Heroes, page 11
But I couldn’t take him up for air. Not yet. We were still underneath the burning oil.
There was nothing I could do but swim for both of us.
I grabbed Patrick’s hand and towed him through the water, going even slower than before. My arms ached, and my lungs began to burn. I was reaching my limit, and I still couldn’t see the end of the flames.
I had been wrong when I imagined there were a hundred ways to die on Pearl Harbor. There were a hundred and one ways to die, and I was sure I had just found the last one.
And then one of the other hundred managed to find me, as up from the depths in front of us swam a giant moray eel.
A giant eel.
I felt a mixture of horror and vindication.
I had told everybody that Pearl Harbor was full of super dangerous giant eels, and now I had proof!
Not that I wanted proof now. Or ever.
Dark and spotted, the snakelike moray twisted its head first this way, then that way, taking me in with its cartoonish black-and-white eyes. It was an absolute monster, at least twice as long as me. It could never swallow me whole, but I knew that moray eels had a secret weapon—a second set of jaws set deeper inside their mouths. First the eel would clamp on to me with its razor-sharp outside teeth, kind of like the dog that bit me in Pensacola. Then it would take a bite out of me again with its interior teeth.
And if I opened my mouth to scream—when I opened my mouth to scream—I would swallow water and drown, and the eel could dine on me at its leisure.
The big fin on top of the eel wiggled expectantly. The beast bared its sharp, jagged teeth in what I swore was a wicked smile, and my heart stopped in my chest.
This was how I was going to die in Pearl Harbor.
And then, like a flash, a whitetip reef shark came streaking out of the murky water. Its powerful jaws snapped tight on the giant eel’s neck, and it dragged the moray off into the darkness, the two creatures biting and squirming and thrashing.
I hiccuped an air bubble, and I am not ashamed to say that I left the waters of Pearl Harbor a little yellower than I found them that day.
I didn’t wait around to see who won the fight. I kicked and pulled Patrick forward frantically, my lungs about to burst. And still there was fire above us.
My stomach folded in on itself. My throat throbbed. My brain went fuzzy. I wasn’t going to make it. I had to come up for air or I was going to drown. But if I came up for air, I was going to burn …
Suddenly an oar crashed down into the water from above, making me flinch. The oar came down again, and again, splashing and swishing, until it made a small, clear circle in the scorching oil. It was an opening in the flames!
I darted up and took a desperate gulp of air—and almost got whacked in the head.
“Sorry!” Stanley cried. He was holding one of our oars, stretching out so far he was about to fall out of the motorboat. The oar looked more like a torch now, covered with burning oil.
I sucked in another deep lungful of air and dove back underwater before the flames could rejoin on the surface. I came up gasping on the other side of the boat, away from the fire, and Stanley reached out to drag Patrick’s limp body on board. The sailor was as white as a beluga whale, and he wasn’t breathing.
I hung on to the side of the boat, too exhausted to climb in, and watched as Stanley pumped Patrick’s chest.
“Come on, come on,” Stanley said.
Patrick suddenly jerked to life, coughing up dirty harbor water and retching in the bottom of the boat.
It was the most beautiful sound I’d heard all day.
“Yes!” cried Stanley. He turned to me and clasped my hand in congratulations. “I never doubted you for a second. Prince Namor lives!”
I laughed wearily and rested my head against the side of the boat. I hoped Patrick was the last person we had to save today, because I didn’t have much energy left for anybody else.
“Hey, did you see a shark?” Stanley asked me. “I thought I saw a shark fin.”
“I saw a shark,” I said, still panting.
“You know, the Hawaiians say the shark gods in Pearl are protectors, not man-eaters. Maybe a shark god was looking after you,” Stanley told me.
“Maybe she was,” I said. “But could you please pull me into the boat just in case?”
I put my wet clothes back on as Stanley steered us through the smoke and flames. I was exhausted, but I felt exhilarated too. Alive in a way that I’d rarely felt before. Like I’d found the real McCoy.
It was nice to finally meet him.
“I thought I was a goner for sure,” Patrick said from where he lay beside me. “All I could think was how I was never going to see my parents and my brothers and sisters again. And then you two showed up out of nowhere.”
“Right place, right time,” Stanley said, and I smiled.
I could afford to smile and relax now, because the second Japanese attack was over. It had ended a few minutes after Stanley pulled me back in the boat. American ships still occasionally fired their antiaircraft guns, but they were shooting at ghosts. The fighters and bombers were gone.
Would there be a third wave? I didn’t know. But if there was, we wouldn’t be on the water for it. Stanley ran the boat up on the beach at Hospital Point, and we were on the mainland at last. I hauled myself up and helped Stanley drag the boat out of the surf.
“Bedraggled, weary, and half-drowned, our heroes gratefully set foot on the solid earth of terra firma,” Stanley said.
“I think ‘terra firma’ means ‘solid earth,’ ” I told Stanley. It didn’t matter. He was right—I was so happy to have survived our trip that I could have gotten down on my hands and knees and kissed the ground. But we still had the two wounded sailors to take care of.
Stanley and I helped Patrick out of our boat. He was able to walk, but we were going to need a hand getting Kowalczyk, Joseph H. up the hill to the hospital.
