Before long, all the soldiers packed into the hold made it hot and stuffy in there even without the summer sun beating down on the metal deck above. There were no portholes—who would have bothered adding them on a freighter? The only fresh air came down the hatch by which the men had entered.
Lieutenant Yonehara didn’t stay with the platoon. Officers had cabins of their own. Things were crowded even for them; junior officers like the platoon commander had to double up. Corporal Shimizu didn’t particularly resent their better fortune. Shigata ga nai, he thought—it can’t be helped.
At last, soldiers stopped coming. Had they crammed the whole regiment into the Nagata Maru? Shimizu wouldn’t have been surprised. The engine began to thump. The ship began to throb. The deck above Shimizu’s head thrummed. Army dentists had given him several fillings. They seemed to vibrate in sympathy with the freighter.
As soon as the Nagata Maru pulled away from the pier, the rolling and pitching started. So did the cries for buckets. The sharp stink of vomit filled the hold along with the other odors of too many men packed too close together. Green-faced soldiers raced up the ladder so they could spew over the rail.
Rather to his surprise, Corporal Shimizu’s stomach didn’t trouble him. He’d never been in seas this rough before. He didn’t enjoy the journey, but it wasn’t a misery for him, either.
No one had told him where the ship was going. When the authorities wanted him to know something, they would take care of it. Till then, he worried about keeping his squad in good order. The men who could eat went through the rations they’d carried aboard the Nagata Maru: rice and canned seaweed and beans, along with pickled plums and radishes and whatever else the soldiers happened to have on them.
Every morning, Lieutenant Yonehara led the men topside for physical training. It wasn’t easy on the pitching deck, but orders were orders. The gray, heaving waters of the Sea of Okhotsk and the even grayer skies spoke of how far from home Shimizu was.
When not exercising, the soldiers mostly stayed on their mats. They had no room to move around. Some were too sick to do anything but lie there and moan. Others gambled or sang songs or simply slept like hibernating animals, all in the effort to make time go faster.
The Kuril Islands seemed like an afterthought to Japan: rocky lumps spattered across the Pacific, heading up toward Kamchatka. Etorofu was as windswept and foggy and desolate as any of the others. When the Nagata Maru anchored in Hitokappu Bay, Shimizu was unimpressed. He just hoped to get away as fast as he could. He wouldn’t even have known where he was if the platoon commander hadn’t told him.
He had hoped to be able to get off the freighter and stretch his legs. But no one was allowed off the ship for any reason. No one was allowed to send mail. No one, in fact, was allowed to do much of anything except go up on deck and exercise. Every time Corporal Shimizu did, more ships crowded the bay. They weren’t just transports, either. Ships bristling with big guns joined the fleet. So did flat-topped aircraft carriers, one after another.
Something big was building. When the men went back down into the hold, they tried to guess what it would be. Not a one of them turned out to be right.
YOU CAN BE unhappy in Hawaii as easily as anywhere else. People who cruise over from the mainland often have a hard time believing this, but it’s true. The sea voyage from San Francisco or Los Angeles takes five days. They set the clocks back half an hour a day aboard ship, so that each outbound day lasts twenty-four hours and thirty minutes. By the time you get there, you’re two and a half hours behind the West Coast, five and a half behind the East.
And then, after Diamond Head and the Aloha Tower come up over the horizon, you commonly stay in a fine hotel. You eat splendid food. You drink . . . oh, a little too much. You don’t get drunk, mind. You get . . . happy. You admire the turquoise sky and the sapphire sea and the emerald land. Strange tropical birds call in the trees. You savor the perfect weather. Never too hot, never too cold. If it rains, so what? The sun will come out again in a little while. You want to be a beachcomber and spend the rest of your days there. If you find a slightly brown-skinned but beautiful and willing wahine to spend them there with you, so much the better.
Hawaii is what God made after he’d done Paradise for practice. How could anyone be unhappy in a place like that?
First Lieutenant Fletcher Armitage had no trouble at all.
For one thing, Armitage—called Fletch by his friends—was a green-eyed redhead with a face full of freckles. In between the freckles, his skin was white as milk. He hated the tropical sun. He didn’t tan. He burned.
