“The end of us, probably,” said Christian, starting to fire, the first in his hole to pull his trigger.
When 3 A.M. rolled in that morning, the tenth of June, Christian and Jack were still awake. Christian, as he’d done every night in Okinawa, spent the quiet hours thinking about his parents. His little family had been flattened by the hell of war. And why? Because the FBI thought his aunt was a Nazi and his father’s colleague turned out to be a power-starved liar. Meanwhile, the people of Okinawa were dying simply because they lived in the wrong place at the wrong time. Christian wrestled with his thoughts, wishing he had Emi to confide in, even by pen and paper. He let the hard ground provide a few moments of cool until he felt Jack’s kick.
“Kraut,” Jack said, as he had every morning since they reached Okinawa. “It’s time.”
The tenth marked the seventy-first day in Okinawa for Christian, Jack, and the rest of the Seventh. Shellfire had become their soundtrack and they’d seen men in their unit start to go mad from it, shutting down, no longer speaking, barely able to pick up their guns and return to the trenches. Other men were weak with malaria; more still were dead, their lifeless limbs propped up in waist-high mud. But by June, the Americans’ position was very strong and so were their numbers. Hundreds of ships had kept up their amphibious assault on the island while Christian and Jack and thousands of others pushed overland toward Okinawa’s southern end.
On June 10, the division, facing severely weakened Japanese troops, was closing in on Yuza in the south. Knowing that the Japanese had lost far more men than the Seventh had, the division’s commanders didn’t expect the barrage of firepower that came suddenly from behind Yuza-Dake peak. Perko screamed for his men to get behind the rocks as the tanks plowed forward. As they scrambled for cover, Christian heard Jack’s voice behind him.
“Watch out to your left, kraut!” Jack yelled. “They’re in the caves! To the left! Get down!”
Christian felt a bullet nick his helmet, but they all made it behind the rocks, the air around them already reeking of dead flesh.
As they reloaded their guns, with Perko bent over his map but still hollering orders, they heard someone howling behind them. Christian looked back to see one of their men, his face turning white. A bullet had gone through his hand. He looked at it, at the place where his fingers had been, and collapsed, but there were not enough men to tend to him. Jack and Christian stared for a few seconds, then resumed firing.
As soon as they were ordered to move again, they ran for a dense cluster of palm trees, hoping to escape the offensive fire raining down from the peak. When the whistle of shells finally slowed, Christian moved to another tree, and Jack waved to indicate that he should run past him a few more feet. He did, but with the sound of gunfire starting up again, he pivoted to his right and began firing back at random. In the next instant, he saw that in his haste, he wasn’t firing at soldiers. He had fired into a group of terrified women. One fell to the ground, a child on top of her, his legs moving, still alive.
“No!” Christian screamed, falling to his knees. He crawled out from behind his cover, making for the women, but Jack grabbed him and pulled him back. Christian turned and rested his head against the palm tree, Jack’s hands still on him. “I didn’t see her. Jesus Christ. I just killed that woman. Did you see? Did you see her child?”
Jack grabbed his arms from behind his back and said, “How many women have we already killed? Get over it and keep going!”
Christian had never imagined anything like Okinawa. It had been a year and a half since he enlisted. He had fought in the Marshall Islands and spent five months in the Philippines. But until Okinawa, he hadn’t known such horror could exist in the world. And in such a tiny corner of it. Since they’d come ashore on Easter Sunday, he’d seen families running into shelters for safety only to burn alive seconds later; civilians who had been living in trenches gunned down, their insides spilling out of their kimonos; mothers clutching their babies and drowning themselves, throwing their bodies from cliffs without a look back; children blown up as they ran toward their parents for help. He’d held his fellow soldiers as they died and seen dozens of young women limping from rape. But this was the first time he’d fired a bullet into a woman’s body at such close range. A civilian. Someone’s mother. He lifted his hand to his mouth and tasted the blood.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said, shaking his arms free and stepping back from Jack and his gun.
Jack picked it up and thrust it into his chest, ramming him back until he was pinned against a tree. “Just because you’re the only fool on this planet who joined the Army for love doesn’t mean you can give up now,” he said through gritted teeth. “Or maybe you can,” he said, pointing to Yuza-Dake peak. “Walk into the open right now and take the bullets. Then Emi can marry some Japanese soldier and this whole mission of yours will be for nothing.”
“It wasn’t just for Emi,” said Christian, finally wiping his hands on what was left of his shirt. “I didn’t want to die in Germany.”
“What was that?” asked Jack.
“I didn’t want to die in Germany!” Christian screamed in his face.
“And you were right!” Jack yelled back. “Everyone in your family has died but you! So don’t fucking die here instead.”
Christian ran to a foxhole, fell belly down on the ground, then rolled himself up to sit against a mud wall. He thought about his last letter from Inge. He’d received it just before she sailed for Germany.
In her small childish hand, she’d written, “Please don’t die, because you never finished telling me the story on the train and you promised you would. You promised.”
Instead it was Inge who had likely died.
Christian picked up his gun, aimed toward the distance, put his finger on the trigger, and let the bullets fly.
CHAPTER 33
EMI KATO
JANUARY–MARCH 1945
Act as normally as you can,” Evgeni had advised her after two weeks had gone by following Oskar’s death. “No one has come looking for you, so don’t go looking for them.”
She had relayed the message to Kenji, who’d seemed thrilled to avoid her, returning to his life as an elementary school student instead of a for-hire butcher, even if it did mean much less to eat.
Emi didn’t know what normal meant for her anymore. She had never developed a routine in Karuizawa; her days were entirely centered on survival. There was no leisure, no moments of real joy. Everything was clouded by a fear of starving and the terror of death. But this time she would listen to Evgeni; she would try to find normal again.