This Light Between Us: Part Three

This truck is not so different from the one that transported him from his farmhouse to the ferry pier on Bainbridge Island. The same overhanging canvas, the same dark green, the same cloying stink of gasoline.

Thick, lush vegetation surrounds the camp, even encroaching into it in places, lending a warmer, homier feel.

Tall trees stand interspersed between the smaller barracks, and break up the monotony of the layout.

Some discreetly copy answers from the soldier next to them, not knowing they are writing their way to a 17 percent.

Shig Hayashi writes over the faint outlines of the half-erased answers, unaware that in a week he will be, based on his top score, assigned to the artillery battalion where he will become known as the stupidest person ever to make the 522nd Artillery Battalion.

The Hawaiian boys take off their fatigues and go about bare-chested, even the scrawny ones.

They chatter all the time in pidgin, an odd combination of English, Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Spanish, and Filipino.

The mainlanders look down on the Hawaii boys as uncouth and coarse and call them “Buddhaheads.”

The boys from Hawaii see these mainlanders as nothing more than brownnosing toadies, always kissing up to the haole superiors.

And they don’t believe in a fair fight; they have absolutely no qualms about outnumbering the foe.

He is tall, with a face that is lean and almost ascetic.

He does not blurt it out, or shout with overbearing confidence.

She has an average face, if not downright homely, a bit wide with a stubby nose.

Find me, Alex.
Three words that sometimes feel like a clarion call.

There: final inoculations against smallpox and typhus, gas-mask training.

Mutt Suzuki, drunk and brazen, asks a few USO hostesses to dance.

An army band plays them a farewell song from the dock, “Over There,” as their boots thump along the gangplank, and it undulates beneath them, strangely in time with the song.

He pulls out the letter, but it’s impossible to make out the words in the dim ambient light.

The air is fetid and hot, and Alex suddenly finds he needs light.

A tiny glowing dot, ghostly and ephemeral.

He’d always imagined the Sinti slips to be large and embroidered, made of cloth or some kind of parchment, and full of gypsy curlicues along the margins, a centering watermark encircled by a phrase in Sinti. Imbued with a mystical aura that would tingle your fingertips.

Some shapes shuffle along, but they are distant and contorted, tiny wraiths floating just above the ground.

The German air raid was so devastating, it was dubbed Little Pearl Harbor.

But it’s the squalor that’s most telling. Only men wear shoes; the women walk around barefoot, their blackened, calloused soles looking hard as black leather. And the children, God, the children. Scrawny, desperate, dirty.

Here, tortoiseshells and cameos and other pilfered jewelry are being sold.

In the hour before dawn, a few soldiers walk through the bivouacked camp, quietly waking up the battalion.

Alex, like many of his fellow soldiers, is already awake. Has been for hours, his sleep fitful through the night, grabbed in brief, fractured snatches.

He goes spinning, his arms a whirling dervish, a geyser of blood ribboning out.

In his head, measurements and yards and grids now interpose upon the terrain.

Skin's always wrinkled and white and sloughing off.

The same disquiet, the same sense of foreboding Alex feels. Something is wrong about this mission.

But the Forêt domaniale de Champ stands between them, and it is a dense, unending forest of sixty-foot pine trees set on steep hills and narrow defiles and ravines that drop precipitously, cliff-like, to the valley floor hundreds of feet below.

Their drenched clothes and skin are the color of sewage, and where soldier ends and forest begins, there is no telling; sometime during the night they have become congealed into a wet sop.

And with that, the mortar shells once again fall from the skies, and the fusillade of bullets rip the ground and trees apart.

And with that, soldiers pour out of the foxhole. Filthy, emaciated, stinking of piss and worse, eyes blinking at Alex and Mutt. They are gaunt, staggering with dizziness and fatigue, phantoms recalled from hell.

American soldiers lie unmoving behind tree stumps, or in slit trenches, eyeballs as hard as ice, hair festooned in icicles.

But Mutt shakes his head adamantly.

They stand shoulder to shoulder in the bracing wind, drifts of snow lightly powdering their new boots and helmets.

None of them wants to be here. Not here before the small retinue of army photographers with Dahlquist, chest puffed out, preening for the cameras.

He turns to his adjutant and points at two companies where only a few soldiers stand.