“You saved my behind back there in Kona Town, Wendell Lett. I never forgot that. But that was just the start, wasn’t it? And, maybe I might have fallen for you one lili bit meanwhile. So you go. I’m helping you go. That’s how much I care for you.”
She hugged him a long time, then she turned and disappeared inside the lush greenery.
Kanani’s fellow valley dwellers came for him the next day and led him up the old steep road and out of the valley. They put him in the back of a pickup truck for Hilo. From there they would put him on an interisland steamer and then a sea-bound merchant ship, all with full papers in his name, since it was certain he would never be exposed for what he’d endured at The Preserve.
No one would ever believe it. No one would believe him if he talked about it. That alone made him no threat. Talking about it would only prove him insane.
On his long journey back by ship and then by rail and thumb, his dead old friends never visited him, nor did his nightmares. Lett wondered if this meant the war was finally over for him. Could it mean that his troubles were healed, that he finally had his cure? Sometimes this worried him more than anything. Yet his lovely vision of Heloise waiting restored him, just as it once had when he was on the front line. And only then did he realize just how much he had truly missed his Heloise. Seeing her again was like discovering something elementary to existence, as if a whole color had vanished from the spectrum of light yet had now returned.
EPILOGUE
Jock Quinn was killed in 1950, one of the early American casualties of the Korean War. He wasn’t a Marine then, for his beloved Corps would not take him back. But General MacArthur’s US Army had. An initial brief obituary labeled Jock a hero for storming an enemy Communist stronghold to save the lives of his fellow soldiers. The truth came out years later, once the records were finally declassified under pressure from journalists and victims’ families. Jock had seen US air strikes using napalm incendiary bombs on innocent Korean refugees. He had witnessed US troops being ordered to gun down civilians. He couldn’t take it anymore. During an air raid he entered a cave and attempted to pull out the civilians inside being asphyxiated by the fumes. Women and children. His fellow GIs, green and rattled and ready to crack, were shooting them dead when they exited the tunnels. Friendly fire caught Jock. Or, maybe he was just in the way.
AFTERWORD
The story of Wendell Lett is fictional, as is The Preserve itself, but I have plucked certain characters and events from established historical record.
The Imperial Japanese Army and its various confederates did plunder hordes of gold and treasure and goods from Asia. Whether they moved the spoils to the Philippines and buried them in underground caves and shelters is disputed. The topic has become known as “Yamashita’s Gold,” named after the top Japanese general defending the isles from General Douglas MacArthur’s storied return. The clearest and strongest substantiation of the plundering and how it was used once in American hands comes from historians Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, who wrote two books that ask many good questions: The Yamato Dynasty: The Secret History of Japan’s Imperial Family (2000); and Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold (2003). My portrayal of the Japanese Golden Lily program comes mostly from these works.
The ensuing mystery of how the loot has been both exploited and hunted is a compelling story in itself. The Seagraves connect real-life persons to the liberation and commandeering of the plunder. Among them are Japanese gangster Yoshio Kodama and shadowy American intelligence operative Edward G. Lansdale, both of whom appear in this novel.
Edward Lansdale was an enterprising and legendary figure who firmly believed in American exceptionalism and was supposedly the model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Lansdale has been described as being responsible for everything from America’s involvement in the Vietnam War to the Kennedy assassination, depending on the angle. While operating in the Philippines, Lansdale worked to prop up his own man for president, one Ramon Magsaysay, whom Lansdale and the CIA helped in defeating opposing Communist rebels. In the mid-1950s, Lansdale took his road show to Vietnam, and on and on.
I portray these players filtered through a writer’s lens, of course. Where I put them in this book is purely notional. Kodama was in a US military prison during much of the period in this novel—I let him out briefly so he could do what my schemers needed him to do.
As for General Douglas MacArthur, the Seagraves contend that the general visited treasure sites in the Philippines after Lansdale reported them to MacArthur’s Tokyo HQ.
