Once they’d eaten, they went back out to the ocean. They rode the surf till sundown, then went back for more siamin. Three days passed like that. Then, not without regret, Oscar said, “I better head back.”
He waited for Charlie to tell him how pussy-whipped he was. But his friend just pointed west and said, “Let’s sail all the way around. We can ride the surf other places, too.”
“Deal,” Oscar said gratefully. Not only was it a deal-it sounded like fun. And he hadn’t looked forward to beating his way back along the windward coast, anyhow.
Kaena Point, in the far west, had been the only part of Oahu where roads didn’t reach, though the island’s narrow-gauge railroad did round the point. As Oscar and Charlie sailboarded by, they watched POWs slowly and laboriously building a highway there. “Poor bastards,” Charlie said. Oscar nodded. They were doing it all with hand tools. That had to be killing labor.
Oscar wasn’t sorry to leave the prisoners behind. They reminded him how bad things really were in Hawaii these days. Being able to catch his own food, being out on the ocean so much, had shielded him from the worst of it. So had having a girlfriend at least as self-reliant as he was.
He and Charlie had made it down the coast almost as far as Waianae when they got another reminder of the war-this one, to Oscar’s surprise, by sea instead of by land. A convoy of several nondescript, even ugly, Marus shepherded along by two destroyers chugged past them well out in the Pacific, plainly bound for Honolulu.
Those dumpy freighters might have been carrying anything: rice, ammunition, spare parts, gasoline. For all Oscar knew, they might have been crowded with soldiers. They were too far away for him to tell. He watched them for a while. So did Charlie. Neither said anything. What could you say? Those ships showed how times had changed.
And then times changed again. One of the freighters blew up-a deep, flat crump! that carried across the water. A great cloud of black smoke sprang up from the stricken Maru. Perhaps half a minute later, another ship got hit. Smoke also rose from that one, though not so much.
“Did you see that?” “Holy Jesus!” “There’s a sub out there-there must be!” “Eeeyow!” Oscar and Charlie were both making excited noises so fast, Oscar didn’t know which of them was saying what. The Japanese destroyers went nuts. They had been sheep dogs. Now they were wolves, on the prowl for a snake in-or rather, under-the grass. They darted this way and that. One of them fired a gun-at nothing that Oscar could see.
Both torpedoed freighters settled in the water, one quickly, the other more sedately. Planes with meatballs on the wings and fuselage buzzed off Oahu and around the convoy, also searching for the American submarine. They had no better luck than the warships did.
“That freighter’s still burning,” Oscar said after a while.
“Oil or gas,” Charlie said. “Oil, I bet-gas and it would really have gone sky-high. That’s no skin off my nose. The Japs would’ve kept it all themselves anyway.”
“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Nice to see the United States hasn’t given up. I mean, we know that, but it’s nice to see.”
Charlie nodded. “I want to see ’em blow King Stanley”-he laced the title with contempt-“out of one of his own guns. Serve him right.”
A Zero buzzed low over the two of them. The pilot could have shot them up if he wanted to, either because he thought they had something to do with the torpedoed freighters or simply for the hell of it. But he didn’t. He just kept going. Oscar breathed a sigh of relief. He and Charlie kept going, too, though much more slowly, on toward Honolulu.
PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER DILLON looked around with a distinctly jaundiced eye. “Well, here I am at this goddamn Camp Pendleton place, and I didn’t make gunny to get here,” he said.
Dutch Wenzel nodded gloomily. “Me, too, and I got the same beef. You know what happened, Les? We got screwed, and we didn’t even get kissed.”
“Damn straight we didn’t,” Dillon said. “ ’Course, the whole Navy got screwed. Wasn’t just us.”
A second look around the enormous new Marine base did little to improve it in his eyes. Camp Elliott had been crowded as a sack full of cats, no doubt about it. But Camp Elliott had been right down in San Diego, not far from the ballpark, not far from the movie theaters, not far from the ginmills, not far from the whorehouses. Once you got off the base, you could have yourself a good time.
“What are we going to do for fun around here?” Les asked mournfully.
“Beats me,” Dutch said. “Got a butt on you? I’m out of White Owls.”
“Sure.” Dillon handed him the pack, then stuck a Camel in his own mouth. Tobacco smoke soothed, but not enough. The powers that be had carved Camp Pendleton out of the northwesternmost part of San Diego County. Another name for what they’d carved it out of was the middle of nowhere. San Clemente lay a little way up the coast, Oceanside a little way down the coast. Neither could have held more than a couple of thousand people; both were towns where they rolled up the sidewalks at six o’ clock. After blowing a sorrowful smoke ring, Dillon asked, “How many divisions of Marines they gonna put in here?”
“Who you think I am, FDR?” Dutch said. “They don’t tell me shit like that any more’n they tell you.” Having established his lack of credentials, he got down to seriously guessing: “Sure looks like it’s big enough for three easy, don’t it?”
Les nodded. “About what I was thinking.” He tried to imagine somewhere between forty and fifty thousand horny young men with greenbacks burning a hole in their pocket descending on San Clemente and Oceanside. The picture refused to form. There was a limerick about a little green lizard that bust. That was what would happen to those quiet seaside towns. He laughed, not that the locals would think it was funny. “The Japs invaded Hawaii, and now we’ve invaded California.”
“Heh,” Wenzel said. “Well, if the guys who grow flowers and the little old ladies with the blue hair don’t like us, tough beans. Let ’em go clean out those slanty-eyed bastards by themselves.”
A flying boat sailed past, out over the Pacific. Les Dillon took a long look to make sure it was an American flying boat. The Japs had paid the West Coast a few unwelcome calls. But he recognized the silhouette. Nothing to get excited about… this time.
“This whole campaign is a bastard,” he said, grinding out his cigarette under the heel of his boot.
“How come? Just ’cause we’ve gotta go a couple thousand miles before we can get hold of Hirohito’s finest?” Dutch said.
“Good start,” Les agreed. “But even getting there isn’t enough. We’ve got to find some kind of way to beat down their air power. Otherwise, we’re screwed again. We can’t even land if we don’t-or I wouldn’t want to try it if they’ve got planes and we don’t.”
“Fuck, neither would I,” Wenzel agreed. “That’d be a mess, wouldn’t it? They’d make waddayacallit-sukiyaki-out of us.”
“Yeah.” Dillon watched a car roll south down Pacific Coast Highway. Idly, he wondered who had the clout to get gasoline. The highway was pretty quiet these days. He looked past it to the beach and the ocean. “How many times you figure we’re gonna invade this goddamn place?”
“Till we get it right,” his buddy answered, which drew a grunt and a laugh and a nod from Dillon. Wenzel added, “Thing is, when we do it for real, we only get the one chance.”
That wasn’t strictly true. If a U.S. landing on Oahu failed, the Americans could always lick their wounds and try again. The country could, yeah. But the Marines who got ashore in that failed effort would never try anything again afterwards. Les didn’t want to think such gloomy thoughts. To keep from thinking them, he said, “Let’s go over to the NCOs’ club and have a beer.”