No Surrender (24 page)

At that point Kozuka growled, “You shouldn't do things halfway. You need a stronger vine than that. Why didn't you look until you found one?”

He was accusing me of being lazy, and I could not let that go by.

“I'm still tired from last night,” I protested. “Anyway this is good enough to carry the stuff as far as we're going.”

That started it, and for a while we bickered with each other, fatigue making us all the angrier. Eventually Kozuka, looking furious, stormed off into the woods. He came back just under an hour later carrying a very strong vine. Taking out his bolo knife, he cut off the vine I had used and began lashing the roofing with the new vine. There was triumph in his profile. I kept my mouth shut, because I knew that if I said anything, we would be at it again. We hardly spoke to each other all afternoon.

In the evening, I put my roll on my back and prepared to move on. Kozuka, walking ahead of me, began grouching about what I had done earlier in the day. I put up with this in silence until he spat out the words, “From now on, I'll lead the way, so you just follow!”

That stopped me dead in my tracks.
He
would lead the way?

“Just hold on a minute, Kozuka,” I said. “I'm not going to take that lying down!”

During all my time in the army, I had never once sent Kozuka or any other of my men in front to protect myself. I could not let him get away with a nasty remark like that. I took off my pack and plopped down on the ground where I was.

Speaking quietly, I said, “I can get along by myself, and I can carry out my duties by myself. I'm grateful for all that I've learned from you and Shimada about living in the mountains, but I am an officer, and I am responsible for the war on this island. Up until now I've acted in accordance with my own judgment, and I'm prepared to take responsibility for what I've done.”

Looking at me insolently, he said, “Second Lieutenant Onoda, sir! Keep it to yourself! I'm fed up with your sermons!”

“Sermons?” I countered. “I am merely stating facts. I'm simply pointing out to you where you're wrong.”

“Why you lazy, good-for-nothing . . .”

He was so mad he could not go on. By this time, our Tagalog
ikaos
had given way to the most abusive army language, and I was almost as excited as he. Suddenly I realized that I was losing control of myself; shouldering my pack again, I walked on ahead. We both needed to go somewhere and cool off.

I had not taken ten steps when Kozuka threw a rock and hit me in the back. I whirled around and found him preparing to throw more rocks.

“Stop that, you idiot!” I shouted.

The command only made him worse, and he started raving.

“Who's an idiot? Not me. I'm no idiot! I know who's on my side and who isn‘t. You don't listen to me, so you're not on my side. You're an enemy! You're an enemy of Japan, and I'm going to kill you!”

I put my pack down again and looking straight into Kozuka's
eyes said, “We've been together a long time. Whenever I've given orders, it has been because I thought they were for the good of my country and my people. I consider you my comrade, and I've tried very hard all this time not to say anything that would harm you or hurt your pride. It hasn't always been easy, because I'm human too. And still, every once in a while you go into your song and dance about how my faulty leadership caused a lot of soldiers to surrender, how I undercut Akatsu, how I was responsible for Shimada's death.

“You don't know it, but whenever you go off on that tack, one of four situations exists. Either the weather is bad, or the enemy is stronger than we thought, or you're tired and discouraged because something hasn't gone according to plan, or chow is late and you're very hungry. It's only when one of those things happens that you get angry and start criticizing me. The situation today is number three—you're very tired, and a couple of things haven't gone the way you wanted them to.

“Why can't you be cooler and more objective? There are only the two of us, after all.”

“Shut up!” he cried. “I told you I don't want any more sermons.”

“All right then,” I replied. “I've said what I had to say. If you still want to kill your only comrade, go to it. I'll do you the favor of dying for you. But after I'm dead, it's up to you to go on living. It's up to you to fight twice as hard to cover my share.”

Rough waves were breaking in the ocean nearby, but I could not hear anything. I do not think Kozuka could either. All sound around us was shut out; we faced each other in silence.

Thirty or forty seconds passed, and Kozuka said quietly, “Lieutenant, you lead the way.”

Those words made us closer comrades than we had been before. I nodded silently and started off on the rocky path.

The islanders called us the “mountain bandits,” the “kings of the mountain,” or the “mountain devils.” No doubt they had good reason to hate us.

One year just before the rainy season we stopped for a few days about halfway up Snake Mountain. At one point we decided to “step out” to the nearby village and look for supplies. We hid our packs and around sundown started down the mountain. Coming out at a spot somewhere between Vigo and Malik, we peered from the safety of a small hillock out over the nearby fields. We saw a young girl with a bandanna around her head and a boy in an undershirt and shorts. They appeared to be watering the vegetables growing in the field. It was already fairly dark, and if they were still working in the field, they must live nearby.

Keeping our bodies low and moving closer, we soon saw the roof of a nipa house nestled among the banana trees. We had never seen the house before and wondered when they had built it.

