It was also one for which Shindo had no taste. He went back to the things over which he did have some controclass="underline" “Fuchida-san, can you get me some extra fuel up here?”
“I don’t know,” Fuchida answered cautiously. “Why do you need it?”
“I want to take these puppies up and let them get some practice dogfighting me,” Shindo answered.
“Once they see I can shoot them down whenever I please, or near enough, they’ll start to realize they don’t know everything there is to know.”
“That would be good,” Fuchida said. “I can’t promise you anything-you know how tight the gasoline situation is. But I’ll try.”
“We can’t fight the Americans if we don’t have the gas to train our pilots,” Shindo said.
“Yes, I understand that,” Fuchida replied. “But we can’t fight them if we don’t have the gas to get our planes off the ground, either. The more we use beforehand, the less we’re liable to have when we need it most.”
“This is no way to fight a war,” Shindo said. Commander Fuchida didn’t contradict him. Fuchida said nothing to reassure him, either.
IN JIM PETERSON’S MILITARY EDUCATION, he’d never learned the difference between dry beriberi and wet. Somehow, the instructors at Annapolis hadn’t thought either kind important enough to put on the curriculum. That only went to show they hadn’t realized slowly starving to death might form part of a naval officer’s career.
Only goes to show what a bunch of ignorant bastards they were, Peterson thought as he lay in the miserable bamboo hut in the Kalihi Valley. It was raining. Of course it was raining. As far as Peterson could see, it always rained in the valley. The roof leaked. Since the Japs didn’t let the POWs use anything but leaves to cover it and didn’t give them much time even to put on more leaves, that wasn’t the world’s hottest headline, either.
Looking around, he had no trouble telling the wet beriberi cases from the dry. Men who had wet beriberi retained fluid. They swelled up in a grotesque and horrible parody of good health. Swollen or not, though, they were starving, too.
Prisoners with dry beriberi, by contrast, had a lean and hungry look. Like mine, Peterson thought through his usual haze of exhaustion. The pins and needles in his hands and feet were red-hot fishhooks and spikes.
The really alarming thing was, he could have been worse off. When cholera went through the camp a few weeks earlier, he hadn’t caught it. He’d buried some of the dark, shrunken corpses of men who had-after he put in his usual shift at the tunnel, of course. Cholera killed with horrifying speed. You could be normal in the morning-well, as normal as POWs got, which wasn’t very-and shriveled and dead by the afternoon.
One nice thing: cholera scared the Japs, too. Several guards had died just as fast as any prisoners. Beriberi, by contrast, didn’t bother them at all. Why should it? They had plenty to eat, and the right kind of food, not just a starvation diet of boiled white rice and not much else.
Peterson looked around, hoping to spot a gecko. POWs ate the little lizards whenever they could catch them. Sometimes they roasted them over little fires. More often, they didn’t bother. When you were in the kind of shape they were in, raw meat was as precious as any other kind.
“You know what?” Gordy Braddon asked from beside Peterson. The Tennessean was as skinny as he was, with knees wider than his thighs. A nasty abscess ulcerated one calf. Pretty soon, the medical officer would have to cut it out to keep it from going gangrenous. A puckered red scar on Peterson’s leg showed where he’d gone through that. Ether? Chloroform? The Japs had them. They laughed when the medical officers asked for some. The medical officers were lucky to get iodine, let alone anything more.
“Tell me,” Peterson said after a while. Beriberi sapped the will as well as debilitating the body. Sometimes even conversation seemed more trouble than it was worth.
“We’re gonna leave one man dead for every foot of tunnel we drive,” Braddon said.
Peterson contemplated that. Again, he took his time. He couldn’t help taking his time-his wits wouldn’t work fast no matter how much he wanted them to. “One man?” he said after the slow calculations were complete. “We’re liable to leave five or ten men dead for every foot of tunnel.”
His companion in misery took his own sweet time thinking about that. “Wouldn’t be surprised,” he said at last. “God damn Walter London to hell and gone.”
“Yeah.” Even in his present decrepit state, Peterson didn’t need to think that over before he agreed with it. He managed a graveyard chuckle. “Well, you know what the Japs say. ‘Always prenty plisoner.’ ”
At the rate POWs were dying in the Kalihi Valley, he wondered how long there would be plenty of prisoners. Of course, this place was specifically designed to use them up. A lot of men who went into the ever-deepening tunnel shaft lasted only a few days. The ones who managed to get past that dreadful initiation to life here did better-if survival was better, which didn’t always strike Peterson as obvious.
“All I want is to be alive when we take this goddamn place back,” Braddon said. “Reckon I get to pay these sons of bitches back then for what they owe me.”
“Yeah, that’s what keeps me going, too,” Peterson agreed. “Sometimes the idea of getting my own back is about the only thing that does keep me going.”
He wondered whether the USA would be able to take Hawaii back. When he’d been in the POW camp up near Opana and the ordinary labor gangs, he’d had some connection with the outside world. Part of what he got was Jap propaganda, of course, but not everything was. Here and there, people had clandestine radio sets and heard the other side of the news.
Not in the Kalihi Valley. The Japs hardly bothered with propaganda here, because they didn’t think the poor damned souls working on the tunnel were ever coming out. If any of the prisoners had a radio, no news from it had ever got to Jim Peterson’s ear.
He started to settle down for sleep. A thrashing in the bushes made him pause. A furious grunting made him scramble to his feet. Braddon jumped up, too. So did men in worse shape than either of them. So did men in worse shape than either of them who’d been sunk deep in exhausted sleep.
That grunting meant a wild pig was out there. If they could catch it, if they could kill it, they could eat it. The mere thought of a chunk of pork drove Jim Peterson harder than any Japanese taskmaster’s bamboo club.
Pigs did wander into the camp every once in a while, looking for garbage-or maybe looking to dig up bodies buried in shallow graves and do unto humans what humans were in the habit of doing unto them. The POWs had pigstickers-bamboo spears with points made from iron smuggled out of the tunnel. They hid them in the jungle; if the guards found them, they confiscated them and beat everybody in the nearest barracks. To the guards, anything that could stick a pig could also stick one of them. The guards weren’t wrong, either. Peterson dreamt of spearing a couple of them. Only the certain knowledge of what would happen to him and everybody else if he tried stayed his hand.
He grabbed a spear now, and plunged into the dripping emerald jungle in the direction of the grunting. Before he got there, it rose to a furious squealing. “For Christ’s sake, don’t let it get away!” he shouted, and ran harder than ever.
He found where the pig was by almost falling over it. It was a boar, as nasty a razorback as ever roamed the hills in Arkansas. Two men had already driven spears into it, and hung on to them for dear life. A boar’s tushes could rip the guts out of a man almost as well as a bayonet could. And a wild pig was faster and stronger than a Jap with an Arisaka.