commissars, ‘They even knocked out the bridges at Toko-ri.’ And that’s the day they’ll quit.” Then reason might come into the world.

  Upon that hope he ended the long day. He had checked the wind and the weather and the rolling of the sea and the number of planes ready for the dawn strike and the location of those storms that always hovered near his ships. He had posted the night watches and he could do no more.

  LAND

  IT WAS the greatest liberty port in the world. It had more variety than Marseilles, more beauty than Valparaiso. Its prices were cheaper than New York’s, its drinks better than Lisbon’s. And there were far more pretty girls than in Tahiti.

  It was Yokosuka, known through all the fleets of the world as Yu-koss-ka, and almost every man who had been there once had a girl waiting for him when he got back the second time. For in the cities near the port were millions of pretty girls who loved American sailors and their hilarious ways and their big pay checks. It was a great liberty port.

  Now as the Savo moved cautiously in toward her dock hundreds of these girls waited for their sailors and thousands were on hand for sailors they had not yet seen. Grim-faced guards kept the invaders away from the ship, but the girls did gather outside the gates, and among them on this windy, wintry day was one especially handsome girl of twenty dressed in plaid skirt from Los Angeles, trim coat from Sears Roebuck, and jaunty cap from San Francisco. She wore her jet hair in braids and kept a laugh ready in the corners of her wide, black eyes. Her complexion was of soft gold and seemed to blush as some of the other girls caught a glimpse of the Savo and pretended they had seen her sailor.

  “There’s green hat!” they cried in Japanese.

  “You don’t worry about green hat,” she replied, pressing against the fence.

  A comic among the girls put her right hand high above her head and swaggered as she had seen Mike Forney swagger on earlier leaves, and excitement grew as the Savo approached her berth. But this morning the girls would have to stand in the cold a long time, for there was a sharp wind off the sea and the lumbering
bulk of the carrier presented so much freeboard for the wind to blow against that tugs with limited maneuvering space could not hold her from crashing into the quay, and emergency measures were clearly necessary. Accordingly the bull horn wailed the bad news, “F4U and AD pilots prepare for windmill.”

  Every propeller pilot cringed with disgust but none showed such outrage as one of the jet men. Stocky, florid faced, with a cigar jutting from his teeth, this forty-year-old Annapolis man whipped his bullet head and underslung jaw toward the bridge to see what stupid fool had ordered another windmill. As “Cag,” commander of the air group, he was in charge of all planes and felt sickened as he watched the propeller jobs wheel into position. He was about to storm off the flight deck and raise a real row when Brubaker, standing with him, caught his arm and said, “Take it easy, Cag. You don’t have to pay for the burned out engines.”

  “It’s murder,” the Cag groaned as his valuable prop planes were lashed down to the edge of the deck which threatened to crash against the quay. Their noses were pointed into the wind and their unhappy pilots sat in the cockpits and waited.

  “Start engines,” yowled the bull horn. Sixteen valuable engines revolved and sixteen sets of propeller blades tried to pull the big carrier away from the quay, but the effort was not sufficient, and the Savo appeared certain to crash.

  “Engines full speed,” moaned the bull horn and the noise on deck became great as the props clawed into the air and magically held the great ship secure against the wind.

  This caused no satisfaction among the propeller pilots, for since their planes were stationary on deck, with no wind rushing through to cool them, each engine was burning itself seriously, and one plane mechanic rushed up to the Cag with tears in his eyes cursing and crying, “They’re wrecking the planes! Look!”

  One of the low-slung F4U’s had begun to throw smoke and the Cag ran over to study it. He chomped his cigar in anger and said grimly, “They’re killing these planes.”