The Second Sun, page 21
Man, I thought. This alliance effort is going to be really hard these next few years.
I told him as gently as I could that I was tired, and that we’d need to go back ashore first thing in the morning. He nodded, sighed, and apologized for lashing out. I said I understood completely, and that I’d stood over too many burials at sea in the first three years of the war.
“Haven’t we all,” he muttered.
“Except, when the president of the United States comes to your house and asks you to go to Japan, and then explains why it’s important that we convert the Japanese from dire enemies to allies, that’s called the Big Picture. The one way above your pay grade and mine. So, no shooting, okay?”
He just stared at me for a moment, as if he couldn’t grasp what I was saying. Then he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Anything you need.”
“Thanks, Captain,” I said. “Good night. And I apologize for sounding soft on the Japanese. I feel like you do. But feelings are no longer the currency of the realm.”
After he left, I thought about going down the passageway to the inport cabin. But this was a small ship. Senior officers moving about on a destroyer could never do so without somebody noticing. Fact of life. It was still early, but I decided to turn in. I had no idea how we were going to fulfill our mission tomorrow. I hoped that Janet did.
THIRTY
THE GROUND TRUTH
I slept well. The long familiar motion of a warship at sea, with all its night sounds: bells for the time, the sounds of the watch-change on the bridge right next door, the howl of the forced draft blowers spooling up to blow tubes after midnight—those were comforting sounds. Everything was as it should be. It was when the blowers suddenly wound down, or there was a rush of bitch-box communications, that you knew something had gone off the tracks. It wasn’t my ship, but I was programmed after years of command at sea to hear it. Warships never slept; a third or a fourth of the crew were always awake and on watch, creating a deeply familiar susurration of footsteps, hatches closing, muted voices and commands, the humming sounds from the boiler rooms, the slap of a seaway against the hull were a captain’s lullaby. It’s when something changed, like a sudden spooling up of the blowers, that you sat up in your rack and looked for your sea boots as the phone began to ring, as you knew it would.
You, sir, are so far out of your depth, I kept reminding myself. I dreamed that night of the Trinity test, re-experiencing the brain-searing flash and then that fiery, mile-wide, bellowing incubus blazing into the dawn air as it devoured the air and the very ground from which it had sprung. Along with images from Hiroshima. I suddenly realized what was so different about that city—everything was in black and white. There was no color, anywhere. Color implied life. There was nothing left alive in that cremated city. Not even insects.
Janet arrived in the unit commander’s cabin the next morning a half hour after reveille, followed by a steward with coffee and some cinnamon rolls. She was dressed in the WAVE version of working khaki—slacks and a short-sleeved blouse. She looked refreshed if a little hollow-eyed, as if perhaps she had entertained some of the same dreams I had. The captain checked in a few minutes later, informing us that breakfast would be brought up in a half hour. He had an interesting question for us.
“The whole crew wants to know who you are, Captain,” he said. “And why you’re here. What can I tell them?”
Janet saw my hesitation and stepped in. “We work directly for the president,” she replied. “I speak fluent Japanese. We’re here to assess the impact of the atomic bomb on regular Japanese citizens. Not public officials or the military leaders, but regular civilians, people who lived and worked here. And who lost friends and relatives here.”
“I would think that’s something that could just be assumed,” the captain said.
“You don’t know the Japanese as I do,” she replied. “The A-bomb represents power at an insurmountable level. The Japanese respect power. If someone A-bombed an American city, Americans would hate them until the end of time. The Japanese are different. I think they’ll absorb what happened here and in Nagasaki and say: let’s not mess with these people ever again. In fact, if they’ll have us, let’s join them as allies, if only so they’ll never come do this to us again.”
The captain was at a loss for words. Janet let him off the hook.
“We could be wrong about that, of course,” she said. “This bomb changes everything about warfare and that’s why the captain and I are here. To test those waters. To see if the usual Japanese pragmatism re-asserts itself—or not. It’s an important question.”
The captain started to say something but then decided not to. He simply nodded and then backed out of the cabin, probably thinking we were nuts.
The boat ride back to the dockyard complex was medium horrible. The rivers were cleansing themselves again and the atmosphere just offshore was nauseating. The bosun driving the launch kindly gave us handkerchiefs anointed with diesel oil. I kept my eyes in the boat for the whole trip, trying to ignore the heavier thumps as the boat made its way through the mess streaming out to sea. We were met at the dockyard by an Army colonel in full formal greens with medical insignia who told us he was taking us to the site of the biggest hospital in Hiroshima, where there were hundreds of people awaiting medical treatment. He explained as we made our way carefully across the atomic wasteland that the top two stories of the hospital were gone, but the bottom half had been shielded from the direct blast wave by a ridge between the building and the city center.
“Even so, the hospital is contaminated,” he said. “So we’ve brought in tents for the docs to work in. They’re making the sickest patients take showers and dispose of clothing before they approach the treatment tents. They’re handing out chemical suits to the most contaminated people. We have a couple DC-3s coming in later today with supplies, but the scene is pretty depressing.”
“Burns?” Janet asked.
