Hooper’s War Read online

  Published by Luminis Books

  90 Rimrock Ride

  Sedona, Arizona, 86351, U.S.A.

  Copyright © Peter Van Buren, 2017

  PUBLISHER’S NOTICE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Hooper’s War graphically portrays events in wartime. These portrayals may be disturbing to some readers.

  Cover design for Hooper’s War by Brit Godish. Cover image courtesy Shutterstock.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-941311-12-7

  Printed in the United States of America

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  Praise for Hooper’s War:

  “Peter Van Buren’s Hooper’s War is a powerful anti-war novel of empathy, wit and engaged imagination, vividly depicting war’s commingled devastation and savage beauty. Van Buren portrays the lasting wounds suffered by innocent victims and guilt-ridden soldiers wracked by grave moral injury. As Van Buren writes, “This shit doesn’t end when the war does, but only ends when we do.”

  —Douglas A. Wissing, journalist and author of Hopeless but Optimistic: Journeying through America’s Endless War in Afghanistan and Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban

  “Peter Van Buren has done an interesting thing here; with Hooper’s War, he’s managed to capture the rage, chaos, disorder, but most of all, shame, of the fighting men from our most noble war effort, without apologizing for any of it. Men in extraordinary circumstances often commit themselves to bouts of magical thinking, and Hooper is no exception.”

  —Brandon Caro, author of Old Silk Road, novel of the Afghan war

  “Hooper’s War is evocative and beautiful, its writing sweeps you along, touches lives and transports you effortlessly on a sometimes poignant, sometimes stark, sometimes obscure journey; that of Hooper himself, attempting to reconcile the deep tragedy and moral ambiguity of war. These are ever-relevant themes, and Van Buren’s authentic insight into human nature reveals itself like the prick of a pin. Anyone can recognize the depth of research that has gone into this book, it’s something those who know Van Buren have come to expect from his work—it feels effortless and uniquely enriches each character, bringing them to life in ways that build empathy for the reader, through details or twists from the ordinary to the obscene—fluently evoking the horror of war.”

  —Dr. Emma L Briant, Lecturer in Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

  “A bloody American invasion of Japan; the incineration by firebombing of Kyoto; an unlikely truce between a U.S. lieutenant and a Japanese sergeant. In Van Buren’s imaginative retelling of the end of World War II, we learn about the stubborn horrors of war—and the fragile grace that blooms ever so fleetingly amid the chaos. ‘The question isn’t so much why Private Garner is screaming,’ notes a doctor treating a PTSD casualty. ‘It’s why we aren’t.’ Striking words from a story of searing intensity.”

  —William Astore, Lt Col, USAF (Ret.), author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism

  “With its changing points-of-view and reverse timeline, Peter Van Buren’s Hooper’s War is a spiritual cousin to the movies Rashômon and Memento. The book is set in an alternate World War II, in which U.S. forces invade Japan, rather than drop the atomic bomb. With philosophical precision and wit, Van Buren has constructed a literary origami, which unfolds to reveal that the creases and lines of history are determined as much by personal chance as they are big decisions—and that war is as much our doing, as it is our undoing.”

  —Randy Brown, author of Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire

  “Hooper’s War is a classic war story of blood and guts spilled in Japan during WWII but with contemporary meanings. Told by both a young American lieutenant and a young Japanese soldier, Van Buren writes of the inevitable questioning of what wars do to those who fight. ‘This shit doesn’t end when the war does, it only ends when we do.’ ‘Garner is likely to just be insane for the rest of his life, mind torn apart and all that. His body’s in terrific shape, not a scratch. But the question isn’t so much why Private Garner is screaming. It’s why we aren’t, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Besides, Garner went insane because of what he saw in Kyoto. Curing him means I’d have to convince him seeing the burned children he’s shouting about was not a reason to be insane.’ These are commentaries echoed seventy-five years later by our young soldiers with PTSD from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.”

  —Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and former U.S. diplomat

  Wars and Presidents will come and go.

  So, too, will parents and children and other first loves.

  All will be eclipsed in memory, leaving you.

  Remember this.

  —Randy Brown, Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire

  The Yellow-Gray Noise of Morning, Pacific Coast of Japan, American Landing Craft, 1946

  THERE IS NOWHERE to go in a landing craft except where it takes you.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “Don’t say that, never, sir, that’s quicksand,” the Sergeant said.

  Chunks of steel destroyed boys. I watched someone I didn’t know ripped apart, face the color of school chalk. Your nightmares have no idea.

  “Stop the boat, make the Lieutenant stop the boat, we’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die,” a soldier said.

  Their blood smelled like copper. I steadied myself touching something too wet and soft. There was a sound that started deep and only found its way out as a scream. A head snapped back like one of those red rubber balls attached to a paddle.

  “Lieutenant Hooper can’t stop the boat, nobody can stop the boat. Boat can’t stop the boat,” another of them said.

  Screeching metal-on-metal, the ramp dropped and everyone ran forward. That was all I could hear except the sing-song of “Lieutenant Hooper! Lieutenant! Lieutenant! Lieutenant!”

