Does this make me patriotic, or just a damn fool? He’d got shot once, and here he was, eager to give a brand new enemy a chance to punch his ticket? He looked inside himself. He really was.
He climbed aboard the bus himself, the last man to do so. The door hissed shut. The driver put the bus in gear. Diesel engine grumbling, it started south, one of the dozens, maybe hundreds heading down from Camp Pendleton to San Diego. Pendleton had the room to train Marines by the tens of thousands. San Diego still had the port.
The convoy of buses had Pacific Coast Highway almost to itself. Gasoline rationing had made civilian traffic disappear. Les saw only a handful of cars coming north. Most of the vehicles in the other lane were trucks painted olive drab.
The Pacific was more interesting and prettier. Gulls and terns glided overhead. Waves rolled up onto the beach. In Hawaii, surf-riders would have skimmed ashore atop them. Nobody’d thought of doing that here. Every so often, a lone man or a knot of two or three friends would stand by the edge of the sea with fishing poles. Dillon saw a lot of fishermen, but he never saw anybody catch anything.
Then the buses got down into San Diego. They rolled right past the park where the Padres played. The team must have been on the road, because the ballpark was quiet and empty. Talk inside Les’ bus got louder and more excited when it pulled into the harbor. He didn’t see any battlewagons or carriers tied up there; they’d probably already put to sea. The harbor was full of ungainly Liberty ships and the destroyers that would escort them and-everybody hoped-keep subs away.
With a squeal of brakes that needed work, the bus shuddered to a stop. “Everybody out!” Les said.
“You’ve got a chance to stretch your legs, so you better take it. You think we were tight in here, wait till we get on the damn troopship. Only difference between us and sardines there is, they won’t pack us in olive oil.”
Some of the Marines laughed. Most of them didn’t. They’d been through last year’s abortive campaign, and they knew this wasn’t going to be a trip to Hawaii on a luxury liner.
They did stretch and twist when they got down on the concrete. Les lowered his pack to the ground. Something along his spine crunched when he stretched. He was older than the men he led. He was in good hard shape for a man his age, but every now and then his body insisted on reminding him that good hard shape for a man in his forties wasn’t the same as it had been when he was in his twenties. He hoped he would be able to keep up when they landed on Oahu.
If they landed on Oahu. Things had gone wrong once. He hoped they wouldn’t go wrong again, but life didn’t come with a money-back guarantee. Too damn bad, he thought.
“My company, form on me!” Captain Bradford called from a nearby bus. “We’ll be boarding that ship.” Since Dillon’s bus stood between him and his company commander, he couldn’t see which ship Bradford had in mind. It didn’t matter much; Liberty ships were as like as peas in a pod, only a lot uglier.
Bradford pointed again when Les could see him. Valdosta Liberty was stenciled in big white letters on the black paint at the freighter’s stern. But for the name, she could have been the Alamogordo Liberty or the Missoula Liberty or any of the others crowding Coronado Bay.
Up the gangplank he went. Merchant seamen in dungarees crewed the ship. He didn’t much like that, but he couldn’t do anything about it. The Navy had trouble finding sailors for all its new warships, let alone troopships. But if trouble came, would these civilians know what to do with the antiaircraft gun at the Valdosta Liberty’s bow?
Hell with it, he thought. If they don’t, some of us’ll take over. Any Japs want this ship, they’ll have to pay the bill for her.
Captain Bradford, being an officer, would share a cabin with his social equals. Dillon, being a noncom, went down into the bowels of the Liberty ship with the rest of the Marines. The air down belowdecks felt still and dead. It would only get worse. They’d be sailing south, so it would get hotter. The men wouldn’t have many chances to bathe. Odds were the galley would serve beans, too. All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia, Dillon thought.
Nobody gave a damn about his opinion. He got his platoon settled in the cramped space available as best he could. The first card games started even before all the men had slung their packs up onto their bunks. The Valdosta Liberty’s engines came to life. He felt them through the soles of his feet as well as hearing them. The whole fabric of the ship vibrated. Then she began to move.
“Here we go again,” somebody said. Les nodded. That summed it all up as well as anything.
KENZO TAKAHASHI MOVED LIKE AN OLD MAN. By late afternoon, he felt all the bruises and lumps the Japanese soldiers had given him earlier in the day. He kept walking all the same. He had to find out if Elsie was okay.
He flinched when he walked past a squad of Japanese soldiers. But he bowed, too, so they didn’t bother him. He might have been bruised, but he wasn’t wearing a scarlet letter (he laughed at himself for remembering American Lit at a time like this). Besides, they were on duty, not on leave and drunk. And he wasn’t walking with a girl, which no doubt counted most of all.
He flinched again when he went up the Sundbergs’ walk and knocked on the front door. If Elsie wasn’t there… If she wasn’t there, Mrs. Sundberg would start screaming at him, and how could he blame her?
The door opened. Elsie’s mom stared out at him. Then she said, “Ken! Thank God!” and hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. She pulled him into the house and called, “Elsie! Ken’s here!”
From the back of the house, Elsie squealed. She came running up to Ken, threw herself into his arms-she almost knocked him over-and gave him a kiss. It wasn’t the sort of peck he’d got from her mother, either. It was the real McCoy. And Mrs. Sundberg, who stood there watching, didn’t pitch a fit. She beamed at him and Elsie.
After the kiss ended, Elsie took a real look at him. “Oh, Ken!” she exclaimed. “You got hurt!”
“It’s not too bad,” he said, and that kiss made him less of a liar than he would have been a couple of minutes earlier. “I’m just glad you got away from those bastards, that’s all.” He bobbed his head toward her mother. “Excuse me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Mrs. Sundberg said warmly. “Elsie told me what you did. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” She eyed him, too. “Can I get you some ice?”
“Probably too late for that,” Kenzo answered. “I’ll be okay in a few days. They didn’t kick me in the teeth, and my ribs are just sore. Nothing’s busted.”
“I’m so sorry!” Elsie squeezed his hands in hers.
He shrugged. “Not your fault. Those miserable goons…” He couldn’t call them what he wanted to, not in front of Elsie and her mother.
“They certainly are.” Mrs. Sundberg’s voice wasn’t warm any more, not when she talked about the Japanese soldiers. She turned to Elsie. “I’m going to let the neighbors know Ken’s all right, too. I’ll be back in a while. I know the two of you have a lot to, uh, talk about.”
He felt he’d earned his American name. Out the door Mrs. Sundberg went. Kenzo nodded to Elsie.
“Hiya,” he managed.
She wasn’t laughing. She looked on the edge of tears. “They really could have killed you,” she said.
“Yeah, well…” He shrugged again. It hurt. He went on, “They would have done some pretty horrible things to you, too.”
Her face twisted. “You hear stories about things like that, but you don’t think they can happen to you. Then they do-or they almost do.” She looked down at the rug. “You hear stories about heroes, too, but you never think you know one.”