“Fine, I’ll shoot… that goat. That Jap goat over there. Otherwise a Jap soldier will eat it and get stronger and then try to kill us,” Jones said.
“Makes sense. But better shoot the goat before the Lieutenant shows up. He didn’t want me to shoot the puppy on Day One, so who knows what he’ll say about the goat. He let me kill the wounded guy, but Lieutenant Hooper likes animals,” Marino said. “You hear the way that knife sounds on bone? Fingernails on a blackboard.”
Former Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Retirement Home, Kailua, Hawaii, 2017
WE WENT ON TO storm the farmhouse like real G.I. Joe’s, but there was no one inside. We stayed warm that night believing Marino and Jones were heroes. Marino told me the Japanese soldier was sneaking around behind them so he had to kill him in spite of my orders to not take action. I saw the dead man’s eyes frozen open, looking like a puppy waiting for its mean owner’s slap. I saw the missing fingers, the blood fan spray on Marino, and I saw Jones off to the side, his mouth pressed against the ground to muffle the sound of his vomiting. But I kept my mouth shut, again. It wasn’t until much later I learned the whole story.
Jonesy was simple. There might have been paper in his head that hadn’t been written on yet, and someday might have been, but at that moment there was no chance he could have figured out just because it wasn’t his fault didn’t mean it wasn’t his responsibility.
And sure, sitting here on the lanai 70 years later, with a glass of sweet tea sweating from all the ice I have in it, I can say it was wrong what Marino did, and what Jones did, standing by while it happened. And it was wrong what I did, saying it was all okay by not saying anything. I thought I’d figured this stuff out back in the village, after Marino killed the wounded Japanese soldier in cold blood, but it turned out it wasn’t as easy as I thought.
The first time, at the village, I acted out of what I convinced myself was maybe excusable ignorance of what I’d gotten into. I’d never confronted those kinds of things before and had no idea what was the right thing, so I did the easy thing and congratulated Marino so I’d look tough. The second time, with Marino’s tortured prisoner, I was scared, and I acted out of that fear. I knew it was wrong, for Christ’s sake we all knew it was wrong. You can kill him, maybe even get a medal for that if you do it by the rules, but carving him up to make his death as horrible as you can, there’s no right there. Sometimes the warrior is the war.
I let myself pretend my little war crime was somehow acceptable because I was afraid. And what if the guy Marino tortured really knew something that could have saved American lives? Would I have joined in?
Most times I tell myself no, but sometimes I convince myself yes, and that scares the hell out of me.
Chapter 20: Mama
Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, On Open Ground, 1946
“GET YOUR HEADS DOWN, right now now now.” It was Laabs.
The nearest real cover was a clump of trees about as far from us as home plate is from second base. It wouldn’t have been safe to try for it under fire even if we ran like it was going to rain.
No one saw whatever it was that Laabs saw, but we all kissed the dirt on his command anyway. I’d heard real combat veterans react somehow even before they hear the rounds snap. Maybe they can taste prey in the air. I’d guess if scientists were to study it, they’d find guys like Laabs were picking up on a smell, a tiny click somewhere caught with the fine hairs of their inner ear and passed on to the lizard brain, the smallest of things in the slightest of ways. But we all heard the shot a breath away from hell a moment later.
“You, Private, move up and shoot at something,” I said.
“What should I shoot at, Lieutenant?”
“The goddamn Japs” was the best I could answer.
I could see the village up ahead, same one I’d seen from the frozen rice paddy earlier, where the three men had been pink misted by the mines. We’d made it all the way back closer to where we’d started, at the cost of seven lives. Having failed to do so on the beach, I now fired my weapon, randomly and pointlessly, with the realization that for the first time in my life I wanted to kill other human beings.
“Anybody see where we’re getting shot at from?” I said.
“Maybe near those trees? You might wanna get some men out on to the flanks, would be a good start, Lieutenant,” Laabs said. I might have heard his eyes roll.
“Um, right, you two, start crawling off to the right and see if you can get into the tall grass alive. Try and get around, you know, dammit what’s the word, flank that bunch of trees,” I said. The two ran off.
