by Alan Gratz
“What is the password?” the voice said.
Hideki suddenly understood. The man was a Japanese soldier, and yokai was the challenge word of the day. If Hideki wanted to come through, he had to know the response.
“Yuta?” Hideki guessed.
Suddenly, a Japanese guard stuck a rifle in his face.
Hideki had guessed wrong.
The soldier snatched Hideki’s grenades and led him into the cave at gunpoint. A covered light helped Hideki’s eyes adjust, and he saw the floor of the main cavern was filled with wounded Japanese soldiers. More IJA soldiers with rifles squatted here and there, and at the back of the cave, huddled together, were ten Okinawans, mostly women and children.
“Who’s this?” an IJA lieutenant demanded.
“An Okinawan boy! I caught him outside,” said Hideki’s captor. “He didn’t know the password. He had these grenades on him. I think he’s a spy!”
“I’m not a spy!” Hideki cried. “My name is Hideki Kaneshiro! I’m a member of the Blood and Iron Student Corps. And look—” He opened the sack of photos he carried. “I’ve been protecting images of His Majesty the Emperor!”
The lieutenant nodded his approval. “All right. Get a new uniform over there.”
The corner the lieutenant pointed to was stacked with the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers. He meant for Hideki to take the clothes off a dead man.
Hideki did as he was told. He found a jacket and pants that fit him if he rolled up the cuffs. The pants had bullet holes in them, but at least they were warm. He found a helmet too, but none of the dead soldiers had shoes small enough for Hideki’s feet. He went barefoot instead.
“Water. Bring us water,” one of the injured soldiers moaned. Another grabbed at Hideki’s trouser legs.
“Get over here!” the lieutenant barked at Hideki. “We’re planning an attack.”
An attack? On who, the Americans? But that was crazy! There were only seven healthy soldiers, including the lieutenant.
“The wounded men need water,” Hideki told the lieutenant.
“Don’t waste your time on them,” the lieutenant said. “They’ll be dead soon anyway. The time has come for a counterattack. There is an American camp nearby. We will leave the cave and surprise them just before dawn.”
Hideki couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “But the Americans have lots more men than we do,” he told the officers. “They’ll kill us all!”
The lieutenant ignored him. “Issue grenades to the wounded soldiers who can’t march and tell them to kill themselves when we’re gone. They are not to be captured by the enemy. Any soldier who can walk comes with us on the attack.”
“That’s still not enough!” Hideki argued.
“Be quiet!” the lieutenant cried. He struck Hideki across the face with the back of his hand, sending Hideki to the floor. “Junior officers will speak only when spoken to!” The lieutenant turned to one of his men. “Get the Okinawans,” he said. “We’ll strap explosives to them and send them out ahead of us.”
Hideki watched, aghast, as two of the soldiers dragged an Okinawan woman and her baby out of the corner. The woman was wearing a beautiful blue bashōfu kimono with white flowers on it. How she had managed to keep it clean so long while a battle was raging all around them, Hideki had no idea.
Hideki blinked. Suddenly, he saw the woman as though she and her kimino had been tinted by a photographer—the only spot of color painted on a black-and-white photograph of the war.
And then the soldiers tied a belt of dynamite around her waist.
Hideki lurched forward, trying to stop them. “No! You can’t! They’re not soldiers!”
The lieutenant shoved Hideki back and pulled out his pistol. “You will fight! You will all fight! This is your island, after all!” the lieutenant spat. Hideki was still reeling as the lieutenant slapped the ceramic grenades back into Hideki’s hands. “You should all be the ones dying to defend it, not us!”
This was crazy. Hideki slipped the grenades into his jacket pockets and staggered back, looking for someplace to run, someplace to hide. But there was no other exit from the cave.
The lieutenant pointed his pistol at them all, Okinawans and Japanese alike.
“Now—attack!” the lieutenant screamed. “For Japan! For the Emperor! Attack!”
“All right, boys, let’s show ’em what the Marines can do!” Big John yelled. “Attack!”
Ray took a deep breath and climbed over the ledge of their foxhole. Stay low, don’t bunch up, and run like hell, he reminded himself.
