XIII
Company of Kings
Twitchy, 19
June–October 1944
ITALY
Naples
June 2
It’s the first time I’ve set foot in another country, and don’t get me wrong, I know what I’m here for—I saw those sunken destroyers in the harbor, the burned-out hulls pitted by shrapnel, I see the buildings collapsed by artillery fire—but goddamn, I’m excited. Everything’s different in Italy—the smells are different, that stink of sea and sewage and sweat, the sounds, the way the language kinda sashays like every conversation is a dance or a knife fight, even the weeds growing out of the rubble are different—and I want to see everything, hear everything, know everything.
My buddy Bill Hayami—he’s the only Hawaiian guy in our squad—says he’s gonna try to get a pass to see the ruins of Pompeii.
And I say, “What the hell is Pompeii?” because it sounds like some dried flowers and shit white people would put in their bathrooms.
He laughs and calls me a stupid kotonk, you know, the sound a coconut makes when it hits the ground, but he also tells me all about how this real old Roman city got buried under a ton of ash when this old volcano erupted, and all that ash protected it from erosion or whatever until archaeologists dug it up thousands of years later.
Bill may be a buddhahead, but he’s a real nice fella ’cause he always takes the time to explain shit to a dumb kid like me.
Funny how a place can be so old and so new at the same time, huh? New to me, but some of these buildings are older than the country I’m fighting for. All those cathedrals and palaces and stuff brought to their knees, piazzas jammed up with jeeps and GIs and bullet casings and trash.
Anzio
June 7
We get our first taste of war when the Germans decide to raid the supply dumps at Anzio, and me and my pal Kaz Okuda run to watch. Kaz’s a funny guy. He kinda reminds me of Frankie, who’s in Item Company, 3rd Battalion, so I don’t see him much, but more than I see Mas, who’s all the way over in 2nd Battalion, but smaller and wiry like a fighting weasel or something.
When we met, he told me, “No offense, but you better be in another company because I sure as hell don’t want a guy named Twitchy covering my ass.” Turns out we’re both in the same platoon in King Company, and the first time we get to handle live grenades, Kaz fumbles his. Lucky for him, I snatch that thing right up and toss it before our platoon sergeant’s any the wiser. Kaz liked me fine after that.
Now German planes are roaring through the sky, red tracer fire streaking through the darkness. Flames explode over the supply dumps. On the ground, the antiaircraft guns are flashing, flak bursts rat-a-tat-tatting through the air.
“It’s like the Fourth of July!” Kaz shouts. His eyes are lit up like he’s a kid seeing firecrackers for the first time.
“Except they’re a month too early!” I say.
He laughs. Kaz has got this big laugh, all teeth and gullet. “Someone’s gotta teach those Germans some goddamn U.S. history!”
Belvedere
June 26
You can say a lotta things about me, but you can’t say I don’t admit it when I’m wrong.
And boy, am I wrong.
I didn’t know what I was here for, and that raid at Anzio wasn’t war.
No matter how much you march or how many targets you shoot or how many maneuvers you do, you can’t really imagine it till you’re in it. Till you’ve got orders to take some city in the middle of Tuscany you’ve never heard of and your buddy Bill hasn’t either, and that’s saying something ’cause Bill’s gotta be the smartest guy in all of King Company, and you’re charging up the road and your ears are ringing with the sound of artillery fire you can’t identify yet and your weapon’s slippery in your hands and you’re running with the rest of your squad or who you hope is the rest of your squad—you can’t tell ’cause it’s so fucking chaotic—and you reach a shed or something and you look around for the guy next to you and suddenly the guy next to you isn’t there, he’s on the ground in that field you just crossed and there’s a hole in his helmet where an MG got him and he’s dead, shit you’ve never seen a dead guy before, but there he is.
Bill runs up and he’s got this panicked look in his eyes and he’s yelling, “That’s Ted Araki! He’s dead, Twitch!” and you’re screaming, “I know! I know! I saw!” Actually, you can’t stop seeing it, even when you’re not looking, and your sergeant’s grabbing you by the jacket now, he’s pulling you forward, shouting, “Keep moving! Get going!” and you want to obey ’cause you know you’re supposed to obey but goddamn, Ted Araki is dead and you don’t wanna fucking die, you wanna hunker down somewhere safe and quiet, except the last time you felt safe and quiet was in the arms of a girl in a desert and now she and the desert are half a world away and they’re shooting at you, those bullets are real, those guys are really falling, dying, and holy shit, I mean holy motherfucking shit, this is really it, this is war.
3rd Battalion, that’s Item, Jig, and King Companies, makes it fifteen hundred yards or something before we’re held up south of our objective. It’s not even noon, and we’re stuck. There’s those big explosions our sergeant says are from German 88s and some automatic fire coming straight at us from Belvedere every time we show our faces.
Me and my buddy Bill are next to each other in the shelter of a road embankment, and he keeps taking off his glasses and cleaning ’em and putting ’em back on only to take ’em off again.
I lean back. “Shit, Bill, I didn’t come all the way to Europe to sit in some ditch. When do we get a move on?”
Then they call the 100th Battalion outta reserve. Yeah, the same 100th that’s made of Hawaiians who joined up after Pearl Harbor and replacements we sent from Shelby. The 100th that’s been fighting in Italy for nine months. The 100th that almost took Monte Cassino with the 34th Division. The 100th they call the Purple Heart Battalion ’cause they’ve had so many guys wounded or KIA.
These guys are veterans now and goddamn heroes ’cause they go charging right up the middle between 2nd Battalion and us in 3rd, take the high ground, Belvedere, and another nearby village. I mean, you think you know something, and then some guys come along and show you that you know nothing and you’d better shut up, watch, and learn fast.
