The POWs did get fed, after a fashion. They were marched past a pot of rice. Each man got a spoonful, shoved straight into his mouth by a cook who looked as if he hated them all. Everybody got the same spoon. Fletch didn’t care. By then, he would have eaten rice off a cowflop. He would have thought about eating the cowflop, too.
Hardly any locals were on the street. The ones who were seemed to cling to the sides of buildings and to do their best not to make themselves conspicuous in any way. They watched the prisoners with frightened eyes.
Through Honolulu. Through Waikiki. Fletch had a pretty good notion of where they were going by then.
When he turned out to be right, he started to laugh. The POW next to him must have thought he was nuts, and might not have been so far wrong. “What’s so goddamn funny?” the man demanded.
“This is where I came in,” Fletch answered.
Back to Kapiolani Park and the POW camp there. Back through the barbed-wire gates that had let him out when the Japs decided they’d sooner get work from their prisoners than leave them sit around idle and starving. As long as they were going to starve us, they could use us while we wasted away. Oh, yeah. That’s what you call efficiency.
Fletch wondered why the Japanese were bringing prisoners back here now. To keep them from running off to the Americans? That was bound to be one reason. To keep the Americans from shooting them up by mistake? In spite of his misery, he laughed again. The next sign the Japs showed of worrying about what happened to POWs would be the first. To gather a lot of prisoners together in one place so they could be massacred more easily? He looked at the machine guns in the towers out beyond the barbed wire. That seemed alarmingly likely.
And what could he do about it? Not one single, solitary thing, not that he could see. The gate shut behind his gang of POWs.
He looked around. The camp wasn’t so insanely crowded as it had been the last time he was here. That would have encouraged him if he hadn’t feared most of the missing men were dead.
His old tent had been right about… here. It was gone. Somebody else had the spot now, and had run up a lean-to that looked as if it would stop leaning and start collapsing any minute now. The barracks still stood, but he didn’t want anything to do with them. Any place where POWs congregated in large numbers was liable to be a place where the Japs could get rid of them in large numbers.
He didn’t mind sleeping on the ground. Why should he? He’d done enough of it lately. There was bound to be canvas to scrounge, and sticks as well. Before long, he could rig some kind of shelter to keep off the rain. Till then, he wouldn’t worry about it, not in this weather. Getting wet mattered much less than it would have on the mainland. He did head for the one water fountain in the park. The march down had left him dry as a bone.
Because the POW camp wasn’t so crowded, the line at the fountain was shorter than it had been in days gone by. Even so, while he waited another gang of POWs came in. He finally got to the water, and drank and drank and drank.
“Been through the Sahara, buddy?” asked the guy behind him.
“Feels like it.” Fletch splashed some water on his face, too. It felt wonderful. At last, reluctantly, he gave up his place.
Still more prisoners came into the camp. Fletch remembered what some crazy Roman Emperor had said, a couple of thousand years earlier. It went something like, I wish all humanity had a single neck, so I could cut off the head at one blow. He wished that hadn’t come back to him from whatever history class he’d heard it in. It described what the Japs looked to be doing here much too well.
THE TROUBLE WITH MORTARS was, you could hardly hear the bombs coming in before they burst. Les Dillon caught a faint hiss in the air and threw himself flat just in time. The fragments from the mortar round snarled past above him. He allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief. The Japs had a particularly nasty little weapon the Americans called a knee mortar. It wasn’t fired off anyone’s knee, but one man could serve it, and every other Jap infantryman seemed to carry one. One of those bombs had almost punched his ticket.
Schofield Barracks lay not far ahead. Bombers had largely leveled the barracks halls. The Japanese didn’t seem to care. They were as ready to defend rubble to the death as they would have been to save Hirohito’s crown jewels.
A machine gun fired several quick bursts from the direction of the barracks-a reminder to Les to keep his head down, as if he needed one. The Japs were even tougher than he’d figured they would be. Logically, they didn’t have a prayer. They had no air cover left. They had next to no armor, and what they did have wasn’t good enough. If he were their CO, he would have dickered a surrender on the best terms he could get.
They didn’t think that way. They didn’t surrender, period. The only Japs who’d been captured were men either knocked cold or too badly hurt to get away or to kill themselves. They also took no prisoners.
God help you if you tried to surrender to them. Sometimes their wild counterattacks would overrun U.S. forward positions. Les had helped recapture one or two of those. The American corpses he’d seen made him hate the enemy instead of just being professionally interested in getting rid of him, the way he had been with the Germans in 1918. After that, he wouldn’t have let any Japs give up even if they’d tried.
One of the green young Marines in his platoon, an open-faced Oklahoma kid named Randy Casteel, hunkered down near him and asked, “Sarge, how come the Japs do shit like that? Don’t they know it just makes us want to fight ’em even harder?” His drawl only made him sound more horrified and more bewildered than he would have without it.
Les Dillon was bewildered, too, and he’d seen a lot more nasty things over a lot more years than Private Casteel had. “Damned if I can tell you,” he answered. “Maybe they think they’re scaring us when they do that kind of stuff to a body.”
“They got another think comin’!” Casteel said hotly.
“Yeah, I know.” Les also knew the Japs hadn’t done everything to bodies. Some of those poor men-most of them, probably-were alive when the enemy got to work on them. He could only hope they’d died pretty soon. “We just have to keep pushin’ and keep poundin’. They won’t do anything like that once they’re all dead.”
“Sooner the better,” Casteel said.
“Oh, hell, yes.” Les felt fatherly-almost grandfatherly-as he went on, “But you got to remember not to do anything dumb, though. Killing Japs is the name of the game. Don’t let them kill you. You do something stupid, they’ll make you pay for it before you can even blink. Take bayonets.”
Randy Casteel nodded eagerly. “Oh, yeah, Sarge. I know about that.”
“Make sure you remember, dammit. The Nips have more evil tricks than you can shake a stick at,” Les said. Normal bayonet drill meant keeping the cutting edge toward the ground. But the Japanese bayonet had a hooked hand guard. The Japs used it to grab on to a U.S. bayonet. A twist, and the Marine’s rifle went flying. “Keep the left side of the blade toward the deck and you’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, Sarge,” Casteel repeated. Several men had died before somebody was sharp enough to figure out a counter. To look at your average Japanese soldier, you wouldn’t think he was big enough or strong enough to win a bayonet fight-but he was. Oh, brother, was he.
“Other thing to remember is, don’t use the bayonet till it’s your last choice,” Les added. “Blow the little fucker’s head off instead. Let’s see him get sneaky trying to dodge a bullet.”
In training, everybody fussed about the bayonet. In the field, it made a tolerable can opener or barbed-wire cutter. It wasn’t a great combat knife; like almost all Marines, Les preferred the Kabar on his belt.