“Yes, burns, contusions, concussions, and undefined internal injuries. A lot of hemorrhaging from just about every human orifice. Blindness is common. The victims’ hair is falling out in clumps. The lines are long, but the people are patient and orderly. Some of them have relatives helping them. As I walk toward the treatment tents, all I can see are trembling arms reaching out to me for help. It’s all I can do not to look at them.”
“We want to talk to some of them,” Janet said.
The colonel shook his head vigorously. He paused, taking a deep breath before speaking. “They’re mostly walking dead,” he said finally. “And I’d guess they know it. The Japanese docs know it, but they do their best. Some of the victims die in the waiting line. The kids go first, of course. You’ll see a lot of small, covered bundles behind the benches. The docs have organized some people to walk the lines and recover the dead. I don’t know where they’re taking them. But they’re busy, I’ll tell you that.”
I watched the colonel’s face up there in the right front seat. He was trying mightily to display the professionally emotionless visage of an infantry commander hearing the butcher’s bill after a tough engagement. Stone-faced, thin-lipped, but betrayed by the rapid blinking of his eyes. The driver was an older Japanese, who I hoped did not understand much English and decide to drive us into a tree.
We stopped asking questions. This was going to be a bust, I thought. Looking over at Janet, I could see that she’d reached the same conclusion. And yet, I thought, we needed to see this, firsthand. The bureaucrats would spare the president most of the horror. He wanted us to tell him like it was.
See it we did. The line—actually there were two lines, on either side of a road leading up toward the hospital. There were ten US Army tents arrayed in what had been the front parking lot. The hospital building was bigger than I’d expected and yet part and parcel of the city’s destruction. The top half had been sheared right off by the invisible hand of the blast wave that had come howling out of the city center. The rest of the building had the by now familiar look of the concrete buildings in the city center. Standing, but bruised, with blackened windows and patches of bright orange rebar showing through the front sections of the building. The hill above the building had been swept clean of what had probably been a wooded hillside.
The approach road to the hospital was lined on both sides with injured people. The car stopped at the hospital complex’s main gate. Janet and I then got out and began to walk up the sloping driveway. The colonel came with us. There were hundreds, if not more, Japanese on either side of the road. They stared at us as if we were aliens from outer space. I could understand: a white American woman in uniform, escorted by what looked to them like an American giant, also in uniform. I was certainly no giant, but compared to the diminutive Japanese on either side of the road, I probably looked like one. It was as if we’d stepped into a valley of pain and desperation. The crowd was made up mostly of women, whose anguish radiated from every burned pore. I had to remind myself to breathe and I dared not look at Janet’s face. Even scarier, there was no sound escaping this mortally wounded crowd. No one said anything. No cries of anger. No pleading for help. They simply were right there, squatting in stoic silence by the side of the driveway, united I’m sure by the knowledge that death was within them. Their faces were fascinating—I’d seen Japanese woodcuts where the exaggerated Asian features seemed otherworldly. And yet, there they were. Except now they were mostly bald, with half their faces burned so red that it hurt to see them. I stopped looking.
Janet called it off. “Keep going,” she said to the colonel. “We can’t bother these people.”
“Thank you,” the colonel replied. “There’s another place. It’s a coal mine where they’d used POWs. Out of the direct path of that radiation cloud. We’re using it as a food distribution center. Able-bodied family members are coming there. Lots of them are contaminated, so we put our guys and the food supplies in the entrance to the mine, which is still clean. Want to try that?”
I said yes and asked if there were surviving buildings there. The colonel said yes, several, including the POW barracks.
“Let’s try for one of those,” I said. “You have interpreters there, I presume?”
“Yes,” he said. “They’re not great, but good enough to explain the handout process to the people. The Japanese are painfully waiting for anything—there’s been no food getting into Hiroshima for days now and now they are afraid to eat fish or rice from paddies near the city.”
We went back to the car and then drove up to the mine works, where another great crowd was waiting. We got to the POW building and went into the dining room, which contained three long tables with wooden benches and some chairs at the head. There were some windows but they were covered with bamboo shades and bars. The room reeked of coal dust, smoke, and death.
I took up the head of the table with Janet sitting on my right side with her notebook. The colonel, accompanied by two armed soldiers, brought in two middle-aged Japanese men and one elderly woman. They looked frightened, their eyes darting around, probably expecting an execution squad. I stood up in front of my chair and all three visibly quailed and dropped onto their knees and then into impossibly deep bows. Janet started speaking to them in rapid-fire Japanese after which they slowly, uncertainly stood back up, making sure not to look at me. I sat down and nodded to Janet, as if I was giving her permission to continue. They sat side by side on the nearest bench, keeping their eyes down as if their lives depended on it. Janet took a seat on the opposite bench and began talking to them. I assumed my role at the head of the table as the duty ogre in the room, staring straight ahead with my best court-martial face on. The colonel and his men withdrew to the farthest table and pretended not to care about anything at all.