For another, his wife had left him three weeks before. He didn’t understand why. He wasn’t sure Jane understood why. He didn’t think there was somebody else. Jane hadn’t said anything about anybody else. She’d said she felt stifled in their little Wahiawa apartment. She’d said he didn’t give her enough of his time.
That had frosted his pumpkin—not that frost had anything to do with anything on Oahu. “For Christ’s sake, I give you every minute I’ve got when I’m not with my guns!” he’d howled. He served with the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion—the Lucky Thirteenth, they called themselves—in the Twenty-fourth Division. “You knew you were marrying an officer when you said ‘I do.’ ”
She’d only shrugged. She was small and blond and stubborn. “It’s not enough,” she’d said. Now she had the apartment, and presumably felt much less stifled without him in it. She was talking with a lawyer. How she’d pay him on a schoolteacher’s salary was beyond Fletch, but odds were she’d figure out a way. She usually did.
What Armitage had, on the other hand, was a hard cot at Schofield Barracks BOQ and a bar tab that was liable to outdo Jane’s legal fees. He had the sympathy of some of the officers and men who knew what had happened to him. Others suddenly didn’t seem to want anything to do with him. Almost all of those were married men themselves. They might have feared he had something catching. And so he did: life in the military. If anything could grind a marriage to powder, that’d do it.
He sat on a bar stool soaking up whiskey sours with Gordon Douglas, another lieutenant in the battalion. “She knew I was an officer, goddammit,” he said—slurred, rather, since he’d already soaked up quite a few. “She knew, all right. Knew I had to take care of . . . this stuff.” He gestured vaguely. Just what he had to do wasn’t the clearest thing in his mind right then.
Douglas gave back a solemn nod. He looked like the high-school fullback he’d been ten years earlier. He was from Nebraska: corn-fed and husky. “You know, it could be worse,” he said slowly—he’d matched Armitage drink for drink.
“How?” Fletch demanded with alcohol-fueled indignation. “How the hell could it be worse?”
“Well . . .” The other man looked sorry he’d spoken. But he’d drunk enough to have a hard time keeping his mouth shut, and so he went on, “It could be worse if we spent more time in the field. Then she would’ve seen even less of you, and all this would’ve come on sooner.”
“Oh, yeah. If.” But that only flicked Fletch on another gripe of his, one older than his trouble with his wife (or older than his knowledge of his trouble with his wife, which was not the same thing). “Don’t hold your breath, though.”
“We do the best we can.” Gordon Douglas sounded uncomfortable, partly because he knew he was liable to touch off a rant.
And he did. Fletch exploded. “Do we? Do we? Sure doesn’t look that way to me. This is a hell of a parade-ground army, no bout adout it.” He paused, listened to what he’d just said, and tried again. “No . . . doubt . . . about it.” There. That was better. He could roll on: “Hell of a parade-ground army. But what if we really have to go out there and fight? What will we do then, when we’re not on parade?”
“We’d do all right.” Douglas still sounded uncomfortable. But then he rallied, saying, “Besides, who the hell would we fight? Nobody in his right mind would mess with Hawaii, and you know it.”
Down the hatch went
Armitage’s latest whiskey sour. He gestured to the Filipino bartender for another one. Even before it arrived, he went on, “All this shit with the Japs doesn’t sound good. They didn’t like it for beans when we turned the oil off on ’em.”
“Now I know you’re smashed,” his friend said. “Those little fuckers try anything, we’ll knock ’em into the middle of next week. I dare you to tell me any different.”
“Oh, hell, yes, we’d lick ’em.” No matter how drunk Fletch was, he knew how strong Hawaii’s defenses were. Two divisions based at Schofield Barracks, the Coast Artillery Command with its headquarters at Fort DeRussy right next to Waikiki Beach, the flyboys at Wheeler right by the barracks complex here, and, just for icing on the cake, the Pacific Fleet . . . “They’d have to be crazy to screw with us.”
“Bet your ass,” Douglas said. “So how come you’ve got ants in your pants?”
