Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo muttered, deliberately ignoring how much he sounded like his father when he said it. To think he’d been reduced to worrying about how he could comfortably wipe his ass! Before December 7, he would have taken the answer for granted. Before December 7, he’d taken all kinds of answers for granted. What did that prove? It proved he’d been pretty goddamn dumb, that was what.

Here came a squad of Japanese soldiers. Kenzo got out of their way and bowed. By now, he did that automatically. But he couldn’t help noticing that one of them was reading a copy of the Nippon jiji. How could he, when the soldier held it open to read an inside page so Dad’s picture was right there looking out at him?

What did the soldiers think when they read a piece like the one Ichiro Mori had written? Did it make them think all the people who lived on Hawaii were glad they’d come? Or did they just go, Oh, more crap? Had they seen so much of this garbage that they recognized it for what it was? Kenzo didn’t know.

He hoped all the people who saw the story wiped their asses with it. Then they would forget about it. If the USA got Hawaii back, people who said stuff like this would be remembered. Dumb as Dad was, Kenzo didn’t want that.

FLETCH ARMITAGE LOOKED longingly past the barbed wire surrounding Kapiolani Park. Waikiki was almost close enough to reach out and touch. Honolulu wasn’t much farther. If I could get past the wire…

Escape was a POW’s duty. He’d had that drilled into him. But even the Geneva Convention let garrisons that recaptured escaped prisoners punish them. And the Japs cared as much about the Geneva Convention’s rules as a bunch of drunks in a barroom brawl cared about the Marquis of Queensberry’s. They’d already made that very, very clear.

And so… Fletch looked. A mynah flew over the barbed wire. The scrounging was bound to be better on the other side. Fletch had never dreamt he could be so jealous of a stupid, noisy bird.

After a little while, he turned away. Contemplating freedom just hurt too much. He laughed, not that there was much to laugh about. In one sense of the word, there was no such thing as freedom anywhere in the Territory of Hawaii, and there hadn’t been since the surrender. In another sense… Fletch would gladly have traded places with anybody outside the camp. He didn’t think anybody out beyond the wire would gladly have traded with him.

He mooched back toward his tent. A slow Brownian motion was always on display in the camp. Some prisoners who had nothing else to do would drift toward the wire to get a glimpse of what things were like out beyond it. Others, having seen as much as they could stand, sadly drifted into the interior once more. You never could tell where any one man would be, but the traffic pattern hardly ever changed.

Here and there, POWs bent over a card game or a makeshift checkerboard or a race between two or three crawling bugs-anything to make the time go by. Most of the captives, though, just sat around letting it go by as it would. A lot of them were too hungry to have the energy for anything unessential. They came fully alive twice a day, at breakfast and supper, and banked their fires the rest of the time.

I’m not far from that myself. Fletch contemplated his own hand. He ignored the filth; nobody here could get as clean as he wanted. What he noticed were the bones and tendons thrusting up against the skin. The flesh that had softened his outlines melted off him day by day, leaving only the basics behind.

He saw the same thing on other men’s faces, which displayed more and more of the hard uplands of nose and cheekbones and chin as time went by. No doubt the same was true of his own mug, but he didn’t get to see that very often. Not seeing himself was a small mercy: in a place singularly lacking larger ones, something to cherish.

Ducking into the tent was another small mercy. If he stayed outside for very long, he burned. Oahu never got too hot, but sunlight here was fiercer than it was anywhere on the mainland because it was more nearly vertical. Back before the fighting started, he’d gone through a lot of zinc-oxide ointment. It hadn’t helped much, but nothing else had helped at all. Since then, he hadn’t had much choice. Some guys tanned almost native-Hawaiian brown. Fletch just scorched, over and over again.

He didn’t have to wait till after sundown to emerge, though thoughts of Bela Lugosi crossed his mind every now and then. The sun was sinking toward Waikiki as he came out to line up for supper. That was funny if you looked at it the right way; people in Honolulu often used Waikiki as a synonym for east, the same as they used Ewa for west. But now he’d moved far enough Waikiki of Honolulu that Waikiki was Ewa of him.

POWs gossiped in the chow line, almost as they would have back at Schofield Barracks. What energy they had came out now. They were hungry, but they knew they’d soon be… less hungry for a little while, anyway.

Somebody behind Fletch said, “Do the Japs really feed you better if you go out on a work detail?” Fletch pricked up his ears. He’d heard the Japs did that, too. They’d damn near have to. They couldn’t expect to get much work out of people who ate only the horrible slop they dished out here.

Another prisoner answered, “Yeah, they do, but only if you meet their work norms. And they set those fuckers so high, you do more shit to meet ’em than they give you extra food.”

“Sounds like the Japs,” the first man said.

Fletch found himself nodding. It sure as hell did. The Russians had a name for workers who went over their norms. Some of the left-wingers at Schofield Barracks had used it now and again. What the hell was it? Fletch scowled, trying to remember. Sta-something… He snapped his fingers. Stakhanovites, that was it!

Feeling smart was almost as good as feeling full. After supper, Fletch shook his head. Feeling full would have been better. But feeling smart was almost as good as feeling not quite so empty, which was the most camp rations could achieve.

After the morning count, a local Japanese came into camp and, speaking good English, did indeed call for volunteers for work details. He got them, more than he could use. Lots of men figured things were so bad here, they had to be better somewhere else.

Fletch wasn’t convinced. Here he ate next to nothing, but he also did next to nothing. If he ate a little more but did a lot more, wouldn’t he just waste away all the faster? That was how it looked to him.

The Japs had boasted about their victories in the Philippines and New Guinea. Taking Hawaii had let them run wild farther west, and had kept the United States from doing one damn thing about it. Fletch could see that very clearly. But the USA hadn’t given up. The B-25s that had visited Honolulu were proof of that. Sooner or later, he was convinced, the Americans would try to retake Hawaii. He wanted to be around when they did.

If that meant sitting around on his can doing very little and eating very little, then it did, that was all. He’d been in more than enough poker games to know that bucking the odds was the fastest way to lose. From where he sat, going out on a work detail looked to be bucking the odds. How many of those who went would come back? Ma Armitage hadn’t raised her boy to be a fool. Fletch hoped she hadn’t, anyway.

CORPORAL AISO WAGGED a finger in Takeo Shimizu’s face. “Be careful when you go out on patrol,” the veteran warned. “Something’s in the air. Don’t trust any of the locals. Don’t even trust the local Japanese. Some of them are like bananas.”

“Bananas?” Shimizu scratched his head.