Another gig packed full of injured sailors pulled up right beside us, and I ran to its pilot. “Hey, can you help us? We have an unconscious sailor,” I said.
“Sorry, kid,” said the pilot. “I got my own guys to worry about.”
A group of Marines dragging burned and bleeding sailors directly out of the water gave me the same story. Farther down the beach, a line of sailors waited to stretcher the wounded off the USS Nevada, which had run aground here on Hospital Point.
“Hey! Help! Here!” Stanley cried, flagging down four civilian men who were passing by. Two were Japanese American, one was Chinese American, and the other was Native Hawaiian. Maybe they were contractors who worked for the base or locals who’d come to help. Whoever they were, for some strange reason they were carrying a door they’d taken off its hinges.
The four men set the door down by our boat, moved our unconscious passenger onto it, and then lifted the door by its four corners. They were using it as a makeshift stretcher!
“His name is Kowalczyk, Joseph H.,” I told them.
“He’s a sub-mariner!” Stanley explained.
“It’s really important that he lives,” I said, feeling kind of stupid as I said it. It was really important that everybody lived. But there was no way to explain to these guys how much we’d gone through to get him here. How much he meant to us, and to Ginny.
“Well, he’s still alive,” the Chinese American man said, putting a finger to Kowalczyk’s neck to feel his pulse. “We’ll get him up to the hospital ASAP.”
“Every doctor and nurse on the island is there, yeah? Even the dentists,” the Native Hawaiian man said.
We thanked the four men as they carried Kowalczyk, Joseph H. up the hill. I hoped he’d be okay, but he was out of our hands now.
We were just starting for the hospital ourselves when a couple of sailors who’d been hauling wounded men out of the water came running up to us.
“Hey, can we use your boat?” one of the sailors asked.
Stanley and I looked at each other. Technically it was Stanley’s boat, so I waited for him to say yes or no.
“Yeah, sure,” said Stanley.
The sailors wasted no time getting the motorboat turned around, and two more sailors jumped in with them before they sped off into the smoke. I suddenly wondered if we’d ever see that boat again, and just as quickly wondered if it mattered. In a place where every day had always seemed as identically perfect as the day before, I couldn’t begin to imagine what tomorrow would be like.
“Come on,” I told Patrick. “Let’s get you to the hospital.”
The hill from the shoreline up to the hospital looked like a bomb had exploded in the middle of a picnic. Sailors were laid out everywhere on the grass. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Some of them moaned and writhed. Others lay still underneath bloody sheets that covered their heads. One man, who was somehow still awake and talking, was burned black from head to foot. I looked away, but the stench of charred flesh was so powerful it felt like an attack.
I heard a wounded sailor cursing the Japanese, and I glanced at Stanley. I worried about how he was taking all this. Worried about how other people would see him now. How he would see himself.
Stanley kept his eyes on the ground, guiding Patrick steadily through the minefield of bodies.
The hillside had become a sort of overflow emergency room, full of doctors, nurses, and orderlies. The nurses—some of them white, some Filipino, some Native Hawaiian—wore smart gray dresses and white aprons. I watched as one nurse gave a wounded Marine a shot of painkiller, and I was surprised to see her then take out a tube of lipstick and mark the man’s forehead with the letter M. The M was for morphine, I guessed, to let the next nurse know the man had already gotten a dose.
The doctors, who were all white men, wore white pants and white jackets stained red with blood. Some of them administered medicine or applied tourniquets and bandages. A medic close to us wasn’t treating patients. Instead he was giving them a quick once-over before marking their foreheads. A sailor he marked with a C was immediately picked up by a stretcher crew and taken into the hospital. Maybe C meant “critical”? Another victim had a gaping hole in his chest, and the medic waved the stretcher crew away and marked the man with an F. Whatever F stood for, it meant the man was unsavable.
The medic worked quickly and efficiently but was grim-faced and ashen. It must have been an awful burden, I thought, deciding which men would live and which would die.
An orderly zipped a dead sailor into a canvas seabag, and he and another orderly picked it up and carried the body up the hill. As we got closer to the front door of the hospital, I saw a pile of canvas bags just like that one, stacked up like cordwood. I stopped. I’d seen a lot of awful things that day, but something about that mountain of corpses made me weak in the knees.
“Hey, what’s that Jap doing here?” someone demanded.
I looked up to see a nervous young soldier in a khaki uniform blocking us from the door to the hospital. The soldier was young and white, and had on a white helmet with the letters MP on it. Military police.
And he was pointing a rifle straight at Stanley.
Stanley’s eyes went wide as he looked into the barrel of the gun, and he took a frightened step back. My first instinct was to jump to his defense and tell the MP where he could stick his rifle. But I remembered what Stanley had said about picking his own fights. So I stood and waited. And watched.
Something of the old Stanley raised his chin and looked the soldier right in the eyes.
“I’m a US citizen,” Stanley said.
I stepped up beside Stanley. “Not every American looks like you,” I told the soldier.
