This Light Between Us

by Andrew Fukuda

  “Enough, boys!” Mother says. “Both of you stop fighting.”

  But Alex isn’t done. “And by the way, she’s also doing her part to help get Father released! Breaking her back at the camouflage-net factory while her oldest son’s doing nothin’ but making pretty speeches—”

  In two strides Frank is looming over Alex, grabbing him by the lapels of his jacket. He hoists him up. “You want to tangle, huh? You think you’re suddenly a tough guy just because you’re enlisting—”

  “Daisuke!” shouts Mother.

  Frank lets go of Alex’s jacket, dropping him into the chair. He glares down with raw contempt at Alex. “You don’t have what it takes to last out there on the battlefield, little kid,” he mutters through gritted teeth. “You won’t last an hour.”

  He storms out, his words echoing off the walls.

  Alex doesn’t know this now, but those words will haunt him terribly. This last awful scene with Frank will be replayed in his mind over and over, in countless sleepless nights for months and years to come.

  42

  APRIL 10, 1943

  Alex and Mother walk slowly to the bus, Alex with a duffel bag slung over his shoulders. All the other enlistees have already boarded, having said their goodbyes to mostly mothers who are now huddled together. It’s a small group of enlistees. Not nearly as large as the army had hoped for, not even close.

  Alex and Mother stop just outside the door. The bus engine humming, its windows steaming up.

  He looks past her shoulder. Maybe he will yet see Frank sprinting over to say goodbye, swallowing the remnants of his breakfast, a gee-whiz look of apology on his face. But he’s nowhere to be seen.

  “Say bye to Frank for me,” Alex says.

  Mother nods. She’s stooped against the wind, swaying slightly. She seems a thousand years old. “I wanted to give you a senninbari,” she says, referring to thousand-stitch belts that many Japanese mothers made for their sons heading to war, six-inch-wide white sashes with a thousand ornamental French knots, each sewn in by a different woman and worn under the uniform. “But you gave me no time. So I made this instead.” She reaches into her pocket, and withdraws an omamori, a simple amulet made of wood. “Keep it close to you always, Koji-kun.”

  He rubs the freshly cut wood. “I will.” He looks at her. I’m sorry I’m leaving you, Mother. I’m sorry I can’t be here for you. Those words mired in his throat, choking him.

  She reaches up to place her hand over his cheek. The first time she has ever done this. “You be safe. You come home alive.” Her eyes well up.

  “I will, Mother.”

  She smiles, sadly. “All those camouflage nets I made at the factory. I hope one of them finds its way to you. I hope it hangs over you. Because then it will feel like I’m with you. That it’s my hand over you, protecting you somehow.”

  He nods. “I have to go now.”

  They look at each other. So much left unsaid.

  He finds an empty seat at the back as the bus pulls away. He stares out the window. She is standing by herself, removed from the group. So small. So alone. The farther the bus pulls away, the more she seems to unspool, the more she disintegrates.

  He wonders what it must be like around the country when young men head for war and leave their hometowns. He imagines a joyous affair, a festive mood. Crowds of well-wishers lining small town streets, the waving flags, the ticker tapes, the signs lofted high, the children jumping up and down, mothers dabbing their eyes with tissue, the pep band playing, the final kisses between lovers. A celebration, a rally. For these soldiers, their chests burn with an uncomplicated, pure patriotism that is a lava of red, white, and blue as they leave to fight for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  But not so for Alex, not so for the other young men in the bus. This instead: a churning. A mix of sadness, guilt, inner conflict. Their patriotism convoluted. They stare somberly back at their mothers and family who are already fading into the distance, who will soon be as small and inconsequential as the dust that gathers around them and blows them away.

  PART THREE

  WAR

  43

  On April 13, 1943, just as Alex Maki and thousands of other Japanese American men arrive at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, to begin military training for the all-Nisei 442nd Regiment, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt speaks before the Congressional Subcommittee on Naval Affairs in San Francisco.

  “A Jap’s a Jap,” he declares. “They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen; theoretically, he is still a Japanese, and you can’t change them. You can’t change him by giving him a piece of paper.”

