He ate with his fingers. The can held greasy roast-beef hash. It was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate beef. Probably when his Army rations ran out. “My God,” he muttered, over and over again. “My God!” That such food was out there! Even his dreams hadn’t been anything like this. He cut his tongue licking the inside of the can to make sure he got every tiny scrap out of it.
The boat’s motion and the rich food they weren’t used to made several men seasick. After some of the stinks Fletch had known lately, that one wasn’t so bad. His own stomach seemed to take the wonderful food for ballast. Nothing bothered him as the boat chugged away from Oahu. He didn’t think anything would ever bother him again. He might have been wrong, but he felt that way.
After a couple of hours, his landing craft and the others came up alongside ships that took the POWs aboard. That wasn’t easy. They couldn’t climb nets, the way sailors and Marines did. Sailors on deck lowered slings to the boats. The sailors there fitted them around the prisoners’ shoulders. The men on the ship hauled them up.
Fletch felt more like a package than the daring young man on the flying trapeze. “Careful, buddy,” a sailor said as he came up over the rail. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
“I’m out of that goddamn camp,” Fletch answered. “How could anything hurt me now?” As soon as he was safely up on deck, he asked, “Can I get some more food? Can I have a bath?”
“We got saltwater soap, and those showers are going,” the sailor said. “Otherwise it’s a sponge bath-too many men and not enough fresh water. Food… Doc’s gotta say it’s okay before we give you much. Sometimes you eat too much too fast, you get sick.”
“I wouldn’t.” Fletch knew he sounded like a whiny little kid. He couldn’t help it. When it came to food, he felt like a whiny little kid.
He decided to take a shower. Even he didn’t believe how filthy he was. As he stripped off his rags, a sailor said, “You got anything in the pockets you need to keep? Otherwise we’re gonna deep-six all of this shit.”
“No, there isn’t anything,” Fletch answered. He wasn’t used to being around well-fed Americans any more. Their fleshy bodies looked wrong, distorted. He knew the problem was in the way he looked at these strangers who’d rescued him and taken him in, not in the men themselves. Knowledge didn’t change perception.
Saltwater soap was nasty stuff, but he needed something nasty to get a few layers of filth off. Lots of freed POWs scrubbed themselves in the showers. An ocean-temperature shower wasn’t too bad, not when the ocean was off Hawaii. He kept flicking glances toward the naked men in there with him. He could see every bone and every tendon in their bodies. That was how Americans were supposed to look. Next to them, the sailors and Marines seemed almost… inflated.
After he came out of the shower and dried off, all he got in the way of clothes was a bathrobe. “Sorry, buddy,” said the sailor who handed it to him. “We didn’t know you guys’d be in such miserable shape.”
“It’s okay,” Fletch said. But for modesty, going naked in this climate was no hardship. The Hawaiians had done it all the time. And he didn’t need anybody else to tell him he was in miserable shape. He knew that himself.
He didn’t actually see a doctor. A pharmacist’s mate looked him over. “You don’t seem too bad, all things considered,” the man said after a very quick, very cursory check. “Just don’t try to fatten yourself up all at once.” He picked up a spray gun. “Shed the robe.” He sprayed both Fletch and the garment.
Fletch’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that stuff?” he asked. Whatever it was, it had a harsh, chemical tang. There were other kinds of bad smells besides those that sprang from filth and death.
“Shit’s called DDT-and now you know as much as you did before, right?” the pharmacist’s mate said.
“What you need to know is, it kills lice, mosquitoes, every kind of bug under the sun, kills ’em dead, dead, dead. You may not believe it, but you aren’t lousy any more.”
“What about the nits?” Fletch scratched automatically.
“Kills them, too,” the sailor said. “And if a louse does somehow hatch, what’s left of the DDT in your hair is plenty to make the little bastard buy the farm. I’m telling you, buddy, this shit is the straight goods.”
“Yeah? What’s it do to people, then?” Fletch asked.
“Diddly squat. Safe as houses. Greatest thing since sliced bread.” The pharmacist’s mate gave him back the robe. “Go feed your face. Not too much, though, you hear? Or you’ll be sorry.”
“Yes, Mother,” Fletch said, which made the other man laugh. He went on to the galley. They had biscuits there, with butter and jam. Flour had vanished from Oahu even before the American surrender. It all came from the mainland-and then it stopped coming. Butter and jam were only memories, too. “Thank you, Jesus!” somebody said: as short and sincere a grace as Fletch had ever heard.
And then the cooks brought out platters of fried chicken. At the sight, at the mouth-watering smell, several POWs burst into tears. One of them said, “But what’s for all the other guys?” That got a laugh and defused the tension that had built at the presence of so much food. Fletch felt the fear-somebody else might get more than he did. He had to remind himself there was plenty for everyone. His head might know that, but his belly didn’t.
He snagged a drumstick. The coating of batter crunched in his mouth. Then he was eating hot chicken. He wasn’t dreaming about it. It was real. Tears streamed down his cheeks. It was real. When he set the bone down, not the tiniest scrap of meat was left on it. No crumbs from the biscuits remained on his plate, either.
He leaned back in his chair. He didn’t feel starved. He didn’t even feel hungry. He could hardly remember what that was like. “Wow!” he said.
The man next to him grinned. “Right the first time, buddy.”
A sailor came by to pick up plates. A POW stopped him, saying, “I was at the Opana camp for a while, up at the other end of the island. That place was as big as this one, maybe bigger. Have you gone after the guys there, too?”
The sailor’s face clouded. “We can’t,” he said. “As soon as we got close to it, the Japs started shooting up the place. We weren’t ready for it then-we didn’t think anybody could act that bastardly. Shows what we knew.” He made as if to spit on the deck, then caught himself at the last second. “Don’t know for sure how many guys those fuckers murdered-gotta be thousands.”
“Jesus!” The prisoner who’d asked the question crossed himself.
Fletch was horrified but not surprised. Everything the Japanese had done since taking Hawaii showed POWs were nothing but a nuisance to them. They’d starved their captives, abused them, and worked them to death. Why wouldn’t they slaughter them to keep them from being rescued? It made perfect sense-if you fought the war like that.
“Thanks for getting to us before they did the same thing at Kapiolani,” he said. The gob hadn’t had thing one to do with it, but Fletch had enough gratitude to spread around to anybody in the U.S. military right now.
“Brass figured we’d better try,” the sailor said. “I’m gladder’n hell it went as well as it did.”
How many Japanese machine-gun bullets had snapped by within a couple of feet of Fletch? How many scrawny, starving men had those bullets killed? He didn’t know. He wondered if anyone would ever know exactly. He knew who would, if anybody ever did: Graves Registration. And yet here he was, on an American ship, his belly full-really full! — of American food. He was gladder than hell the rescue had gone as well as it had, too.
THE GUARDS IN THE KALIHI VALLEY WERE JUMPIER than ever. That made the prisoners tunneling through the Koolau Range jumpier than ever, too-those of them who kept the strength to worry. Jim Peterson still did. So did Charlie Kaapu. Peterson admired the hapa-Hawaiian’s strength and determination. He wished he could match them, but he’d been here much longer than Charlie, and he’d been in worse shape when he got here. His spirit was willing. His flesh? He had no flesh to speak of, not any more. He had skin, and he had bones, and only hunger between them.