  Chapter 1: The Last Day

  Former Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Retirement Home, Kailua, Hawaii, 2017

  LOOKING BACK, the party is more important than the planning. A sad marriage fades into a thing we thought would last forever. Fighting over the covers is better than remembering the empty side of the bed. Everything comes from somewhere, so once you start winding things back you can’t stop until you hit the beginning. Age is not gentle.

  I think of it this way: remembering can be what’s happened, but also what’s to come. Like water forming on top of thinning ice.

  THE UNITED FLIGHT TO Japan was a long one to make alone. Unlike those around me in the cabin, I wasn’t coming for business, or as a tourist; I was coming solely for memory. As we crossed the coastline from the Pacific, I thought it might be the same view our airmen had during the war, and I imagined dropping incendiary bombs from Business Class.

  There’s been a hell of a lot of things written about how the war might have ended if the atomic bomb had worked, both alternative histories I hate and scholarly stuff I don’t, but no one can really know. All that’s a lot of ink that ends up in the same place: America, and me as a young U.S. Army officer, invaded Japan, they surrendered and we won. I was briefly known as Lieutenant Hooper instead of Nathaniel. About the only thing that might have changed had any of those “alternative histories” been true was, well, me.

  But bomb or no bomb, I had done a terrible thing. I was wounded. But there’s no prosthetic for a soul that’s dying faster than its body. You have to heal it.

  SEEING KYOTO SO MANY years aft
er the war was like looking at an old woman trying to remember the girl. Kyoto now is a huge city, too much of it gray sprawl without charm. The city in 1946 was different. While the rest of Japan tore into the modern era, Kyoto stubbornly held on to its dowager status. If you wanted a wash bucket in 1946 Kyoto, it was most likely made by hand, of wood, down the street from where you lived, by someone you knew. Your neighbors’ grandparents had been your grandparents’ neighbors. Kyoto was born an old soul, a special place, even in as foreign a country as Japan.

  If you are high enough up in modern Kyoto, and I recommend the ugly concrete Kyoto Tower near the bullet train station, but only for the view, you can see patches of green surrounding the temples and shrines that have been there since forever. At least they’ve been in those same locations since forever. After the war the Japanese surveyed the ground and rebuilt every single one of them as close to the original place as possible. Kyoto’s temples are mostly made of cedar, and from time to time throughout their thousands of years of history, burned down for one reason or another or were toppled by earthquakes. Almost none of them, even at the time of our 1946 firebombing, were the original structures, so the process of renewal was not alien. Once something gets broken you make repairs and it doesn’t matter that it can’t ever be new again, a thought that was in Kyoto’s blood. The city was at peace well before I was.

  I HAD PUT OFF the visit as long as I could. But now, more than wanting someone still around to go with me to the early bird buffets, I wanted this. It’d outlasted every other ambition. I was in Kyoto because like every old man, I needed to deal with a young man’s choices.

  If in 1946 I’d told the truth about Naoko, and Sergeant Eichi Nakagawa, I would have been thrown into the stockade for cowardice. But by being a real coward and allowing the Army to call me a hero, I had to pay up someday, collected here, now, in 2017. If I’d told the soldiers in my outfit in 1946—Laabs, Marino, Smitty, Steiner, Burke, Polanski, goddamn Jones—that only four years later they’d be taking R&R in Japan from a new war in Korea, and then a few years after that from a war in a place they’d never heard of called Vietnam, they’d have looked at me like I had a screw loose.

  I’d read how awful those first post-war years had been after the destruction of Kyoto. It had taken three weeks to dispose of the dead. To earn a little money, survivors collected up bits of bone and twisted pieces of metal to sell to the occupying soldiers as souvenirs. Many of the survivors would pose for pictures with the G.I.s, earning a few coins to pull up their shirts and show off their burns while the soldiers grinned. MacArthur soon put a stop to that. He didn’t want the details of what we did exposed to the folks back home. There was that myth—that we were the good guys, that we did the Japanese a favor by immolating an entire city to wrap up the war faster.

  I’d picked up a bit of an apologetic stoop over the decades, but not to worry, the only thing for me to hurry about in Kyoto was dodging the crowds getting on and off trains. Walking, I remembered the river from my last visit, in 1946, and started near there. The geisha quarters, rebuilt where they’d been since the 1200s, are nearby. The main intersection into town, the one we must have passed over back then, is jammed with tourists. An American standing there was as noteworthy as the McDonald’s next to the central aiming point for the firebombing. For about 55 years the world knew that Ground Zero, until we Americans appropriated the term on September 11, 2001, after we were attacked from the air for the first time ourselves.

  Looking around, I put the Japanese man who’d watched his wife die right there—by the vending machine, Coca Cola, of course—so that I could fix him in my memory long enough to discard him. It didn’t work. The dead keep coming back. I’ll have to live with him.

  I MADE MY WAY to what had once been the northern outskirts of town, locating, with the help of a high school girl pressed into using her limited English, that familiar temple. You’d think after 70 years married to a Japanese woman I’d have learned more of the language.