  APRIL 13, 1943

  CAMP SHELBY, MISSISSIPPI

  The young men exit the steam locomotive with loopy grins and stiff legs. On the station platform, two train porters, old black men in white coats, attempt to assist them. If these two porters are surprised to see this stream of Japanese Americans pouring out of the train, they don’t show it. They’ve learned through hard decades in the deep South to mask their emotions. They only extend their arms, offering to help with luggage. But no one gives up their overstuffed duffel bags. The young men—or soldiers, as they now regard themselves—hoist their bags onto their shoulders, and, with necks crooked and backs stooped under the unwieldy load, head down the length of the platform to awaiting army trucks. Though their legs are weakened from days cooped up in the train, excitement hastens their strides.

  No sergeant yells at them, no lieutenant directs them. It’s self-explanatory enough: climb into the beds of the awaiting GI trucks. Hurriedly, as if the trucks might at any moment depart without them, they rush over and climb aboard.

  Alex is the first to jump in. This truck is not so different from the one that transported him from his farmhouse to the ferry pier on Bainbridge Island. The same overhanging canvas, the same dark green, the same cloying stink of gasoline. But this time there are no soldiers with bayoneted rifles escorting him. This time he is the soldier.

  The trucks lurch forward, and those sitting in the rear are almost thrown out of the opening. Hey, we almost had our first fatality. They chuckle, they grin. Give that kid a Purple Heart, he survived. The laughter, echoey under the thick canvas, is full of camaraderie. Thick smoke chuffs out of the mud-splattered trucks. There are big stars painted on the doors of the front cab, another on the rear tailgate.

  Alex stares at these stars. He thinks of Charlie, of the yellow star she’d said she was forced to wear. He wonders, as he does almost every day, where she is. He wants to believe she is safe, hiding in a secret room in Paris, or perhaps already escaped south. But perhaps not. Perhaps she is somewhere horrible, the place of his visions, a prison where the cold air is filled with ash—and this is the point when Alex always turns off his mind, refuses to think any further.

  The ride is bumpy. The men stare out the open back. They point at road signs, town names, anything that might give them a clue where they’re headed. When signs for HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI pop up, someone says, “I told you all along it was Camp Shelby.”

  Camp Shelby is set out on a spread of flat land: mostly boxy barracks laid out in a grid, not unlike Manzanar or the nine other Japanese American internment camps around the nation. But there the resemblance ends. These surroundings are less desolate or harsh. Thick, lush vegetation surrounds the camp, even encroaching into it in places, lending a warmer, homier feel. Tall trees stand interspersed between the smaller barracks, and break up the monotony of the layout. A water tower stands regally in the center of camp, like the church steeple of a small quaint town.

  And here there is no barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. No guard towers with machine guns pointing inward. No searchlights at night sweeping across the barracks. There are rules, yes, to be sure; and there are consequences if you break them. But here if you walk past the perimeter without permission, you will not get shot. You might be forced to do an overnight
fifteen-mile march, but you will not be gunned down.

  A white soldier in his forties barks at them. He has stripes and insignia on his shirt, but none of the young men have yet learned what they signify. It is the man’s whiteness and his age that gives him rank and authority, and though the young men have yet to learn the proper at-attention posture, they instinctively stand with straight backs and arms pressed against their sides.

  They are issued uniforms. Two pairs of winter pants, two khakis, two shirts. The winter pants are too warm to wear, but the army still issues them anyway. Everything is too big: boots two sizes too large, shirts that button down to their crotches, khakis that flow a foot past their toes.

  A few complain. A few—including Zack Okutsu, who passed the minimum height requirement by literally a hair—ask for smaller sizes. They’re ignored.

  In another building, they’re issued equipment: a canteen cup, mess kit, aluminum knife, fork, spoon. A service belt, too large, which they will later add notches to. They’re herded into the mess hall, wide-eyed and curious, hitching up their pants, clutching their mess kits. It is past mealtime, and they are served the day’s leftovers: powdered eggs, cold slices of ham, slaw, and hot dogs.

