And when he woke up, the dreams would seem so vivid, so real. He’d be just about to dig in, just about to make up for more than a year and a half of tormenting hunger-and then he’d have his food snatched away by cruel consciousness. When a man cried in Kapiolani Park, he most likely cried after a dream of food.
Still, if you didn’t dream of roast beef, sleeping was better than staying awake. General anesthesia would have been better still. The only kind the Japs offered, though, was too permanent to suit him.
When he didn’t dream of food, he often did dream of combat. Sometimes he and the U.S. Army triumphed over the Japs. Waking up after those hurt almost as bad as waking up after a dream of Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. Sometimes he got shot in the night or, worse, bayoneted. Returning to himself after those dreams came as close to relief as anything in the POW camp.
He dreamt of combat tonight. It was artillery in his head, which could be as bad as bayonets. He’d commanded a 105; he knew too well what shellfire did to human flesh. If he hadn’t known before, what he’d seen in the fighting would have taught him plenty.
And when he woke, he woke from a noisy dream of combat to… combat. Machine guns and rifles and mortars were going off much too close by. Tracers ripped through the prisoner camp, mostly from south to north. The tracers were red. Fletch needed a moment to remember what that meant. The Japs used ice-blue tracers. Red tracers meant… Americans!
“Holy Jesus!” Fletch whispered. Tears filled his eyes. Maybe those were tears of weakness. He didn’t care. Somebody’d remembered he and his comrades in misery existed. Somebody was trying to save them.
What might have been the voice of God but was more likely a Marine or sailor on a PA system shouted through the racket of gunfire: “Prisoners! U.S. prisoners! Move toward the beach! We’ll get you out!” As if to underscore that, a mortar round hit a guard tower. It went over with a crash. There was one machine gun that wouldn’t shoot back-and wouldn’t shoot any POWs, either.
But the guards and soldiers around Kapiolani Park weren’t about to give up without a fight. As far as Fletch could see, the Japs never gave up without a fight-never gave up, in fact. They stopped fighting only when they died. Their cold-looking tracers spat out at the attacking Americans. And, as the POWs started moving toward their rescuers, automatic-weapons fire lashed the camp.
Men died and fell wounded and screaming just as they were on the point of being rescued. The unfairness of that tore at Fletch. So did raw terror. He didn’t want to be one of those casualties, not now, not at this of all moments. But the prisoners couldn’t do anything to protect themselves. They had no place to hide. Bullets either nailed them or didn’t. It was all luck, one way or the other.
A squad of guards rushed into the camp and turned their Arisakas on the POWs, too. They must have thought they could turn the Americans back. Instead, careless of whether they lived or died, the POWs surged toward them. Disciplined to the end, the Japs all emptied their clips at about the same time. As they were reloading, the Americans swarmed over them. The scene was straight out of Durer or Goya: skeletons rising up to attack the living. The Japs screamed, but not for long. Fletch had always thought only artillery could tear a man to pieces. He found he was wrong. Bare hands did the job just fine.
One by one, machine guns in the guard towers fell silent, knocked out by the attackers. “Move! Move! Move!” roared the big voice on the loudspeaker. “American prisoners, move to the south!”
Tracerlight gave Fletch his first glimpse of the soldiers who’d hit the beach to liberate the POW camp. He needed a moment to recognize them for what they were. They wore dark uniforms-dark green, he thought-not the khaki that had been his color. Even their helmets were different: pot-shaped domes that covered more of the head than the British-style steel derbies Fletch and his comrades had used. For a heartbeat, he wondered if they really were Americans. But they had rifles and submachine guns in their hands, and they were shooting up the Japs. What else mattered? He would have kissed Orson Welles’ Martians if they turned their fearsome heat rays on those guard towers.
These weren’t Martians. They were Americans, even if they wore funny clothes. “Haul ass, youse guys!” one of them yelled in pure New York. “We got boats on the beach waitin’ for youse. Shake a leg, already!”
Fletch gave it all he could. He had the feeling a tortoise with a tailwind would have left him in the dust, but he couldn’t do anything about that. The Marines had landed with bulldozers with armored driver’s boxes to tear paths through the barbed wire. He stumbled out through one, stumbled across Kalakaua Avenue, and then fell down when he got to the sand.
Not all the Japs were out of action. Falling down might have saved his life-a sniper’s bullet cracked past just over his head. He hauled himself to his feet and staggered on. The beach was alive with stick figures just like him.
“This way! This way!” Marines and sailors with red flashlights steered POWs toward the boats that waited for them. “We got plenty for everybody. Don’t fight! Don’t trample!”
Obeying that order came hard. How could anyone stand to wait another moment to be free? As he stood there, bullets still snapping and cracking past every so often, he got a look at the boats that would take him and his partners in misery away. He knew damn well that the U.S. military had owned no such slab-sided, front-mouthed machines before the war with the Japs started. Like the airplanes, like the uniforms, these had all been designed and built from scratch while he waited on the sidelines. A career officer, he wondered if he’d have any career left even after he got his strength back.
While he was staring at the landing craft, the men who crewed them stared at the nearly rescued POWs.
“You poor sorry sons of bitches,” one of them said. “We ought to murder every motherfucking Jap in the world for this.”
Before Fletch could say anything, one of the other Americans on the beach beat him to the punch:
“Sounds good to me.”
One by one, the boats filled and waddled off the beach and into the water. They were every bit as ungainly there as they were on land. Fletch’s turn finally came. He climbed an iron ramp and got into a boat. A sailor was passing out cigarettes to the POWs. “Here ya go, pal,” he said, and gave Fletch a light. The first drag on the Chesterfield after so long made him dizzy and light-headed and sick to his stomach, as if he’d never smoked at all. It felt wonderful.
Another sailor said, “You guys are so skinny, we can load more of you on each boat than we figured.” It only went to show there were advantages to everything, even starvation. Fletch would gladly have forgone that one.
A motor started. Chains rattled. The ramp came up. Sailors dogged it shut. All of a sudden, it was the bow of the boat. Awkward as a drunken sow, the landing craft backed into the water. Beside Fletch, a man quietly started to bawl. “We’re free,” he blubbered. “We’re really free. I didn’t think we ever would be, but we are.”
“Yeah,” Fletch said, and then he was crying, too, joy and weakness all coming out at once. Inside a couple of minutes, half the breathing skeletons in the boat were sobbing as if their hearts would break.
Sailors dealt out more smokes. And they passed out open ration cans, too. Tears stopped as abruptly as they’d started. Everybody crowded forward, wanting his with a fierce and terrible desire. None of them would ever be the same about food again. Fletch was sure of that. Right now, they might have been hungry wolves in a cage. Not till his hands closed around a can did a low, unconscious growl die in his throat.