Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Fuck that,” his buddy answered. “They’re treating us like dogs, so complain to the goddamn SPCA.”

They had their first abandon-ship drill a little more than an hour after leaving port. Part of Les approved; they were doing what they needed to do in case of disaster. The rest of him worried. Did they have so little confidence that they could evade Japanese subs? If they did, how much trouble was the invasion fleet liable to be in?

He shrugged, down there in the bowels of the troopship. He couldn’t do anything about it, one way or the other.

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU felt every gram in the pack on his back. He and his men had spent too long in Honolulu, and hadn’t done enough while they were there. Now they were marching again, and he could feel that they hadn’t done it for too long. He could also feel that it was summertime. Oahu didn’t get cold in the winter or hot in the summer, but it was warmer now than it had been when he fought his way south across the island. As the sweat streamed down his face, he felt every degree, too.

“Come on, keep it up!” he called to his men. “You’ve got soft! You’ve got fat! You’ve got lazy!” He’d got soft and fat and lazy himself, but he wasn’t about to admit it to the soldiers in his squad. He would march till he fell over dead before he showed weakness. Noncoms had to act that way. If they didn’t, if they let their men get the edge on them, they couldn’t hope to do their job.

The very landscape had changed since he last came this way. It wasn’t that he was heading north instead of south, either. What had been fields full of sugarcane and pineapple were now rice paddies. That gave the countryside a much more familiar feel. The men who had grown the other crops were now hard at work to feed the island. Some of them looked up from the fields as the regiment marched by. Others just kept on with what they were doing.

“I wonder if they’d rather be doing this or the work they had before,” Senior Private Furusawa said. He’d always had an inquiring turn of mind.

“They’d rather eat,” Shimizu said. “You can’t live on that other stuff, even if it’s nice once in a while. Rice, now…” He didn’t go on, or need to. To him, to all of them, rice was food. Everything else added variety.

All the blown bridges on the north-south highway had been repaired. All the damage from mines and shells had been fixed, too. Cars and trucks and tanks could travel without any trouble. So could soldiers.

Shiro Wakuzawa asked, “Are the Americans really going to attack us? Didn’t we teach them enough of a lesson when we took Hawaii away from them?”

“Who knows for sure?” Shimizu answered. “That’s not for us to worry about. If they try to land on Oahu, what we’ve got to worry about is throwing them back. We can do it-if we’re in the right place when they try to land. If we’re there and they don’t have the nerve to try anything, that’s all right. But if we aren’t and they do, then we’ve got a problem.”

Mynah birds scolded the Japanese soldiers as the men marched north. Corporal Shimizu did his best to ignore them. They were noisy and pushy and had no manners. They might as well be Americans, he thought.

When he said that out loud, the men in his squad laughed. Of course, any joke a noncom made was automatically funny to the men he commanded. Corporals and sergeants had too many ways to avenge themselves on soldiers who didn’t think so-or, more to the point, who acted as if they didn’t think so.

Shimizu remembered the other birds he’d seen when he first came to Oahu: the pigeons and the little blue-faced doves. They’d got thin on the ground in Honolulu, and there weren’t many of them left in the countryside, either. He had no trouble figuring out why: they were good to eat, and food had got scarce. When supplies came regularly from the U.S. mainland, nobody’d bothered the birds. Nowadays, though, they were nothing but meat.

More slowly than they should have, the Japanese soldiers reached the cross road that led west to Schofield Barracks. A gang of American prisoners was repairing it, as the POWs had already done on the north-south road. The prisoners were a sorry-looking lot: skinny and dirty and dressed in the tattered remnants of the uniforms they’d worn before giving up.

“See what happens when you surrender?” Shimizu said, pointing their way. “That’s what you get. That’s what you deserve. Better to die fighting. Better to hug a grenade to your chest and get everything over with at once. Then, at least, you don’t disgrace your family. Honto? ”

“ Honto! ” his squad chorused. No hesitation, no disagreement. Surrender was the ultimate disgrace. How could you hope to go back to your home village after falling into the enemy’s hands? You couldn’t. You’d bring dishonor with you, and all your kin would lose face. Yes, better by far to tap a grenade against your helmet and then hold it tight. Everything would be over in a hurry, and your spirit would go to the Yasukuni Shrine.

After the turnoff for Schofield Barracks came the town of Wahiawa, more of it to the east of the road than to the west. Locals on the street bowed, but didn’t pay much attention to the regiment passing through. By now, they were bound to be used to Japanese soldiers coming and going. They were thin, too, though not so scrawny as the American prisoners. Shimizu thought most of them were skinnier than the civilians in Honolulu. He wondered how much of the fish the sampans caught came this far inland. Not much, unless he missed his guess.

No matter how skinny they were, some of the white women wore scandalously little: nothing but shorts that came more than halfway up their thighs and tops that covered their breasts but not much else. A yellow-haired woman perhaps a few years older than Shimizu walked along the sidewalk with her back very straight, doing her best to pretend the Japanese soldiers in the street didn’t exist.

“They look like whores,” somebody behind Shimizu said.

Soldiers nodded, though he wondered why. No whore in Japan would show herself in public wearing so little; it would shame her. From what he’d seen in the brothels in Honolulu, the same held true here. None of the women in Wahiawa seemed the least bit ashamed.

The women did seem cool and comfortable in the warm weather. Shimizu’s feet were sore. Sweat dampened his uniform. He could smell the men he marched with. They didn’t have the sour, beefy reek a like number of Americans would have, but he knew they were there. He sighed, wishing he were marching with almost-naked women instead of his squadmates. That would sure liven up the day.

Not far beyond Wahiawa, the regiment took a ten-minute break. “Leave your boots on,” Shimizu warned his men. “If you take them off, your feet will swell up and you won’t be able to get them back on again. You wouldn’t like that.” Anyone who couldn’t get his boots back on would have to finish the march barefoot. No, the men wouldn’t like that a bit.

When the sun went down, the regiment was short of Haleiwa and had to camp by the side of the road. The officers muttered and fumed at that, which meant Shimizu and the other noncoms were obliged to mutter and fume, too. He didn’t know about anybody else, but he growled at his squad more for form’s sake than from conviction. If he’d had to march another hundred meters, he was sure he would have fallen over dead.

Cooks who’d brought their field kitchens on horse-drawn carts fixed rice for the men. Some of the soldiers had fallen asleep and couldn’t be shaken awake even to eat. “More for the rest of us,” Senior Private Furusawa said.

“Yes, why not?” Shimizu agreed. “For them, sleep is more important. As for me, I wouldn’t be sorry if the cooks slaughtered the horses and fed them to us, too.” Hashi flashing in the firelight, he emptied his bowl amazingly fast-but he wasn’t the first man done. The soldiers who were hungrier than they were sleepy were hungry.