“The Japs stopped shooting. What should we do, Lieutenant?” Burke said.
The worst words in the English language to me had become “What should we do, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, cease fire, stop now. You two on the flank, this is Hooper, shit, Lieutenant Hooper, can you hear me? We’re ready to provide covering fire for you to advance,” I said, with confidence I didn’t own and they weren’t buying. They refused to move, at first, then reluctantly rose up.
“Sergeant Laabs, how am I doing with this?”
“A lot of on-the-job training opportunities for you today, Lieutenant. You’re handling it like a fish at a swimming lesson, sir.”
WE WERE DOING WHAT the Army calls a “movement to contact,” something that sounded fine in training back at Fort Polk when we were only attacking a swamp. That hadn’t prepared me for this any more than looking at a cake would’ve prepared me to be a baker. Out here we were bait for the Japanese to find and thus expose themselves. It was a lot like hide and seek, except the losers died.
I’d wet myself as those first rounds came in, and hoped it would freeze on my pants before I had to stand up. The two men I’d asked to run out to the flank emerged from cover there. I’d no idea what to do if they hadn’t moved out. I couldn’t figure out how to sound like an officer, talking so that it leaves no way to disagree. The soldiers wiggled forward maybe an inch, then another, then a foot. One shouted he saw a foxhole. Like the inexperienced soldiers they were, the two stood up, took a few steps in the open and leaned over the hole.
The rest of us, minus Laabs, who stayed stapled to the ground, then also stood up and walked over to the hole as if we’d been called to look under the hood of a stalled car and give our opinions on the next step. Could be the carburetor, you know.
“Jap soldier here, sir. He’s real dead,” Marino said. “Like they said in training, shallow foxhole, deep grave.”
“He looks old. And he stinks. Maybe like cow drop,” Jones said. “See, I grew up on a farm, and—”
“Shut up, Jones. Dead men, their bodies let go when they get killed,” Sergeant Laabs said as he walked over. It didn’t seem necessary to spit, but he did.
“So how come we couldn’t smell poop on the boat when that Corporal got greased?” Jones said.
“Likely because you kiddies soiled your own diapers,” Marino said. “Anyway, I smelled it on the boat. I just didn’t say anything is all.”
We’d hit the soldier only once it looked like, a round into his shoulder. The body looked shapeless, like a pile of laundry on the floor, but it was all still there.
“Okaachan…”
“Hell, he ain’t all dead. He’s talking in his Jap talk,” Jones said.
There was a sound like a sock full of dimes hitting wet meat. Marino had shot the wounded Jap soldier again, at point blank range.
“Like it matters how. We’re supposed to kill Japs,” Marino said. “You know they only need two pallbearers at their funerals ’cause garbage cans only got two handles. Anyway, I’ve seen worse shit back in the neighborhood.”
“Marino, watch your mouth, you’re still talking to a goddamn officer,” Laabs said. “Lieutenant, sir, a word?”
“Good job, um, Marino. Okay, Sergeant Laabs, over here. Rest of you keep an eye out,” I said.
Laabs and I walked a few steps away in what was becoming our ritual. The men kept looking at
the dead guy, lowering their voices like they were worried they might wake him up.
“Goddammit Lieutenant, Marino shot a wounded man we should’ve taken prisoner. You didn’t need to condone that,” Laabs said. “You don’t have to be much of a leader, sir, just be one. The men watch you to see how they should act. It matters out here, sir, a lot.”
“I wanted to look tough in front of the men,” I said.
“I understand, sir, I get it, I really do. You want it to be simple, you want it to make sense, but it was just wrong. Hey sir, that a stain on the front of our trousers?”
“Nope, rice paddy water, Sergeant.”
“Ground’s frozen, sir.”
“YOU SEE ME GREASE that guy?” Marino said to the men. “What was he saying before he died anyway?”
“Sounded like okaachan.”
“What’s that mean?” Jones said. “Burke, you got that Japanese phrase book?”
“I’m savin’ it for when we see the geishas.”