The running like hell was the easy part—Ray was so scared he ran like a locomotive was bearing down on him. Big John did the same on one side of him, Gonzalez on the other.
The hill above them was called Kakazu Ridge. For more than a month, the army had tried to take this one little hill from the Japanese, and every single time the Japanese had beaten them back.
Now it was the Marines’ turn.
Ray, Big John, and Gonzalez stayed five paces apart and ran low as bullets began to fwip into the mud at their feet. A mortar blew up to the left of Ray, and just like that Gonzalez was gone. Gonzalez!
Ray couldn’t stop. Couldn’t think about it. He kept running uphill, his heart thumping so hard he thought it would burst. He slipped and slid as he tried to get traction up the slope, hauling himself up on shredded tree stumps and saplings when he could. Bullets zipped. Grenades boomed. And then suddenly Ray was at the top of the ridge. What they called the “saddle”—the gap in the ridge where two hills came together. Ray could see a small valley just beyond Kakazu, and another, taller mountain range on the other side. The valley might once have been green and lush, but the naval bombardment had left it a stumpy, blackened wasteland filled with giant craters. It was like looking down on the moon.
Ray didn’t have much more time to take in the scenery. He dropped flat and dragged Zimmer down beside him. Somehow the rookie had survived the charge. Big John had too. He flopped down next to Ray in the saddle as blue tracer fire from a Japanese machine gun skimmed the air right above them. A fourth Marine, a recruit so new Ray didn’t even know his name, collapsed on the other side of Big John.
“Am I dead?” Zimmer asked. “Am I a ghost?”
“You’re not dead,” Ray said. “Not yet. But what do we do now, Sergeant?” Nobody else had made the saddle with them.
Big John didn’t seem to hear him, and that’s when Ray noticed he wasn’t wearing his helmet anymore. He didn’t have a right ear anymore, either.
“Big John! Your ear!” Ray yelled. It was a bloody mess, but Big John didn’t seem to notice until Ray pointed to it. Ray dug in his web pack for bandages and wrapped Big John’s head for him.
“Huh,” Big John said, peering over the side of the ridge while Ray worked on him. “I think I can see my house from here.”
“I can’t see a blessed thing!” Zimmer said. He had his face in the mud and his arms around his head.
They were mercifully safe here in the gap between the ridges. But the rest of the battalion was taking heavy fire trying to get all the way to the tops of Kakazu and Kakazu West.
“What do we do?” Ray asked again, this time yelling loud enough that Big John could hear him.
Big John lay on his back, hugging his big BAR like a security blanket. “I figure if we lay low here long enough, some of those Japs from the south slope are going to get it in their heads they can counterattack. That means they gotta come right through us. Turn around and get yourselves in position.”
Ray was already in position. But aiming at any attacking soldiers meant raising his head, and it sounded like the bullets were missing him by inches. It took every ounce of courage he had just to shift his face to the side, and he held his breath as he twisted his chin forward.
Come on, Ray, he told himself. You’re not gonna die with your eyes closed.
Ray let out his breath and opened his eyes. It wasn’t much of a view—just more mud and coral and the
little lip at the edge of the saddle that had kept them all from dying for the past five minutes. Beyond that, through the haze of smoke from mortar and artillery fire, Ray could see a sliver of the green mountains beyond. That was where the Japanese soldiers would come from, if they came at all.
No sooner had Ray thought it than the mortars and grenades stopped falling. He tightened his grip on his rifle. If the IJA wasn’t shooting anymore, that could only mean one thing: The Japanese were about to storm Kakazu Ridge themselves.
“Banzai!” the Japanese lieutenant yelled as the soldiers and refugees streamed outside.
Hideki didn’t want to die. Shigetomo’s mabui took over, and Hideki ducked the lieutenant’s bamboo stick and fled deeper into the cave.
“You! Get back here, you coward!” the lieutenant cried. He raised his pistol and pulled the trigger.
