Hooper’s War Read online

  This was no impromptu wartime reunion. The woman wasn’t a destroyer captain who had hunted me as a sub commander, now sharing a drink years removed from being anonymous enemies. It felt more like an affair, a chance encounter with a willing stranger who wanted to do the things someone at home wouldn’t do. I certainly wasn’t saved by this, but maybe, for the first time, I felt savable.

  After the elderly woman left, there was one more thing. My wife refused to return to Kyoto herself, but insisted I do something for her, after her death. Doctors say someone can’t technically die of a broken heart, but I know better. It just takes a long time. So my final obligation in Kyoto was to leave behind an old photo of two Japanese children. I’d helped take care of it for 70 years, but it was never mine. It was a treasured possession of hers, and it needed to return home, before the next change of season. They were together. It had just taken a long time.

  Before Kyoto 2017, Kyoto 1946

  Chapter 2: A Hero’s Welcome

  Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, Before Kyoto, Captain Christiansen’s Tent, 1946

  THE DOGS WERE HOWLING even before I approached Captain Christiansen’s tent. They must have picked up the first vibrations from the approaching planes even I could hear now, and it must have scared the hell out of them.

  “LIEUTENANT HOOPER, LET ME get you a cup of coffee,” Captain Christiansen said. He was talking, little pops of condensed breath as he spoke, even as my eyes took a second to adjust to the light inside the tent. I could see he’d taken up chewing tobacco, and alternated between a cup to spit the juice into and another cup to drink coffee from. He seemed to have a good rhythm down, but the last thing inside the tent needed was more tension. Still, I’d never seen him so pleased about something to do with me.

  “We all figured you were dead, and then you show up all alive outta that goddamn fight at Nishinomiya,” Captain Christiansen said. “Your parents will be proud, you disguising yourself in Jap clothes and escaping from behind enemy lines. Damn, boy, I’d never have guessed you had it in you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, looking down. “I guess I had it in me.”

  “You need to get caught up. The morning after the battle we were going to bomb the hell out of a small house nearby the Nishinomiya train station. A spotter thought they saw someone going to hide in there. Instead, our fly-boys picked out maybe 40 Japs in a valley not far away, laid out for us all pink and naked. Pilots said there were crows starting to circle over the dead before our planes even cleared out. Forgot all about the house we set out to bomb in the first place.”

  “Yes, sir. Um, sorry I wasn’t there.” I realized I was a pretty crappy liar even if he didn’t.

  “Well, you’re hero enough, Hooper, surviving in Japanese captivity. So let me see if I got it all, because Major Moreland is up my ass to write you up for a Purple Heart. Now, after the fight for Nishinomiya train station, you were wounded—”

  “No, sir, only knocked out. Private Jones was wounded,” I said.

  “Jones is only worth so much to us because he’s dead. So be advised, young lieutenant: we attacked the Jap train station. You were fighting the Japs and got knocked out by the Japs. Getting knocked out is being wounded.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Wounded.”

  “We’ve been chewing through the stock of actual Purple Hearts pretty fast. We’ll borrow one for you for pictures.” He started jotting things down. “So, you were inadvertently left behind, and defended yourself from the Japs, protecting Jones.”

  “Sir, no, that wasn’t what happened. Frankly sir, maybe I should explain it, because in truth I was more stupid than brave,” I said.

  “Stupid and brave are pretty close in war.” He lowered his voice and came close enough that I could smell him, coffee, tobacco juice, and old sweat. He set the spit cup and the coffee cup down, something of a relief for me. “Son, look, between us, I can well imagine Major Moreland wants to puff up the truth a bit. The homeland needs heroes. The medals aren’t for you. Now, you ready to hear what’s next?”

  “Given what, um, happened to me, I thought I might take my foot off the gas for a couple of days,” I said. “I mean, what I did, doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “It’s the only reason I’m really still listening to you. And I’d love to give you some time off, Hooper, but I need to put ass into the fight right now. The Japs dug in a defensive line around Kyoto. We’ve hammered the hell out of them day and night. I bet you wished you had a piece of that.”

