Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Old man Okamoto looked faintly apprehensive when they walked in. Oscar wondered why. They hadn’t cadged a meal off him in a year and a half, and they’d paid him back for that one the next time they were here. They ordered their noodles and sat down to wait while the gray-haired little Japanese man ladled them out of the big pot he kept bubbling in back of the counter. He set the bowls on the table along with the short-handled, big-bowled china soup spoons every Japanese and Chinese place in Hawaii seemed to use.

“Thanks, Pop,” Oscar said, and dug in. He and Charlie both ate like wolverines. He was halfway down the bowl before he noticed old man Okamoto had the radio tuned to KGMB, not to the nasal-sounding Japanese music he usually listened to. KGMB should have been playing music, too, if of a more normal sort. It wasn’t. Instead, an announcer was gabbling into the mike. He sounded as if he’d have kittens right there on the air.

That was how Oscar-and Charlie, too-heard about Pearl Harbor. “Jesus,” Charlie said. Then he spooned up some more siamin. Oscar nodded. He went on eating, too. After a couple of minutes, he glanced over to old man Okamoto. No wonder the old guy was nervous! If the Japs had done that down there, he probably counted himself lucky that his neighbors hadn’t come by with pitchforks and tar and feathers.

Oscar laughed. Like most old-country Japanese, Okamoto had come to Hawaii to work in the fields. He’d been running this place for as long as anybody could remember, though. You had to be crazy to think of him as a danger to the United States. His neighbors must have felt the same way-no sign of tar and feathers.

“Your KGMB time is eleven-forty-eight,” the man on the radio said, his voice getting shriller every minute. “We have been ordered off the air by the United States Army, so that our signal does not guide Japanese airplanes or parachutists. We will return only to transmit official bulletins and orders. Please stay calm during this period of emergency.”

This time, Charlie laughed first. Oscar followed suit. The radio signal cut away to sudden, dead silence. How would the horrible news, followed by the station’s disappearance, make anybody stay calm?

Something else crossed his mind. Japanese parachutists? What would happen if the Japs invaded Oahu? He hoped the Army would trounce them. What else was it here for? But suppose it didn’t. It sounded as if the Japs had landed on things with both feet. Suppose…

Oscar eyed old man Okamoto again, more thoughtfully this time. If the Japanese Empire’s soldiers came to Oahu, how would the local Japanese respond? He’d heard Army and Navy brass had sleepless nights about questions like that.

But it was their worry, not his. He and Charlie got to the bottom of their bowls at the same time. “What now?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t want to go back to Honolulu right away. Everybody’s gotta be going nuts down there,” Oscar answered. “Besides, if the Japs are shooting up Wheeler and Schofield and Kaneohe, God knows if we can even get there from here. We might as well hang around and surf and hope the waves get better. What do you think?”

Charlie nodded. “Suits me. I was gonna say the same thing, but some haoles, they figure they all the time gotta do stuff, you know what I mean?”

“If I saw anything I could do, I’d do it,” Oscar said. “You want to join the Army right now?” Charlie shook his head. Oscar shrugged. “Okay. Neither do I. In that case, we might as well do what we’re doing.” He left a dime on the table for old man Okamoto as he and Charlie headed out to his car.

By the time they got back to the beach, Oscar could see smoke rising in the south up over the mountains. He whistled softly. That was a hell of a lot of smoke. He and Charlie were both shaking their heads when they paddled out into the Pacific. No wonder the fellow on the radio sounded as if he’d just watched his puppy run over by a cement mixer. The Japs must have blown up everything that would blow.

They rode the waves all afternoon, then went back into Waimea for supper. Okamoto’s seemed to be the only place open, and nobody but them was in it. Along with siamin, Oscar bought a loaf of bread and a couple of Cokes for breakfast the next morning. Getting the old man to understand a loaf of bread wasn’t easy, but he managed.

He and Charlie slept in the car again that night. Some time after midnight, truck noises and swearing men woke them up. “The Army,” Oscar said, and went back to sleep.

Army or no Army, it never occurred to him not to go into the water at dawn the next morning. It didn’t occur to the soldiers to try to stop them till they were already in the ocean and could pretend not to hear. When fighter planes zoomed by overhead right afterwards, Oscar wished he’d listened.

He didn’t know whether he spotted the incoming barges before the Army men on the beach did or not. He did discover getting stuck in a crossfire was no fun at all. By what would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along, he and Charlie made it back to shore alive. They piled into his Chevy and got the hell out of there.

JIM PETERSON HADN’T thought the Japanese would hit Hawaii. He would have been glad to have his fellow fliers from the Enterprise tell him what a damn fool he’d been, but he didn’t think many of them were left alive. Nobody was saying much about what had happened to the carrier, either.

And nobody was letting him get back into combat. The only Wildcats on Oahu were the couple that had survived the flight in from the Enterprise. They already had pilots. “Put me in anything, then!” Peterson raged after the golfers whose round he’d interrupted brought him to the Marine Corps Air Station at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. “I don’t care what I’m in, as long as I get another swing at those little yellow bastards!”

They wouldn’t listen to him. The first thing they did was send him to the dispensary tent, where a harried-looking medic confirmed that yes, he was still breathing, and no, he didn’t have any bullet holes in him. That done, they took him out to the airstrip. It was nothing but wreckage, some still burning.

“You see?” a Marine Corps captain said. “You aren’t the only one who wants another shot at the Japs-but you’re gonna have to wait in line, just like everybody else.”

“Jesus!” Peterson said. And it could have been worse. The Enterprise had taken some of the Marine pilots and plants from Ewa to Wake Island just before the Japs came in. Otherwise, they might have got stuck on the ground, too. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“Beats me,” the captain answered.

“They kicked us in the nuts, and we weren’t even looking!”

“Sure seems that way.” The Marine seemed to take a certain morose satisfaction in agreeing with him. “And it’s not just this base, mind you.” He waved to the east. It looked like hell over there-literally. The pall of thick, oily black smoke filled that half of the sky. “Sons of bitches didn’t just hit the fleet. They got the tank farms, too. God only knows how many million gallons of fuel going up in smoke.”

“Up in smoke is right,” Peterson said. Little by little, the sheer scale of the disaster began penetrating even his stubborn soul. “For God’s sake, if you can’t do anything else, give me a rifle and a helmet and let me shoot at ’em.”

For the first time, the Marine officer looked at him with something approaching approval, not barely concealed annoyance. “That, now, that may be arranged-if it turns out there’s anybody to shoot at.”

Peterson stared at him. “If they’ve done this much, you think they won’t follow it up with an invasion? They’d have to be crazy not to.” He was a born zealot; his views swung from one extreme to the other with the greatest of ease.