In the postwar years, General MacArthur remained all-powerful in Asia, much like an aspiring emperor who once ruled and consolidated vast regions of the Roman Empire. MacArthur’s power wouldn’t hold, however, as President Truman dismissed the popular commander in 1951 at the height of the Korean War. In this novel, I propose, however, that there never was a problem that powerful money could not fix. And as the Seagraves argue, the plundered Japanese treasure would go on to outlive MacArthur by decades, its profits creating one unassailable legacy after another. It went on to fund CIA missions, and black ops, and on and on, right down to the Nixon administration’s dirty tricks. We see the fingerprints of such machinations on all of our transgressions right through to the debacle that was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And onward today. When, upon leaving office in 1961, celebrated former WWII commander and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, he well knew what he was predicting, warning, and deploring.
After the war, the early days of a reborn US intelligence system constituted a type of Wild West prompted by postwar musical chairs, power plays, and the seminal National Security Act of 1947 that ultimately created the CIA. From this font of intrigues arose the true and disputed existence of clandestine rogue operations and camps, classified psychological drug programs, and even plots against major figures, including assassination. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but there’s enough historical record already released to show such things went on. General MacArthur’s power struggle with President Truman of course existed, made no better by an awkward and brief attempt at reconciliation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at Wake Island in 1950. It came to a head with Truman’s dismissal of MacArthur. Like Lansdale, MacArthur remains a controversial lightning rod for the issue of American might. This stretches back to the 1930s, to MacArthur’s involvement leading the brutal clampdown of the Bonus Army as well as to his courting by right-wing interests scheming to overthrow FDR in the Business Plot—both of which are fact (see The Plot to Seize the White House, 2015, by Jules Archer). As with Lansdale, many either love or hate MacArthur depending on allegiances. I find both characters to be those larger-than-life types that a writer simply can’t resist fictionalizing. So here they roam. Some may not like my depiction of MacArthur’s realm or even of the man himself, but there exists more than enough complimentary nonfiction to offset any concerns. Other true events and characters in this story include Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler (and his War Is a Racket, 1935), US Military Government in Hawaii, Hotel Street in Honolulu, the wartime tragedy on Saipan, early atrocities in the Korean War, and many additional details large and small.
Other characters are completely notional. Kanani Alana didn’t exist, but how I wish that she had. I like to imagine Hawaii celebrating her as a national hero. For her self-styled Hawaiian Pidgin English, I relied on novels by Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body (1975) and Plantation Boy (1998), as well as on the Internet, but especially on the dedicated work of Kent Sakoda (see Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Hawaii, 2003). Previous versions of the manuscript had Kanani speaking hardcore Pidgin throughout—in the end, Kent Sakoda and other wise folks helped me realize that I should ease up on the Pidgin because it might distract the reader. The language dork and literary translator in me resisted, but common sense won out. In any case, all mistakes are my own.
Jock Quinn is also fictional, t
hough millions of sincere yet troubled vets just like him served back then and continue to serve today. Surely, many traumatized vets like Wendell Lett existed, nabbed or not, tens of thousands of them having deserted during WWII and a number never returning. Where did they all go? A few were certainly pressured into severe and damning duties they found themselves all too suited for.
What was often called “combat fatigue” in the postwar years is unfortunately all too real. It has had many names and will remain with us as long as we kill our fellow human beings. Today we know it as PTSD, of course. For research, I’m grateful for The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2015) by David J. Morris as well as countless other sources, including a moving 1946 documentary by John Huston, Let There Be Light. The Army commissioned the film but tried banning it because the truths within were deemed too “demoralizing.” Find it if you can to gain a uniquely disturbing sense of the postwar period.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In addition to Kent Sakoda at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I’d like to thank the countless kind people who assisted me with research in Hawaii. They include Ermile Hargrove, Brandy Field, The Great Barusky, and so many others whose names I didn’t get.
I’m also deeply grateful to the perceptive test readers who slogged through earlier versions of this story and shared their thoughts—thank you a ton Dave Anderson; Gary Cruiser (whereabouts unknown); the crack team of Molly Holsapple, Sherry Cronin, and Lynn Greenwood; and to Mary Bisbee-Beek for her always wise advice. Special thanks to Beth Canova and Kim Lim at Skyhorse Publishing for their keen and invaluable guidance and to Peter Riva for suggesting General MacArthur’s postwar Pacific realm as Wendell Lett’s next destination.
As always, I thank my wife René for all her support and belief in me—and for introducing me to the amazing world of Hawaii.
***
Wendell Lett’s nightmarish experience in WWII is told in my novel Under False Flags (2014).
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