Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

One by one, machine guns in the guard towers fell silent, knocked out by the attackers. “Move! Move! Move!” roared the big voice on the loudspeaker. “American prisoners, move to the south!”

Tracerlight gave Fletch his first glimpse of the soldiers who’d hit the beach to liberate the POW camp. He needed a moment to recognize them for what they were. They wore dark uniforms-dark green, he thought-not the khaki that had been his color. Even their helmets were different: pot-shaped domes that covered more of the head than the British-style steel derbies Fletch and his comrades had used. For a heartbeat, he wondered if they really were Americans. But they had rifles and submachine guns in their hands, and they were shooting up the Japs. What else mattered? He would have kissed Orson Welles’ Martians if they turned their fearsome heat rays on those guard towers.

These weren’t Martians. They were Americans, even if they wore funny clothes. “Haul ass, youse guys!” one of them yelled in pure New York. “We got boats on the beach waitin’ for youse. Shake a leg, already!”

Fletch gave it all he could. He had the feeling a tortoise with a tailwind would have left him in the dust, but he couldn’t do anything about that. The Marines had landed with bulldozers with armored driver’s boxes to tear paths through the barbed wire. He stumbled out through one, stumbled across Kalakaua Avenue, and then fell down when he got to the sand.

Not all the Japs were out of action. Falling down might have saved his life-a sniper’s bullet cracked past just over his head. He hauled himself to his feet and staggered on. The beach was alive with stick figures just like him.

“This way! This way!” Marines and sailors with red flashlights steered POWs toward the boats that waited for them. “We got plenty for everybody. Don’t fight! Don’t trample!”

Obeying that order came hard. How could anyone stand to wait another moment to be free? As he stood there, bullets still snapping and cracking past every so often, he got a look at the boats that would take him and his partners in misery away. He knew damn well that the U.S. military had owned no such slab-sided, front-mouthed machines before the war with the Japs started. Like the airplanes, like the uniforms, these had all been designed and built from scratch while he waited on the sidelines. A career officer, he wondered if he’d have any career left even after he got his strength back.

While he was staring at the landing craft, the men who crewed them stared at the nearly rescued POWs.

“You poor sorry sons of bitches,” one of them said. “We ought to murder every motherfucking Jap in the world for this.”

Before Fletch could say anything, one of the other Americans on the beach beat him to the punch:

“Sounds good to me.”

One by one, the boats filled and waddled off the beach and into the water. They were every bit as ungainly there as they were on land. Fletch’s turn finally came. He climbed an iron ramp and got into a boat. A sailor was passing out cigarettes to the POWs. “Here ya go, pal,” he said, and gave Fletch a light. The first drag on the Chesterfield after so long made him dizzy and light-headed and sick to his stomach, as if he’d never smoked at all. It felt wonderful.

Another sailor said, “You guys are so skinny, we can load more of you on each boat than we figured.” It only went to show there were advantages to everything, even starvation. Fletch would gladly have forgone that one.

A motor started. Chains rattled. The ramp came up. Sailors dogged it shut. All of a sudden, it was the bow of the boat. Awkward as a drunken sow, the landing craft backed into the water. Beside Fletch, a man quietly started to bawl. “We’re free,” he blubbered. “We’re really free. I didn’t think we ever would be, but we are.”

“Yeah,” Fletch said, and then he was crying, too, joy and weakness all coming out at once. Inside a couple of minutes, half the breathing skeletons in the boat were sobbing as if their hearts would break.

Sailors dealt out more smokes. And they passed out open ration cans, too. Tears stopped as abruptly as they’d started. Everybody crowded forward, wanting his with a fierce and terrible desire. None of them would ever be the same about food again. Fletch was sure of that. Right now, they might have been hungry wolves in a cage. Not till his hands closed around a can did a low, unconscious growl die in his throat.

He ate with his fingers. The can held greasy roast-beef hash. It was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate beef. Probably when his Army rations ran out. “My God,” he muttered, over and over again. “My God!” That such food was out there! Even his dreams hadn’t been anything like this. He cut his tongue licking the inside of the can to make sure he got every tiny scrap out of it.

The boat’s motion and the rich food they weren’t used to made several men seasick. After some of the stinks Fletch had known lately, that one wasn’t so bad. His own stomach seemed to take the wonderful food for ballast. Nothing bothered him as the boat chugged away from Oahu. He didn’t think anything would ever bother him again. He might have been wrong, but he felt that way.

After a couple of hours, his landing craft and the others came up alongside ships that took the POWs aboard. That wasn’t easy. They couldn’t climb nets, the way sailors and Marines did. Sailors on deck lowered slings to the boats. The sailors there fitted them around the prisoners’ shoulders. The men on the ship hauled them up.

Fletch felt more like a package than the daring young man on the flying trapeze. “Careful, buddy,” a sailor said as he came up over the rail. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I’m out of that goddamn camp,” Fletch answered. “How could anything hurt me now?” As soon as he was safely up on deck, he asked, “Can I get some more food? Can I have a bath?”

“We got saltwater soap, and those showers are going,” the sailor said. “Otherwise it’s a sponge bath-too many men and not enough fresh water. Food… Doc’s gotta say it’s okay before we give you much. Sometimes you eat too much too fast, you get sick.”

“I wouldn’t.” Fletch knew he sounded like a whiny little kid. He couldn’t help it. When it came to food, he felt like a whiny little kid.

He decided to take a shower. Even he didn’t believe how filthy he was. As he stripped off his rags, a sailor said, “You got anything in the pockets you need to keep? Otherwise we’re gonna deep-six all of this shit.”

“No, there isn’t anything,” Fletch answered. He wasn’t used to being around well-fed Americans any more. Their fleshy bodies looked wrong, distorted. He knew the problem was in the way he looked at these strangers who’d rescued him and taken him in, not in the men themselves. Knowledge didn’t change perception.

Saltwater soap was nasty stuff, but he needed something nasty to get a few layers of filth off. Lots of freed POWs scrubbed themselves in the showers. An ocean-temperature shower wasn’t too bad, not when the ocean was off Hawaii. He kept flicking glances toward the naked men in there with him. He could see every bone and every tendon in their bodies. That was how Americans were supposed to look. Next to them, the sailors and Marines seemed almost… inflated.

After he came out of the shower and dried off, all he got in the way of clothes was a bathrobe. “Sorry, buddy,” said the sailor who handed it to him. “We didn’t know you guys’d be in such miserable shape.”

“It’s okay,” Fletch said. But for modesty, going naked in this climate was no hardship. The Hawaiians had done it all the time. And he didn’t need anybody else to tell him he was in miserable shape. He knew that himself.