When we came out of the bushes, we saw the girl walking toward the house beyond the banana field. The boy had disappeared. The girl went into the house and soon came out again with a man who appeared to be her father. They started preparing their dinner on an outdoor hearth near the door. We slipped up behind them and forced them at gunpoint back into the house. Inside was a darkish, dingy room where an elderly woman, presumably the mother, stood motionless with fright as she watched us. We began searching the hut, but there were only a few articles of men's clothing among a lot of women's things.

I motioned for the man to give me his flashlight; trembling with terror he handed it over. The battery was so near dead that it was useless. The only food to speak of was some unpolished
rice, and we found neither sugar nor cigarettes. Near the back of the room there was a pair of new basket-weave sandals, which I took.

“There's nothing else here,” I said, “so we may as well go back.”

But at that point the man started talking in Tagalog, and I gathered that he wanted to go outdoors and take his pot off the fire. I nodded permission, and the girl and her father tumbled out of the house as though they were falling from a ladder. After the man had removed the pot, he said something that seemed to mean that the rice was just right, and then he offered it to us.

“Should we eat it?” asked Kozuka.

“Why not?” I replied.

The girl had gone back into the house. We thought she was helping her mother prepare something to go with the rice, but when we looked inside, we found that the mother was gone. We immediately saw where the woman had removed a floor board and crawled out on the other side of the house, doubtless to run for the police. That did not seem to matter much, because it would be some time before they arrived, and we could eat in the meanwhile.

Just as we were finishing, the mother came back. We knew it was time for us to leave, but somehow we felt we ought to pay the woman back for her treachery. Scowling, we pointed our rifles at the girl and the father, and I said, “You're coming to the mountains with us.”

Upon hearing that, the girl sank to the floor and got a tight hold on the doorpost. The father started pointing to the rice pot to remind us that he had fed us.

Kozuka and I shook our heads in rejection of his plea, and I took out a match as if to set fire to the house. The daughter started talking in Tagalog. I could not understand her, but I suppose she was praying, because at the end she said “Amen.”
The natives on the island were almost all Catholic, and there was a picture of Christ on the wall.

I said, “I guess we've scared them enough. After all, they did give us dinner. Let's beat it!”

But just then I heard the report of a gun, and a bullet tore through the roof. The mother and daughter flattened themselves out on the floor, and the man ran out of the house. For a moment we considered staying and putting up a fight, but it seemed like a spendthrift way to use ammunition. We ran out the door and made straight for the jungle, keeping low to avoid the fire that we could hear behind us. After running about a hundred yards, we dived into a thicket of trees, where we stopped to catch our breath. The police did not pursue, and from there on we climbed the mountain at our customary pace, grumbling to ourselves about having been reported on the sly. Kozuka was so angry that he threw the basket-weave sandals into a clump of bushes and left them. As we proceeded toward Snake Mountain, we could still hear sporadic fire. Once when we looked back, we saw flashlight beams crossing each other back and forth.

Several months after that, we discovered that the islanders were coming in large numbers to the Vigo River valley, and we went to a hut near the quarry at Tilik to scare them away. On the way back, we were surprised by the police, who had received an early report of our foray, and who now had us in a crossfire from a distance of only about thirty yards. We escaped by diving into some
gaba
hedges, but one bullet ricocheted into my ankle and wounded me slightly.

When we reached our base, I opened the brand-new waterproof tent that I had found at the hut and discovered that the lettering on it said “Mitsubishi Trading Company.” This was gratifying, because it confirmed our belief that war and commerce were being carried on independently of each other. At the same time, the police at Tilik had moved against us with
such speed that we decided to be more careful in the future.

On the last day of every year, we went to a river and washed all of our clothes. Like most Japanese, I set great store by the New Year's celebration, and in that season at least I liked to have on fresh, clean clothing. The year-end washing was one of the major events on my private calendar.

On the last day of 1971, we did our washing in the middle reaches of the Agcawayan River, where the water was clear and rapid. As it turned out, this was my last New Year's Eve with Kozuka. The location was not far from Wakayama Point, where I encountered Norio Suzuki in February, 1974.

We started washing before the sun was well up. We did our caps, our jackets, trousers, loincloths, stomach wrappers and leggings—everything that we were not wearing at the time. As we were finishing up, Kozuka exclaimed in alarm, “My pants are gone! They must have been carried off by the current.”

This could be very bad. The river flows down into a village called Brol, but even if the pants did not get that far, they were very likely to be spotted by islanders fishing between the village and where we were. Our whereabouts could easily be guessed at, but aside from that, we were vain enough not to want to give the islanders a close look at the patched-up clothing we were wearing. We started running down the river, splashing water all over ourselves. We ran a hundred yards, two hundred yards, five hundred yards, but no sign of the pants. We made our way back upstream, looking slowly and carefully all the way, but the trousers were not to be found.