Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

He’d fought in trenches before, in 1918 and here. That was the worst war had to offer. The Germans had been tough. The Japs here were even worse, because they didn’t give up and they kept coming at you till they were dead or you were. So he had standards of comparison. The fifteen or twenty minutes till the Marines killed the last man from the Royal Hawaiian Army were the worst minutes of his life-even worse than the time Cindy Lou Callahan’s father caught them in bed together and ran for his shotgun, which went a long way towards explaining how and why Les joined the Marines.

The Hawaiians wouldn’t give up, either. They wouldn’t retreat. They didn’t just stay in place and die. They kept making countercharges at the Marines, screaming and swearing and throwing grenades. Like anybody who’d done any fighting, Les vastly preferred bullets to his bayonet. The bayonet got blood on it in those trenches. So did his Kabar. So did the butt end of his rifle. He killed one bastard with his bare hands in an animal tangle of flying arms and legs. If he hadn’t tucked his chin down tight to his chest, the enemy soldier might have broken his neck instead of the other way round.

Afterwards-but only afterwards, when the red madness of battle eased-he wondered why the Hawaiians sold their lives so dear. Did they think the USA would hang them for traitors and they had nothing to lose? Did they really hate Americans? Or were they simply as much caught up in the madness as the men who faced them? He couldn’t even ask a prisoner afterwards. There were no prisoners. Like Napoleon’s guards, like the Japanese who’d given them guns, the men from the Royal Hawaiian Army died but did not surrender.

Once the last of them had died, Les Dillon squatted in a muddy trench and lit a cigarette. He’d just finished bandaging a Marine’s leg. He hoped the man wasn’t hamstrung. All he could do was hope; he was no corpsman. Another Marine who’d also come through unhurt stared at him from about ten feet away. He too had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Fuck,” he said, and then again:

“Fuck.”

Les nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and, “Jesus.” That amounted to about the same thing. If he’d spoken first, he would have said what the younger man had.

He looked around. These torn-up trenches weren’t worth a thing by themselves, any more than one German trench had been worth anything in particular during the War to End All Wars. How many men had died defending them? How many had died or been maimed taking them? He knew the answer to the last question, knew it out to the tenth decimal place: too goddamn many. He threw down the cigarette butt and lit a new one.

A runner came over from the right. “What are you guys sitting around with your thumbs up your asses for? Pick up your feet-get moving. Back where I came from, they’re going forward like Billy-be-damned.”

A burst of weary profanity answered him. Les said, “Cut us some slack, okay? We almost got our heads handed to us here. Those fucking Hawaiians wouldn’t give up for shit.”

“Goldbricks. I knew you guys were goldbricks,” the runner said.

“Goldbricks, my ass,” Les said. Even after a fight like the one he’d just been through, sometimes your own side was a worse enemy than the bastards who’d been trying to kill you. “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“Hawaiians,” the runner sneered. “You can’t bullshit me about Hawaiians-I damn well know better. We had Hawaiians in front of us, too, all decked out like the Army was when the shit hit the fan. They fired two, three shots and then threw down their pieces and threw up their hands. We musta took a company’s worth o’ POWs.”

The man meant it. Les could see that. He and the other Marines who’d just gone through hell stared dully at the irate runner. “Fuck,” he mouthed, as the youngster had a few minutes earlier. He gathered his men by eye. “Come on,” he said. “We gotta get back in the goddamn war.”

THINKING BACK ON THINGS, Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa couldn’t account for being alive. Most of the men from his regiment had died at or near Oahu’s northern beaches. They’d done everything they could to throw the Americans into the sea. They’d done everything they could-and it hadn’t been enough.

Furusawa stayed alive after the first day’s fighting-one of the few who did. Naval bombardment didn’t kill him. Neither did U.S. air strikes. Nor did enemy artillery and small-arms fire. By the second morning, nobody survived to give him orders.

He’d retreated several times since then. For one thing, he had no one left to tell him not to. For another, he wasn’t a typical soldier. Most of the men in his regiment-even most of his noncoms-had come into the Army straight off a farm. A lot of them had had to learn how to make up a bed that stood on a frame instead of just on the floor. They sucked up the indoctrination about the duty to die for their country along with the rest of their training till it became as automatic as slapping a new clip into an Arisaka.

It wasn’t that Furusawa was unwilling to die for Japan. Like any soldier with a gram of sense, he knew that was always possible, often likely, sometimes necessary. But he was less inclined to die if it wasn’t necessary than most of his comrades. Because he was a druggist’s son, he’d got more education than the average conscript. And his father had taught him to think for himself in a way most Japanese didn’t.

“You always have to worry. Is this the right medicine? Is this the right dosage? Will it be good for this patient? Never assume anything. Always check, always question-always.” Furusawa didn’t know how many times he’d heard his father say that. And the old man, being a typical Japanese father in a lot of ways, would usually follow the advice with a clout in the ear to make sure it sank in. The method was brutally simple. The Army used it, too. Like a lot of brutally simple things, it worked.

In his innocence, the younger Furusawa had gone on asking questions after he was conscripted. The Army, far more brutal than his father ever dreamt of being, soon cured him of that-at least of asking them out loud. But the habit of thought persisted. He would sometimes smile to himself when he ran into things that made no logical sense. Even smiling could be dangerous. He was convinced he got more than his share of thumps and slaps because he didn’t act like a patriotic machine. Of course, he didn’t know a single soldier who wasn’t convinced he got more than his share of thumps and slaps, so who could say for sure?

After the Americans landed, he’d fought hard. But he’d watched other soldiers rush across open ground to try to come to close quarters with the enemy. And he’d watched rifles and machine guns and mortars and artillery shells tear them to bloody shreds before they accomplished a thing. If a sergeant or a lieutenant had shouted at him in particular-“You! Furusawa! Forward!”-he supposed he would have charged, too. No superior had. That left him to use his own judgment. And he was still alive and fighting, while flies buzzed around the bloated, stinking corpses of most of his regiment.

How long he could escape becoming a bloated, stinking corpse himself was anybody’s guess. He crouched in a shell hole not far in front of the ruins of Schofield Barracks. The U.S. Army’s former base had been smashed twice now, first by the Japanese when the Yankees held it and now by the Americans to keep Japan from getting any use out of it.

Several of the men nearby were stragglers and orphans like himself. Others belonged to a company whose captain wasn’t shy about grabbing reinforcements wherever he could. A corporal spoke in bitter frustration: “Those stinking bastards!”