Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“He’s gonna get us all killed, you know that?” Gordy Braddon said as they dumped dirt and gravel into a hole in the road near Schofield Barracks. “He’s gonna get us all killed, and that ain’t the worst of it. You know what the worst of it is?”

“Depends,” Peterson said judiciously. “Maybe you mean he’ll do something stupid and get himself caught and shot, too. Or maybe you mean he won’t just get us killed-he’ll laugh about it, too.”

The PFC stared at him. “Shit, Corporal-you readin’ my mind or what?”

“Hell, anybody with eyes can see what that London item is like,” Peterson said. “He’d take money out of a blind man’s cup-and then, if he thought somebody was watching, he’d toss back a nickel so he’d look good.” Quietly, out of the side of his mouth, he added, “Careful. He’s liable to be listening.”

Gordy Braddon looked around. “Sorry. Don’t reckon he heard me, though.”

“Okay.” Peterson checked, too, a lot more subtly. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Can’t blame me for being jumpy, though.”

“Only thing you can blame anybody for these days is letting his pals down. You don’t do that, by Jesus,” Braddon said. Two dive bombers blazoned with Rising Suns flew north over their heads, not too high. Braddon watched them till they were out of sight. “I think the Japs are jumpy, too. They’ve been doing a lot more flying lately than they had for quite a while. Wonder what the hell it means.”

“Just one thing I can think of.” Peterson had watched the dive bombers, too, watched them with hatred in his eyes. Planes like that had done horrible things at Pearl Harbor-and, he gathered, against the Enterprise, too. Scowling still, he went on, “They must figure we’re going to try to take the islands back.”

“Christ!” Braddon said reverently. “Hope to God you’re right. You think we can do it?”

Before Peterson could answer, the Japanese sergeant who did duty as straw boss for the work gang pointed at the two of them and said, “ Isogi! ” That meant something like, Make it snappy! As slave drivers went, he was a fair man. He warned you before he turned the goons loose on you. If you didn’t get the message, it was your own damn fault. Peterson found it a good idea to busy himself with his shovel for a while. Braddon worked beside him.

After a while, the Jap found someone else to yell at. It never took real long. For one thing, the American POWs were doing work they hated, work any idiot could see would help Japan against their own countrymen. No wonder they didn’t give it their finest effort. And even if they’d shown the best will in the world, they were still too weak and too hungry to work as hard as the Japs wanted them to.

“I’m with you. I hope we can do it,” Peterson said when he judged the coast was clear. The Japanese sergeant didn’t come down on him. Neither did any of the other guards. He kept busy filling in shell holes and potholes just the same. “I’m afraid of what happens if we don’t send enough out to do what needs doing. Yeah, that’s what scares me. Back on the mainland, have they figured out how tough the goddamn Japs really are?”

“If they haven’t, they sure ain’t been paying attention,” Gordy Braddon said. Like Peterson, he went on talking while he worked now. “They beat the shit out of us here. They did the same thing in the Philippines. They bombed San Francisco, for cryin’ out loud. What more does the mainland need?”

“Maybe they’ve got the message over there. I hope so. But I don’t know. I remember how things were before the shooting started,” Peterson said. “Hardly anybody thought they’d have the nerve to pick a fight with us, and everybody thought they’d get their heads handed to them if they tried. After all, they were just using a bunch of junk made out of our old tin cans, right?”

His laugh had a bitter edge. The Japs had used a lot of U.S. scrap metal till FDR stopped selling it to them. But they hadn’t built junk out of it. He’d never got a nastier surprise in his life than when he tried dogfighting a Zero with his Wildcat. The Jap in that fighter had taken him to school, chewed him up, and spit out the pieces.

From what he’d heard since, he’d been damn lucky not to get shot while he was parachuting down to the ground, too. Plenty of pilots had been. The Japanese didn’t respect the chivalry of the air. As far as he could see, they didn’t respect anything but strength. If they had it and you didn’t, they walked all over you. If you had it and they didn’t… maybe they’d kowtow. Maybe. How could anybody know for sure? Nobody’d managed to make ’em say uncle yet.

Walter London laid down his pick in the middle of the road. “I’ve got to take a whizz,” he announced, as if the bulletin were as important as one from the Russian front.

To Peterson and the other men in the shooting squad, it was a lot more important than that. He looked at his comrades in mistrust. Was it his turn? He thought it was. He let his shovel fall. “Me, too,” he said.

London scowled at him. “I can’t even piss without somebody looking over my shoulder.”

“It’s not while you piss that really scares me,” Peterson answered. “But if you take off afterwards, I get shot.”

“I won’t do that,” London whined.

“Not while I’m watching you, you won’t,” Peterson said.

London went off behind a bush. Peterson stood behind another one no more than ten feet away. He didn’t need to piss. He was sweating so hard, most of his water leaked out that way. London did a fine job of watering the grass. “See?” he said to Peterson as he set his clothes to rights.

“Hot damn,” Peterson said. He almost added, Only goes to show what a pissant you are. Almost, but not quite. If he came down on London too hard, he’d give the SOB reason to run and hope everybody else in the shooting squad, or at least one Jim Peterson, got an Arisaka round right between the eyes.

Peterson sighed as they both headed back to the roadway. Maybe having to make calculations like that was the worst part of being a POW. He went back to work while another northbound dive bomber roared by overhead. As soon as he got another hole halfway filled, he was forcibly reminded that exhaustion and starvation came in a long way ahead of calculation after all.

WHEN MITSUO FUCHIDA went down to the Akagi ’s sick bay to see how his friend Genda was doing, a pharmacist’s mate wearing a gauze mask over mouth and nose-a masuku, they called it in Japanese-chased him away. “ Gomen nasai, Commander- san,” the petty officer said, not sounding sorry at all, “but Commander Genda is contagious. We don’t want anyone else coming down with his sickness.”

“I just wanted to say hello and ask how he’s doing,” Fuchida protested.

“I will pass on your greetings, sir.” The pharmacist’s mate stood in the doorway like a dragon. “Commander Genda is doing as well as can be expected.”

That could mean anything or nothing. “About how long do you think he’ll be laid up?” Fuchida asked.

“Until he is well enough and strong enough to resume his duties,” the pharmacist’s mate said. Fuchida wanted to hit him. Petty officers slapped seamen around all the time, the same way Army noncoms did with common soldiers. Officers needed good reasons for belting noncoms, though, and a refusal-or maybe just an inability-to communicate wasn’t enough, not when the pharmacist’s mate was odds-on to be obeying the doctor’s orders by keeping Genda isolated.

Thwarted, Fuchida turned away and went up to the officers’ wardroom. The food there was better than what he’d been eating in Honolulu. Captain Kaku was also there, eating a bowl of pickled plums and sipping tea. “Any sign of the Americans, sir?” Fuchida asked.