By the time 1700 hours rolls around, we’re advancing again, driving the Germans right into the sweet embrace of the 100th. It feels different this time, knowing that the gunfire’s gonna be all around us, knowing that after the 100th’s lightning strike on Belvedere, we can’t let them show us up, knowing that this is what we came here to do, this is really it, and we can’t choke now.
Monteverdi
June 30
After three days of fighting around Belvedere, they pull us back to Monteverdi. It’s a pretty little hilltop town of red shingle roofs, green shutters, and stone the color of orange sherbet. Best of all, on the second day, me and Kaz are poking around, looking into storage sheds for eggs or some of that good Parmesan Mrs. K. likes to use on Italian night at the Katsumoto house, and Kaz is scuffling around, griping about something or another, when he knocks over a sack of grain. The thing hits the floor, whump!, and the burlap splits, spilling seeds like a little waterfall.
Kaz curses and kneels to scoop it back into the bag, but he stops. The grain’s going right through the floorboards, and in the silence you can hear it falling, sssssss, down a long ways.
Quickly, we move some barrels around and pull up a trapdoor like the one my dad uses in Topaz to hide his sake still, and we look down this hole with a ladder leading into cobwebby darkness.
Kaz whistles. “Think it’s a crypt or something?” he asks.
It isn’t.
It’s wine. Barrels and barrels of the stuff. Must be ten thousand gallons at least, all holed up below this old storage shed. Some of it’s bottled, and Kaz is quick to taste it. “Gotta see if it’s poisoned, am I right, Twitch?” He takes a big gulp, and his eyes go real bright. “Hell, if that’s poisoned, I’m gonna die happy!”
Except we don’t get a chance to enjoy it. Half an hour later, we’re ordered out of Monteverdi and on to Bibbona, and I swear to God, Kaz couldn’t’ve been sadder if he’d gotten a Dear John letter from his sweetheart back in Minidoka.
“All that wine!” he moans as we load into the trucks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s a crying shame.”
“Don’t gimme that,” he says. “You didn’t taste it. You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“I’m not missing anything.” With a grin, I flip open the top of my pack. Inside, I’ve got four bottles of wine for our squad.
He lets out a whoop that echoes off the Monteverdi walls. “Twitchy Hashimoto, you sly son of a gun!”
Hill 140
July 6
Guys who were injured at Belvedere start going AWOL from the hospitals and the aid stations, trying to get back to the line. They reappear at the company command post, grinning like nothing happened, maybe they’ve got a limp or something, but they say as long as they’ve got a working trigger finger, they wanna keep fighting. I mean, can you believe that? White boys go AWOL ’cause they’re scared. Nisei boys go AWOL ’cause they wanna keep fighting.
You know what’s funny? If a white guy abandons his post, he’s a coward. It’s a shame. But he’s just one guy. But if a Nisei did that? Hell, it wouldn’t just reflect on him, would it? Nah, we’d all be cowards.
I think that’s why the 100th tackled Monte Cassino so many times last winter, even though it was hopeless. That’s why they struck so hard that first day in Belvedere, doing in one afternoon a job that everyone else thought would take days.
Mas says it best, I think: We gotta be better. We gotta fight harder. We gotta be twice as perfect so they can’t overlook us.
And we are. Fucking perfect.
We’re on the western slopes of Hill 140, this ridge so long that in the distance you can see all the way down to the ocean, and the going’s hard. The whole hillside’s riddled with caves, and it seems like the Germans are holed up in every one of ’em, but we’re protecting 2nd Battalion’s left flank, and if they’ve got any hope of reaching the summit, we gotta be there for ’em.
We’re under cover in this dry creek, but at any second the Germans could come striking at us from above, and our sergeant, Toshi Tamura, he peers over the lip of the wash. Sprat-a-tat-tat! Some machine-gun nest to our left goes after him. He ducks back down and he grabs his Thompson. “Cover me!” he says.
Then he runs out.
“What the hell!” Bill says. We’re laying down covering fire, bang bang bang bang, shells flying. Sgt. Tamura is running across the slope, his Tommy gun chattering, Germans firing on him left and right, but he takes out the machine-gun nest. Lots of blood. Germans falling. He turns, fires again, takes out another bunch of guys we didn’t even know were on our right.
“Holy shit!” I say. “Are you seeing this?”
The sarge is outta ammo now, so he tosses his Thompson, grabs a potato masher, you know, a German grenade, and chucks it into one of those goddamn caves. The machine gun’s after him while the other Germans try to get his grenade out of their nest. Dirt’s spraying up at his heels. He skids in the dust.
I’m screaming, “Get outta there, Sarge!”
Then boom! The cave explodes. He hardly stops. He gets right back up, and he’s motioning us all outta the wash. “Get moving, boys! We got a hill to climb!”
And I look at Bill, and Bill looks at me, and we grin at each other and grab our guns and go charging out, out and forward, up the hill.
Luciana
July 16–17
Day one in Luciana, and we already know it’s a different kinda fighting here.
Luciana’s a small village, barely even a village, a dozen buildings, maybe, a couple blocks, it’s even smaller than Japantown back home. But you take Luciana, and you’ve got the high ground on the port city of Livorno, which they call Leghorn but I like the rolling sounds of the Italian, Lee-vorrrr-no, and everybody knows that. Us and the Germans both.
So they don’t give it up easy.
First thing, we’re met with a barrage. They throw everything at us. Tanks. Artillery. Automatic weapons. Our first command post is a little house on the edge of town, and it’s shelled so hard, we have to abandon it. Seconds later, the thing is totaled. Direct hit.
In the fighting, we lose most of our officers, including our company CO.
But we keep going. Our radioman’s calling in enemy positions in Japanese and the 522nd Field Artillery is delivering, boom! boom! boom! A tank, gone. A machine-gun nest in a second-story window, destroyed. Our bazooka guys are blasting through walls and shop windows. Mortars are falling on the rooftops, in the streets.
