He knew how that worked. He’d been a buck private himself in 1918, and his own sergeant had scared him a damn sight more than the Germans did. He’d gone over the top time after time, till a machine-gun bullet took a bite out of his leg and put him on the shelf for the rest of what the politicians had insisted was the War to End All Wars.
But his unhappiness here was at least as much personal as it was institutional. His company commander, Captain Braxton Bradford, had ordered all his noncoms not to go drinking in San Diego. Bradford’s logic was crystal clear. “Y’all go drinking off the base, you’ll run into sailors,” he’d said-he was as Southern as his name. “Y’all run into sailors, you’ll fight ’em. Tell me I’m wrong and you can go.”
None of the corporals and sergeants had even tried. Les knew he wanted to punch the first swabbie he saw. One of his buddies, another platoon sergeant named Dutch Wenzel, said, “We wouldn’t if those pussies hadn’t blown the fight with the Japs.”
“They did their damnedest,” Captain Bradford answered. “Nobody can say any different.”
No one contradicted that, either. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the troopship carrying the regiment had had to hightail it back to the mainland after the Navy lost. Marines didn’t like running away, even for the best of reasons. There had already been a lot of brawls between angry leathernecks and sailors. Some of the sailors hadn’t even been part of the failed attack on Hawaii. The Marines weren’t inclined to be fussy.
And so Dillon sat in the Camp Elliott NCOs’ club, soaking up a beer and pondering the unfairness of the world-a melancholy pursuit usually reserved for privates and other lower forms of life. It wasn’t so much that he minded drinking with his own kind. He didn’t. But the decor left a good deal to be desired. And the chances of picking up a barmaid were pretty damn slim-there were no barmaids, only Filipino mess stewards to take away empties and sometimes help the bartender by bringing out reinforcements.
When Dutch Wenzel walked into the club, Les waved to him. Wenzel ambled over. He and Dillon were two of a kind: big, fair-haired men with bronze suntans that said they spent a lot of time in the open. Wenzel was a few years younger: too young to have got into the First World War. But he’d served in Central America and in China and on several warships, just like Les.
“Bourbon over ice,” he called to the barkeep, who waved back to show he’d heard. Wenzel nodded to Dillon. “Ain’t this a lovely snafu?”
“What? You mean you’d rather be drinking in Honolulu?” Les said.
“Bet your ass,” Wenzel replied. “And they wouldn’t try and put Hotel Street off limits, either. We’d riot if they did, and so would the Navy. Army, too,” he added after a moment-to a Marine, soldiers were hardly worth noticing.
“We coulda done it,” Dillon said, draining his beer and holding up the glass to show he wanted another one. “If they’d landed us, we could’ve kicked the Japs’ scrawny little ass.”
“Oh, hell, yes,” Wenzel said. He paused while the bartender brought his drink and a new beer for Dillon.
“No doubt about it. They beat the Army, yeah, but they wouldn’t’ve had a chance with us. Not a chance.” He sounded as sure as if he were talking about the sunrise. That the Japanese had beaten the Army might almost have been proof they couldn’t beat the Marines.
“Wonder how long it’ll be before we have another go at the slant-eyed sons of bitches,” Les said moodily, and then answered his own question: “We’re gonna have to build more carriers first. God only knows how long that’ll take.”
“I hope they started ’em before we got whipped out there,” his friend said. “Hell, I hope they started before the bombs stopped falling on Pearl Harbor.”
Dillon nodded. “I wish they would’ve started a long time before that. Then we wouldn’t’ve had to worry about any of this in the first place.”
“Yeah, and then you wake up.” Wenzel knocked back the rest of his drink. He looked over to the man behind the bar and nodded. The barkeep started making him another one. He went on, “Half the guys who joined the Corps in the Thirties did it because they were out of work-no better reason than that.”
“Most of ’em turned out to make pretty fair Marines anyway,” Dillon said. He’d signed up in a wartime burst of patriotism. He didn’t ask why Dutch had. If Wenzel wanted to say, he would, but you didn’t ask. The Marines weren’t the French Foreign Legion, but they came closer than any other U.S. outfit.
II
THE OSHIMA MARU RAN SOUTH BEFORE THE WIND THAT BLEW DOWN FROM Oahu’s hills. The island rapidly receded behind the fishing sampan. Jiro Takahashi tended the sails with more pleasure than he’d ever taken in riding herd on a diesel engine. Up till Hawaii changed hands, the boat, like all the sampans that set out from Kewalo Basin, had had a motor. When fuel dried up, they’d had to make other arrangements.
“I used to do this on the Inner Sea with my father when I was a boy,” Jiro said. “You had to sail then-nobody could afford an engine.”
His two sons, Hiroshi and Kenzo, only nodded. Neither said anything. Jiro realized he might have mentioned his time on Japan’s Inner Sea a time or two-dozen-before. But that wasn’t the only thing that made his sons surly. They’d both been born here on Oahu. Their Japanese was all right-Jiro had made sure of that with after-school lessons-but they both preferred English, a language in which he’d learned only a few swear words and other common phrases. They liked hamburgers and hot dogs better than rice and raw fish. Kenzo was seeing a blond girl named Elsie Sundberg. They were, in short, Americans.
Because they were Americans, they hated the Japanese conquest of Hawaii. They hardly bothered making a secret of it. They hadn’t got in trouble for it, but they’d had endless rows with their father.
Jiro Takahashi had been born near Hiroshima. He’d come to Hawaii when he was still in his teens, before the First World War, to work in the cane fields, make himself some money, and go home. He’d made himself some money: enough to get out of the fields and go back to fishing, which was what he knew best. But he’d never returned to Japan. He’d married Reiko, settled down in Honolulu, and raised his family.
A sigh escaped him. “What is it, Father?” asked Hiroshi, who was standing by the rudder.
“I was just thinking of your mother,” Jiro answered.
“Ah. I’m sorry,” his older son said, and looked downcast. So did Kenzo. Their mother had died in the closing days of the fighting, when the Japanese bombarded Honolulu. The two of them and Jiro had been at sea. When they came ashore, that whole district was nothing but wreckage and fire. No one ever found Reiko Takahashi’s body.
Even there, Jiro and his sons differed. The boys blamed Japan for bombing and shelling a defenseless city. Jiro blamed the Americans for not giving up when their cause was plainly hopeless.
He remained proud to be Japanese. He’d waved a Rising Sun flag when the Japanese Army held its triumphal parade through Honolulu after the Americans finally did surrender. Along with everyone else along the parade route, he’d gaped at the dirty, ragged, glum American prisoners herded along by Japanese soldiers with well-pressed uniforms and gleaming bayonets. The big, hulking Americans weren’t cocks o’ the walk any more. He still made a point of delivering fancy fish to the Japanese consulate on Nuuanu Avenue. He was, in short, Japanese to the core, and glad about what his countrymen had done.
And, being a father whose sons had ideas of their own (and what other kind of father was there?), he wasted no chance to show the younger generation it wasn’t as smart as it thought it was. “These islands are going to stay in the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” he said. “You saw what happened when the Americans tried to take them back. They couldn’t do it.”