Armitage shrugged. “I just wish . . .” His voice trailed away. He wished for a lot of things that mattered more to him right now than just how prepared the men at Schofield Barracks were to turn back an attack unlikely ever to come. And those weren’t ants in his pants. He and Jane had been married for five years. He was used to getting it regularly. These past three weeks had been a hard time in more ways than one. He sipped at the drink. “Life’s a bastard sometimes, you know?”
“Plenty of people in it are bastards, that’s for goddamn sure,” Gordon Douglas agreed. “You keep the hell away from ’em if you can, you salute ’em and go, ‘Yes, sir,’ if you can’t. That’s the way things work, buddy.” He spoke with great earnestness.
“Yeah. I guess.” Fletch’s head bobbed up and down. He didn’t feel like nodding. He felt like crying. He’d done that only once, the night he moved out of the apartment and into BOQ. He’d been a lot drunker then than he was now. Of course, he could still take care of that. The whiskey sour vanished. He signaled for a refill.
“You’re gonna feel like hell tomorrow morning,” Douglas said, also putting his drink out of its misery. “If they have live-fire practice, you’ll wish your head would fall off.” That bit of good advice didn’t keep him from reloading, too.
Armitage shrugged. “That’s tomorrow morning. This is now. If I’m drunk, I don’t have to worry about . . . anything.”
“Look on the bright side,” his friend suggested. “If we were back home, there might be snow on the ground already.”
“If you were back home, there might be snow on the ground,” Fletch said. “That’s your worry. I’m from San Diego. I don’t know any more about it than the Hawaiians do.”
“You grew up in a Navy town,” Douglas said. “You’re here where they’ve got more goddamn sailors than anywhere else in the world. So what the hell are you doing in the Army?”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Armitage said. If he had one more whiskey sour, he was going to start wondering about his own name, too. The only thing getting drunk didn’t make him wonder about was Jane. She was gone, and he wouldn’t get her back. That was why he was drinking in the first place. It didn’t seem fair. He turned his blurry focus back to the question. “What the hell am I doing in the Army? Best I can right now. How about you?”
Gordon Douglas didn’t answer. He’d put his head down on the bar and started to snore. Fletch shook him awake, which wasn’t easy because he kept wanting to yawn, too. They lurched back to BOQ together. Patrolling sentries just kept patrolling; it wasn’t as if they’d never seen a drunken officer before, or even two.
The next morning, aspirins and most of a gallon of black coffee put only the faintest of dents in Fletch’s hangover. He managed to choke down some dry toast with the coffee. In his stomach, it felt as if it were all corners. Douglas looked as decrepit as he felt, a very faint consolation indeed.
And they did go through live-fire exercises. Having a 105mm gun go off by his head did nothing to speed Fletch’s recovery. He gulped more aspirins and wished he were dead.
JIRO TAKAHASHI AND his two sons carried tubs full of nehus onto the Oshima Maru as the sampan lay tied up in Kewalo Basin, a little west of Honolulu. Takahashi, a short, muscular, sun-browned man of fifty-five, had named the fishing boat for the Japanese county he’d left around the turn of the century. He watched the minnows dash back and forth in the galvanized iron tubs. They knew they weren’t coming along for a holiday cruise.
He wondered if his sons knew the same. “Pick up your feet! Get moving!” he called to them in Japanese, the only language he spoke.
Hiroshi and Kenzo both smiled at him. He didn’t see that they moved any faster. They should have. They were less than half his age, and both of them were three or four inches taller than he was. They should have been stronger than he was, too. If they were, he hadn’t seen it. They didn’t have the fire in their bellies, the passion for work, that he did. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to give it to them.
Hiroshi said something in English as he set his tub down on the deck. His younger brother answered in the same language. They’d both been educated in American schools on Oahu. They used English as readily as Japanese, even though Jiro had sent them to Japanese schools after the regular schools ended. They went by Hank and Ken as often as by the names he’d given them.
They both laughed—loud, boisterous, American laughs. Jiro shot them a suspicious glance. Were they laughing at him? They sometimes used English to keep him from knowing what they were saying.
All over Kewalo Basin, big diesel engines were growling to life. Blue-painted sampans glided out of the basin and into the wide Pacific. The blue paint was camouflage. The fishermen hoped it fooled the tuna they caught. They knew good and well it fooled other fishermen who might try to poach in fine fishing spots.