That night, you hear patrols skirmishing in the darkness. The quick fire of machine pistols, Tommy guns. The guys on guard duty with you jumping at shadows. The guys who were sleeping or who were trying to sleep starting out of their dreams and grabbing for their rifles.
Day two’s worse, if you can believe it. We’re going house to house, room to room, smashing windows, throwing grenades. We kick open doors. We storm up creaking staircases. A guy at the window with a rifle. Pop! Pop! He gets two rounds in the chest and then I’m gone again, down the creaking steps, past the blown-out parlor and the dead bodies on the floor.
Every street crossing is a hazard, every street corner is a deathtrap. They’ve got snipers in every window, MGs—you know, machine guns—on every floor. Our squad has gotta cross this intersection, but we’re too spread out. An MG’s got some guys held up behind a pile of stones and warped iron from a collapsed balcony. Me and Bill are pinned in a doorway. The rest of our squad is somewhere farther down the street, trying to get to us, but if we don’t hurry up, the Germans are gonna call in our position, and I don’t wanna be around when the mortars start falling.
Me and Bill peep around the doorframe. There’s a flash from across the intersection, and we duck back as a bullet chips the wall where my head just was.
“You see where it came from?” I glance at Bill.
He clutches his rifle. “Don’t do nothing stupid, Twitch.”
I laugh. “Don’t you know me by now?” And I dash out the doorway, into the street. Bullets ping against the stones behind me. I can almost feel them, they’re so hot, and I think I could die, I could die right now, but I’m not afraid. I’ve got Bill backing me up.
There’s a bang of Bill’s M1 as I hurl myself against the wall on the other side of the road. The sniper fire stops. But I don’t. I’m in the MG’s line of fire now, and I’m scrambling for the nearest cover and I’m really scared this time, fingers digging at the cobblestones, trying to run faster, go faster, except you can’t outrun a bullet.
But good old Bill’s still watching out for me. While the Germans are shooting, he pulls the pin on one of his grenades and runs right up to that machine-gun nest. He flings a grenade through the window, but not before one of them gets him. Crack! He goes down. The walls explode outward.
“Bill!” I run for him.
The guys are all around me. They’re shooting out windows as I drag Bill outta the line of fire, but my hands are slick. I don’t know where he’s bleeding from. I’m screaming, “Medic! Medic!” as I get him behind the rubble again.
The rest of our squad’s passing us, and he’s patting me, saying, “I’m doing fine, Twitch. I’m doing fine. They just got my arm. I’m doing fine.”
Sgt. Tamura’s leading the squad across the intersection and the medic’s heading for us and by God I can’t believe we made it but we did, and all I had to do was a bit of running.
I let out a chuckle and fix his glasses, which were knocked crooked when he got hit. “You’re one crazy motherfucker, Bill.”
He grins at me. “Yeah, yeah. Stupid kotonk.”
By midafternoon, we’re running outta ammo and there’s jeeps coming in at the edge of town, but half of them are shelled on the way in and don’t make it. Luciana’s in ruins. This little village. Roofs collapsed, rubble falling into the streets, shrapnel flying, shells exploding, guys crying “Medic!”
Then someone calls in an artillery barrage. We find cover as hundreds of rounds rain on Luciana. The noise is deafening. That sound of breaking rock, wood splitting, rockets exploding, glass showering the chewed-up ground.
And I’m watching this and I’m rubbing my knuckles, waiting for the barrage to end, waiting for orders to push on, and I’m thinking about Japantown. The Toyo Hotel demolished, all the bay windows on Post Street shattered, Uncle Yas’s tailor shop blown to pieces by a grenade, dummies and sewing needles on the floor, the churches turned into rubble, Katsumoto Co. raided, corpses in the aisles, Yum-yum’s piano in the middle of the street, splintered by shell fragments, its innards showing.
Then Sgt. Tamura is telling me to move, and I’m back in Italy, I’ve got my rifle and my orders, and by dusk we’re chasing the last resistance out of Luciana and my hands are so black I don’t even remember that part of it’s blood, German blood, Bill’s blood, until I start trying to wash ’em clean again.
Vada
July 22–August 15
We get as far as the road between Livorno and Firenze, which they call Florence, when they pull us back to Vada for hot showers and a couple nights of rest. Me and Kaz even scrounge up some pretty good grub. There’s some ceremonies. The 100th Battalion gets its Distinguished Unit Citation for the job they did at Belvedere. In 2nd Battalion, Mas gets to meet the king of England, who’s in Italy to review the troops or something.
A couple days in, Frankie comes over from Item Company to find me. He’s got a butterfly knife, like the old one they took from me back in San Fran.
“Jeez, Frankie,” I say, flipping the blade open and shut, open and shut, finding the rhythm of it again after over two years, the familiar click click click click of handles coming together. It’s like a little piece of home, right here in my hands. “Where’d you get this?”
He shrugs and takes a swig of the cognac I liberated from an enemy observation post near the river. “Got it off some dead German.”
“What’s a dead German doing with a butterfly knife?”
“Nothing. That’s why I took it.”
Click click click click.
“How’re you doing out here?” he asks.
“You know me.” I grin at him. “Having a ball.”
He gives me a look. He’s got this mean-looking scar on his chin now from a grenade fragment. “You hear from any of the folks back home?”
“I write ’em all the time.”
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t.”
In the evenings, we spend a helluva lot of time slinging the bull about all the things we’ve seen and done. Guys talk about the grateful Italian women. Kaz tells the Monteverdi story over and over, embellishing it a little more every time. Sgt. Tamura’s too modest to say anything about his run on Hill 140, so I tell that one and I tell it pretty good. During the day, we even do a bit of training with the replacements to get them ready to go into the field. No one who’s been out there already really wants to go back, but we all laugh about it and say, “Yeah, get us back on the line. We’ll push those Germans outta Italy. Lemme at ’em. I’m ready. Hitler’s got another thing coming. I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m ready.”
