Charlie nodded. “Suits me. I was gonna say the same thing, but some haoles, they figure they all the time gotta do stuff, you know what I mean?”
“If I saw anything I could do, I’d do it,” Oscar said. “You want to join the Army right now?” Charlie shook his head. Oscar shrugged. “Okay. Neither do I. In that case, we might as well do what we’re doing.” He left a dime on the table for old man Okamoto as he and Charlie headed out to his car.
By the time they got back to the beach, Oscar could see smoke rising in the south up over the mountains. He whistled softly. That was a hell of a lot of smoke. He and Charlie were both shaking their heads when they paddled out into the Pacific. No wonder the fellow on the radio sounded as if he’d just watched his puppy run over by a cement mixer. The Japs must have blown up everything that would blow.
They rode the waves all afternoon, then went back into Waimea for supper. Okamoto’s seemed to be the only place open, and nobody but them was in it. Along with siamin, Oscar bought a loaf of bread and a couple of Cokes for breakfast the next morning. Getting the old man to understand a loaf of bread wasn’t easy, but he managed.
He and Charlie slept in the car again that night. Some time after midnight, truck noises and swearing men woke them up. “The Army,” Oscar said, and went back to sleep.
Army or no Army, it never occurred to him not to go into the water at dawn the next morning. It didn’t occur to the soldiers to try to stop them till they were already in the ocean and could pretend not to hear. When fighter planes zoomed by overhead right afterwards, Oscar wished he’d listened.
He didn’t know whether he spotted the incoming barges before the Army men on the beach did or not. He did discover getting stuck in a crossfire was no fun at all. By what would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along, he and Charlie made it back to shore alive. They piled into his Chevy and got the hell out of there.
III
JIM PETERSON HADN’T thought the Japanese would hit Hawaii. He would have been glad to have his fellow fliers from the Enterprise tell him what a damn fool he’d been, but he didn’t think many of them were left alive. Nobody was saying much about what had happened to the carrier, either.
And nobody was letting him get back into combat. The only Wildcats on Oahu were the couple that had survived the flight in from the Enterprise. They already had pilots. “Put me in anything, then!” Peterson raged after the golfers whose round he’d interrupted brought him to the Marine Corps Air Station at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. “I don’t care what I’m in, as long as I get another swing at those little yellow bastards!”
They wouldn’t listen to him. The first thing they did was send him to the dispensary tent, where a harried-looking medic confirmed that yes, he was still breathing, and no, he didn’t have any bullet holes in him. That done, they took him out to the airstrip. It was nothing but wreckage, some still burning.
“You see?” a Marine Corps captain said. “You aren’t the only one who wants another shot at the Japs-but you’re gonna have to wait in line, just like everybody else.”
“Jesus!” Peterson said. And it could have been worse. The Enterprise had taken some of the Marine pilots and plants from Ewa to Wake Island just before the Japs came in. Otherwise, they might have got stuck on the ground, too. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“Beats me,” the captain answered.
“They kicked us in the nuts, and we weren’t even looking!”
“Sure seems that way.” The Marine seemed to take a certain morose satisfaction in agreeing with him. “And it’s not just this base, mind you.” He waved to the east. It looked like hell over there-literally. The pall of thick, oily black smoke filled that half of the sky. “Sons of bitches didn’t just hit the fleet. They got the tank farms, too. God only knows how many million gallons of fuel going up in smoke.”
“Up in smoke is right,” Peterson said. Little by little, the sheer scale of the disaster began penetrating even his stubborn soul. “For God’s sake, if you can’t do anything else, give me a rifle and a helmet and let me shoot at ’em.”
For the first time, the Marine officer looked at him with something approaching approval, not barely concealed annoyance. “That, now, that may be arranged-if it turns out there’s anybody to shoot at.”
Peterson stared at him. “If they’ve done this much, you think they won’t follow it up with an invasion? They’d have to be crazy not to.” He was a born zealot; his views swung from one extreme to the other with the greatest of ease.
Supper was an oddly carefree meal, featuring some of the best lamb chops Peterson had ever eaten. Supper also featured hot and cold running booze. Admiral Halsey sometimes winked at the rules against shipboard alcohol, but Peterson had been mostly dry for a while now. The whiskey and rum and gin and Irish coffee added something to the rumors coming in from around the island. Some of the Marines believed everything, no matter how gloomy. Some refused to believe anything.
“Only stands to reason,” one of them insisted. “If the Japs plastered us and Pearl Harbor, they couldn’t have had much left over to do anything else.”
“Bullshit,” said the captain who’d shown Peterson around. “If they did that much down here, they aren’t going to forget about Schofield and Wheeler and Kaneohe. They’ll hit everything.”
Reports seemed to bear him out. With the radio off the air, though, Peterson found it hard to be sure of anything. He supposed the big wheels here knew what was really going on. He hoped they did, anyhow. They should have-phones were still working, even if the radio had been yanked. But whatever they knew, they weren’t talking. That by itself seemed to say the news wasn’t good.
Peterson got a cot in a tent that night, and counted himself lucky. When reveille sounded, he thought for a moment he was back aboard the Enterprise. Then memory returned. He was swearing as he bounced to his feet. A Marine climbing out of another cot a few feet away nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, Navy, it’s a bitch, isn’t it?” he said.
“A bitch and a half,” Peterson answered. “What the hell do we do now?”
“Might as well have breakfast,” the Marine said practically. “Soon as the brass wants anything from us, I figure they’ll let us know.”
Breakfast was bacon and eggs and hash browns, not much different from what Peterson would have eaten on the Enterprise — she hadn’t been at sea long enough to switch from fresh to powdered eggs. But the walk to the mess hall reminded him where he was and what had happened. The west was light, but in the east the sun couldn’t penetrate the smoke rising from Pearl Harbor. They hadn’t even slowed down the fires there during the night. How much fuel was burning?
He’d just got a second cup of coffee when air-raid sirens began to howl. He sprang up and followed the Marines as they ran for shelter. Most of them made for a nearly finished swimming pool not far away. “First time I ever jumped into one of these when it was dry,” he said.
He got a laugh. Minutes later, though, bombs started whistling down. Being on the receiving end and unable to hit back was anything but funny. A few antiaircraft guns banged away, but the enemy airplanes were high in the sky. Peterson didn’t think any of them got hit. No U.S. planes rose to challenge them. No U.S. planes at Ewa could.
“This isn’t how it was yesterday morning,” said one of the Marines in the pool. “Then they came in with fighters, right over the rooftops. We shot back with Springfields,45s, anything we could get our hands on. Didn’t do a hell of a lot of good, not as far as I could see.”