PAKOW! The sound of the lieutenant’s gun was so loud in the little cave that Hideki was sure he’d been shot. He flinched and stumbled to the ground, scuffing his knees. But he wasn’t shot. The bullet had missed him. Heart pounding, Hideki scrambled to his feet and snatched up the sack with the Emperor’s photos. But there was nowhere to run. The front entrance was the only way in or out of the cave. Hideki’s breath came hard and quick as he backed away.
The lieutenant’s eyes were wide with madness. He aimed the gun at Hideki again.
Pakow. Hideki’s eardrums were so damaged that the sound was muted now, but he felt the sting of the bullet as it grazed his arm. It burned white hot, like touching a pot that had been too long over the fire. He cried out, his own voice muffled to him.
The sound of the gunshots had hurt the lieutenant’s hearing too. He winced, closing his eyes and holding his ears. In moments, Hideki knew, the lieutenant would recover and take another shot. Hideki searched desperately for some way to escape.
The air shafts! These man-made caves had air vents cut into them, leading up to the surface.
While the lieutenant still had his eyes closed, Hideki slipped the string of the sack of photos around his neck and scrambled up a hill of dead bodies and into the air shaft above them. There weren’t many places to hang on, but he managed to wedge his knees against the hard rock to hold himself in place. The sack weighed him down and he struggled to climb, his knees barking in pain, his arm burning and bleeding.
Hideki looked down, worried that the lieutenant was going to appear underneath him any moment. But the lieutenant must not have seen him climb into the air shaft. He cried out in surprise, demanding Hideki come out from wherever he was hiding.
That gave Hideki a panicky few seconds to claw himself higher, higher. Just as his hand found the wooden frame at the top of the shaft, he heard the lieutenant cry out again. He’d spotted Hideki! He was looking right up the air shaft!
The lieutenant yelled something at him, something Hideki’s ringing ears couldn’t understand, and Hideki heaved himself up and out of the air shaft as another bullet from below hit the wooden frame, showering him with splinters.
But he was free.
Hideki crawled out onto a hilltop studded with broken tree stumps. There was no chance the tall lieutenant could follow him up the shaft—Hideki himself had barely fit. And the entrance to the cave was nowhere nearby. He was safe. For now.
His limbs near useless, ears still pounding, Hideki rolled into one of the water-filled craters that pitted the ground.
As he lay half submerged, he began to cry again. Great wracking sobs he couldn’t control. Hideki cried for the Okinawans he’d watched get strapped with explosives. He cried for the Japanese soldiers who lay dying in the cave. He cried out of sheer exhaustion. He even cried for the awful lieutenant. Hideki cried until he had no more tears to shed, and then the Okinawan sky cried for him, raining down its own cold tears.
His father was right. Okinawa was a sute-ishi. A sacrificial stone. Just like the Blood and Iron Student Corps. The Japanese army had sent him and the other boys out to fight against an experienced, well-equipped American killing machine with nothing more than a few days’ training and two grenades each. They expected them to die. The Japanese army didn’t care about “protecting” Okinawa or its people. All they cared about was buying themselves enough time to defend their own islands.
Hideki’s face burned hot with anger and shame. He’d believed everything they’d told him. Swallowed all their insults and lies. And for what?
Hideki picked up the sack with the images of His Majesty the Emperor of Japan and flung it away with a scream, picture frames spilling out into the mud. Hideki was done. Finished. There was nothing left to fight for, and certainly nothing left to die for. He would find a squad of American soldiers and surrender to them, just like the leaflets had told him to.
Hideki trudged down the other side of the hill, slipping and sliding in the muck. He spotted American soldiers up ahead, clearing a cave.
Hideki froze, watching in horror as the Americans fired a flamethrower through the cave’s tiny entrance. They hadn’t even checked to see if it was soldiers or civilians inside!
One American soldier spotted Hideki and pointed. He yelled something.
Suddenly, the other soldiers turned and aimed their guns right at him.
“No—wait!” Hideki cried.
Another American with a huge gas tank on his back turned on Hideki with wild eyes—blazing, crazy eyes like the ones Hideki had seen on the lieutenant in the cave. Liquid flame spurted out from the nozzle of the American’s flamethrower. Fwoosh!