  “Of course, sir,” I said.

  “Now the whole damn Japanese 16th Army is right in the outskirts of Kyoto city. They refuse to surrender, so we’re gonna burn the goddamn thing down. Fry up the women, the children, the old men. Burn the goddamn temples, the old palaces, every goddamn thing that’ll spark up. One massive firebombing, modern-like, whole city at once. You hear the planes?”

  “Can’t miss them, sir. But we’ve been firebombing Japanese cities for months, haven’t we, sir?” I said.

  “Jesus, you sound like you got an old girlfriend in town or something. Since Kyoto hasn’t been bombed this whole war, there’s a lot of virgin city left. And it’s all wood. The damn thing is gonna go up like every Fourth of July you ever saw back in, where was it, Ohio, right?”

  “Yes, sir, Reeve, Ohio. May I ask a question, sir?” I said. “Why are we bombing the whole of Kyoto? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just bomb the enemy part?”

  “Hooper.” He said my name like he was chewing on a cold sore. “Who the hell do you think grows the food and runs the trains and works in the factories? Jap civilians. Their women make baby Japs that grow into soldiers. They’re all in on it. We can shave weeks off this war by killing them.” He ticked off those sentences like throwing stones into a steel pail. “We’re saving lives here, mister.” Bang.

  “You said I have some duty connected with all this, Captain?” We were almost shouting at each other over the sound of the planes now.

  “Tomorrow, as our hero, you’ll lead a patrol into Kyoto city center, first light. We’ll send reporters from Stars and Stripes, probably Chaplain Savage to get him the hell out of my way. Kind of a plum assignment, Lieutenant, so smile, you get to take the victory lap on this one for Uncle Sam. OK, now beat it and get yourself something hot to eat.”

  As I turned toward the tent flap a soldier pushed past me, carrying some scrap of a message form. Captain Christiansen signed for it and without looking up, snapped at the soldier to straighten his helmet.

  “It is straight, sir,” the soldier said.

  “If I say your helmet isn’t on square, it isn’t on square,” Captain Christiansen said.

  “But Captain…”

  “I said straighten the helmet and you will straighten the goddamn helmet.”

  I was afraid for the young soldier, but as Captain Christiansen rose from his seat with his fists balled the soldier fixed his helmet and backed out of the tent. I could feel the sound of the planes pressing on my ear drums. It was inside me.

  “Captain, there’s something I need to say. I’m not sure I’m the right guy for the victory lap and all. See, there’s more you gotta know about—”

  “Save it for someone who cares, Lieutenant Hooper. We’re all just doing our job here and sometimes it isn’t what we wanted, sometimes it feeds someone else’s appetite.” He’d snapped in, no more joking, deep into the real war now. Then just as fast his body went brittle, the air let out, and he sat back down. It isn’t often that a guy like Christiansen won’t meet your eyes. “You’d think I’d get tired of having to explain that to kids like you.” Not aggressive or sarcastic, an assertion.

  There was a lot of whiskey-hurt in it, but it fell into one of those cracks because I was too caught up in my own mess with Naoko and Sergeant Nakagawa to feel much about someone else’s. I didn’t know whether it was a confession coming from Captain Christiansen and if it was, if it was the first one or the last one. He started twisting the ring on his left h
and.

  “Hooper, you really want to know why I don’t give a rat’s ass about what we do? Because I want to go back to Arkansas and drink until this all can’t ever catch me sober again. I divorced once into Army life, didn’t care, juice wasn’t worth the squeeze back then, so what’s another one. You know, when I was last home, I slept at the kitchen table plenty of nights because I still thought then my first wife’d come back late and I wanted to hear the door open. But no matter. I already know the second wife won’t be in bed when I come in at 3 a.m. One day I’ll cap it off, but I’ll be at home when I do. You’ll learn, Lieutenant. This shit doesn’t end when the war does, it only ends when we do.”