“You ain’t never gonna see no geishas. Gimme the goddamn thing,” Marino said. “Okaachan. It means ‘mama.’”
“Same as the Corporal. The guy from Indiana, too, in the landing craft. They all said mama.”
Laabs and I walked over to where the rest of the men had flopped down on the ground, acting like one dead enemy soldier had made for a good day’s work, and it was time to settle back a bit.
“On your feet, contact right.” It was Polanski this time who saw it first.
“Relax, it’s just a Jap girl, waving a white flag,” Marino said.
The girl probably would have been scared to see a full meal in her house; she looked like a marionette, arms and legs all spider thin. She shouted something over her shoulder we didn’t understand, and an old Japanese man came out of the woods. “Yankee, come friend,” he said, pointing toward the village.
We had been told a lot of things about the Japanese people, mostly along the lines that they were fanatics who were going to resist us to their last breath, fighting with sticks and kitchen knives if necessary, suicidal samurai. It happened a few times during the earlier landings on Kyushu, at least we’d heard that from some guy who knew someone that’d been there. And everybody knew about the Sasebo Massacre, where the crazy ass Marines killed 50 unarmed civilians, some women, when they wouldn’t surrender. But after that, there weren’t many more. It got so when a couple of crazed farmers came at our guys with pitchforks, they’d fire a few shots over the farmers’ heads and get behind a wall or something until the old men tired themselves out. Turkey shoots are only fun at first, then you feel sorry for the birds.
Still, according to the field manuals, if it was to be a massacre, this would be the time.
I could see everyone’s breath condensing in the air. Lined up along both sides of the single unpaved street were dozens of Japanese, mostly women and children, a few old men. You couldn’t tell how old the women were closer than somewhere between 15 and 80. No young males of military age, no geishas. They all mostly looked like sacks of bones loosely wrapped with skin, a medieval scene out of some picture book. We were the most powerful military on Earth and we were greeted by the poorest Japan had to push up against us. We stood with our rifles, and they stood silent. Both sides were encountering this situation for the first time, and neither knew what to do.
The war had certainly been here ahead of us. A few houses had been spared, maybe by fate as reminders of what more this war still had left to eat. Some others had burned; they were made mostly made of wood and paper and straw, almost purpose-built to be taken by our firebombs. But the houses that startled me most looked as if they’d just had their legs kicked out from under them. The heavy tile roofs sat more or less intact on top of broken furniture and pieces of wood. From the skeletons of the places, they built them here with roofs too heavy for the wood beams holding them up. Our concussion bombs had their way with that. What kind of boneheads built houses out of paper and wood? Even in Ohio we knew better than that.
A few of the children looked up into our faces, then the women looked, and finally even a few of the old men. Without an order, my men lowered their rifles.
“Sergeant Laabs, move the men back, and be ready to lay down covering fire. Jones, come forward with me,” I said.
“You going to do whatever the hell this is without backup, Lieutenant?” Laabs said.
“Sergeant, rank has its privileges. C’mon, Jones.”
THE FEW YARDS DEEPER into the village were a long walk.
“Bang! Bang! Boku ga Amerika-hei o uttan da yo.”
“Lieutenant!”
“Jones, stop, lower your weapon. It’s just another damn kid. He was playing, shooting at you with a stick. Be easy, Jones. They’re scared.”
“Well, how you think I feel, Lieutenant?” Jones said. Just a farm boy likely out of state for the first time, you could hear the soil in his voice. I remembered now seeing him aboard ship, his lips moving as he read a paperback Western on deck. A man ought to be remembered for something more than that, even Jones.
An old man startled everyone by falling to his knees and bowing until his head touched the ground.
“Makoto ni moshiwake gozaimasen deshita.”
“What’s he saying? Anybody in this village speak English?” I said.
“Yes, I.” It was the same man. “But I wanted apologize Japanese first. Now we can talk English, a little, because I was a merchant sailor. I sailed Kobe to San Francisco. And back, too. My village asked me to talk you, for them.”
“What the hell are you people doing? Why the hell did we almost shoot a child down there? Who was that old soldier who nearly killed me?” I said.
