Hooper’s War Read online

  AS WE WALKED, WE left a trail of silver chewing gum wrappers behind us. The gum helped cover some of the smells, because if hell smelled it smelled like this, and it felt better to be doing something, even if it was just chewing. No mind the clouds, the wrappers glittered against the darker ashes. As we encountered live children, they scurried to collect up the silver paper, a distraction I guess, felt better to be doing something, certainly nobody’s trail of breadcrumbs home. They quickly figured out about the gum part.

  “Throw those kids some more. Look at ’em smile, least a little,” one of the troops said.

  “But their mama-sans ain’t smiling. Why ain’t they smiling?” another said.

  “How would you feel if the Indians handed out chocolate to Custer’s kids after Little Big Horn?” I said.

  “Aw, LT, lighten up, we’re just tryin’ to get them to like us more.”

  “How much chocolate you gonna need?” I said.

  SHE LOOKED CRAZY AT first, seeming to pull out her hair in clumps. It took another glance for me to realize she wasn’t pulling it out. It had burned all crispy, so every time she touched it it crumbled apart in her hands. Same for her eyebrows; she smudged them off with her fingers.

  “She is looking for her children,” the translator said. “But she ran through the smoke and she is blind now. She is asking if we know where her children are. She says they’re named Mei and Satsuki, if we spot them.”

  “Hey, translator,” one of the men said, laughing. “Tell her I found one of her kids.”

  On the woman’s back was a burned lump, the one she must have been carrying in a sling.

  “The woman,” the translator said, “she says thank you, and when we find the other child, tell her mommy said come home and not be so naughty.”

  “THIS MAN WANTS TO know why we did this,” the translator said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “He says he does not know either, so he asked,” the translator said.

  “Ask him why he’s still alive.”

  “He says he does not know.”

  “I mean, how come he didn’t die?”

  “He says he does not know that either.”

  “How come the firebombing didn’t kill him? Was he in some kind of shelter?” I said.

  “He says he does not know,” the translator said.

  “To hell with it. Just tell him I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He wants to apologize, too. He says he is actually dead, and you are talking to his ghost.”

  “Excuse me, translator,” said one of the newspapermen with us. “Ask the ‘ghost’ if I can take his picture for Stars and Stripes. Tell him he’ll be in newspapers all over America, maybe that’ll cheer him up. I gotta get this shot, he’s the first of these that still looks like a whole person. And what a joker. A ghost, sure thing, pal. Smile for Uncle Sam.” The Japanese man jumped at the camera flash.

  “So, Stars and Stripes, you gonna write about who’s responsible for all these things we’re seeing? You going to let the world know that?” I said.

  “Oh, that’s a sensitive subject, Lieutenant,” the reporter said. “You see, I heard back at HQ the old man’s trying to take all the credit, which is getting Division’s back up since they cut the actual orders. Sort of like a rooster taking credit for the sunrise, amiright? Meanwhile, Major Moreland has his nose so far up the old man’s butt looking for some pat on the back he might be Pinocchio. They act like there’s only one more medal left to issue in all of the Pacific Theater. Oh, hey sir, sorry, I just noticed. Nice Purple Heart you got there.”

  “Lieutenant, excuse me. I’m Warrant Officer Rand, 20th Army Air Force, strategic bomb damage assessment branch, acting deputy chief assistant assessor. I might be able to help explain all this. I’m also filling in for the Office of the Army Air Force Historian. They’re quite busy.”

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  “Oh, you don’t know the half of it, sir. We’ve bombed 60 Jap cities down to the dust, but then we keep bombing them over and over, our pilots don’t have much else to do and the brass figures idle hands are the devil’s workshop and all. Every time we destroy one city again, well, that means more history. Once you get behind, it’s damned hard to tell the new damage from the old damage, and then the records get skewed.”

  “You want people to remember this?” I said.

