After agreeing, however, that the Japanese were not likely to invade California this particular day, they changed into swimsuits and traipsed down to the water’s edge. The sea was fairly calm and the temperature warm. A pair of seals stared curiously at them from perches on rocks, decided that the two men with pale white skin were insignificant, and went to sleep.
“Rough duty,” Dane said, and Farris only grinned.
“If it wasn’t for my CO, Lytle, it’d be pretty good.”
“I met him on the way in. I decided a courtesy call was in order. He was clearly drunk and didn’t much care what I did. I was going to leave him a steak just to show what a good guy I am, but screw him.”
“And leaving him some beer would be like taking coals to Newcastle,” Steve laughed. “I’ll probably hear about my not telling him you were coming. I’ll just lie and say you surprised me as well, but now you know what I’m dealing with. I keep him informed about everything I see, including ships that I identify thanks to a copy of Jane’s that I had to buy out of my own money. He’s as much as told me to quit bothering him.”
“How does he get away with it?” Dane asked.
“Easy. Major Harmer is the battalion CO and he’s totally dominated by Lytle. Rumor has it he’s as big a lush as Lytle. A lot of us wish the Japs would swoop in some dark and stormy night and carry them away. Of course, with our luck they’d be returned.”
Dane smiled. “Give me some time and maybe I can arrange for somebody in the army’s chain of command to make a surprise visit.”
“That’d be nice. I admit there’s likely only one chance in a million that the Japs will show up here, but I think it pays to be at least a little vigilant. Now, what are you up to with the navy?”
Dane told his nephew about his ordeals on the Enterprise and his rescue of Spruance. He didn’t spare the details, including Spruance’s wish to be killed rather than captured. He knew his nephew would keep his mouth shut. Farris’s eyes widened as he took in the gruesome firsthand story of the U.S. Navy’s second major defeat in the still-young war.
“That landed me in intelligence, which would better be named lack of intelligence, but not because people are stupid, far from it. Some of the brightest people I’ve ever known are trying to figure out what the Japs will do next. Some people say that military intelligence is an oxymoron and, to some extent, they’re right. However, we’re like kids trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle but are never given all the pieces. Generally we’ve only got a few. From them we have to extrapolate what the whole picture is, and a lot of times it later turns out to be a picture of a cow instead of a tree. We do the best we can with what we have.”
“Like Kimmel and Short in Pearl Harbor?” Farris asked.
“Yes. They did what they thought best with the information on hand. They guessed wrong and paid for it with their reputations and thousands of American lives.”
“So they’re scapegoats?”
“That’s an opinion question, and here’s mine. Yes, they are scapegoats but only to a point. They willfully and foolishly didn’t cooperate with each other, and neither realized they were the equivalent of a frontier outpost surrounded by potentially hostile Apaches or Comanches. Instead, they continued to run the base like it was a country club in Virginia. They didn’t send out enough scout planes and did nothing to coordinate their defenses. If they’d been prepared and we’d fought like bandits, and still lost, they’d be heroes, tragic heroes, but still heroes. Maybe they didn’t know how to prepare for a war? Hell, I didn’t. Still don’t.”
Dane took another beer. “Look, here’s the problem with intelligence and the Japs. Even if they send radio messages, which they didn’t before Pearl Harbor, the important messages will be in code, which we can’t read, although I presume we’re trying to. Most communications aren’t encoded because they are routine, mundane, and unimportant, but are still in Japanese, which only a precious few, like me, can understand.”
“Is that why you’re on Spruance’s staff?”
“No, it’s because of my good looks. Yes, it’s because I can understand Japanese. There are literally tens of thousands of Americans who understand German, probably a lot more, but maybe only a few score who can do the same with Japanese and who can be trusted because their ancestry’s not Japanese. Nobody’s quite ready yet to enlist the help of local Japanese, although necessity might force that to change. So, even if we do intercept a radio message and manage to translate it, we find that most of them are innocuous, like requests for rations, complaints about the weather, and other stuff. Even if we find something referencing a future action, it’s going to refer to something like Plan Jupiter and Objective Fred. Then we have to figure out what Jupiter and Fred are.”
“Sounds like great fun,” Steve laughed.
“It’s a royal pain in the ass, which is why I finagled a day off to come out here. There’s no way I can succeed and provide the higher-ups with a clear picture. I convinced them I needed a break. At least I got promoted and my group now reports more to Nimitz than Spruance.”
Dane changed the subject and told about his trips on a submarine and the girl he’d met in Honolulu.
“Wow,” said Farris. “You really think it’s possible she’s trying to sail from Honolulu to here?”
“Yep.”
“Jesus, I’d like to meet her.”
“And I’d like to see her again.”
They cooked their steaks over a fire made of driftwood, ate, drank beer, and swam in the warm water, always staying in the shallows. Neither was a strong swimmer and they were concerned about tides and, of course, sharks. They talked about families and home, topics that seemed like they were from another galaxy. They only touched on their futures, since they would be in the military for the foreseeable future. Soldiers and sailors everywhere joked that they’d be discharged in just time to collect Social Security.
“I wonder when the war really will end,” Farris said.
“You think we should negotiate with the Japs?”
“Someday, we’ll have to,” Steve said. “I don’t think we should cave in to them, especially not after Pearl Harbor and all the other crap they’ve done to us, but yeah, sooner or later there’ll have to be some talks unless this is really going to be a second Hundred Years War.”
“They’ve kicked our asses up and down the street,” Dane said. “What should we give up in order to stop the killing and get our people back?”
His nephew jabbed the opener into the can of Budweiser and took a swallow. “I don’t know. Do we need the Philippines? Hell, we were going to turn them loose anyhow. Does it really matter who gets them next?”
“But we promised them independence, not brutality and slavery.”
“But, Tim, how many Americans will have to die to get those islands returned, just so we can give them away? Certainly we want to keep Hawaii and get Midway, Wake, and Guam back, and they sure as hell are going to have to pay for Pearl Harbor and all the atrocities, but I guess I can’t totally rule out negotiating with the little yellow bastards. Just count your fingers when you shake their hands and cover your ass when you bow.”
Steve belched before continuing. It was his fourth beer and he was starting to feel it. There hadn’t been all that much opportunity for serious drinking lately. “First of all, we’ve got to start winning some battles so we can bring them to the table. When the hell is that going to start?”