We Are Not Free: Chapters 13–16

He laughs and calls me a stupid kotonk, you know, the sound a coconut makes when it hits the ground, but he also tells me all about how this real old Roman city got buried under a ton of ash when this old volcano erupted, and all that ash protected it from erosion or whatever until archaeologists dug it up thousands of years later.

Funny how a place can be so old and so new at the same time, huh? New to me, but some of these buildings are older than the country I’m fighting for. All those cathedrals and palaces and stuff brought to their knees, piazzas jammed up with jeeps and GIs and bullet casings and trash.

On the ground, the antiaircraft guns are flashing, flak bursts rat-a-tat-tatting through the air.

Kaz has got this big laugh, all teeth and gullet.

...you wanna hunker down somewhere safe and quiet, except the last time you felt safe and quiet was in the arms of a girl in a desert and now she and the desert are half a world away and they’re shooting at you, those bullets are real, those guys are really falling, dying...

It’s a pretty little hilltop town of red shingle roofs, green shutters, and stone the color of orange sherbet.

Guys who were injured at Belvedere start going AWOL from the hospitals and the aid stations, trying to get back to the line. They reappear at the company command post, grinning like nothing happened, maybe they’ve got a limp or something, but they say as long as they’ve got a working trigger finger, they wanna keep fighting. I mean, can you believe that? White boys go AWOL ’cause they’re scared. Nisei boys go AWOL ’cause they wanna keep fighting.

The whole hillside’s riddled with caves, and it seems like the Germans are holed up in every one of ’em, but we’re protecting 2nd Battalion’s left flank, and if they’ve got any hope of reaching the summit, we gotta be there for ’em.

First thing, we’re met with a barrage. They throw everything at us. Tanks. Artillery. Automatic weapons.

That night, you hear patrols skirmishing in the darkness. The quick fire of machine pistols, Tommy guns.

Me and Kaz even scrounge up some pretty good grub.

The 100th Battalion gets its Distinguished Unit Citation for the job they did at Belvedere.

Kaz tells the Monteverdi story over and over, embellishing it a little more every time.

We cross a minefield with the help of some Italian partisans.

Dirt sprays up around me as I take his weapon and roll into a little divot of earth that’s not much cover but it’s some.

By noon, we’ve taken Hill D and we’ve got orders to move on to the railway embankment near La Broquaine, so we go dig ourselves in a hundred yards from the German line. Only problem is, and we don’t find this out till we get there, that us suckers in King and Item Companies are bivouacking in the middle of a goddamn minefield.

There’s movement between the trees, and wouldn’t you know, it’s the commander of the whole division walking by with his aide-de-camp.

And I look around here, and we’re not invincible, guys are dropping all around me, and I’m pulling that trigger over and over again, screaming, “Banzai!”
We’re not invincible.
But we are unstoppable.

What can you say? What do you have but platitudes? We’re sorry for your loss. He was a good boy. We loved him.

The words mean nothing, and that’s why you say them. Because you need that fog, that barrier of obscurity, between you and everybody else, or your grief will blind them in its rawness, in its brilliance.

Our teacher’s frigid glare—
our pyrotechnic laughter.

Will you renounce
your American citizenship?

Will you renounce
and stay in Tule Lake?

We hear
America only promises
wholesale bloodshed and violence—
nurseries burned, barns bombed,
wounded soldiers, back from Europe,
shot in train cars.

My mother believes the rumors:
If true Japanese return to the homeland,
they will be endowed with property,
jobs, accolades, gestures of gratitude
from the emperor himself.

Stewing
in our own fear, our confusion,
our anger, we tear ourselves to pieces
over a rumor, speculation.

I can just picture him,
arms flapping, screeching,
“Washo! Washo!”
like a demented albatross.

In her dream, her son is obedient,
speaks Japanese without an accent,
is stoic, good with money,
going into engineering or
another profession of equal pay.

Upon their departure from Tule Lake,
every evacuee will be compensated
with twenty-five dollars and a train ticket.

I stare at my name, my desire
to give up my country,
transcribed in my mother’s hand.

Her umbrage. Her throat bulge.

“My son has proven his loyalty.
My son is a true Japanese.
My son is the pride of this family.

Offer your congratulations, not your pity.”

Yum-yum will be practicing arpeggios, the notes wafting through her window onto the block.

To stand before a flushing toilet instead of a latrine. It feels like a dream.
Tentatively, I press the handle and almost jump back as the pipes roar.

A minute goes by, then two, then five, the waitresses passing our table without so much as a glance, the cooks glaring at us from the kitchen, the other diners watching us furtively as they tuck into their hamburgers and scoops of pie.

The whole scene reminds me of the evacuation: the luggage, the harried families, the way people keep snapping at one another in travel-strained voices.

They’re a riot of color in a world of graphite, like everything for years has been dull, dull, dull, rendered in grays, and all of a sudden I’m remembering rainbows, sunsets, forests, reds.