The apartment building plainly didn’t impress her. Well, it didn’t much impress Oscar, either. She did seem surprised when he opened his door without a key. Once she walked in, she said, “Oh, I get it. You don’t bother to lock it because you don’t have anything worth stealing.”
“Only things I own that are worth anything are my car and my surfboard, and my car isn’t worth much,” Oscar answered with another shrug. “You don’t need much to live here.”
Susie didn’t say anything about that. Even so, he got the idea she wasn’t going to stay there forever, or even very long-she was a girl who liked things. He could tell. What she did say was, “You want to lock the door now?”
“How come?” he said, and then, “Oh.”
She laughed at him. He deserved it. He laughed, too. She said, “We were doing something or other when that air raid started.” As if to remind him what, she peeled off her bathing suit.
The bed was narrow for two, but not too narrow. Things were going along very nicely when a great roar made the walls shake and the window rattle-it was a miracle the window didn’t break. Susie squealed. Oscar needed a bit to recover. John Henry the Steel-Driving Man would have needed a moment to recover after that. He’d just started again when another identical roar made Susie squeal again.
This time, though, it didn’t unman him, for he’d realized what it was: “More things blowing up at Fort DeRussy, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” Susie exclaimed. “Jesus!”
Oscar didn’t answer, not with words. After a while, he managed to distract her, which he took as a compliment to himself-distracting somebody from the thunder of those explosions was no mean feat. Susie’s gasp said he hadn’t just distracted her-he’d got her hot. A moment later, Oscar exploded too. He stroked his cheek. “Not so bad,” he said, and tried to believe it. What the hell had he got into, getting into Susie? Well, he’d find out.
AN AMERICAN SOLDIER showed himself. Corporal Takeo Shimizu’s rifle jumped to his shoulder. He steadied on the target, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger. Just like a drill, he thought as the Arisaka rifle kicked. The American crumpled. Shimizu ducked down deep into his foxhole in the pineapple field outside of Wahiawa.
He didn’t feel particularly proud of himself for shooting the enemy. The Americans were brave. He’d seen that since coming ashore. They were braver than he’d expected, in fact, even if some of them did try to surrender instead of fighting to the death. That made for amusing sport.
But shooting them hardly seemed fair. Hadn’t anyone taught them anything about taking cover? He was one of the veterans in his regiment who’d fought in China. You never saw the Chinese bandits till one of them put a bullet between your eyes. They didn’t have a lot of rifles, and even less in the way of heavy weapons, but they made the most of what they had, and of the ground on which they fought.
The Yankees, by contrast, were very well armed-better than Shimizu’s own men, probably. If their air power hadn’t been knocked out, they would have been tough to shift. But they didn’t seem to know what to do with what they had-and they paid the price for it, again and again.
Machine-gun bullets snarled over Shimizu’s head. He laughed. The Americans must have thought he’d stay upright waiting to get shot. They were like someone who covered his belly when you hit him there, then covered his face when you hit him there. They didn’t know what was coming next, and they didn’t think their foes did, either. And they paid the price for being so naive.
Behind Shimizu, a mortar started going pop-pop-pop. The bombs came down around the machine-gun position the Yankees had incautiously revealed. Shimizu hoped they knocked out the gunners. Even if they did, though, they were unlikely to put the gun out of action. A machine gun wasn’t so complicated that ordinary soldiers couldn’t handle it.
Lieutenant Yonehara crawled up to Shimizu’s foxhole. Yonehara had pineapple leaves fixed to his helmet to make him harder to spot. His belly never came up higher off the ground than a snake’s. He pointed south. “Do you see that white frame house, Corporal?”
Shimizu warily raised his head for half a heartbeat. Then he ducked back down again. “Yes, sir. I see it. The one about a hundred meters behind the enemy line?”
“Hai,” Yonehara said. “That is the one. It’s on high ground. Our company has been ordered to seize it. You will prepare your men to take part in the attack.”
“Yes, sir,” Shimizu said: the only thing he could say when he got an order like that. No, not quite, for he did add a few words that expressed his opinion of the order: “Hard work, sir.”
“Yes, hard work,” Yonehara agreed, his voice not without sympathy. “Colonel Fujikawa feels it is necessary, however. I will lead the attack. We will use the sword and bayonet if that is what it takes to clear the Americans from their positions.”
A bayonet made a handy tool for gutting a chicken. If you stabbed it in the ground, the socket held a candle. Shimizu had yet to fight with his. But if the lieutenant led, he would follow. “Yes, sir,” he said. And if the Americans didn’t run, he would give them the bayonet-unless he shot them from close range instead.
“At my order,” Yonehara said, and crawled away. Shimizu passed the news to his men.
Mortar fire picked up. From farther back of the line, field guns started pounding the American position. When Lieutenant Yonehara shouted, “Forward!” Shimizu jumped out of his foxhole and ran toward the American line.
“My squad, with me!” he yelled. They too came out of their holes. Pride filled him. Truly he sprang from a warrior race. How could the Americans hope to stop his comrades and him?
He got the answer to that sooner than he wanted. The Americans hoped to stop them with sheer firepower. The machine gun that had been shooting at him opened up again. So did others that had been silent till then. Onrushing Japanese soldiers fell as if scythed. A bullet tugged at Shimizu’s sleeve, as if to tell him he had to go back or go down.
He kept going forward nonetheless. The platoon commander had given the order, and he had to obey. Lieutenant Yonehara had drawn his katana. The sword blade shone in the sun. It could lop off an arm, or a head-if Yonehara ever got close enough to use it. No sooner had that thought crossed Shimizu’s mind than a bullet caught the lieutenant in the face and blew out the back of his head. He crumpled as if all his bones had turned to water.
Seeing him fall was like waking from a fevered delirium. Corporal Shimizu looked to his right and to his left. A lot of the company was down. Like him, the men still on their feet wavered. If they kept on advancing, they wouldn’t waver. They would die. Shimizu could see that perfectly well. Machine-gun bullets didn’t care whether you were a warrior. They’d kill you any which way.
But the soldiers had been ordered to advance. Shimizu wondered how to change that. The officer who’d given him the order was dead, but the thing itself remained very much alive. Bullets couldn’t slaughter an order, only the soldiers who tried to obey it. No one had ever trained Shimizu or any other Japanese soldier in retreating. If he ordered the survivors to fall back, they might not obey him.
All that ran through his head in less than a heartbeat. And then, fast as lightning, he found the answer. “Men, we’re going to recover our positions!” he shouted. That didn’t say a word about retreat. It got the message across even so. And it gave the soldiers an honorable way to get back to the foxholes and trenches from which they’d emerged.
They took advantage of it, too. Shimizu might not have called it a retreat, but a retreat was what it was. They dragged the wounded back with them and left the dead where they had fallen. American fire stung them all the way back to their starting point.