Janet finally coaxed them to start talking and even I could immediately tell the difference between her Japanese and that of our “guests.” I had heard Japanese only in wartime movies, where they spoke to each other in a rapid and harsh tone, which sounded like they were about to draw swords and go at it at any moment. Janet’s tone was not harsh but definitely superior and I could make out individual syllables; the three Japanese answered in short, respectful guttural bursts, bowing their heads each time they spoke, signaling total subservience every time. It was obvious they were scared to death.
At one point Janet told me in English that she was getting somewhere. Staying in character, I grunted without looking at her and then nodded. She bowed her head in in my direction and went back at it with the three civilians. I caught the colonel nodding approvingly from his distant table as if he understood what he was seeing, that we were role-playing.
She “interviewed” four more sets of people, all of them equally scared until Janet reassured them that I had been fed recently and did not plan to eat them. I was suddenly thirsty when the second group was brought in, and I knew if I was thirsty, those Japanese must have been positively dehydrated. I turned to the colonel and said the words “water, please” in my best daimyo voice. The colonel nodded and sent his two men to get some clean water. They came back with canteens and a stack of paper cups. I got the first cup, naturally, Janet the second, and then the Japanese were each given water. Their hands were trembling so badly that I’m not sure how much they got but it was clear they were desperately thirsty. God only knew how long they’d been in line on that dusty industrial road leading into the mine complex. The soldiers gave them refills, which disappeared in seconds. Then Janet began again.
THIRTY-ONE
STAYING THE COURSE
After four sets I could see that Janet was getting tired, so I stood up. The Japanese stood up immediately and went into deep bows. I told the colonel we were done for the day and asked if they could get these people back into their place in line. Janet assured me that the Japanese in the line would see to that. Once they left the room to go back to the main tunnel entrance, we could relax. I apologized to the colonel for talking to him like he was a dog, but he grinned.
“I savvied how you two were playing it,” he said. “No offense at all. With your permission, my lord, I’d like to go to the mine and see how the supplies are holding up. We have some C rations there for our troops; I’ll see if I can bring some back for you. Not promising, mind you.”
We thanked him and he and his crew tramped out. Then Janet and I conferred. “Is this working?” I asked.
“Sort of,” she said. “You deserve an Academy Award, by the way; you were intimidating me.”
“These people have lived under a regime of militarist monsters since the late nineteen thirties,” I said. “I suspect anyone in a foreign uniform would scare them, especially an American who shows up after an atomic bomb.”
“They’ve been living like that a lot longer than that,” she said. “Those people in line at the mine are mostly simple fishermen and rice farmers. They were too old to be drafted and they were providing food, which became increasingly important once our subs went to work. Many of them have relatives at home who are in a bad way because they were in the city. There was nowhere to go, so they went home.”
“How do they view the Bomb?” I asked.
“An act of God,” she said, simply. “An angry, very displeased god. Who brought the sun down from the heavens to punish them. The sun is a centrally important entity to the Japanese. Japan, or Nihon as they call it: Nihon translates roughly as the land of the rising sun. Japan is east of China, so they see the sun first. They don’t know what to do next. Everything’s gone—fresh water, food, the roads, the harbor. Interestingly, they revere the emperor for stopping the war! In their view he was placating the sun god from whom he is descended, who appeared in the heavens to burn down the entire nation. Every one of them have relatives or neighbors who are simply gone. One man said that when they are in their homes and villages after dark, everyone weeps.”
“Is the fact that we’re feeding them and offering medical assistance making any impact?”
“They might one day be grateful, but right now I think they’re in extended, communal shock. I’m not entirely sure they’ve connected the Americans to what happened. They will eventually, of course. You saw them. We’re alien beings who arrived after the sun-bomb—that is what they’re calling it, by the way—and offered to help. These are uneducated people. I even had to simplify my language so they could understand me. They’ve been subject to Japanese army propaganda since the invasion of China. I think they’re too stunned to figure it all out.”
“Will they figure it out?” I asked.
“They’ll remember,” she said. “Once they put the Bomb and the Americans together, they’ll also remember who came to feed them, and that it wasn’t their government in Tokyo. One thing I did learn—for every individual we saw at that hospital, there are ten more suffering out in the countryside with their families at their sides as they die of invisible radiation poisoning or blast injuries. These were shipyard workers, street cleaners, food stall workers, deliverymen, the layer of menial people in every city who make things run. Those people out there at the mine aren’t young people—the young men have all gone for soldiers, and most never came back. Those are their parents, sisters, or grandparents. Japan lost an entire generation in this war.”
“Only because they set out to conquer all of Southeast Asia,” I reminded her. “And did a damned brutal job of it, too. The Japanese aren’t the only ones who lost a whole generation of young men, are they. Plus, they started it—everywhere.”
She nodded. “I know that,” she said. “But I’m not sure they”—she gestured toward the mine works just visible through the shuttered windows, where desperate crowds of old people waited patiently for anything at all—“understand all that. Obedience to authority is a big part of Japanese character and always has been. The man-god in the palace told them the war was necessary, a mandate from heaven. That was echoed all the way down the line, with a liberal dose of bushido thrown in. You know: ‘war is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to die with honor.’ And this is how it ended.”
