“Sir, till the war started, I never figured I’d get there at all,” Joe answered.
“Well, since you did, suppose you tell me what you saw,” the briefing officer said.
“Aye aye, sir,” Joe said, and he did.
AT BREAKFAST ONE MORNING on the hospital ship, Fletch Armitage realized he was making progress. Breakfast, like most breakfasts on the Benevolence, was scrambled powdered eggs, fried Spam, and hash browns. Nothing was wrong with the hash browns. They had crunch over greasy softness, and you could pour on the salt till they tasted just the way they were supposed to.
The powdered eggs and Spam, on the other hand… Up till that morning, Fletch had shoveled them into his face with reckless abandon, like a man coming back from the ragged edge of starvation. He damn well was a man coming back from the ragged edge of starvation, and he wanted to claw back from that edge just as fast as he could. He made a pig of himself at lunch and dinner and snacks in between times, too.
Some of the rescued POWs had eaten themselves right into stomach trouble. The only trouble Fletch had was gaining weight back fast enough to suit him.
This particular morning, he took a big gulp of coffee with plenty of cream (well, condensed milk) and sugar and tore into breakfast. He ate a mouthful of Spam and eggs, then paused with the oddest expression on his face. “You know what?” he said to the guy next to him in the galley.
“No,” the other ex-prisoner said. “What?”
“These eggs and this meat-they’re really lousy.” Fletch knew he sounded astonished. He had all the food he wanted. Now he’d got to the point where he didn’t just want food. He wanted good food. Wanting it on a hospital ship was probably optimistic, but even so…
“You’re right.” The other man sounded as astonished as Fletch had. “I didn’t even notice up till now.”
“Neither did I,” Fletch said. The guy to his left was just as skinny as he was. Some of the poor bastards from Kapiolani Park had actually starved to death before the U.S. Navy could throw enough food into them to keep them going. Fletch hadn’t been in that boat, but he’d been in the one tied up right next to it.
“Take your plate, sir?” a Filipino mess steward asked. Fletch nodded. Good, bad, or indifferent, every scrap of food in front of him had vanished. He wondered if he would ever leave anything uneaten again. The way he felt now, he wouldn’t bet on it.
As the steward also took the other former prisoner’s plate, Fletch asked, “Any chance of getting fresh eggs and real ham around here?”
“Yeah,” the other former POW said. Several other scrawny men nodded.
The Filipino beamed at them like a proud mother just after Junior’s first steps. “Oh, my friends!” he said.
“You feel better! I am so happy for you!”
“Does that mean we don’t get the fancy grub?” asked the guy on Fletch’s left.
“Probably,” the mess steward answered, not beaming so much now. “Two thousand miles from the mainland, remember. You eat better than other people out here.”
“We’ve earned it,” Fletch said. He didn’t quite feel as if he were made of pipe cleaners any more. He’d graduated to pencils-gnarled, knotty pencils, but pencils all the same. He wondered what would come next in his gradual reinflation.
What came next that day was an examination by one of the doctors on the Benevolence. Fletch got weighed. He had his blood pressure taken. The sawbones looked pleased. “You’re getting there, Captain.”
“I’m just a lieutenant,” Fletch said.
“Nope.” The doctor shook his head. “If you weren’t a POW, you would’ve got the promotion by now. And so-you did.”
“Thanks, Doc!” Fletch would rather have heard it from somebody besides an M.D., but he wasn’t going to complain any which way. Instead of complaining, he asked, “When can I go ashore?”
“When we decide you’re strong enough, and when it seems safe,” the doctor answered. “I know you’re feeling better-you were one of the men bitching about chow this morning, weren’t you? That’s a good sign. But you’re not fit for active duty yet, and Oahu’s no place for tourists right this minute.”
“I understand that,” Fletch said. “My wife’s there, though-if she’s still alive, anyway.” He didn’t say anything about the divorce that had been in progress. It wasn’t final when the fighting started. Jane wouldn’t have kept on with it since then… would she?
He’d got the doctor’s attention. “Oh,” the other man said. “We are letting men in that situation onto the island. It won’t happen tomorrow, though, or the day after. You’ll have some hoops to jump through as far as the paperwork goes.”
“Let me at ’em!” Fletch said. “After what I went through with the Japs, I’ll never worry about that kind of crap again.”
“You’re not the first guy I’ve heard that from, either,” the doctor said. “One way or another, it’ll get sorted out. In the meantime, try to be patient-and the breakfasts are still good for you, even if they aren’t the most exciting thing in the world.” All of that was undoubtedly good advice, which didn’t make Fletch like it one bit better.
AFTER THE JAPS TOOK WAHIAWA, they set up a community kitchen in the elementary school to share what little there was to eat. The U.S. Army troops who retook the town kept the kitchen going.
These days, it doled out K-rations and C-rations and big, tasteless chocolate bars called D-rations. The joke was that if you ate one of those, it was in you for the D-ration.
Jane Armitage was not inclined to be fussy about what kind of food she got. There was plenty of it: the only thing that mattered to her. No, one more-she didn’t have to give herself to Japanese soldiers if she wanted to go on eating (to say nothing of breathing).
No one had thrown her time in the brothel in her face-yet. She didn’t think any of the other women had had trouble with it, either. If the Japs dragged you in there, kept you in there with bars on the windows, and screwed you whenever they felt like it, you pretty plainly weren’t collaborating. That meant you got to stand in line behind the people who damn well were.
Several women collecting their rations had hair clipped down to stubble to show what they were. They’d collaborated with the occupiers on their backs, but they’d done it for fun or for advantage, not because they had to. Most of them were local Japanese-most, but not all. One was a tall redhead who had been-maybe still was-married to somebody from Fletch’s old unit. She got her food and sat as far away from everybody else as she could. Her belly bulged. The baby was due any day now. Jane would have bet anything in the world that it wouldn’t have red hair.
But women who’d gone to bed with Japanese soldiers were only the small change of collaboration. Everybody stared when Yosh Nakayama came into the community kitchen. The nursery man stolidly collected his ration tins, sat down not far from Jane, and started to eat. He’d translated for Major Hirabayashi and relayed the Japanese commandant’s orders to the rest of Wahiawa. But he’d also done everything he could to get crops in the ground when Oahu was hungriest, and nobody’d ever claimed he’d informed on people. Jane knew he’d done what he could to keep her out of the brothel, though she’d been too dumb to realize it till too late. Some wanted to string him up. Others thought he deserved a medal. He went on about his business, there in the eye of the storm. It wasn’t as if he could hop in a plane and fly off to Tokyo.
There had been informers. Some of them had slipped out of Wahiawa before the U.S. Army came in. Jane hoped they were getting the shit bombed out of them in Honolulu. That would start to give them what they deserved. And some had tried to stay and brazen it out. Again, a lot of those were local Japanese who’d bet on the wrong horse. You could understand them even if you despised them.
But Smiling Sammy Little, who had the biggest used-car dealership in Wahiawa, was as Anglo-Saxon as George Washington. And he was in the guardhouse. He’d rolled over and wagged his tail for the Japs. They were on top, and he’d wanted to stay near the top: it seemed as simple as that. Figuring out how many people were dead because of his toadying wasn’t so simple. Jane hoped he’d get it in the neck.