The colonel made a low grunt and jerked her up by her wrist, and it looked as if he were dragging a skinned billy goat or calf, her body thudding dully against the step and then being pulled across the rough planking of the porch. He got her inside and a peal of cries went up from an unseen corner of the room. He shouted for quiet with a sudden, terrible edge in his voice. All at once he had become livid, and he shoved the girl with his foot as though he were going to push-kick her across the floor. Meanwhile the sentry had heard the outburst and ran around to the front, instinctively leveling his rifle on us as he came forward. I raised my hands and the sentry yelled, “Hey there!” and I realized that Corporal Endo, inexplicably, had begun to sprint back into the darkness of the jungle.
I barked, “Don’t shoot!” but the sentry couldn’t help himself and fired once in our direction. The shot flew past well above me, though I could feel it bore through the heavy air. There was little chance that it could have hit the corporal, or anyone else. The sentry seemed shocked at his own reaction and dropped his rifle. I was relieved, but the colonel had already come out of the house, this time a robe hastily tied around his middle, a shiny pistol in his hand. Over the sentry’s shoulder I could see the colonel take aim from the veranda and fire twice. It was like watching the action through a very long lens, when everything is narrowed and made delicate. Then a questioning, half-bemused expression flitted across the sentry’s face, and he fell to the ground like a dropped stone.
The colonel walked over and motioned to me with the gun to let down my hands. He had recognized me as the doctor’s assistant. “Lieutenant Kurohata,” he said unseverely, not even looking down at the sentry’s body, which he practically stepped over as he approached me. I knew the man was dead, as one of the bullets had struck him in the neck and torn away a section of carotid artery. The ground was slowly soaking up his blood. The colonel said, “You are a medical man, are you not?” Up close the colonel was more inebriated than I had surmised, his sleepy eyes opaque. “You can help me then, I hope, with a small confusion I was having this evening.”
He paused, as if trying to remember what he was saying, and in the background I could hear the chaotic shouts of orders and footfalls coming from the main encampment. I replied, “However I am able, sir.”
“What? Oh yes. You can aid me with something. I was being entertained this evening, as you may know, and it occurred to me that there was a chance of…a complication.”
“Sir?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, though in fact I had no idea.
“They are young, after all, and likely fertile.” He paused a moment and said as if an aside, “And of course, being virginal, that can’t protect them, can it?”
“No, sir.”
“Of course not,” he concurred, as if I had asked him the question. His ignorance surprised me. The colonel was in his mid-thirties, which is not old in the world, but late in the war he was practically ancient. He crossed his arms in an almost casual pose, though he kept a tight hold on the pistol, which poked out beneath one folded arm. “And yet one grows up with all kinds of apocrypha and lore, yes? I mean us men. A young woman naturally receives guidance and training about such matters, estimable information. While it seems we are left to our own methods, each by each and one by one. To our own devices, yes?”
Immediately I thought of Corporal Endo and his interests, and then with alarm wondered where he was now, but I couldn’t answer, as a squad of armed men came running up to us. The colonel waved them forward. The squad leader, a corporal, seemed shocked to find the lifeless body of the sentry lying in awkward repose by our feet.
“Remove him,” the colonel said, prompting the corporal to order two of his men to lift up the corpse, which they hefted by the armpits and calves. Someone gathered the dropped rifle and the bloody cap. Two other men were to remain as sentries. Soon enough they were bearing the body off, the assemblage disappearing beyond the pale ring of lamplight about the hut. I realized then that neither the colonel nor I had spoken a word of explanation to the men, nor had any of them even whispered a question.
“You’ll look after this,” the colonel said to me matter-of-factly, referring, I understood immediately, to the death report, which was filled out whenever time and circumstances allowed. He was not requesting that I cover for him or whitewash the situation in any way; rather, he was simply reminding me of one of my usual duties, as though not wanting me to be remiss. The next day I would note in the necessary form that the sentry, a Private Ozaki, was shot dead by a forward sniper who was sought out by our patrols but never found.
I bowed curtly and the colonel acknowledged me with a grunt. I waited while he ascended the low porch and went inside. As I started back for my own tent, I could hear him speaking again, in a calm, unagitated tone, the same way he had spoken to the one of them who had hidden beneath the house. “Look at my girls,” I heard him saying, repeating himself slowly, like a father who has been away much too long. “Look here at my girls.”
9
BY MID-MORNING the day was already muggy and bright. I hadn’t gone in search of Corporal Endo the night before, nor did I have any interest in doing so amid the usual early bustle of the day. No one knew he had instigated the shooting, or that he had even been present, and when it was announced that patrols would be increased to prevent further sniping, I hoped he would keep quiet and let the event pass. Colonel Ishii, whom I saw during the morning exercise, seemed fresh and fit. I had not confided in anyone, for there was no one to confide in. But in truth I was more than just annoyed with the corporal. In fact I felt sure my association with him — and indeed, my continued tolerance — should come quickly to an end. I didn’t care about him, or perhaps closer to the truth was that I didn’t wish to care about him any longer. He had plumbed the limits of my patience, and I was sure I should be done with him.
I was also aware that a half-humorous notion about me had begun circulating about the camp. It was not so awful, but embarrassing all the same; namely, it was being joked that I was intending to become a professional mental therapist or psychologist after the war, and that I was employing Corporal Endo as a “practice patient.” Of course I found the jest insulting, and to know my name was being snickered about the infantrymen’s tents, but it was particularly shaming when Captain Ono casually mentioned during an inspection of the ward that I might take an interest in one of the soldiers who had just come in from the front, who had not a scratch on his body but could no longer see or hear or speak. Captain Ono had effected all manner of examination on the man, and finally ended up restraining his arms and legs and beating him on the feet with a switch. But even this had not worked, for the man just moaned torturedly from his throat, as though he were drowning in the pain.
“Why don’t you sit with him awhile, Lieutenant,” he had said thickly after that, his brow crinkled. “Perhaps it’s only you who can reach him now.”
At the time I was almost sure the captain was being serious with me, and in fact I spent a quiet hour that evening at the man’s bedside, inspecting his stoic face for the least indication of sentience. It was soon thereafter I understood that the doctor had been teasing me, and I felt, for a moment, the sharp heat of anger and shame. I was a young man, yes, but one of some learning and modest position as a junior officer, and if it was true that I was trained in a military school, not having his kind of university pedigree, it still seemed somewhat unfair of the doctor to belittle me so before a ward of enlisted men. I tried not to give further quarter to the feeling. The doctor was highly skilled and noted throughout our theater of operations for his innovations in field surgery, and I hoped that I could learn from him techniques and procedures that my textbooks and manuals could only hint at, such as his preliminary forays into open-heart surgery. In this sense it could be said that I genuinely admired Captain Ono, even held him up as a model for my future career. I had known from the first moment I met him that he was a person of singular resolve and even hardness, particularly when it came to the disposition of what must always be for him the patent, terrible frailty of his patients and others under his care, but I assumed it was his necessary mode, his own way of focus and concentration.