The MP scowled and gripped his rifle tighter. It was scary having a gun pointed anywhere close to me, but I knew it had to be even more frightening for Stanley. I just had to hope that me standing firm next to him meant something. To Stanley, and to the soldier.
The MP shifted his weight and looked back and forth between us, but he kept his rifle aimed at Stanley.
Then Patrick stepped up beside us, still cradling his broken arm. “Buddy, this kid just saved my life, and the life of another sailor,” Patrick said, nodding toward Stanley. “He’s a hero. They both are.”
A hero? Me? I thought. Frank McCoy, the scaredy-cat?
All day I’d seen regular, everyday people—sailors and civilians—be heroes as they risked their lives to help people in need. But now that I stopped to think about it, hadn’t Stanley and I done the same thing? When we’d seen people in trouble, we’d had the courage to help, even when it was hard. Even if it meant we might get hurt.
I looked at Stanley, who stood a little straighter beside me. Patrick was right, and Stanley knew it too.
We were heroes.
I looked straight into the MP’s eyes and dared him to suggest otherwise.
The MP studied all three of us, then slowly lowered his weapon and stepped aside.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Stanley once we’d made it inside and handed Patrick off to a nurse. “He called us heroes!” I felt a warm glow of pride that was better than any smile my dad had ever given me.
But one look at Stanley’s downcast face made me swallow my joy. Stanley might have convinced one distrustful American soldier to give him a pass, but we both knew he wasn’t always going to have Patrick there to speak up for him. Or me, for what that was worth.
Heroes or not, everything had changed for Stanley.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Listen, you should wait here for your mom and sister. I’m going to head into Honolulu, make sure my grandparents are okay.”
“Okay. I can come with you,” I offered, but Stanley clearly wanted to be alone.
I stared after him as he left. Of all the things I would remember about the attack on Pearl Harbor—all the horrible images that had been burned into my brain that day—I already knew that Stanley walking away from me was the one I would never forget.
Dear Lord,
Lest I continue
My complacent way
Help me remember
Somehow out there
A man died for me today.
As long as there
be war,
I then must
Ask and answer
Am I worth dying for?
A poem First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt kept in her wallet during World War II
Author unknown
I gripped the side walls of the Navy launch with my old nervousness as we motored across Pearl Harbor. There were four of us in the boat—me, the pilot, and two Navy guys headed for Honolulu.
It was almost a week after the attack, but it felt like a lifetime ago that Stanley and I had crossed this same stretch of water on our way back from baseball practice.
Pearl Harbor was completely different now.
The air smelled of hot metal and black smoke and charred skin. Oil oozed from dozens of damaged ships, and burning slicks of the stuff moved down the water with the tide, ghostly and dangerous. Half the Pacific Fleet was hull down or belly-up. The Arizona had only stopped burning a few days ago, and rescue crews were still working night and day to cut people out of the Oklahoma. Tugboats and repair ships hovered around the other ships in the harbor, helping them stay afloat.
And everywhere there were bodies. Still. It was unbelievable. I averted my eyes from the captains’ gigs and divers who trolled the water all around us, afraid I’d watch them pull another dead sailor from the deep.
America’s “indomitable fortress” had turned out to be anything but.
An airplane droned overhead, and all of us in the launch ducked. The ships that were still afloat had sailors on round-the-clock guard duty, and I watched now as every one of those sailors aimed their rifles at the sky. It was just an American plane though, and they let it fly by. The night after the attack, American pilots hadn’t been so lucky. Frightened, itchy-fingered sailors had shot down a half dozen of our own planes, thinking it was another air assault.
My dad’s plane hadn’t been one of them, thankfully. Not that we knew that night. Mom and Ginny and I had no idea if Dad was alive or dead until forty-eight hours later, when he came staggering into our temporary quarters on the mainland, grimy and miserable and ready to pass out. He told us that he’d shot down two Zeros during the attack, and then spent the next two days flying nonstop patrols to look for the retreating Japanese planes, without any luck.
Except for a few random strikes on the way out, the attack on Pearl Harbor had ended for good after the second wave. And we didn’t understand why, but the invasion everybody expected never happened. The Japanese army had just wrecked the US Pacific Fleet and run.
But that had done plenty enough damage. And it had officially dragged the United States into the war.
As the boat sailed on across the harbor, I thought back to the day after the attack. It had been lunchtime in Hawaii and nighttime in Washington, DC. Mom, Ginny, and I, along with all the other relocated families, had huddled around a radio—just like every other person in the whole country—to hear President Roosevelt’s address to Congress. He called December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” and asked Congress to formally declare war on Japan. They did. A few days later, Germany declared war on the US, and Italy had followed.
Now everybody in America was all in on the war. Web Edwards said on the radio that people were lined up at Army and Navy recruiting stations across the country. Even people who’d been against the war before agreed: We had to fight.
And I was with them. I hadn’t wanted to fight. Hadn’t wanted it to come to this. But Mr. Summers was right. You couldn’t get punched in the face and not do something.
There was more to it, though. On the night after the attack, as I huddled sleepless with Mom and Ginny, listening to overzealous air-raid sirens, I’d remembered something Stanley had said on our way to the Utah early that morning. How real heroes step up when they see other people getting hurt.