  The day was warm, late March weather before Japan’s infamous humidity settles in. The cherry trees had exploded into full bloom, bursts of fragile pink and beautiful, with some new unbelievably green leaves in behind them. Once a year heaven visits earth like that in Japan. I didn’t see it on my first trip, as it had been winter, and cold enough then to freeze shadows to the ground. We’d knocked down a helluva lot of trees, too; maybe some of these rooted off those branches. These days beautiful things can again seem beautiful to me.

  The high school girl passed me off at the temple gate to a happy college student. For those who have never been to Japan, these young people sometimes haunt tourist attractions. Unlike the rest of the world, where amateur guides demand tips or try to sell you something, in Japan they simply wish to practice English. They wouldn’t know what to do if you handed them money.

  “My name is Sayako, but please call me my English classroom name, Sally,” Sayako/Sally said. “Do you know this temple?”

  Indeed I did, but it would have been impossible to explain. Better to let her go on with her well-practiced speech.

  “Therefore, let me introduce this temple for you. It is old. You might say, ancient. It has been in this very location for a long time. Locally, it is known as a place of remembering resilience. This is, first, because the temple had withstood despite many earthquakes. Second, it is because this temple did not burn during the firebombing of Kyoto. Though, it was damaged by the artillery after the bombing. So, therefore, many small Buddha statues—do you know Buddha?”

  I assured her I did.

  “So, therefore, many small statues are placed here after war to remember the children who died in the firebombing elsewhere. They were roasted.”

  I suggested Sayako/Sally say something like “killed in the fire” instead of “roasted,” and she looked grateful, jotting it down with a pink mechanical pencil into a pink Hello Kitty notebook.

  “So because they were killed in the fire—” Sayako/Sally looked to me for approval and I smiled “—these small statues are here. The relatives of them come to pour the water on and pray for the souls of the killed-in-the-fire-children of Kyoto.”

  In any other place on Earth where such violence had been done, this conversation could never have unfolded like this. Sayako/Sally knew I was an American. She could guess my age. She knew my country had roasted children to death near this spot only a blink in time before our odd meeting.

  While every nation gets its own history wrong to a certain extent, there is truly no sense in Japan that the war—either its causes or how it was carried out—was ever given proper airing. It’s a family secret. The emperor in 2017 is the son of the emperor from 1946—imagine some kid of Hitler’s still in power in Germany. The Japanese accepted it all like a natural disaster, something that couldn’t be helped. Unlike the plaques in every small town in America with lists of soldiers who lost their lives in battle, there are few if any markers or monuments referencing the war in Japan. But while they thought they’d swept up every expended cartridge and smudged away every boot print, the grass grows too well around some random parking lot, fed by something deeply embedded. I knew they couldn’t clean it all up. We’d left too much behind.

  Sayako/Sally gestured to an old woman gently pouring ladles of water on one of the small stone statues. The statues did not look like children. They were small ovals, with partial faces, cartoonish egg figurines with little cloth bibs, symbolic without being ghoulish. A very Japanese touch. The old woman seemed to be speaking with the statues.

  “I want to talk with her, Sally, the elderly woman there.”

  As nonchalant as Sayako/Sally had been in her discussion of the war’s events with me, speaking to another Japanese person of a certain age about what happened was a forbidden act. My request trapped Sayako/Sally between such a taboo and the equally strong requirement of treating a guest from far away well. I could see her face as she chewed on the koan I’d handed her. I knew I was being selfish in even asking, bu
t cruelly justified my request in thinking it would be Sally’s penalty for not understanding what had happened in her nation’s recent history.

  Sayako/Sally’s introduction in Japanese to the woman, complete with many physical gestures toward me, took much longer than the “Hello, may we talk?” I asked her to translate. And I suspect no matter how long Sayako/Sally lives, nothing in her life will make her happier than she was at the moment the old woman said she spoke some English and would talk with me herself.

  “I’ve been here before,” I said.

  “I come often to pray for the souls of these children. I have much to discuss with God.”

  “What do you say as you pour the water on the statues?”

  “I say ‘Haruo-kun, that day of the firebombing was so hot for you.’ I say ‘Akiko-chan, you wished so hard for water then. Please drink now.’ You must think I am silly, talking to ghosts,” she said.

  “I am here for ghosts,” I said, and without warning to myself let out everything I had seen in 1946. It was unfair, and I was conscious that I was forcing my thoughts on the woman. I didn’t know what else to do. Words were all I had. When I paused, though, she made no movement away, said none of the polite things one can say to break off an unwanted conversation. When I was spent, she surprised me by telling her own story, everything she had seen us do in Kyoto during the war, but it was sorrow, not rage.

  “I am sorry,” she said, “but I have never been able to tell anyone before. My husband died in the war, and there was no one I could talk to.”

  “I, too, am sorry,” I said, “but I have never been able to tell anyone. I outlived them all, and usually in a war that means I won. My wife was from this area, but I was never able to tell it all to her before she passed. There was no one I could talk to even once about the things I think about every day.”