  “The good Lord willing, yes, sir,” Rand said. “Now about these civilians being alive, frankly, we don’t know why, that’s another big part of why I’m here. No matter what we try, a few always squeak through. Fire’s a funny thing, sir. It can skip around with the wind and all. But we’re working on getting some 100 percent spreads in these death events, if only the war’ll last long enough for us to finish the calculations. Hate to have to wait until the next war to pick that up again, lose our rhythm and all.”

  “What do you make of that guy over there?” I said.

  “Not uncommon, sir, no, not at all, in my experience. Usually what happens is they try and push open a metal door that got real hot, and their arms kinda melt, right to the elbows. Bad ones are when they lean their whole body against something hot, and stick. Sometimes there’s enough left to tell what happened, so we can record it properly in the stats. Easy on us when we have to collect samples, because with the water and fat all boiled off you can get several of ’em into one sack. Other kinds of melting out there, too.”

  “Melting?” I said.

  “Oh sure,” Rand said. “Saw this one head sticking out of the road, looked like a Halloween pumpkin left outside too many days. We all got a little chuckle out of that. What we figure happened is the asphalt melted, the guy got stuck, and sunk in up to his chin. Like those dinosaurs in the La Brea tar pits outside L.A. Ever see those, sir? Quite a sight if you get the chance after the war.”

  “I’ll see if I can get there, Rand.”

  “Lieutenant, a word of advice? You really need to stop thinking so much about the Japs that got killed and start thinking about the Americans who didn’t. You don’t seem to be enjoying this at all, but everything you see here means we’re winning. C’mon, let’s lighten things up, Lieutenant, it’s gonna be a long day otherwise. Here, I got a joke for you. How do you explain a Jap with both legs, one arm and his head shot off, you know, just the other arm left?”

  “God help me, I don’t know, Rand.”

  “Somebody ran out of ammo! Pretty funny, huh, Lieutenant? See, ’cause he only had one arm, and we should have shot that one off, too, right? C’mon, you gotta laugh or you’re gonna cry.”

  “What’d you do before the war, Rand, back home?” I said.

  “Small town, sir, Nebraska. Taught high school. Math, so I’m good with numbers. That’s how I got this job.”

  “Isn’t it gonna be hard to go back to that school, after this?” I said.

  “You could say so, sir. Sometimes back in the office I start imaging what kids I see would look like burned dead, you know, fat ones and skinny ones,” Rand said. “Guess you could say I’ll take my work home with me. Another joke there, sir.”

  “These things don’t bother you Rand? These…”

  “Not really, sir, kind of my job. Maybe another guy would lose perspective on all this and see it as something it’s not. But atrocities aren’t organized like this. Lieutenant, see, this war is really underrated. Maybe you should talk to the Chaplain about it.”

  “So, Rand, you’re saying this all is good?”

  “No sir, not good,” Rand said. “I’d have to score it pretty close to perfect to be honest about it. Almost nothing left standing. That’s an achievement.”

  “If you’re so smart Rand, tell me, why are there so many logs blocking up the river? What caused that?” I said.

  “Oh, those aren’t logs, Lieutenant.”

  Chapter 4: The Children of Kyoto

  Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Japan, Kyoto, 1946

  “I SPEAK ENGLISH. DO not shoot, please. I am a professor.”

/>   “Identify yourself. And why the hell are you wearing a top hat and a vest?” I said. With his odd clothing and small, impeccably groomed mustache, he looked like some character out of one of the old British books I didn’t finish in high school.

  “I am Professor Shinichiro Kanazawa, Department of Western Philosophy, Kyoto University. My card. I am here as a vicambulist, someone who pleasantly strolls around cities for recreation, though like you I prefer the vernacular ‘to ramble.’ As to the why, I typically wear a top hat and vest when I go out for a walk. It is splendid English wool, this vest, from when I studied abroad. Oxford, you know. I think that covers your queries. Oh, yes, manners. My regards to your President Harry S. Truman. Quite a little experiment he has succeeded with here. I read a funny thing about him, though perhaps you already know. The ‘S’ in his name does not stand for any name, it is just an S, though followed always by a period. Now, how else may I assist you?”