Arno River
August 20–September 5
Course we do end up back on the line, on the Arno River, west of Firenze, trying to throw the enemy off-balance. But we’re veterans at this now. We patrol the hedges, we skirmish in the vineyards, our OPs get hit by artillery, our guys by small-arms fire, our guys go to the aid stations, our guys get up again, our guys keep patrolling, skirmishing, fighting. We’re all looking for prisoners ’cause we wanna know what the Germans know, and some of us get lucky and capture some troops from the Panzergrenadiers.
We cross the river. We cross a minefield with the help of some Italian partisans. We occupy San Mauro, where I’m on guard duty with Bill, who went AWOL from the hospital to get back to us, and split a tube of Limburger cheese as we watch the sun go down on the river, turning the waters red.
Naples
September 27
As soon as we’re relieved, there’s talk of sending us to France. For a while, we’re shuffled around. Castiglioncello, the 88th Division, Piombio, the Seventh Army, Naples again.
Naples is different, somehow. There’s still the sunken destroyer in the harbor. There’s still weeds in the rubble. But it’s dirtier, more crowded, replacements yakking and patting their rifles, saying shit like, “Berlin by Christmas,” guys with their legs blown off getting wheeled over the cobbles, everything looted and stripped down, the fountains clogged with dead leaves. I dunno if it’s me or the city or both that’s changed, but when we finally board the assault boats that’ll take us out to the navy transports, I watch the collapsed buildings and cathedrals and palaces and piazzas disappear, and all I can think is I’m glad to be leaving them behind.
France
Lyon
October 11
Once we get to France, most of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team departs for the line in a bunch of old trucks, but us suckers in 3rd Battalion have to wait another couple days before we’re crammed into ancient 40x8 boxcars—that’s forty guys or eight horses—and sent by railroad like cargo.
We’re chugging up the Rhone Valley in these rickety old trains and we pull to a stop in Lyon, where we hop out to stretch our legs. It’s a rail yard, so there’s not much to see, just some woodland and some tracks, but I’m poking around the other cars when I slide open this door and find crates upon crates of C rations, all those beautiful cans, ham, turkey, stew, franks and beans, powdered coffee, graham crackers, and it may not seem like much, but we’ve been on a steady diet of pork loaves and fighting biscuits from our K rations and whatever we can scavenge, so right now a can of stew is a real sight to behold.
I whistle. “Hey, Kaz, Bill, c’mon!”
And we just start taking stuff. We’re carrying boxes back to our 40x8 by the armful, and as soon as Sgt. Tamura catches on, he organizes a supply party and before you know it, the whistle’s blowing and we’re all clambering back into the boxcar with twenty new cases of nutritious combat meals.
There’s things I’m never gonna forget, like the sight of the Japantown boys running down Buchanan Street or the first time I saw Keiko laughing in the snow, and I know this is gonna be one of ’em.
The whole squad’s perched on the C rations, all of them, Kaz and Bill and Sgt. Tamura and the rest, and they look damn good up there, laughing and talking and passing around a pack of cigarettes.
These guys, I’m telling you. These tough sons of bitches, these Nisei warriors. Some of us have been together since Shelby, and that means we’re real fucking close. We can recognize a guy by the way he walks in the dark, by the way he breathes. We’re in the shit together when the shit hits the fan and there’s no one in the world we’d rather be in the shit with ’cause there’s no better bunch of guys in this or any other army.
No wonder they call us King Company, huh? We’re like goddamn royalty out here.
I’m just scrambling into the car when this colonel appears. He’s a hairy guy, he’s got so much hair, you can see it sticking out his nostrils when he looks up at us and starts yelling.
“What do you think you’re doing? Put those crates back!”
The whistle’s blowing again and the train’s starting to roll and we’re all waving from our C-ration thrones. Someone tosses him a packet of instant coffee that lands inches from his polished boots.
“You’re all going to be court-martialed for this!” he’s saying. “I’m a colonel!”
Laughing, Kaz salutes him as we roll the door shut. “Thanks for the grub, Colonel!”
Bruyères
October 18–24
And that’s a lot of fun, but it’s the last bit of real fun we’re gonna have for a while, because as soon as we get to the assembly area at Charmois-devant-Bruyères, it starts raining, and it doesn’t let up. After an hour it doesn’t even matter that it’s raining ’cause we’re already soaked through, and then it’s the cold that gets you, the cold that’s almost freezing but not quite, and you’re shaking so much, you don’t even notice it until you’re trying to hold your rifle and you can’t keep the damn thing still long enough to shoot.
Thanks to the 100th and the 2nd Battalions, who’ve been fighting it out on the hills around Bruyères, it only takes a day and an artillery barrage to clear the town. By evening, we’re going house to house with the 143rd Infantry, rounding up prisoners, and me and Bill are marching a German out of a blown-out townhouse, and one of the boys from the 143rd says to me, “I wanna ask you something.”
I glance at Bill, who shrugs. “Yeah?” I say.
“How is it you 442nd boys don’t got an ounce of fear?”
“Oh, we’re afraid, just like you and anybody else and this guy here.” With a laugh, I poke the prisoner, who kinda glances back at me over his shoulder. He doesn’t look much older than Minnow. Jesus.
“You’re shitting me,” the guy from the 143rd says. “What’s your secret? Some kinda Oriental meditation thing?”
I wanna say, Hai, hai. It ancient Bushido technique called kusottare. You want know how?
