Afterwards-but only afterwards, when the red madness of battle eased-he wondered why the Hawaiians sold their lives so dear. Did they think the USA would hang them for traitors and they had nothing to lose? Did they really hate Americans? Or were they simply as much caught up in the madness as the men who faced them? He couldn’t even ask a prisoner afterwards. There were no prisoners. Like Napoleon’s guards, like the Japanese who’d given them guns, the men from the Royal Hawaiian Army died but did not surrender.

Once the last of them had died, Les Dillon squatted in a muddy trench and lit a cigarette. He’d just finished bandaging a Marine’s leg. He hoped the man wasn’t hamstrung. All he could do was hope; he was no corpsman. Another Marine who’d also come through unhurt stared at him from about ten feet away. He too had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Fuck,” he said, and then again:

“Fuck.”

Les nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and, “Jesus.” That amounted to about the same thing. If he’d spoken first, he would have said what the younger man had.

He looked around. These torn-up trenches weren’t worth a thing by themselves, any more than one German trench had been worth anything in particular during the War to End All Wars. How many men had died defending them? How many had died or been maimed taking them? He knew the answer to the last question, knew it out to the tenth decimal place: too goddamn many. He threw down the cigarette butt and lit a new one.

A runner came over from the right. “What are you guys sitting around with your thumbs up your asses for? Pick up your feet-get moving. Back where I came from, they’re going forward like Billy-be-damned.”

A burst of weary profanity answered him. Les said, “Cut us some slack, okay? We almost got our heads handed to us here. Those fucking Hawaiians wouldn’t give up for shit.”

“Goldbricks. I knew you guys were goldbricks,” the runner said.

“Goldbricks, my ass,” Les said. Even after a fight like the one he’d just been through, sometimes your own side was a worse enemy than the bastards who’d been trying to kill you. “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“Hawaiians,” the runner sneered. “You can’t bullshit me about Hawaiians-I damn well know better. We had Hawaiians in front of us, too, all decked out like the Army was when the shit hit the fan. They fired two, three shots and then threw down their pieces and threw up their hands. We musta took a company’s worth o’ POWs.”

The man meant it. Les could see that. He and the other Marines who’d just gone through hell stared dully at the irate runner. “Fuck,” he mouthed, as the youngster had a few minutes earlier. He gathered his men by eye. “Come on,” he said. “We gotta get back in the goddamn war.”

THINKING BACK ON THINGS, Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa couldn’t account for being alive. Most of the men from his regiment had died at or near Oahu’s northern beaches. They’d done everything they could to throw the Americans into the sea. They’d done everything they could-and it hadn’t been enough.

Furusawa stayed alive after the first day’s fighting-one of the few who did. Naval bombardment didn’t kill him. Neither did U.S. air strikes. Nor did enemy artillery and small-arms fire. By the second morning, nobody survived to give him orders.

He’d retreated several times since then. For one thing, he had no one left to tell him not to. For another, he wasn’t a typical soldier. Most of the men in his regiment-even most of his noncoms-had come into the Army straight off a farm. A lot of them had had to learn how to make up a bed that stood on a frame instead of just on the floor. They sucked up the indoctrination about the duty to die for their country along with the rest of their training till it became as automatic as slapping a new clip into an Arisaka.

It wasn’t that Furusawa was unwilling to die for Japan. Like any soldier with a gram of sense, he knew that was always possible, often likely, sometimes necessary. But he was less inclined to die if it wasn’t necessary than most of his comrades. Because he was a druggist’s son, he’d got more education than the average conscript. And his father had taught him to think for himself in a way most Japanese didn’t.

“You always have to worry. Is this the right medicine? Is this the right dosage? Will it be good for this patient? Never assume anything. Always check, always question-always.” Furusawa didn’t know how many times he’d heard his father say that. And the old man, being a typical Japanese father in a lot of ways, would usually follow the advice with a clout in the ear to make sure it sank in. The method was brutally simple. The Army used it, too. Like a lot of brutally simple things, it worked.

In his innocence, the younger Furusawa had gone on asking questions after he was conscripted. The Army, far more brutal than his father ever dreamt of being, soon cured him of that-at least of asking them out loud. But the habit of thought persisted. He would sometimes smile to himself when he ran into things that made no logical sense. Even smiling could be dangerous. He was convinced he got more than his share of thumps and slaps because he didn’t act like a patriotic machine. Of course, he didn’t know a single soldier who wasn’t convinced he got more than his share of thumps and slaps, so who could say for sure?

After the Americans landed, he’d fought hard. But he’d watched other soldiers rush across open ground to try to come to close quarters with the enemy. And he’d watched rifles and machine guns and mortars and artillery shells tear them to bloody shreds before they accomplished a thing. If a sergeant or a lieutenant had shouted at him in particular-“You! Furusawa! Forward!”-he supposed he would have charged, too. No superior had. That left him to use his own judgment. And he was still alive and fighting, while flies buzzed around the bloated, stinking corpses of most of his regiment.

How long he could escape becoming a bloated, stinking corpse himself was anybody’s guess. He crouched in a shell hole not far in front of the ruins of Schofield Barracks. The U.S. Army’s former base had been smashed twice now, first by the Japanese when the Yankees held it and now by the Americans to keep Japan from getting any use out of it.

Several of the men nearby were stragglers and orphans like himself. Others belonged to a company whose captain wasn’t shy about grabbing reinforcements wherever he could. A corporal spoke in bitter frustration: “Those stinking bastards!”

“Who?” Furusawa asked. That could have meant either the enemy or the Japanese high command.

“The Yankees,” the corporal answered. “When the wind blows from them to us, you can smell their cigarettes. When was the last time you had one?” Naked longing filled his voice.

“Please excuse me, but I don’t smoke,” Furusawa said.

“Ai!” The noncom’s disgusted grunt might have meant, Why do they saddle me with idiots like this? Furusawa’s cheeks heated. The corporal went on, “Well, even you’ll know they don’t send many smokes from Japan. I haven’t had one for weeks. American tobacco’s good, too-better than what we use ourselves. I’m tempted to sneak over there and cut somebody’s throat just so I can steal his cigarettes.”

He sounded as serious as a funeral. “Are cigarettes worth risking your life for?” Furusawa asked.

“Why not? I’m going to get killed pretty damn quick anyway,” the corporal said. “Cigarettes or hooch or pussy-might as well have fun while I can.”

That made more sense to Furusawa than it might have to a lot of his countrymen. “You don’t think we can win?” he said.

“Win, lose-who gives a shit? They’ll use us up either way.”

And that made sense to Furusawa, too, however much he wished it didn’t. All the phrases the Japanese Army used to convince its men to fight to the end no matter what came bubbling up in his mind. He didn’t bring any of them out. But even thinking them at a time like this showed he’d been more thoroughly indoctrinated than he thought. What were such words worth on a real battlefield, with the stench of death and its lesser cousin, the stench of shit, all around?