  “Hey, at least we didn’t have to line up,” someone at the table says. No one finds that funny.

  After the meal, in the fading light, they’re taken out to the field. All their duffel bags have been thrown into a giant heap. For a moment, Alex thinks crazily that it’s all going to be lit in a huge bonfire. A white sergeant, not much older than them, steps forward. “Last ten to find their bag will be assigned latrine duty tonight.”

  The young men stare at one another. No one moves. A boy from Hawaii—more than half of the soldiers here are from Hawaii—is the first to spring into action. He leaps forward, sprints toward the pile of duffel bags. That snaps the collective stupor: at once, everyone else charges, hands clutching their baggy, droopy pants. They descend on the pile like a pack of wolves.

  It is pandemonium. Elbows flying, bodies jostled. Hands stomped on, faces kicked inadvertently and, as the minutes pass and the number of remaining bags dwindle, not so inadvertently. A few men stop to upchuck still-intact chunks of sauerkraut and ham, wasting precious seconds. Then there are only twenty soldiers left. Including Alex. Panic sets in. They tug-of-war over the remaining bags, start throwing punches.

  The sergeant observes all of this with a wry smirk on his face.

  A duffel bag tumbles from out of nowhere, unnoticed. Alex grabs it. Not his. Doesn’t matter. He scampers away with it and melts in with the others, the duffel bag turned away to keep the written name—SHIG HAYASHI—hidden from view. The unlucky last ten are ordered to the latrines where they will spend the night cleaning urinals and toilet bowls.

  Everyone else is taken to their barracks. Or “hutments,” as they are called. These are square-shaped huts with thin wooden walls that go only as high as Alex’s armpits. Wire mesh screens rise from the top of these walls to the eaves. The roof is—much like the army trucks—a canvas covering.

  Alex finds an empty cot beside an unused charcoal stove. He is faintly aware of others, maybe a dozen, lying on cots or playing cards, but he is too tired to care.

  “You a kotonk?” someone says from across the room. A strange accent. “Where you from?”

  “What?” Alex says, his arm lying across his eyes.

  “You a kotonk? Wass your name? Wassamatta why you no talk to me, braddah? You a kotonk or what?”

  Alex has no idea what a “kotonk” is. A minute later he is fast asleep.

  That night he dreams of latrines.

  “Everyone out of bed and fall out. Now!” And that is how Alex is introduced to Sergeant Grieves, by a cannon of a voice shattering into his sleep. Then out onto the field where he is the last to arrive, his boots untied, the laces flinging about, his shirt untucked down to his thighs. The group is already doing push-ups, and he throws his stiff body to the ground and into a push-up. His head spinning, in a dazed blur.

  It is how he will spend the next few days, in a haze of half-awake, half-asleep existence of marches, drills, exercises, exhaustion, snatches of sleep.

  By the third day their feet are blistering from marches through swamps and drills in ill-fitting shoes. Their bodies are ravaged by mosquitoes, leeches, and wood ticks. Their legs marked in bloody scabs and scratches from all the chigger bites. Little red bugs that burrow deep into the pores of the skin. You couldn’t not scratch, it was that itchy, even as your skin inflamed into an angry red.

  Teddy Ikoma, a skinny boy with a slight frame, fights tears every night. He is last in everything: last out of bed, last out of the showers, last to finish eating, last in the marches, last in every single drill. But he never once thinks about quitting.

  * * *

  A reprieve arrives on the fourth day. In the form of a math test. After breakfast they are taken to a different mess hall. Pencils are distributed, most worn to the nub, some without lead. A few raise their hands to complain, holding up their blunt pencil stubs. Those soldiers are ordered out into the heat to do push-ups. Other hands holding blunt pencils quickly lower. A set of test papers is distributed to each soldier. Some sets are missing pages; some have answers only partially erased; some are torn in half. Now no one complains.

  “You have half an hour,” the corporal says. He props his feet up, reads a magazine. The soldiers stare blankly at the math sets, at the geometry problems.

  “Is this a joke?” someone in the back mutters under his breath. “Like, we’re all supposed to be good at math, right, because we’re Japanese?”