  “Hey Professor, Warrant Officer Rand, 20th Army Air Force, strategic bomb damage assessment branch. Filling in for the historian, too. One of our goals here is for intellectuals like yourself to spread the word about what happened in Kyoto, to compel your government to surrender. We really don’t have any way to communicate other than via these dead bodies, you know, to send a message. Would you agree to do that for us, sir?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” the Professor said. “Delighted to assist. The bombing has been quite helpful, you know. Once this city was all windy paths and twisty dead end streets, quite inconvenient for walking. With everything burnt down, I can get between any two points now in a straight line. Saves so much time. The only minor concern, and I am so hesitant to even bring it up, is the rats. I suppose it is really a Japanese problem, us dying hither and yon and such.”

  “Professor, you have no pants on,” I said.

  “True, sir, true. A keen eye. You see, there was no time to dress fully, as I just watched my wife die. No time even to cremate her before my walk, but I did not think she would really mind. She was always a good egg.”

  “I’m sorry, that must have been horrible, Professor,” I said.

  “Indeed, indeed, for her. She watched me fetch the things for the cremation while I waited for her to die. Cheers!”

  KYOTO HAD BEEN A city of one million souls. They didn’t open their mouths to answer the silence. They weren’t hiding, they just… weren’t. Everywhere else on earth there was always something. Here there was nothing, and nothing made its own sound.

  In many parts of the city we traveled through you could see for miles, as thousands of tons of incendiary bombs can clear quite a path. Behind the emptiness, the haze and smoke covered the rest. For the most part, even the roads we walked on were uncluttered, as there was little stone or concrete rubble to have collapsed into them like we saw in the pictures from Germany or the London Blitz. Just soft ash. You almost could’ve walked barefoot. It had all been made of wood, paper, and cloth, and it had all burned. Well, maybe not all of it. Everywhere were charred ceramics, glazed chinaware that survived the heat. Forget the rats and roaches; the only thing certain to survive the end of the world will be dinner settings.

  I saw three bodies in the street, a little vignette. Came down to this:

  The black stick of a woman was fused by the heat hunched over a small child—there was no he or she—probably trying to shield the kid from the fire. The little ones like that, the soldiers took to calling them roasted peanuts, not because they didn’t want to care, more because they couldn’t care any more about dead seven-year-olds as a military objective. Beyond the beast was the body of another sexless child, the arms extended. Must have reached out to the mother at the last moment. If mother had been looking back, and the devil would have forced her to do so, that’s the last thing she saw. Flakes of char were blowing off them. If there was any solace, it was the wind was gentle, nature saying maybe, “Here’s one small thing I can do to help.”

  “PRIVATE, ARREST THAT MAN for looting,” I said. “Corporal, make a note: I observed the subject pulling a wagon around, around whatever the hell part of Kyoto this is, stripping fragments of clothing off the dead. Looting. Got that? We don’t need to add looting to everything else that happened to this city.” I felt better helping, doing something at least halfway good.

  “He denies it, Lieutenant,” the translator said. “He says he was collecting clothing for children who need it. The children are not far from here, in a basement.”

  THE BASEMENT WAS DARK, though some light came through the small windows set at ground level, catching the dust and creating yellow fingers. Moving among the children was a single woman, dressed in what must have once been a nurse’s uniform, still looking somewhat white against the background. She was using chopsticks to pick bits of burned flesh off a child’s back. She was gentle and slow, staring ahead into the darkness as much as watching her work. Dozens of children lined up behind her in a ghost parade, snaking off into some corner we could not see into. There was moaning that lasted way longer than the sound.

  “Translator, ask her, how many children has she helped so far?” I said.

  “She says just the one. Because it’s only been 20 hours since she started, she says, and the child keeps falling asleep.”

  I saw one of the reporters write that down.