Back when Jiro first came to Hawaii, sampans had been sail-powered. Diesels let them range much farther asea. Takahashi muttered to himself as he started the Oshima Maru’s engine. He liked to be one of the first boats out of the basin. Not today, not when he’d had to drag his boys out of bed. Did they think the tuna were going to sleep late, too?
Up at the bow, the two of them were tossing a hollow glass globe as big as their heads back and forth. The net float had drifted here all the way from Japan. A lot of sampans carried one or two of them, sometimes more. They showed up around Kauai more often than anywhere else: some trick of the currents, no doubt.
Jiro hauled in the mooring line and got the Oshima Maru going. His sons went right on tossing the float back and forth. He finally lost patience with them. “Will you two knock off that foolishness?” he shouted.
“Sorry, Father,” Hiroshi said. He didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t look sorry, either. He had a silly grin on his face.
Grimly, Jiro steered the Oshima Maru south and west. “Careful, Father,” Kenzo said. “You don’t want to end up in the defensive sea area.”
The last three words were in English, but Jiro understood them. Kenzo meant the three-mile-square region south of the Pearl Harbor outlet that the Navy had declared off-limits to sampans. The Navy patrolled aggressively to make sure the fishing boats stayed out of it, too. If you got caught in the defensive sea area, you were sure to get a warning and an escort out; you’d probably also draw a fine.
“You think I’m going to give the Navy my money?” Jiro asked his younger son. “Am I that dumb?”
“No, Father,” Kenzo answered. “But accidents can happen.”
“Accidents. Oh, yes. They can happen,” Jiro Takahashi said. “They can, but they’d better not.” Straying into the defensive sea area wouldn’t be an accident, though. It would be a piece of stupidity Jiro had no intention of allowing. His boat went where it was supposed to.
A seaplane buzzed by overhead. A Navy man with a radio was probably reporting the Oshima Maru’s position. Well, let him, Jiro thought. I’m not in their restricted area, and they can’t say I am.
On went the fishing boat. Pearl Harbor and Honolulu sank below the horizon. Jiro and his sons ate rice and pork his wi
fe, Reiko, had packed for them. They drank tea. Hiroshi and Kenzo also drank Coca-Cola. Jiro had tried the American drink, but didn’t think much of it. Too sweet, too fizzy.
It was the middle of the afternoon before they got to a spot Jiro judged likely. He couldn’t have said why he thought it would be good. It felt right, that was all. Some combination of wind and waves and water color told him the tuna were likely to be here. When he was a boy, he’d gone out with his father to fish the Inland Sea of Japan. His father had seemed able to smell a good catch. When Jiro asked him how he did it, he’d just laughed. “If you know fish, you know where they go,” he’d said. “You’ll figure it out.”
And Jiro had. He glanced over to his strapping sons. Would they? He didn’t want to bet on it. Too many things distracted them. He could get them to fish with him, and even to do a good enough job while they were here. But he could have trained a couple of Portuguese cowboys from a cattle ranch on the Big Island to do that. It wouldn’t have made them fishermen, and it didn’t make Hiroshi and Kenzo fishermen, either. To them, this was only a job, and not such a good one. To Jiro, it was a way of life.
He cut the motor. The Oshima Maru drifted silently on the light chop. Not far away, a booby plunged into the sea. It came out with a fish in its beak. That was a good sign. The booby wasn’t big enough to catch a tuna, of course, but it caught the sort of fish on which tuna fed. If they were here, the tuna probably would be, too.
Nodding to his sons, he said, “Throw in the bait.”
Hiroshi tipped one of the tubs of minnows over the side. The little silvery fish, still very much alive, made a cloud in the water. Hiroshi and Kenzo and Jiro dropped their long lines into the Pacific, lines full of gleaming barbless hooks that a hungry tuna might mistake for a minnow. Greed killed. Jiro understood that. The tuna didn’t, which let him make a living. He wondered if his sons did. Compared to him, they’d had things easy. How much good had that done them? Jiro only shrugged.
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