Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

A sergeant who usually dealt with a swarm of privates had no trouble putting one mouthy civilian in his place. “What are we doing?” he echoed. “We’re making sure you don’t get your stupid ass shot off, that’s what. And this is the thanks we get? The horse you rode in on, too, buddy.” He spat in magnificent contempt.

The fat man deflated like a leaky balloon. Jane had all she could do not to giggle. Years as an Army wife had acquainted her with the talents of sergeants. This one turned back to his men. They hadn’t missed a beat. As soon as they had their barricade finished, they hauled a cannon up behind it. It wasn’t one of the bigger guns Fletch dealt with, but an antitank weapon. Seeing its snout pointing north gave Jane pause.

When she got to the grocery store, she discovered she wasn’t the only one who’d had the same idea. The line stretched out the door. Some of the women in it were haoles, others Japanese or Chinese or Filipino, though there were just a couple of the latter. Most of the Filipinos on Oahu were men brought in to work in the fields. They sometimes brawled because they didn’t have enough women to go around-or got into knife fights over the ones there were, or over fighting cocks, or over nothing in particular. Jane didn’t have much use for Filipinos.

Two Japanese women right in front of her chattered in their own language. She’d heard Japanese almost every day since coming to Hawaii. She took it as much for granted as the perfect weather or the funny birds or the palm trees. She had taken it for granted, anyhow. Now she eyed the women suspiciously. What were they saying? What were they thinking? If the Japs got this far-almost inconceivable, but for the soldiers in the streets-what would they do?

The white housewife who came out of the store was loaded down with so many groceries, she could hardly walk. She gave the Japanese women a hard stare. “Goddamn lousy Japs,” she said, and trudged on.

They plainly understood English. They stared after her, their flat, narrow-eyed faces unreadable, at least to Jane. For close to a minute, neither of them said anything in any language. Then they started speaking again-in Japanese. Jane didn’t know whether to want to applaud them or kick them in the teeth.

By the time she got into the grocery store, it looked as if a swarm of locusts had been there ahead of her. And so they have, she thought, and I’m another one. She bought canned vegetables and Spam and yams and potatoes and crackers-everything she could think of that would keep for a while. Well, almost everything: try as she would, she couldn’t make herself get a sack of rice. Other haoles weren’t so fussy. Jane shrugged. She liked potatoes better anyhow. She bought toilet paper and Kleenex and soap, too.

She brought her cart up to Mr. Hasegawa. He totaled everything up, not on a cash register but with a pencil on the back of an old envelope. “Twenty dallah, fo’ty-t’ree cent,” he said at the end of his calculations.

On impulse, she asked him, “What do you think of all this?”

His face closed down, the same way those of the Japanese women outside the store had. “Very bad,” he said at last. “We have war, where get more groceries?”

That undoubtedly wasn’t a tenth of what was on his mind, but it wasn’t far removed from what Jane and the other panic shoppers were thinking, either. She set a twenty and a one on the counter. The storekeeper gave her a half-dollar, a nickel, and two pennies. She bumped her little cart out of the grocery store and headed home.

One of the soldiers manning the antitank gun sent a wolf whistle after her. She ignored him, which only made him laugh. Getting mad at them-letting them see you were mad at them-just encouraged them. Fletch had been right about that.

What else had Fletch been right about? Jane angrily shook her head. No matter how much her in-the-process-of-becoming-ex-husband had known about soldiers and artillery pieces, he hadn’t known a goddamn thing about being a husband. If he’d been married to anything, it was the Army, not her.

She looked back at the soldiers. She looked south at the appalling black smoke rising from Pearl Harbor-and west at the smaller smoke clouds from Wheeler Field and Schofield Barracks. All she’d done to Fletch was throw him out of the apartment when she couldn’t stand living with him another minute. Being married to the Army was liable to get him killed.

FLETCHER ARMITAGE STUCK a fresh five-round clip in his Springfield and worked the bolt to chamber the first cartridge. He wanted something that would hit from farther away than he could throw a rock. He still had the officer’s.45 on his hip, but he hadn’t used it for a day or two. The soldier who’d been issued the rifle wouldn’t miss it; a Japanese shell had cut him in half.

The roadblock south of Haleiwa to which he’d added his gun hadn’t held the Japanese for long. They hadn’t come straight at it. He could have slaughtered a million of them if they had. Instead, they’d gone around, through the cane and pineapple fields. The bastards were like water or mercury; they flowed through the tiniest gaps in the American line-and came out shooting on the other side.

He still had the 105mm gun. He still had the De Soto that hauled it, too. The windshield had been shot out of it. A bullet hole went through both rear doors. The round hadn’t gone through any of the men in the back seat. Fletch didn’t know why it hadn’t. Maybe God was on his side after all. But if He was, why had He turned so many Japs loose on Oahu?

A bullet from off to the left cracked past his head and ricocheted off the barrel of the field gun. He ducked, automatically and much too late. He had no idea whether the bullet was American or Japanese. If many more came from that direction, though, he’d have to pull up stakes and fall back again… if he could. If he couldn’t, he’d fall back without it, and take along the breech block so the Japs couldn’t turn the piece around and start shooting it at his side.

More shooting did come from off to the left, but most of it came from two American machine guns. They fired noticeably faster than their Japanese counterparts. Maybe the Japs, instead of flowing through a hole, had walked into a buzz saw this time. Fletch’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. Jesus, he hoped so!

And so it seemed, for the shooting moved farther north. “My God,” one of the artillerymen said wearily. “I didn’t think them slanty-eyed fuckers knew how to back up.”

“I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose. I think we’re doing it to them. There’s a difference,” Fletch said. The artilleryman paused in the act of lighting up a cigarette long enough to nod.

A wild-eyed foot soldier burst out of the cane to the left of the Kamehameha Highway. Half a dozen men around the gun swung their rifles toward him. He didn’t seem to notice how close a brush with death he’d just had. All he did seem to notice was the single silver bar on each of Fletcher Armitage’s shoulders. “Thank God!” he said. “An officer!”

“What the hell?” Fletch said. Most of the time, enlisted men wanted nothing to do with officers. They hoped their superiors would leave them alone. When a PFC actually came looking for a first lieutenant, something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

“Sir, come with me, please.” The PFC sounded close to tears. “There’s something you need to see.”

“What is it?” Fletch asked.

The soldier shook his head. “You got to see it, sir. Christ almighty!” He gulped as if fighting his stomach.

Fletch had already seen much more than he ever wanted to. War was nothing like the sanitized version the Army had got ready for in the drills on the mainland and around Schofield Barracks. People didn’t just get killed. They got blown to pieces. They got chopped to shreds. They got holes punched through them-not neat, tidy holes but ones that poured-often gushed-blood. Fletch had smelled shit and burnt meat, sometimes from the same wounded man. He’d heard shrieks that would haunt him as long as he lived-which didn’t look like being long.