Hideki was far enough away that the flames just brushed him, singeing his eyebrows and setting the front of his uniform on fire. He stumbled backward into the mud, desperately patting out the flames. Bullets buzzed like mosquitoes in his ears, and he turned and ran. They were all monsters, the Japanese and the Americans, and he zigged and he zagged, trying to escape their evil spirits, just like his father had taught him.
Hideki didn’t know where he was, or where he was going. He just knew he never wanted to see another American soldier again as long as he lived.
The Japanese were coming.
“Me and Barbecue’ll take the first wave!” Big John yelled. “New guy, Zimmer, you’re the second team. You fire while the first team reloads! Got it? Don’t shoot ’til you see the whites of their eyes!”
Ray took aim through the sights on his rifle. At first he was just looking at green mountains and blue sky, and then suddenly there was a dirty green helmet, and then the face of a Japanese soldier, his eyes wide with surprise at seeing Ray and his rifle team. Ray raised himself up on his elbows and fired his M-1.
Pa-kow! The soldier fell backward down the slope. There was no time to think, no time to do anything but shoot again, and again, as Japanese soldier after Japanese soldier tried to get high enough on the ridge to shoot them back.
“I’m almost out!” Ray yelled. Click! His clip was spent, but there was already another soldier in his sights. Pa-kow! Ray flinched as Zimmer took him down.
“Reload! Reload!” Big John yelled at him. Ray ejected his rifle’s spent clip and scrambled for a new one from the pouches on his belt. He had another loaded and ready to go just in time for him and Big John to take over for Zimmer and the new guy when they ran out.
The Japanese kept coming, and Ray kept shooting. He had to. Pakow. Pakow. Pakow. How long had they been at this? It felt like hours, but Ray knew it had to only be minutes. His arms and shoulders ached.
“I’m running low on ammo!” the new guy yelled. Ray was low too. They all had to be. They didn’t have an unlimited supply of bullets and grenades.
And then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. The Japanese soldiers stopped coming, and Ray breathed a huge sigh of relief and checked his watch.
The whole counterattack had lasted no more than fifteen minutes.
“Hey. You guys still alive?” Big John asked.
“Just barely,” Zimmer called back. The new guy was alive too.
Everything was still and quiet. The Amer
ican mortars weren’t firing because they didn’t want to hit any Marines left alive on the ridge, and for some reason the Japanese mortars hadn’t started up again. The silence was almost more frightening than the attack. Ray knew some Japanese soldier was out there right now with his rifle trained on the very place he was hiding, just waiting for Ray to peek out.
“Now what do we do?” Ray asked.
“Hang on—somebody’s coming!” Big John told them.
Another ground attack? Ray checked his ammunition. He only had two clips left. That was just sixteen bullets. They weren’t going to be able to hold out much longer.
“Same pairs as before,” Big John said, his voice hard. “When we’re out, we’re out, and we make a run for it.”
The top of a head rose on the Japanese side of the saddle, and Ray took careful aim with his rifle. His finger tightened on the trigger as he waited for the soldier’s eyes.
But it wasn’t a soldier. It was an Okinawan woman! And there were more of them. Women. Children. Old men. Refugees. Dozens of them coming up the hill toward the saddle between the ridges. But why here? Why now?
The woman closest to Ray had on the most beautiful blue dress Ray had ever seen. It was covered with white flowers, white like fluffy clouds on a sunny summer day in Nebraska. Ray froze, the woman floating in front of him like some kind of vision. Who was she? What was she doing here, in the middle of a firefight? How in the world had she kept that blue dress so clean when everything else was covered in mud?
The woman was sobbing, Ray noticed, and she held a baby in her arms. With sudden horror, Ray understood why these people were here, now, in the middle of a battlefield.
The woman had dynamite strapped around her waist.
The Japanese were using the Okinawans as human bombs.
“Shoot! Shoot them before they get too close!” Big John roared. Zimmer and the new guy fired, their fear overcoming their discipline.
But Ray was frozen. He couldn’t do it. The woman in the beautiful blue dress staggered closer, closer, her arms wrapped tight around her baby. Protecting him from the monsters in their world.