But then I think of Ma and Pa and my siblings back in Topaz and I wanna say there is no secret. There is no secret, you just gotta do the job, you just gotta get out there and do the thing you were trained for, the thing you volunteered for, because there’s a bunch of people back in America counting on you, and they’re in camps, they’re in fucking camps, they were forced outta their homes, they were put in stables like goddamn animals, they had their jobs taken, their families, their liberties, and you’re here as evidence that all that shit was wrong because the ketos won’t see they’ve fucked up until they see Nisei boys spilling blood over it.
I think of Shig and his origami and I wanna say, Gaman.
Instead I say, “Yeah, and it takes a year of silence to master, so you better start now.” And me and Bill walk away with that prisoner who reminds me of Minnow.
That night, I’m jarred out of a dream when the 232nd Engineers blow a roadblock, and all the windows in Bruyères are shattered. My ears are ringing for a long time afterward, and I dunno why, but in that ringing, I keep thinking I hear the distant sound of a piano. Some faint melody like when you’d walk past Yum-yum’s block and you’d hear her practicing, the notes floating like soap bubbles down the street.
In the morning, we jump off against Hill D east of Bruyères, and it’s like we’re fighting in a dream, in a nightmare, with a cold fog on the slopes and the pines breaking under enemy fire, crashing all around us.
The Germans are all dug in here and they’ve got such good cover, we pass ’em right by and don’t even know they’re there until they pop up behind us.
We hit the ground. We try to find some cover. A fallen tree. A broken stump. A low place in the terrain with the rainwater pooling in it.
Me and Bill are trapped behind a log with a few limbs for cover. There’s a machine-gun nest only twenty-five yards off, and they’re peppering us with fire, splitting the log, breaking the branches, making the air smell stronger and stronger of pine, and me and Bill are doing our best to return fire when my rifle jams.
We can’t stay here, but there’s a dead German nearby and he’s got a weapon he isn’t using, so I lunge for him. Dirt sprays up around me as I take his weapon and roll into a little divot of earth that’s not much cover but it’s some. Even better, I’ve got that machine-gun nest in my sights and as Bill gets their attention with his Thompson, I shoot. It’s a German rifle, but it’s not that different from my M1. Aim and fire. Aim and fire. I get four of them with their own bullets, and me and Bill continue the advance.
By noon, we’ve taken Hill D and we’ve got orders to move on to the railway embankment near La Broquaine, so we go dig ourselves in a hundred yards from the German line. Only problem is, and we don’t find this out till we get there, that us suckers in King and Item Companies are bivouacking in the middle of a goddamn minefield.
The Germans got all sorts of mines—teller mines to take out tanks, S-mines or “Bouncing Betties” that pop twice, once to jump into the air and a second time to blast you with shrapnel—and until the 232nd Engineers can get here to sweep the place, we gotta clear our own paths.
So it’s near dark and it’s still raining and my job is to find a way to the observation post so we can relieve the forward observers, and I’m belly-down in the mud, poking around with my bayonet, hoping not to trigger a tripwire or a shoe mine, ’cause one of those can be set off by the pressure of a single step, and my face is so close to the ground right now, it wouldn’t be a pretty sight for the folks back home if I got hit.
Every time I find something, I wrap a bit of toilet paper around a rock and place it so the guys behind me know where not to step, and I think about how something you use to wipe your ass is the only thing keeping you alive, and I can just picture Shig laughing over that in some dinky room in Chicago, good old Shig, who writes pages of nothing ’cause he knows anything written in his chicken scratch is better than anything here, descriptions of the hostel where he’s been staying, the crummy all-nihonjin dances that’re no fun without Yum-yum, the shit jobs he gets and quits ’cause he’s always been a lazy bum and he’s not gonna change now, and I wonder if I’ll still be alive when he gets my letter, or if I’ll have been taken out because the toilet paper disintegrated in this goddamn rain and I didn’t step carefully enough.
The next morning, me, Bill, and Kaz are crouched in a foxhole when Sgt. Tamura comes to tell us we’ve been attacked from the rear. “Germans on Hill D,” he says grimly.
“We just took Hill D,” Kaz says, poking at the layer of ice that’s formed on the puddle at the bottom of the foxhole.
“Guess they took it back,” Bill says.
With his finger, Kaz submerges a chip of ice, which bobs to the surface again as soon as he’s released it. “Why’d we take it in the first place if we couldn’t keep it?”
Three companies are sent back to retake Hill D, and the rest of us push on. It takes us all day to cross the embankment, but once we’re on the other side, it’s another long fight to push the Germans back to the Belmont forest.
The fighting seems like it’s dying down when we stumble onto a German squad in their slit trench. The sudden fire. The scramble for cover. We’re ducking behind trees and returning fire, and Sgt. Tamura gets ’em with a rifle grenade. There’s an explosion of earth and wood, and in the smoke, we’re shooting at silhouettes, which fall one by one until there are no more.
I’m breathing hard. I’ve got my rifle to my shoulder. I’m blinking rain out of my eyes.
A guy gets up, gray uniform almost black in the downpour.
I shoot him straight through the helmet.
He falls.
We move forward. If those Germans are alive, we’ve gotta capture ’em. “Shit, Twitchy,” Kaz says, starting forward, “I think you got an officer!”
I’m so close, I hear the first explosion of the S-mine, that soft boom of the Bouncing Betty as she takes off into the air, and I fling myself face-down in the dirt as the second charge detonates, and it’s deafening this time, so loud it knocks the sound outta the world, and for a second I’m lying on the ground and my ears are ringing again with that piano song I can’t quite remember, but then the ringing fades, and someone’s groaning. Someone’s gibbering and whimpering.
“Bill?” I call.
“Doing fine,” he says. “I’m doing fine.”
“Kaz?”
No answer. Just a moan. Just a cry. He’s ten yards away from me and his uniform’s all ripped to hell and I’m running to him even though there could be another mine around here. I’m turning him over and he’s bleeding from so many places, I can’t count ’em all. Sgt. Tamura is shouting for a medic, and Kaz is looking up at me, and half his face looks like pulp.
