Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

He didn’t. He just said, “Prepare your report. We’ll put it together with all the others and see what kind of picture it makes.”

“Yes, sir,” Saburo Shindo said again, and gave Genda a salute as mechanically perfect as his landing a few minutes before. As he had then, he followed someone else’s will rather than his own. He shrugged, if only to himself. A lot of military life involved following someone else’s will.

THE SUN SANK toward the Pacific. Jim Peterson took a nail out of his mouth and used it to fasten a plank to a two-by-four. He wished he were using his hammer to smash in a Jap’s skull instead. The guards, though, were on the other side of the barbed wire as the POW camp rose near Opana-about as far north as anyone could go on Oahu. From there, it was nothing but ocean all the way up to Alaska. Peterson could look up and see waves rolling onto the beach.

He drove another nail to make sure the plank stayed securely fastened. He might have to stay in the barracks he was building. He wanted to make sure the building kept off the rain. He didn’t have to worry about making sure the place was warm, the way he would have on the mainland. A good thing, too, because the Japs couldn’t have cared less if their prisoners froze.

He fastened another plank, and another, and another. He worked till a Jap outside the wire blew a horn. The bastard must have thought he was Satchmo Armstrong; he put some Dixieland into the call that let the POWs knock off for the day. And wasn’t that a kick in the nuts-a Jap who liked jazz? Peterson had run into some crazy things in his time, but that might have taken the cake.

The prisoners lined up to return their tools. The guards kept track of every hammer and saw and chisel and axe and screwdriver and pliers they issued each morning. If the count didn’t add up when the tools came back, there was hell to pay. They’d beaten the crap out of a guy who tried to stick a chisel in his pocket and walk off with it. You had to be nuts to think you’d get away with something like that, but young Einstein had taken a shot at it. He’d paid for his stupidity, too; he was still laid up in the infirmary.

Peterson turned in the hammer without any fuss. No matter what he wanted to do with it, he couldn’t, not with armed Japs ready to kill him if he got cute with the sergeant in charge of checking off the tools on a chart full of incomprehensible squiggles.

Prez McKinley stood a couple of men behind Peterson in line. He gave the Jap sergeant his saw. Then he and Peterson got bowls and spoons from their tent and headed for the chow line. The march up to Opana had taught them sticking with a buddy was a good idea. The Japanese had hardly bothered to feed the POWs on the trek across the island. What the guards did give out, the strong had tried to snatch from the weak. Two men together were stronger than any lone wolf could be. Nobody had robbed the two of them. They’d got to Opana in fair shape. Some of the weaker, hungrier men had lain down by the Kamehameha Highway and, too weary to go on, let the Japs do them in.

Here at the camp, having a buddy proved even more important than it had on the road. A buddy could hold your place in line if nature called or if you were busy trying to make some scheme pay off. A buddy might help you escape, too. Prisoners were duty-bound to try to get away. Nobody seemed hot to try it, though. Even under the Geneva Convention, the power holding prisoners could punish would-be escapees who failed. Since the Japs hadn’t signed the convention, no one was eager to find out what they’d do.

“I wonder what sort of gourmet treat we’ll have tonight,” Peterson said. “The pheasant under glass, do you think, or the filet mignon?”

“Shut the fuck up,” said somebody behind him in line.

“Hey, I can dream, can’t I?” Peterson tried to stay pleasant.

“Not while I gotta listen to you, goddammit.” The other prisoner didn’t bother.

It could have turned into a brawl. The main reason it didn’t was that Peterson was too worn and hungry to take it any further. He told McKinley, “Some people can’t take a joke,” but he didn’t say it loud enough for the angry POW in back of them to hear.

“Filet mignon… Hell, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to want to deck you myself,” McKinley answered. “Your belly’s empty, you take food serious.”

Peterson decided he must have stepped over a line if that was the most backing his friend would give him. Joking about steak and pheasant here felt like joking about somebody’s mother on the outside. You were asking for trouble if you did. But if you couldn’t joke, wouldn’t you start going nuts?

Such thoughts vanished from his mind when the chow line started snaking forward. His belly growled like a wolf. He had to clamp his lips together to keep drool from running down his chin. The spit flooding into his mouth reminded him that he took food as seriously as Prez McKinley, as seriously as the son of a bitch who’d resented what he’d said, as seriously as all the other sorry bastards cooped up here with him. The most beautiful prisoner-of-war camp in the world-but who gave a damn?

He looked down at his bowl. It was cheap, heavy earthenware, glazed white. It had probably come from a Chinese restaurant. He’d eaten chop suey out of bowls just like it plenty of times. Thinking about chop suey made him want to drool, too. I really was out of line with that crack, he decided.

Cooks slapped stuff into POWs’ bowls. Peterson wondered how they’d landed the job. Had they been cooks before the surrender, or had the Japs just pointed and said, “You, you, and you”? Either way, he was jealous of them. If anybody here came close to getting enough to eat, it had to be the cooks.

Plop! A ladleful of supper went into a bowl. Plop! Another ladleful, one man closer to Peterson. Plop! Another. Plop! Another. And then plop! — and it was his turn.

He stared avidly at the bowl as he carried it away from the chow line. Just behind him, McKinley was doing the same thing. Rice, some broth, some green things. He didn’t think the green came from proper vegetables. Some of it looked like grass, some like ferns, some like torn-up leaves boiled in with the rice. He didn’t care, not one bit. He drank every drop of the broth and made sure he ate every grain of rice and every bit of greenery-whatever the hell it was-the cook doled out to him.

He was still hungry when he finished-hungry, yes, but not hungry. Even partial relief might have been a benediction from on high. “Jesus!” he said. “That hit the spot.”

“Hit part of the spot, anyway,” McKinley answered. His bowl was as perfectly empty and polished as Peterson’s. “Give me about three of those, and some spare ribs to go with ’em…” Before the surrender, he wouldn’t have talked so reverently about anything but women. People had taken food for granted then, fools that they were.

The two men carried their bowls over to what looked like a horse trough. For all Peterson knew, it had been a horse trough once upon a time. He sloshed his bowl in the water, and his spoon, too. You did want to keep things as clean as you could. Otherwise, you were asking for dysentery. With so many men packed so close together, you might come down with it anyhow, but you were smart to try not to.

After supper came the evening lineup and count. Nobody got to sack out till the Japs were happy with it. Some of the guards couldn’t count to twenty-one without undoing their fly, which didn’t make things any easier. It started to rain while the Americans stood in their rows. Nobody tried to get away from the rain. That might have fouled up the count and left them out there longer yet. At least it wasn’t a cold, nasty rain, like so many on the mainland. Not even the Japs could ruin the weather. Peterson stood there with rain dripping from his nose and ears and chin and the ends of his fingers. He felt sorry for the guys who wore glasses. They probably went blind after a few minutes.