  OUTSIDE THE TENT AN overture of weather and reconnaissance aircraft in pairs flew over, and the noise cracked the sky itself. The moonlight caught on the polished aluminum skins of the B-29s, and soon everything in the world was replaced by planes. An explosion lit up the undersides of the next row of bombers, turning them from silver to orange, until the rising smoke got so thick I couldn’t see the planes anymore. Every flash silhouetted another bit of Kyoto, teasing the planes to go get it. Maybe someday, I thought, they’d make bombs smart enough to have nightmares, but for now those would be ours.

  I heard something new, growing in volume until it was louder than the planes themselves: The soldiers around me were cheering.

  Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, Hilltop Outside Kyoto, After Midnight, 1946

  “LIEUTENANT HOOPER? I’M DOCTOR Klein, Division Assistant Medical Officer. They sent me all the way up this damn hill to meet you because of your patrol into Kyoto tomorrow.”

  Doctor Klein was an ugly man, the kind you look at, then turn away from, then look back at, even though you feel wrong doing it, something like the way people behave around toupees. He was every puggy bastard that ever made someone else’s life more difficult. And now he was standing there, chewing on a Hershey bar, talking to me.

  “You want a bite? Captain Christiansen said Major Moreland ordered me to prepare you and your men for what you may encounter tomorrow in Kyoto. Hey, you heard what happened, right? Christiansen took a full swig of tobacco juice from his spit cup the other day at the staff briefing, never even flinched, just gutted it like a champ,” Doctor Klein said. “The pool on that had been up to $50. I think Chaplain Savage won. You sure you don’t want a bite of this chocolate? Now about Kyoto, ever seen the aftermath of a firebombing before? I haven’t. Made it damn hard to figure out how to prepare you for it. The best I could find in the manual is to issue your men were these yellow atabrine malaria pills.”

  “Leave ’em, Doc, and I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  “Normally that’d be SOP, but since Major Moreland is taking such a personal interest in your mission I need to report to him how much I helped you. I’m trying to get promoted you see, and frankly, with this war going so well for us, there’s not much time. I’d hoped you would be a sport about this.”

  “Look, I’ll tell everyone you did a good job,” I said.

  “No, that would be dishonest, and I’m a moral man,” Doctor Klein said, raising his voice over the sound. “Here, the pills, take them, for me. Please.” He said that last word as if he had to squeeze it out past a hemorrhoid.

  “Please, Lieutenant, we’ve all got our jobs to do. Be sure the men take three pills a day. Have them report to me immediately if their urine turns purple. See how easy that was? Didn’t hurt a bit, eh? Hey, you feel that? What the hell is that?”

  A hot breeze blew back my hair. That was where I was headed at first light. That was Kyoto, burning.

  Chapter 3: Oh, the Night Does Not End in Kyoto

  Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, Kyoto, 1946

  KYOTO AS WE TOOK her was the opposite of impregnable. For all the Japanese fears we’d rape their women, they thought too small.

  We were in a couple of Jeeps heading toward the city the morning after the firebombing. Ahead of us, smoke rose from inside piles of wood. The ground was uncomfortably warm for winter when we stopped to take a piss. The sky was the shade of old jeans, with the sun a chalky dime. We saw a few houses with the side toward Kyoto city charred black and blue. The trees looked like something alien that’d been replanted by the fires, branches twisted into skinny arms, smoke still reaching off them. It would’ve looked like cotton candy, except cotton candy wasn’t black and stabbed into the sky and didn’t smell and wasn’t liquid and thick like this. Everything was covered in a fine gray ash, the devil’s snow, one of the guys called it. It was a fitting way to say it, because this looked like what I’d imagined back in Ohio when the preacher wound up to describe hell to us on Sundays. At first I thought the only thing missing was demons walking around.

  WE THOUGHT WE COULD drive into Kyoto by dead-reckoning, as it was a big enough target. Instead, the narrow, unmarked roads brought us to a place where the straight way in was lost. We had no detailed maps, and even my compass was of little use when every road took us through three directions just to travel half a mile. We were lost, in no way sure what was the right thing to do, so we blundered in the way we thought was correct. There was no one to ask for directions, and our new Jap translator had been to Kyoto as many times as I had. Without knowing what we were doing, we finally entered the outskirts of the city.