“I got you,” I say. “I got you, Kaz. It’s gonna be okay.”
He gulps and looks up at me out of the one good eye he’s got left. “We got an officer, huh?”
I have no idea, but I’ll say anything to keep him calm at this point, so I say, “Yeah, we got him.” I’m trying to apply pressure, but I’ve only got two hands and there’s just so many holes in him.
He grins. Kinda crooked. I dunno why he’s grinning, but he’s still got that dumb look on his face when the medics take him away on a stretcher.
Turns out we did get an officer, and he had plans for the defense of the whole sector on him. They make a task force. They send ’em out in the dead of night to outflank the Germans on Hill 505. I wonder if Kaz knew if it would happen like that. If that’s why he was grinning like a damn fool.
The next few days are senseless. They send us at this hill, at that hill, clear out that enemy pocket, flush those Germans from cover. We do what they say, we take our objectives, but a day later, the areas we just cleared have been taken again. Take Biffontaine. Defend Biffontaine. Get supplies to the 100th at Biffontaine ’cause now they’re cut off. I write home. I write to Keiko. I tell Shig about that toilet paper stuff. I hope that in writing, things will make sense again.
They don’t.
Belmont
October 25–26
When we’re finally pulled back to Belmont for some rest, I find out that Kaz is gonna live. They’re sending him to a hospital, then back home, and it’s funny because I know he’s lying on a cot somewhere with a roof over his head and some nurses checking his bandages or whatever, waiting to get well enough for the ship back to America, but to me it’s like he’s dead because—home? Thinking of home? It’s like thinking of heaven. Some place you hope you’ll end up one day, but good luck, buddy, because you’re a soldier, not a saint.
I dunno what happened. Two months ago, three months ago, home seemed so close. A little fighting, and the war would be over. A little fighting, and we’d be sent back to our families. A little fighting, and we’d all be reunited in San Francisco, with those beautiful red towers rising out of the fog. Me, Shig, Keiko, my folks, my siblings, Minnow and Mas and Frankie and Stan Katsumoto and Tommy and Yum-yum and Bette Nakano and all their kid brothers and sisters . . .
Now I’m in this little village in the Vosges Mountains, stripping off my clothes in a shower tent with the sounds of shells falling on the main road junction, and my skin is white and wrinkled from the rain and cold to the touch and I look like a corpse, and home is like one of those dreams that seem so real when you’re asleep, but when you wake, you can barely remember them. Because in the dream, things made sense, they had that dream logic, only when you wake to this, to the chatter of a machine pistol, to a guy crying for a medic, to new orders, Take this hill, take that hill, keep moving forward, keep pushing ’em back, nothing makes sense anymore. What’s peace? you wonder. What’s it like to walk down the street, to walk from one building to another and not run for cover at the sound of a German howitzer? What’s it like, you wonder, to dance to the sound of the radio? To eat rice out of a bowl with a pair of hashi? To close your eyes and get some shuteye and not be afraid of waking?
Tossing everything but my dog tags, I stand under the hot water and wait to thaw.
Forêt domaniale de Champ
October 27–29
We’re hoping for a week of rest at Belmont, but of course we don’t get it. They’ve got something that needs doing, another objective that needs taking, and who’re they gonna send in but the boys in the 442nd? 2nd Battalion is ordered out on the 26th. Us and the 100th follow the next morning at 0400.
There’s no light, no light at all, just us and the rain and the dark. We’re marching in columns, but it’s so black out here, I can’t see the guy in front of me, the only way I know he’s even there is by the sound of his footsteps and the creaking of his gear. I feel like I’m marching into nothing, we’re gone, we’re going nowhere, we’re dead already.
Then the guy behind me grabs onto my pack, this heavy tug, like a weight, like an anchor, and all of a sudden I’m connected to something. I grab the guy in front of me, the strap of his pack in my fist, and I feel him grab the guy in front of him, and we’re all links in this long chain, and we’re walking through the darkness, but we’re not walking alone.
I dunno what to tell you. We lose a lot of guys in those woods.
Their legs are blown off by mortars. Their bodies are undone by machine-gun nests. Their skulls are punctured by sniper fire. A tank takes out our platoon leader and all the guys that are with him.
Still, we move forward. A yard at a time. A tree at a time. We move forward.
Guys get wounded, little wounds our medic patches up, ’cause there’s no going back. If you can walk, you stay on the line. Part of it’s ’cause we have to. Part of it’s ’cause our supply lines are in danger and half the stuff we ask for, ammo, supplies, replacements, doesn’t make it to us, so even if we wanted to go back, we couldn’t.
But we don’t wanna go back.
I dunno why. It’s like a compulsion now. It’s not just our duty. It’s not just our orders. It’s like we’re detached from reality somehow, like we’re a thread that’s come loose, and the only thing we’ve got to hold us together is the mission. The moving forward. The next yard. The next tree. We dunno why. We don’t have to know why. We just keep moving forward.
It’s the first night and no one’s getting any sleep, but at least they got us some replacements and some coffee, and me and Bill have got a cozy setup in our foxhole with a little fire and a tarp for light discipline when our new platoon leader, Lieutenant Parker, comes around to check on us.
“Hey, Lieutenant, how’s it?” Bill offers him some coffee, which he waves off.
“How’re you boys doing out here?” he asks.
“We’re doing fine, sir,” Bill says.
“Snug as a bug in a freezing pit of water, sir,” I add.
Lieutenant Parker laughs like he hasn’t heard a joke in weeks, which maybe he hasn’t. I think I’m gonna like this guy.
“Say,” he says, taking an envelope from his pocket, “I’ve got a letter for some guy called David Hashimoto. I’ve been asking around and no one seems to know who he is. You don’t think the mail guys made a mistake?”
