Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

He winced when he emerged from the tent. Hawaii had always struck him as paradise on earth, or as close as anybody was likely to come. The thought was profoundly unoriginal, which made it no less true. Here, hell had visited itself on paradise. The noxious smoke swirled everywhere, now thicker, now thinner, depending on the vagaries of the breeze. Maybe the gauze mask Peterson wore helped some, but he still had a permanent nasty taste in the back of his throat, while his eyes felt as if somebody’d thrown ground glass into them.

Heavy black fuel oil fouled the turquoise waters of the harbor. The floating fires were finally out. That helped a little, but only a little. The Navy’s proud battlewagons lay shattered and broken, their terrible grace and beauty turned to trash: Oklahoma capsized; West Virginia and California sunk; Arizona not just sunk but with her back broken, too, her bridge and foremast all twisted and askew and blackened by the conflagration that had raced over her. And Nevada, or what was left of her. Yet another armor-piercing bomb had struck her in the third wave of the attack, after she beached herself near Hospital Point, and started fires that still smoldered. She might be salvageable, but it would be a long, slow job.

Bombs had savaged the lush greenery on Ford Island, too, toppling palm trees and showing the earth all naked and torn. This is what war looks like. This is what war feels like. This is what war smells like, Peterson thought. It wasn’t the way he’d imagined it at Annapolis. It wasn’t even the way he’d imagined it when that goddamn Jap shot him down. That had been a duel in the air, a fair fight-except that his Wildcat was a lumbering pig when measured against the machine the Jap flew. This… Nothing even remotely fair about this. Japan had kicked the USA right in the nuts, and this was the aftermath.

Peterson wanted with all his heart to visit the same devastation on Tokyo. He couldn’t. His country couldn’t. He was painfully aware of that. But Japanese soldiers were within reach on Oahu, and getting closer all the time. He could pay them back for some of what they’d done to Hawaii.

That they might do the same to him never crossed his mind. He’d spent his whole military career training as a pilot. Ground combat was a closed book to him, though one he wanted to open.

If they tell me no, goddammit, I can steal a Springfield and a bike and head for the fighting myself, he thought. Hell, I don’t even need a bike. I can hoof it. This isn’t what anybody’d call a big island. Being ready to contemplate ignoring orders spoke strongly about how frazzled he was.

Bombs had hit the dispatching office, too. Is there anything around here bombs haven’t hit? But the clerks-the pen-pushers and rubber-stamp stampers and typewriter jockeys without whom the military couldn’t function but who often thought themselves the be-all and end-all instead of the men who did the fighting and dying-the clerks persisted, even if they had to go to tents, too. Some of them had died here. Some of them might even have fought here.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. No chance for a plane. We haven’t got any planes to give you right now,” a yeoman said through his own muffling of gauze.

Peterson knew nobody had any planes. He’d heard nothing but how nobody had any planes since those gray-haired geezers from the golf course got him to Ewa. “Let me have a rifle, then,” he said. “Let me have a rifle and a helmet and permission to go north. There’s a war on up there.”

Unlike the Marine captain over at Ewa, the yeoman shook his head. “We don’t want to do that, sir. If we get planes, we don’t want to find out that all the people trained to fly them have turned into casualties in the meantime.”

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Peterson exploded. “Where the hell are you going to get more planes from? Pull ’em out of your asshole? Everybody and his mother-in-law says the Japs have blown all the planes in Hawaii to hell and gone. What did I join the Navy for if you won’t even let me fight?”

The yeoman turned red. “Sir, I have my orders,” he said stolidly. “And if you don’t mind my saying so, sending you to the front with a rifle is about like putting a doughboy into a fighter cockpit and expecting him to shoot down Japs.”

“My balls!” To Peterson, ground combat looked simple. You aimed at a Jap, you shot the son of a bitch, and then you aimed at the next one. What was so complicated about that? Flying a plane, now, was a whole different business. That took skill and training.

With a shrug, the yeoman said, “However you want it, sir. If you like, I’ll bump you on to Lieutenant Commander McAndrews. I don’t have the authority to change orders like that. He does.”

“Bring him on!” Peterson said eagerly.

Lieutenant Commander McAndrews still had an office in a real building to call his own. As it did everywhere, rank had its privileges. McAndrews, a jowly man in his late forties, looked at Peterson as if he were a cockroach in the salad. “So you want to go off and be a hero, do you?” he said in a voice like ice.

“No, sir. I want to serve my country, sir.” Peterson could yell and cuss at the yeoman-he outranked him. The shoe was on the other foot here. He had to move carefully. “They won’t let me get back into an airplane. If they would, I’d gladly fly. But the enemy is here. I want to fight him.”

“You may not be doing yourself any favors, you know,” McAndrews said. “Things aren’t going so well. The Army may have promised more than it can deliver.” He sniffed, as if to say one couldn’t expect anything else from the Army. By all the signs, the rivalry between Navy blue and Army khaki counted for more with him than the war against Japan.

Maybe that made sense in peacetime. Peterson had had plenty of rude things to say about the Army, too. What Navy man didn’t? But you could take it too far. “Good God, sir!” he said. “In that case, they need all the help they can get.”

McAndrews eyed him curiously. “Are you really so eager to get yourself killed, Lieutenant?”

“No, sir,” Peterson answered. “What I’m eager for is killing those little yellow bastards who jumped on our backs when we weren’t looking.”

“Your spirit does you credit,” McAndrews said, but not in a way that made it sound like a compliment. “It is policy not to risk those men who have skills that may be valuable in the future…”

“How? Where? We haven’t got any airplanes to speak of, and we have got more pilots than we know what to do with,” Peterson said. “Sir.”

“If I have more money than I know what to do with, Lieutenant, I don’t throw some of it in the fire,” McAndrews said coldly. “Do you?”

“I don’t know, sir. I never had more money than I knew what to do with.” As a matter of fact, Peterson had done the equivalent of throwing his money in the fire plenty of times. When he was in port, he spent it on booze and broads and bright lights. What else was it good for?

“I was speaking metaphorically.” Lieutenant Commander McAndrews’ tone declared that Peterson wouldn’t recognize a metaphor if it bit him in the leg. He might have accused the younger man of eating with the wrong fork. “But if you are mad enough to want to go…”

“If somebody doesn’t go stop the Japs up there, sir, don’t you think they’ll come down here?” Peterson asked. “What happens if-no, when — they do?”

By the horrified expression that washed across McAndrews’ face, he hadn’t even imagined that. A lot of possibilities about the Japanese hadn’t occurred to Americans till too late. Peterson knew all about that; he was one of the Americans those possibilities hadn’t occurred to. Maybe McAndrews hadn’t let himself think about this one. He looked as if he hated Peterson for making him think about it.