About twenty years ago, I heard the story of a man who had one of these Japanese samurai swords like the one on the wall behind me. He had gotten it as a souvenir after the surrender. After all of those years, he decided to see if the officer he had gotten it from was still alive. After an extensive search, he found him and went all of the way to Japan to return the sword.
Shortly afterwards, I decided maybe I should do the same for the officer who had surrendered his ship to me. I didn’t even bother to get his name at the time he surrendered, but it wasn’t hard for a retired admiral to pull in some favors and find the name of the officer in command of the I-57 at the end of the war. After a couple of months searching, I discovered that he had died shortly after the war.
From what I could find, after we towed his sub in to the base on Okinawa, he was released from the Japanese navy and went to find his family. He was from Hiroshima. His wife, his family, and his home were all gone in the first of the two blasts that ended the war. Nothing was left for him. Not even his honor. Shortly after that, he died, just as surely as if I had put my own Colt against his head and pulled the trigger.
In 1986, four of the former crewmen of the Japanese I-19 met with some of the former crewmen of the North Carolina to solve one of the war’s great mysteries. The United States Navy never found out who torpedoed the Showboat in 1942. The I-19 was the only Japanese submarine in the area that fired torpedoes that day but it was thought the Showboat was too far from the I-19 when the attack was launched. And the crew of the submarine never claimed to have attacked the North Carolina or the O’Brien.
After forty-four years, these men from both sides of the war sat down with each other and retraced their steps to find out that their attack, which sank the Wasp, also yielded the sinking of a destroyer and the damaging of a battleship. This was something they didn’t even know before. All from a single spread of six torpedoes, three of which missed their intended targets, only to be lucky enough to find two more targets by pure accident.
After all of those years, these men got together and found a way to become friends. The North Carolina crew members even presented a framed fragment of the torpedo that the I-19 had fired, which was retrieved from the hull of the Showboat, “with apologies for damage done to it when we hit it.”
My former crewmates and those of the I-19 are and should be an inspiration to all of us to be more human to each other.
In a war, people tend to have their attention hung up on the hardware, the ships, the torpedoes, the bombs, airplanes, generals, admirals, emperors, presidents, soldiers, sailors, and marines, whether they are ours or theirs. Just think of the victories, defeats, glory, heroism, rubble, fire and destruction, victims, deaths, refugees, genocides, starvation, cruelty, death marches, pestilence, and all of those brilliant big explosions created by brilliant men fighting for their country. As if all the world’s problems could be solved with a suitable application of high explosives. If we can only make a big enough boom, well, then things would be okay. All I’ve ever seen it do is scatter the very same problems over a larger area.
And these things are important. Believe me, nothing, and I do mean nothing, is more demanding of your attention than when a volley of torpedoes strikes the hull of the ship you happen to be eating your breakfast on. But these things only serve to draw your attention off of the more important subtleties, which seem to hide so well among the chaos of war, from humanity’s attention.
The real trick of it is to realize that none of these things are the real enemy.
The moment my hands took the sword from that Japanese officer surrendering his ship to me, I began to realize I was missing something. Some basic consideration hiding just below my level of attention was, for the first time, beginning to show itself.
For years, I could not get my attention off of that man whom, just a few short minutes before, I had wanted to kill in the most brutal fashion I could conceive. And with all of the grace and dignity that could possibly be instilled into an officer, this man, on the deck of my own ship, handed me the sword that you see hung on the wall behind me, thus surrendering his ship and his honor and placing himself at my mercy. This was an officer. This was a captain. This was an equal. This was a human being.
And my life changed.
All I wanted to believe during the war was the Japs were something different. They were animals. They were cruel. They were the aggressors. Killers, every one of them. They were something very separate and different from us and below us. And history shows it’s true in many ways. The Japanese, in every measurable way, were just as brutal over their conquered territories as the Nazis were in Europe. And they bombed Pearl Harbor.
In return we firebombed Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were incinerated, just like that. Old, young, women, children, sick, well, innocent, or guilty—it didn’t matter who they were. They all died horrible deaths at our hands. That’s the problem in handling things with anger; it doesn’t discriminate. So what does that make us?
Just like Ahab and the great white whale tied together, revenge has a way of taking you down along with the subject of your anger.
Now it’s true that, from time to time, people, for whatever reason, go insane. And for whatever reason, that insanity sometimes seems to spread into a society to the degree that the whole culture or country goes insane. Then you have war. You have to understand when this happens people are going to act very badly.
And occasionally, you have to fight. You do have to put a stop to it, to preserve as much life as possible. Sometimes that does involve lopping off a few heads to save the greater number of people from the insanities of a country that has obviously gone mad. But you don’t have to hate them.
The minute you succumb to the urge to take revenge, to kill just to get even or to hate them, you have given in to the one thing that, left to run unchecked, will keep mankind locked in a state of war, to a greater or lesser degree, for all of time.
It’s the most dangerous enemy mankind will ever face. It isn’t the Japanese or the Germans or anybody else. And it isn’t the bombs or ships or planes. The real enemy is vengeance.
Author’s Notes and Acknowledgments
One might consider it would be counterintuitive for a fiction author to destroy his own illusions at the end of his own work. In this case, I think the actions of the real men involved in the actual historic events noted in this book are important enough to justify the risk to my own work and be brought to light. Very often the History Channel will do a “History versus Hollywood” for a movie that covers actual historic events. You could think of it as me just saving them the trouble of research if you like, but that’s not the real point.
This, as I said at the outset, is a work of fiction. But in order to put my character in where I wanted him to be, I had to bump several real people out of the way. This, I assure you, was not intended to be disrespectful but instead to tell a story of how these men lived and fought for all of the free people of the world and at the same time try to avoid “putting words in the mouths” of the real men in those situations. It was a hard line for me to walk between writing a fictional story that would both honor these men for their service and sacrifice, and, at the same time, restrain myself from putting actual people into situations that they never actually faced; or more importantly, taking them out of the events they really did participate in. In the end, I had to do a little bit of both to make my storyline work. So in order to keep from pulling any regret in on myself, as a result of stepping on these men’s toes, I decided to write this to set the record straight.