Days of Infamy (2 page)

Gulls wheeled and mewed overhead. They descended on fishing boats in vast skrawking clouds, hoping for a handout or a theft. The salt tang of the sea—slightly sullied by sewage—filled Shimizu's nostrils.

He trudged up a pier toward a big merchant ship. Her name—
Nagata Maru
—was painted in hiragana and in Roman letters on her stern. Up the gangplank he went. His boots clanged on the iron plates of the deck. Sailors stared at him as if he were nothing but a monkey. He glared back, but only to show he wasn't intimidated. On land, he knew what he was doing. But this was the sailors' world. Maybe he wasn't a monkey to them. Maybe he was just . . . cargo.

“This way,” Lieutenant Yonehara called, and led them down a hatch into the hold. The
Nagata Maru
had been a freight hauler. Now the freight she would haul was men. Double racks of rough, unsanded wood had been run up in the hold. Each one held a straw mat. They had numbers painted on them. Yonehara checked them. “My platoon goes here.” He raised his voice to make himself heard over the clatter of more soldiers marching with their hobnailed boots on the steel deck not far enough overhead.

Two of his squads got upper racks, two lowers. Corporal Shimizu and his men were assigned to uppers. He wasn't sure if that was better or worse. They were right under the deck and could bang their heads if they sat up carelessly, but nobody was spilling anything on them from above.

The hold filled and filled and filled. The mats on the racks were very close together. If a man rolled over, he was liable to bump into the fellow next to him. “Packing us in like sardines,” Corporal Shimizu said.

Most of his men just nodded. They sprawled on the mats. Three or four of them had started a card game. But a young soldier named Hideo Furuta said, “It could be worse, Corporal.”

“How?” Shimizu demanded—he thought it was already pretty bad.

Furuta realized he'd blundered. Anger at his own stupidity filled his broad, acne-scarred face. But he had to answer: “If it were hot, the deck right above us would be like an oven.”

He was right. That would have been worse. Being right did you little good, though, when you were only a first-year conscript. Shimizu said, “Why don't you bring us a pot of tea?” He'd seen a big kettle in the improvised kitchen up on deck.

“Yes, Corporal!” Thankful Shimizu hadn't hit him, Furuta got down from his mat and hurried up the narrow aisle toward the ladder that led to the deck. He had to go belly-to-belly with newly arriving soldiers coming the other way.

“Hard work!” somebody called after him. That could mean several things: that the work really was hard, or that the man calling sympathized with the one stuck with the job, or simply that the luckless one
was
stuck with it. Tone of voice and context counted for more than the words themselves.

After what seemed a very long time, Furuta came back with a pot of tea. Shimizu thought about bawling him out for dawdling, but decided not to bother. Given the crowd, the kid had done the best he could. By the way the men in the squad praised the tea, they thought the same thing.

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.

Y
OU 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.