  A JAPANESE WOMAN, THE first live person we saw, waved us over. She had streaks on her face where her tears had run, scarring the soot like mascara. She pointed to her mouth and then her belly, universal signs for hunger. She made an obscene gesture and held out four fingers, asking I guess for four dollars, or four yen, or four more days to live, in payment. She opened her top to reveal her breasts, trying then to cup them seductively. The fire had flash-burned the pattern of her kimono on to her skin.

  “Hope you brought some flowers, Lieutenant,” one of the men said, laughing. “I think the bitch’s gonna be your Jap girlfriend.”

  “A harlot right out of Sodom and Gomorrah,” Chaplain Savage said. “No wonder God struck this wicked place. I pity the men He chose to act through. Imagine how they felt having had to do this.”

  The woman whispered something to us through the translator.

  “Kill me,” she said.

  “Nah,” one of the troops said back. “It won’t be that easy, girlie.”

  THE NEXT PEOPLE WE encountered described through the translator how at first the firebombing was beautiful. They had no experience with such things in Kyoto, the city never having been bombed before, and many people stepped outside to watch. The live ones we were talking to were those who did not stay long. They lived near the river and ran into a kind of tunnel they’d dug in the embankment. They said it was like looking out through a child’s toy.

  “I do not know the exact word for it,” the translator said. “The kind where you peer down a tube and turn it to see different colors and shapes.”

  “A Kaleidoscope,” I said.

  “Yes, that is it, a kaleidoscope,” the translator continued. “They saw red, then black, then it became orange, then red again, and then black again. They say it sparkled. At first the airplanes frightened them but soon enough they could not even hear the planes as the sound of the wind became as loud as during a typhoon.”

  The translator pointed out one woman who said she had crept outside for a moment to look up at her home. She thought it had not been hit. Then the windows glowed like what she said was a summer paper lantern. The flames soon shot long lines of sparks into the sky, and the next clutch of bombs with their streamers caught the light and looked like falling stars as they got pulled into the fire. When her home collapsed, she returned to the tunnel. She said she looked away from the opening after that, back into the darkness, but she could still see the imprint of the light from the fires and nothing else. She said now the night never ends in Kyoto.

  “Do they want food?” I said.

  “They are asking for kerosene to make fires,” the translator said. “Also matches. Or a cigarette lighter.”
/>   “I got a lighter, sir,” a solider named Garner said.

  “Shut up. Translator, ask them what they need that stuff for? We just set the whole damn city on fire,” I said.

  “They want to cremate their dead.”

  “They’re already cremated,” I said.

  “Not the right way,” the translator said. “They say everything else here is burnt already and they cannot start proper fires without gasoline.”

  The Chaplain pushed his way through our little group.

  “Now translator, ask them a question for me. Are any of them Christians?” the Chaplain said.

  “They say they are all Buddhists.”

  “Oh, never mind. I was going to ask if they needed me to pray for any of their dead. Let me know if we find any Christians. I don’t want to feel like my whole goddamn day here is being wasted,” the Chaplain said.

  “LIEUTENANT, WHAT ARE THOSE little black piles?” one of the men said.

  “Burned stuff.”

  “People?”

  “I guess, people.”

  “Like the enemy, right?”

  “WHAT THE HELL’S THAT sound?” one of the soldiers said. “Too loud for cats, unless there’s thousands and there isn’t because the Nippers would’ve eaten them already. You know they eat cats, right?”

  “More like it’s the Japs, but I don’t think even Japs are supposed to make sounds like that, to tell ya’ the whole truth,” another said.

  “I heard it before, back home, when we herded the cows together. After you slaughtered the first one the others would know.”

  “I think it’s burned Japs that ain’t dead yet. What should we do, kill them?”

  “To hell with them, they’re already dead, they won’t admit it yet. Let ’em burn.”

  “Amen to that, brother. They started this shit.”

  I couldn’t say a word. I thought then we were at the bottom of the swamp but I was stupid.