Yeah, but that was a long time ago. The words died unspoken on Les’ lips. It might seem a long time ago to him. To the noisy bastard on the other side of the line, it wasn’t even the day before yesterday. For that matter, you couldn’t talk about the Civil War with a lot of Southerners-Captain Bradford included. It wasn’t the Civil War to them, either. It was the War Between the States… or, if they’d been drinking for a while, the War of Damnyankee Aggression. Whatever you called it, it happened long before Hawaii joined-or was joined to-the United States.
He tried another tack: “Why fight now, for Chrissake? You can’t win, and you’ll just get shot.” He knew damn well the Japs wouldn’t surrender. He’d seen them fight to the death in hopeless positions too many times to have any doubts on that score. But maybe the Hawaiians were different. If he could do things on the cheap instead of putting his one and only irreplaceable ass on the line, he would, and gladly.
No words came back this time. One more burst of machine-gun fire did. Whatever the men in front of him had in mind, surrender wasn’t it. He muttered to himself. Sooner or later, he’d find out what those bastards in old-fashioned khaki were worth.
It turned out to be sooner. Not long after dark fell, a runner brought word that the Marines would go forward the next morning, half an hour after sunrise. Les almost opened fire before the man stammered out the countersign to his hissed challenge. When he got the news instead, he half way wished he had shot the fellow.
He lay in his foxhole, trying to grab whatever uneasy sleep he could. That wasn’t much. Little firefights kept breaking out all along the line. Maybe the Hawaiians knew something was up, or maybe they just wanted to prove they had balls. He would have been happy to take it on faith.
The U.S. barrage started as soon as morning twilight painted the eastern sky gray. Volley after volley of 105s crashed down on the enemy positions in front of Les and his buddies. Mortar bombs added to the weight of flying metal. He’d seen heavier bombardments in the last war, but this was plenty to cut a man into screaming hamburger if he stood up in it-and maybe if he didn’t, too. The Royal Hawaiian Army wouldn’t have faced artillery fire before. He wondered how the Hawaiians liked it.
Under cover of the booming guns, half a dozen Shermans clanked up toward the line. Les was glad to see the big, ugly iron monsters. They could clear out the strongpoints that survived the artillery-and some always did. And they drew enemy fire, too. Infantrymen always aimed small-arms fire at tanks. Les didn’t know why-rifle and machine-gun bullets couldn’t penetrate armor plate. But he’d seen it again and again. If the Hawaiians were shooting at the Shermans, they wouldn’t be shooting at him so much.
He approved of that. Oh, yes. He approved of that very much indeed.
His belly knotted as soon as the 105s fell silent. He knew what was coming next. And it came. Captain Bradford yelled, “Come on, men! Up out of your holes! Follow me!”
Grunting, Les scrambled out of his foxhole and ran forward. He bent over. He zigged and zagged. He knew none of that would do him a damn bit of good if the bullet with his name on it was out there flying. A Boche machine gunner had taught him that lesson once and for all time in 1918, and he still had the puckered scars to prove it.
Bullets cracked past him. The Hawaiians weren’t dead, and they weren’t paralyzed, either. Too fucking bad, he thought. When you heard a crack, a round came much too close. He ducked automatically whenever he did hear one. He’d been ashamed of that till he saw everybody else did it, too, which sure hadn’t taken long.
He’d fought in trenches before, in 1918 and here. That was the worst war had to offer. The Germans had been tough. The Japs here were even worse, because they didn’t give up and they kept coming at you till they were dead or you were. So he had standards of comparison. The fifteen or twenty minutes till the Marines killed the last man from the Royal Hawaiian Army were the worst minutes of his life-even worse than the time Cindy Lou Callahan’s father caught them in bed together and ran for his shotgun, which went a long way towards explaining how and why Les joined the Marines.
The Hawaiians wouldn’t give up, either. They wouldn’t retreat. They didn’t just stay in place and die. They kept making countercharges at the Marines, screaming and swearing and throwing grenades. Like anybody who’d done any fighting, Les vastly preferred bullets to his bayonet. The bayonet got blood on it in those trenches. So did his Kabar. So did the butt end of his rifle. He killed one bastard with his bare hands in an animal tangle of flying arms and legs. If he hadn’t tucked his chin down tight to his chest, the enemy soldier might have broken his neck instead of the other way round.
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.