Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

By the PFC’s grime and the stubble on his chin, he’d been fighting from the very beginning of this mess. How could he not have seen and smelled and heard the same kinds of things as Fletch had? How could he not be getting hardened to what war did? What he’d seen just now, though, had shaken him to the core.

Which meant that either he was shell-shocked or that it was going to shake Fletch to the core, too. For his own sake, Fletch rooted for shell shock. But he went into the cane field with the soldier. Stalks rustled. Bugs chirped. One of them lit on him. He brushed it away, trying to walk as softly as he could.

“Eddie?” the PFC called, cradling his Springfield. “You there, Eddie?”

“Wish to hell I wasn’t,” another soldier answered from not far ahead. “You find an officer, Bill?”

“A lieutenant,” the PFC-Bill-said, damning with faint praise.

“Bring him on.” Eddie didn’t seem inclined to be fussy. “I’m with poor goddamn Wilbur. Ain’t no Japs around-now.”

Following Bill, Fletch pushed the last little way through the cane. Eddie was a stocky, swarthy private who looked straight out of Hell’s Kitchen or some other equally charming slum. He stood guard over a corpse. The dead man’s hands were tied behind his back, which Fletch saw first. Bill said, “Jap bastards caught poor Wilbur alive. Go on around, sir. Take a look at what they done to him.”

I don’t want to do this. I really don’t want to do this went through Fletch’s mind eight or ten thousand times as he took the four or five steps that let him see what the Japanese had done to the American soldier they’d captured. And he was right. He was righter even than he’d imagined. “Fuck,” he said softly, the most reverent, prayerful obscenity he’d ever heard.

They’d bayoneted Wilbur again and again, in the chest and in the belly-but not in the left side of the chest, because that might have pierced his heart and killed him faster than they wanted to. And after he was dead (Fletch hoped like hell it was after he was dead) they’d yanked down his trousers, cut off his penis, and stuffed it into his mouth. And they must have been proud of their handiwork, too, because they’d stuck a piece of cardboard by his head. On it, one of them had written, in English, HE TAKE LONG TIME DIE.

“Fuck,” Fletch said again. “What do you need me for?”

“What do we do with him, sir?” Eddie sounded like a lost kid, not at all like a tough guy.

“Bury him,” Fletch answered at once, his mouth running ahead of his brain. His wits caught up a moment later: “Bury him, and for Christ’s sake don’t tell anybody just what happened to him. But spread the word: you really don’t want the Japs to take you alive.”

Eddie and Bill both nodded. “Yes, sir,” they said together, seeming relieved somebody was telling them what to do. Then Bill asked, “What about the Geneva Convention, sir?”

“I don’t know. What about it?” Fletch pointed to the mutilated, degraded remnant of what had been a man. “How much do you think the Japs care about it? Why don’t you ask Wilbur here?”

They both flinched. “What do we do if we catch one of them?” That was Eddie.

Fletch looked down at the dead American soldier again. He knew what he was supposed to say. What came out of his mouth was, “Whatever you do, don’t come asking an officer beforehand, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir! ” Where nothing else had, that got Bill and Eddie’s enthusiastic approval.

WHILE AT ANNAPOLIS, Lieutenant Jim Peterson had taken a lot of military history. Back around the time of Christ, he remembered, the Roman Empire had tried to conquer the Germans. (That looked like a damn good idea nowadays; too bad it hadn’t worked.) Augustus sent three legions into the middle of Germany under a bungling general, and they didn’t come back. The Emperor howled, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”

Peterson felt like howling, “General Short, give me back my airplanes!”

Yes, the Japs had sunk the Enterprise and the Lexington, but they’d both gone down swinging. They’d shot down enemy planes. A couple of surviving pilots claimed the Lexington ’s aircraft had nailed an enemy carrier, maybe even two.

But the Army? Before the Japs struck, the Army had lined up its fighters and bombers wingtip-to-wingtip. Scuttlebutt said the illustrious General Short had been scared of saboteurs. Peterson didn’t give a damn about scuttlebutt. What Short had done was set up the bowling pins. And when the Japs did show up, they knocked just about every one of them down.

Not that the Navy came off smelling like a rose. There was plenty of blame to go around, as far as Peterson could tell. Looking back on it, Admiral Kimmel’s decision to have most of the Pacific Fleet in port every weekend seemed something less than brilliant. If Hirohito’s boys had somebody keeping an eye on Pearl Harbor-and anybody with two brain cells to rub together would have-they’d spot the pattern lickety-split. And, again, the USA paid because the Japanese were on the ball when its own top officers weren’t.

Peterson also wondered why the hell neither the Army nor the Navy had spotted the enemy carriers before they launched their planes. Someone should have been looking off to the north. That was the logical direction for the Japs to pick if they were crazy enough to attack the United States at all. Peterson hadn’t thought they would be.

Crazy? The slant-eyed bastards were raking in the chips. “Shows how goddamn smart I am,” he muttered inside the Pearl Harbor BOQ, where he’d gone from Ewa. It was, at the moment, a tent city. Japanese bombs had blown the original structure to hell and gone.

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Peterson had taken English Lit, too. Lines like that stuck in the mind as firmly as Augustus’ anguished cry. This one was a pretty good description of what things were like at Pearl Harbor right now. Everybody wore gauze of some sort over his nose and mouth. Despite the Americans’ best efforts to douse the flames, the fuel-tank farm still burned a week after it was bombed. Noxious smoke filled the air. It got on everything and everybody, and made men look as if they were in blackface for a minstrel show.

Distant thunder came from off to the north. The only trouble was, that wasn’t thunder. It was an artillery duel, the Japs versus the U.S. Army. Again, scuttlebutt was the only way to get a handle on what was happening if you weren’t at the front. On the rare occasions the radio said anything, it belched out optimistic twaddle that made Peterson want to puke. He knew bullshit when he heard it.

Gossip and rumor said the Americans were falling back. The way the distant thunder didn’t seem quite so distant argued that gossip and rumor knew what they were talking about. They also said you didn’t want to try to surrender to the Japs. Peterson didn’t know about that. He’d talked to people who’d talked to people who’d talked to people who said they’d seen this, that, and the other thing. Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t. There were party games where you passed a sentence around the room from mouth to mouth. It always came back to the person who’d started it garbled beyond recognition. The rumor just didn’t make any sense to Peterson. If the Japanese abused American prisoners of war, wouldn’t the USA declare open season on captured Japs? Who’d want to start anything like that?

His doubts weren’t what propelled him out of BOQ. Nobody had yet figured out how to get him into action. He’d been patient as long as he could stand. Now he intended to start pounding on desks and shouting at people till he got what he wanted. That was the strategy of a four-year-old throwing a tantrum, but it often worked. The squeaky wheel got the grease. Peterson wouldn’t just squeak. He’d scream.