I’m taking a sip of coffee and I almost spit up all over our new lieutenant, but I hold it back. “I’m David Hashimoto,” I tell him.
He cocks an eyebrow at me. “You?”
“Me, sir.”
“They told me your name is Twitchy.”
I shrug. “Just a nickname, sir.”
As he hands me the letter, he looks me up and down. “David, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
He laughs again and shakes his head. “You don’t look like a David.”
I grin. “Thank you, sir.”
He nods at us. “All right, well, I’m gonna check the line. You boys keep your heads down and don’t get hit, huh? We’ve got fighting to do tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir,” I say as he lifts the tarp and crawls out into the darkness.
“Shit.” Bill takes the cup from me, and his hand is shaking so bad with cold that the coffee sloshes onto his gloves. “I forgot your name was David.”
The letter’s from Keiko. She says Shig’s gotten a new job as a dishwasher at some place in Chicago. She says my folks are well. She says she’s been stealing fruit from the iceboxes in my honor. She says there’s talk of lifting the exclusion order that’s kept us from the West Coast, so they could be going home any day now. She says she misses me. I’m reading it for a second time when we find out that Lieutenant Parker was killed as he was checking the line. Another officer gone. Another guy dead. I sigh, fold up Keiko’s letter, and try to get some sleep.
The next day we run into a manned German roadblock, and these things are no joke. A whole company of infantry with a nice fat supply of automatic weapons, and we can’t keep moving forward unless we get rid of ’em, so it’s us and whatever we’re carrying against these well-armed, dug-in soldiers, and I’m not a gambling man, but those aren’t great odds, except us and whatever we’re carrying have taken every objective they’ve asked of us for five fucking months and we’re not about to stop now.
Guys are advancing alone, killing snipers, knocking out machine guns. Guys are using bazookas and stolen pistols and their Thompsons. Me and Bill blow a machine-gun nest with a potato masher and go jumping in after to take out the gunners. I get one of ’em with my butterfly knife, click click slash, and then we’re moving on, we’re moving forward again, me and Bill.
We’re on the far left flank with the rest of our squad when there’s a rustling in the underbrush. I don’t even have time to look before Bill yells, “David, get down!” and tackles me as the rattle of machine-gun fire breaks over us. I hit the dirt with him on top of me, and the guy’s heavy, so I’m balled up on the ground with that rat-a-tat-tat all around me and I can’t see anything but twigs and mulch, but then there’s the boom of a grenade and the MG stops.
I kinda catch my breath for a second. “Bill?” I shake him a little.
Doing fine. That’s what he’s supposed to say. I’m doing fine.
“Bill!” I say again. I’m struggling out from under him, and he’s too heavy now, he shouldn’t be this heavy. “Bill!”
But he doesn’t answer, and when I turn him over, he’s all shot through and there’s blood coming from his mouth and his glasses are gone and he’s staring at nothing. To our left is the smoking remains of a hidden machine-gun nest, and ahead of us the rest of our squad is moving forward, and Bill’s dead.
“C’mon, soldier,” Sgt. Tamura says, hoisting me up. My legs are like rubber. Bill’s dead. “We can’t stay here.”
The rain’s striking Bill’s upturned face as we leave him on the slope, as we keep moving forward, pushing forward, ’cause there’s a hill to be taken and it’s our job to take it.
We gain five hundred yards that day. Bill’s life for five hundred yards.
That night, I’m sitting down, staring at the puddle forming at the bottom of my foxhole, the rain pattering its surface the way it pattered Bill’s dead face, small, never-ending drops, and I’m thinking about how he called me David. Funny, right? I don’t think he’s called me David once since we’ve known each other, it’s always been “Twitchy” or “stupid kotonk,” but almost the last thing he says to me is my given name. I can almost hear him now, saying how funny it was, how he didn’t even think about it, must’ve been that stuff with the lieutenant and the letter last night. Funny.
There’s movement between the trees, and wouldn’t you know, it’s the commander of the whole division walking by with his aide-de-camp. I guess they want to see the front. I guess they want to walk those five hundred yards they bought with Bill’s life.
They’re so clean. That’s the thing I notice, how clean they are. I wonder if they smell clean too, like shaving cream or cologne or whatever, or if they smell like mud and sweat and damp like the rest of us.
I dunno how long I think about that, but sometime later, there’s the report of a rifle, and I’m crouching in my foxhole, searching the darkness for signs of movement, and someone’s calling for a medic, and soon the Division Commander’s walking back in a hurry. He’s missing his aide and he’s got blood on his hands and his uniform, which means he’s not so clean anymore, and he looks at me looking at him without his aide, those pouchy eyes beneath his helmet, and he doesn’t say anything.
Maybe I drift off. Maybe I dream of Bill, of Kaz, of Keiko, of Shig, and when Sgt. Tamura slides into the foxhole with me, for a second I’m disappointed because for a second I thought for sure he’d be Bill.
“The general’s aide okay?” I ask him.
Sgt. Tamura looks tired. “He’ll live.”
“Huh.”
“They say one of our battalions from the 141st is out there.” Sgt. Tamura nods toward the front, toward the rest of the hill we’ve yet to take. “That’s why we’re doing this. There’s two hundred guys out there with Germans on all sides, and no one’s been able to get through to them for days. They’re going to die out there if we don’t get to them.”
I look out into the woods, like I’ll be able to see the silhouettes of the lost soldiers out there, helmets and M1s, or peeking between the trees with their pale, rain-washed faces, like I’ll be able to see Bill out there.
And even though I know we won’t find Bill, even though we might lose a lot more guys tomorrow, I somehow manage a grin. “Then I guess we’d better go get ’em, huh, Sarge?”