  Some stare dumbly at their leadless pencils. Unable to write, they scratch their heads, their itchy crotches. They fall asleep. Others attack the pages with gusto, their pencils rasping across the pages. Minutes pass. Pages rustle, the sound of autumn leaves blown across asphalt sidewalks. Some discreetly copy answers from the soldier next to them, not knowing they are writing their way to a 17 percent. Shig Hayashi writes over the faint outlines of the half-erased answers, unaware that in a week he will be, based on his top score, assigned to the artillery battalion where he will become known as the stupidest person ever to make the 522nd Artillery Battalion.

  On the fifth day the men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team are assembled. Thousands of Japanese American men who will eventually be assigned into three infantry battalions, one artillery battalion, and several service companies. Some will be sent early to join the only other all-Nisei battalion, the 100th Infantry Battalion, which is already seeing heavy combat in Italy.

  Colonel Charles W. Pence delivers a formal welcome to the assembly. He is a white man standing on a stage staring at an ocean of Japanese American faces before him. Alex is expecting a lecture. Or an ingratiating speech about listening to (white) authority, the need to obey in all things, about proving their patriotism. Instead, this man speaks to them man to man, American to American. Soldier to soldier.

  “You men have more than an opportunity,” Pence says into the mike. A hush has fallen among the assembled thousands. So quiet, even the swaying tree branches can be heard. “You have a challenge. If there is any one lesson the history of America has taught, it is this: that the rights of American citizenship must be defended before they can be fully enjoyed.”

  Something about this man: a no-nonsense muscularity about him, a sincerity that is pure. Not a hint of patronage. A man who—Alex senses this in his gut—would be giving the exact same speech in the exact same tone to an assembly of white soldiers. Alex closes his eyes, lets the man’s words sink into his bloodstream. It is the first time he feels less like a tossed piece of rag and actually a soldier.

  His next thought: Frank should be here. Frank would love it here. Frank would be incredible here.

  * * *

  The Nisei soldiers. By day, in the heat of the broiling sun, they are the same. They sweat the same, they bleed the same. In their marches, in their drills, in their roll call, there is syn
chrony and orderliness. When they jog with weighted backpacks pulling them down, chanting right, right, right-left-right, there is unity. As they pump out push-up after push-up, shouting out the ascending numbers in unison, as they salute the flag together, shout Sir, yes, sir! together, puke together, simmer together, groan together, suffer together, they are brothers-in-arms.

  But in the late afternoon when training ends, it all dissolves away. The boys from Hawaii separate from the boys from the mainland. The Hawaiian boys take off their fatigues and go about bare-chested, even the scrawny ones. They whip off their boots, the stink almost flaming out, and either wear zori slippahs or go around barefooted. Instead of heading straight to the showers like the mainlanders, they whip out cards. Shoot dice. They go days, in fact, without washing. A cloud of underarm stink hovers around them. Only when they get yelled at by a corporal do they shower. They squat everywhere. They stay up all night to play cards in the latrine, the only area with light after midnight. They chatter all the time in pidgin, an odd combination of English, Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Spanish, and Filipino. To Alex and the other mainlanders, it is a crude, almost primitive form of English. Barbaric.

  From the get-go, the two groups mistrust each other. The mainlanders look down on the Hawaii boys as uncouth and coarse and call them “Buddhaheads.” “Buddha” because it sounds like puta, the Japanese word for “pig.”

  For their part, the Hawaii boys hate the haughty mainlanders just as much, if not more. Hate the hoity-toity English with which they speak. The refined way they hold utensils to eat, never replying until all the food is swallowed. Hate the manner in which they dress, careful always to tuck in their shirts and button up the sleeves even when the corporal isn’t around. Hate how they run too cautiously, how they scale the obstacles with fear, and with a certain daintiness, too. Hate how their pale skin burns under the sun, how the backs of their smooth hands are lined with delicate blue veins. The boys from Hawaii see these mainlanders as nothing more than brownnosing toadies, always kissing up to the haole superiors. They are weak, lacking heart, lacking substance—they are, in other words, kotonks, the hollow sound coconuts make when knocked together.