  Most of the children had no clothes. Either the clothes had been burned off, or the kids had torn them off because of the pain from their burns. There was skin peeling off their backs like paint chips flaking. They weren’t even human, as alien as if they glowed in the dark. To me the children were more horrifying than all the corpses because I knew our weapons would not be finished with them for some time, as the burns healed but only over a period of years. That was real revenge for Pearl, something beyond an Old Testament God’s imagination.

  I saw handwritten signs on the walls. The translator said they were the names of relatives who’d come looking for their children. They posted their names in hopes their child might find his way here, and know auntie was alive somewhere. One sign had a picture, an unsmiling adult who must have belonged to someone in this city. How the picture survived, and how it got to this place, was just another shrewd invention of the devil. Was anyone ever reunited, I asked the nurse. No, she said, the children are mostly too young to read, and there was only the one photo every child stopped to look at many times, as if the person in it might change.

  I felt huge and terrible. “Ah, Christ, here, here’s my sweater for one of them if they’re cold. Tell them the American Army will bring them lots of sweaters, soon.”

  “Is that true, Lieutenant?” the translator said. “Because this boy wants to know if the American sweaters are going to fall from the sky. He says can we please bring them by train instead.”

  “Lieutenant? I’d like to give the children this if I may. Maybe they could sell it and raise some money,” the Chaplain said. “It’s a samurai dagger. I took it from one of the houses we visited earlier.”

  “That’s looting, Chaplain, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Looting’s what they do. For me it’s a war souvenir, you know, a trophy,” Chaplain Savage said.

  “Chaplain, time for you to shut the hell up,” I said.

  “Same to you, Lieutenant. You’re starting to really piss me off, son.”

  “It is very possible I feel the same way about you,” I said. “Now goddammit, translator, ask the man what he really needs.”

  “He says he would like a bigger wagon, please.”

  THE TRANSLATOR EXPLAINED during the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, people dove into rivers to escape the fires in the aftermath, but since they could not swim, most drowned. Learning to swim was then made part of the standard school curriculum, and the government built pools outside most public schools. He said it would make sense for children to have gone to such places for safety, and suggested we have a look.

  “HEY SIR, THAT POOL, the one the translator guy told us was here?” the Corporal said. “I checked it out l
ike you said to. It looks like a bunch o’ kids were in it, but they got, well, boiled, sir. The bodies alongside the pool are black like everywhere, but inside the pool they’re more kinda pink. Look like department store mannequins, ’cause most of them was all still kind of standing. It was so crowded, I think they ended up leaning against each other.”

  As I turned away, the Corporal followed me.

  “Hey, sir, um, Lieutenant Hooper?” the Corporal said. “You got a second? I’m sort of wondering, maybe what we’ve seen is sort of the bad parts, you know, the worst. There’s not stuff like this everywhere, right?”

  “I don’t know, Corporal. This was a big city, maybe a million people. Probably a lot more around like we’ve seen,” I said.

  “You mean there might be hundreds of more kids who look like that?”

  “Thousands.”

  “See, I’m not sure anymore,” the Corporal said. “When the Japs were shooting at us, it was pretty clear, you know, sir? I guess I just thought it’d be different, that’s all.”

  “So what do you think, are we good guys or bad guys?” I said.

  “We’re just soldiers, sir, following orders,” the Corporal said.

  “Don’t let us off too easy.”

  I LOOKED AT THESE people, the Japanese. They weren’t fighting over food, they weren’t looting, they hadn’t gone feral like you’d have expected. We were not going to break these people with bombs. We could kill them or force them to do what we wanted, but we were never going to really win. They owned their own hearts and minds and some free food wasn’t gonna change that.

  Before Kyoto, I’d been told we had killed 110,000 people, made a million more homeless and burnt down a quarter of a city in one night of firebombing over Tokyo, the greatest death toll in a single act in the history of human warfare. Stars and Stripes did a couple of pictorial stories on it.

  I realized standing there we had no strategy for victory other than simply to keep fighting. Our mission was not to take terrain or seize positions. There was nothing in Kyoto we wanted to capture, no fortress, no strategic hill. It was just killing.