The ridge up to the Lost Battalion narrows until there’s only room for King Company and Item Company to advance, and we’re chipping away at the German defenses, gaining a yard here, a tree there, when we’re held up by mines and artillery fire. It’s death from above and death from below, and guys are falling all around me, dead, wounded, wounded, wounded, dead.
So we try to flank ’em on the left side, but it’s so steep and they’re so dug in that we come out with half the guys we started with.
Then we try to hit ’em with tanks and artillery and maybe we get a little farther this time, but we’re stopped again by machine guns and mortars, and, Jesus, we’re down to a third of our fighting strength, and I know I said we’ve taken every goddamn objective they’ve asked us to, but this hill, this one hill, this fucking hill in France, this one hill and two hundred stranded guys from the 141st, two hundred guys to save and we’ve already lost more than that, double that, triple that by now, dead, dead, wounded, dead, dead and wounded Nisei boys, and this one hill might finally have us beat.
So we’re driven back after two failed attempts and we know that if we’re gonna do this thing, if we’re gonna do what we always do and that’s take our objective, if we’re gonna break through to the Lost Battalion, we’re gonna have to go through the Germans, those Germans on their high ground, in their machine-gun nests and slit trenches, those Germans with their guns and mortars, who’ve been told to hold to the last man ’cause we’re on the edge of their border and they’re what stands between us and their homeland.
And the orders come down.
Take the hill.
We look at one another. The rest of the platoon. The last of the platoon. No more officers. No more Kaz or Bill. Just us clutching our weapons and Sgt. Tamura to lead us, if he wants to lead us, if we wanna follow him, up that hill.
All up and down the line, no one moves.
There it is. No one wants to go. No one wants to move forward now because moving forward means throwing yourself into the paths of the MGs, means leaping toward the artillery fire, means launching yourself at death with your rifle in your hand and your heart in your throat.
Sgt. Tamura looks around at us and he sighs and he takes up his pistol. “Well, boys?” he says. “Let’s go.”
He’s first. First out of the foxholes. First into the line of fire. I dunno how they don’t get him right away, how the bullets don’t find him, how the shells miss him by what seem like miles on this narrow ridge, but they don’t. He keeps going, keeps moving forward.
And as we watch him, charging up that slope, we, too, break from cover. We keep moving.
I go pretty fast in life, but for some reason this part’s real slow. Trees are exploding all up and down the hillside. Dirt’s flying. Guys are lunging forward, shooting from the hip. The ground’s muddy. The earth’s torn. There’s fire all around us, and we know we don’t have a chance in hell of making it, but for a second it seems like we’re invincible, unstoppable, kings of this godforsaken hill.
The guy next to me opens his mouth. He looks scared. I guess we all look scared. Scared and determined and fucking magnificent. And he shouts, “Banzai!”
Banzai.
The word rushes over me like a river. A memory of what we used to say on the streets of Japantown when we played at war. A memory we inherited from our fathers and their fathers, this word, this history, this giving of ourselves for the nation, for the emperor.
Except now it’s not for the emperor.
I don’t think, in this moment, that it’s even for our nation.
It’s for us, for our brothers, here, who have died on this hill and in dozens of battles before, for our families back home, in that dreamworld of deserts and barbed wire, for our folks who had everything taken from them and still were asked for more: compliance, obedience, money, blood.
And I look around here, and we’re not invincible, guys are dropping all around me, and I’m pulling that trigger over and over again, screaming, “Banzai!”
We’re not invincible.
But we are unstoppable.
“Banzai!” The cry echoes around me. So Japanese and so American at once, this one cry in this one moment, this last cry, this last moment. “Banzai!”
We move forward.
Up the hill.
We’re almost at the enemy line. We’re almost to the Germans, and we can see them running. What’s left of a hundred guys, running from these Nisei boys, these scattered, scared, determined, magnificent boys, who take every goddamn objective that’s asked of them.
But not all the Germans run.
One gets me. I don’t know from where. It’s so loud, it’s so quiet, I don’t even hear the shot.
I feel it, though, wham, right through my thigh, and I crumple. I grab the earth.
At first I think I’ll be all right, it’s just my leg, a couple stitches and I’ll be all right, maybe it got the bone, maybe I won’t be so fast anymore after this, but I’ll be all right.
I try to crawl, I try to keep going, but for some reason I can hardly move, the blood’s going outta me so fast, rushing outta me onto this hill, onto this wet earth, and I’m collapsing, I’m sliding down that slope, back, back, until I’m stopped by something, another body, another buddy, I think, and I know it got something important, that bullet.
I’m fumbling for my leg. I’m trying to stop the bleeding, but my blood goes so fast through my hands, fast like me, faster and faster, and I’m cold, and I’m scared, and I don’t wanna die.
I can’t apply enough pressure. My hands are shaking too hard, my fingers are too weak, and I’m lying back now, lying back against my dead buddy on that bloodstained hill, and I turn my face to the sky like my pal Bill.
It isn’t raining anymore. The rain has become soft and light and cold.
It’s snowing.
Snowing.
I’m thinking of Topaz and the first snow I ever saw, flakes tumbling lazily out of the sky and settling on the barracks and the dusty roads, so quiet.
And the guys throwing snowballs. That numbness in your fingers, that wet slap in your side, Shig and Tommy and Minnow and Stan Katsumoto . . .
Everyone running and shrieking with laughter. Mas, Frankie, Bette, Yum-yum . . .
Keiko laughing. Prettiest girl I ever saw, with snow like stars in her hair.
I close my eyes, and I think I can hear us, all of us, running. The Topaz roads are turning into pavement, the barracks are turning into San Francisco apartment buildings, the desert air is turning wet and salty, and we’re running, running, running until we hit the ocean, that roaring blue expanse, and all of us, running into the waves.
Laughing.
