Little by little, the brass started waking up from the haymaker they’d taken. Orders came for units to move to their defensive positions. The Twenty-eighth Infantry Regiment headed for Waikiki. The Ninety-Eighth Coast Artillery Regiment (Antiaircraft) rolled out for Kaneohe, on the windward side of Oahu. And, along with the Nineteenth Infantry Regiment, the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion hurried up to the north shore, to defend the beach between Haleiwa and Waimea.
They hurried, that is, once they got everything ready to roll. That took a while. Along with everybody else, Armitage discovered war was different from drills. The sense of urgency was much higher. Unfortunately, it made a lot of people run around like chickens that had just had a meeting with the hatchet and chopping block.
“Come on, goddammit!” Fletch screamed at a sergeant fifteen years older than he was. “You know how to hitch the gun to the truck. How many times have you done it?”
“About a million, sir,” the sergeant answered quietly. “But never when it counted, not till now.” He looked down at his trembling hands as if they’d betrayed him.
That wasn’t the only foul-up, small and not so small, in the battalion-far from it. Armitage thanked God things weren’t worse. At last, all the 105mm guns and their limbers were attached. All the men who would fire them had piled into the trucks. All the infantrymen in the accompanying regiment had their rifles and ammunition and helmets. They started north from Schofield Barracks a little before two in the afternoon.
They had barely begun to move when the antiaircraft guns still at the barracks began pounding away, throwing shells up into the sky. Through the roar and rumble of the trucks’ diesel engines, Armitage hadn’t been able to hear any airplanes overhead. “Are they shooting for the fun of it?” he asked whoever would listen to him.
He got his answer less than a minute later, when bombs started bursting not far away. The truck stopped, so suddenly that the soldiers in back were pitched into one another. “Holy shit!” somebody shouted.
Fletch was shouting too, in a fury at the driver: “What the hell are you doing? Keep going!”
“I can’t, sir,” the man answered. “Truck two ahead of this one just got blown to hell and gone. Road’s blocked.”
“Well, get off the road and go around him,” Armitage raged.
“I’ll try, sir,” the driver said dubiously.
Armitage wished he could see better. With the olive-drab canvas cover over the back of the truck, he might as well have been inside a Spam can for all the visibility he had. Then a fragment of bomb casing ripped through the canvas about six inches above his head. He decided he didn’t want a view all that badly.
The driver let out a frightened howclass="underline" “Fighters! Jap fighters!”
They were coming in low, plenty low enough for Fletch to hear their motors over the noise the trucks were making. He heard their machine guns and cannon going off, too. And, half a heartbeat later, he heard the driver scream.
He had other things to worry about, though. Machine-gun bullets finished the job of shredding the canvas. They did a pretty good job of shredding men, too, and metal as well. Four or five soldiers in the rear compartment started screaming and shouting and cursing, all at the same time. Something hot and wet splashed Fletch’s ear and the side of his face. The iron stink of blood filled the compartment.
More screams followed when the truck ran into the one in front of it. Next to getting strafed by a Zero, though, a collision was a small thing. The diesel engine didn’t go up in flames the way a gasoline-powered motor would have. Even so, Fletch said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Nobody argued with him. In fact, soldiers scrambled over him to escape. Some of them were wounded, others just panicked. By the time he got out, blood splashed the front of his uniform, even if he wasn’t hurt himself.
Japanese planes still buzzed overhead. Here came a fighter, low, flames winking on and off as its machine guns shot up the U.S. column. “Get down!” people were shouting. “Hit the dirt!”
Fletch was damned if he would, even after a bullet slammed into a man less than ten feet away with a noise like a baseball bat hitting a watermelon. The luckless soldier clutched at himself and crumpled. Fletch yanked the.45 from his belt and banged away at the Jap. He had about as much chance of hitting the speeding fighter as he did of taking wing himself, but he gave it his best shot.
Infantrymen started firing at the enemy, too. That actually gave him a little hope. Put enough lead in the air and it was liable to do some good. Meanwhile, though, the handful of enemy planes were cutting the column to ribbons. Bombers pounded it from on high, while the fighters swooped low to strafe again and again. At every pass, men died and vehicles caught fire.
Somebody not far away moaned, “Where the hell are our airplanes?”
“You stupid asshole!” Fletch pointed south, toward the funeral pyre of Wheeler Field. “Where the fuck do you think they are? This has got to be the worst sucker punch in the history of the world.”
A bomb screamed down, louder and louder. With artillery fire, it meant the shells were headed right for you when the sound behaved like that. Armitage didn’t know if bombs worked the same way, but he didn’t want to find out by experiment, either. Now he did throw himself flat, a split second before the bomb burst.
Blast picked him up and slammed him down again like a professional wrestler. It tried to tear his lungs out through his mouth and nose. Dazed, he tasted blood. Concussion could kill without leaving visible injury. As he staggered upright again, he realized that had almost happened to him.
Closer to the crater the bomb had dug, men hadn’t been so lucky. Some of what he saw might have come straight from a butcher’s shop. Butcher’s meat, though, didn’t scrabble frantically, trying to put itself back together. Butcher’s meat didn’t scream for its mother, either.
Fletch bent over and was noisily sick. Then he yelled, “Corpsmen! We need some corpsmen over here!” That shout was rising everywhere.
He bent again, this time by an injured man. With clumsy fingers, he put on a wound bandage to slow the soldier’s bleeding. Then, almost stabbing himself in the process, he gave the man a morphine injection. The wounded soldier sighed as the drug began to take hold.
Next to him, a sergeant was using a bayonet to cut another wounded man’s throat. Considering what the bomb had left of the young man, Armitage only nodded. The sergeant was doing him a favor.
After plunging the bayonet into the ground three or four times to clean it, the sergeant looked over to him. “How the hell are we supposed to get to our deployment area now, sir?” he asked.
The column was an abbatoir. Trucks burned. Others lay on their side or upside down. Guns had been flipped about like jackstraws. “Sergeant, I’ll be damned if I can tell you,” Fletch answered. “Truth is, I’ve been too busy trying to stay alive the last few minutes to care about anything else.”
“Yeah,” the noncom said. “But we better start caring PDQ, don’t you think?”
Fletch looked around again. He saw ruin and wreckage and slaughter. He looked up to the sky. He didn’t see any more Japanese planes, for which he heartily thanked God. But that didn’t mean the bastards with the meatballs wouldn’t come back again. He also didn’t see any American planes. That didn’t surprise him. The Japs must have swept them away like kids in second grade erasing a blackboard. How the hell was his force supposed to do anything if the Japs could hit it from above whenever they pleased?
He had no idea, none in the whole wide world. But he managed a nod he hoped wasn’t too downhearted. “Yeah, Sergeant. You’re right. We’ve got to try.”
JIRO TAKAHASHI TOOK the Oshima Maru out on Sunday just like any other day. The idea of the Sabbath meant nothing to him. The Sabbath was for haoles, who’d invented the silly notion. As far as he was concerned, work was work, and one day as good for it as another.