“Please, slow. A long time since English. So now, we are surrendering to you.”
“You can’t surrender, we just liberated you,” I said.
“Sorry, there is some ‘liberate’ on your shirt,” the old man said.
I looked down. Blood from the Japanese soldier, or maybe from one of my men killed on the boat—who could tell, red is red. Then an old woman screamed something in Japanese so sad that I knew it was her husband, the old soldier, we’d shot.
“What about the child down there? Was she trying to surrender?” I said.
“We were afraid of how to contact you after you shot the old soldier. The man you talked to down below said he was not scared, so he sent his granddaughter while he hid in the weeds.”
“What is wrong with you people? We could’ve killed her, for God’s sake,” I said.
“We have lost many children already to your bombs and planes. Now, we ask only for our lives.” The old man stood up, putting his hands on his knees to push himself vertical.
“We’re Americans. You’re free now, dammit. Don’t you know that? Don’t you understand what we’ve done for you? Let’s start over, old man. Any soldiers here?” I said.
“Only the one you killed. He is no longer here.”
“Why was there only one soldier defending a whole village?” I said.
“He was not defending us,” said the old man. “The old soldier served with the Imperial forces in Manchuria long ago. He could barely see. He was not a danger man for you. About one month ago, real Japanese soldiers came here and instructed us to fight to the death when the kichikubeei, ‘The Devil’s Farm Animals,’ came. That is you. It is not a nice word. They said that ji ji old soldier had an obligation to prepare us. He made us sharpen bamboo sticks to use against your guns. He told us to shave the heads of our women so you would find them ugly. He made me teach them to say ‘syphilis’ in English to scare you away.”
“Old man, how come these kids all look so hungry?” I said.
“We do not have much meat. We even ate the dogs, or they ran away.”
“I had to stop my men from killing one we ran across this morning,” I said.
“A dog? If you had shot it we could have fed our children tonight.”
“It was just a puppy. What was that you said before about t
he old soldier and obligation?”
“Mister soldier, we Japanese believe life is controlled by otsutome. I am not sure how to explain it to people like you—maybe, ‘obligation is everything,’” said the old man.
“And so the old soldier had to die to fulfill his obligation to the Emperor? That it? That banzai thing?” I said.
The old man explained things to me like if I was a child. He said the soldier saw us, so tall, so well fed, and knew he had been wrong to try and convince the villagers to fight. They would have all died because of him, and so he did what he had to do. They were weak and I wasn’t. I realized I could do anything I wanted to these people. They couldn’t stop me, only I could do that, and only if I wanted to. None of the rules from home, church, the cops, the consequences, mattered. The war would bury any crime.
Marino had killed the Japanese soldier. Then I said it was okay. Without that second guy—shit, me—it’s just something bad in isolation. But real evil’s participatory. It’s the condoning that makes it cross over into something you learn in church you shouldn’t do.
I didn’t know what to do next, but I knew the others would just stand by when I acted. I could do anything I wanted.
“Jones, give these people some of your rations,” I said.
“The ones you wouldn’t let me give to the puppy?” Jones said. “To them, sir? The enemy?”
Skirmishes
Chapter 21: The Real Lesson from Major Yamada
Eichi Nakagawa: Kyoto Train Station, 1946
AFTER I WATCHED OLD Man Tanaka die inside his home, I welcomed the army recruiters taking me. We traveled to the largest train station in the area, in Nishinomiya itself. It was a two story brick building that used to be a maroon color, the same as the others that were built in all the big cities during the Emperor Meiji’s time. It was just gray now, as there was only soft coal left for heat and the air was smoky.
I remembered train stations from when I was a child. Outside then were always vendors. You could buy snacks and bento lunches for long trips, omiyage souvenirs and so much more that my eyes would spin. At times my parents would allow Naoko to come along with us, or I would go with her and her mother. When her mother would reach into her purse and hand us a few sen—one yen was too large a sum for such things—I always knew what to buy, running with Naoko to the candy man for the fruit drops we loved, called Sakuma.
Hooper’s War Page 14