Southland Page 12

  Frank wore a long-sleeve shirt, an old army jacket, and the same pair of gray work pants every day. Frank’s mother, who was always cold, had to dress in men’s clothes—the sweaters and long underwear she’d received from her son’s friends, khaki trousers and peacoats and green earmuffs left over from the first World War, black boots and knit caps the officials handed out after three people died of exposure; huge ugly clothing everyone had to take because they had nothing else; because they had only been allowed to bring what they could carry. In the mornings and evenings, Frank went with his mother to the bathroom, helping carry the folding cardboard refrigerator box he had given her to bring. There they waited half an hour to catch a glimpse of the overflowing toilets, and Frank waited another ten minutes while Masako sat in silence, the cardboard box her only means of privacy.

  When spring came, after they had been there for nearly a year, Frank’s mother made a small clearing in front of the barracks, three tufts of bush next to the stairs, the whole space bound by rough white stones. There she sat and wondered about her husband. They were both from farming families in Nagano Prefecture, and in America he’d become a buranke katsugi, a shoulderer of blankets, a man who followed the crops through Northern and Central California. Masako had married him sixteen years later, on the evening she arrived in America; she was twenty on their wedding day and he was thirty-seven. She traveled with him, cooking for the roaming gangs of workers, until—because they could, and because of their son—they bought the house in Angeles Mesa and found jobs in Little Tokyo. Their original intention of saving money and returning to Japan had changed as soon as their daughter was born. Both children seemed so happy here in the Land of Rice, less cramped than they’d been as children, in a larger world with more opportunity. But now, in the camp, Masako wondered if she and Kazuo had been foolish. Look at them—jailed like criminals, like animals, and the children now lacking their father. Many of the Issei men who’d been whisked away the night after Pearl Harbor had been spirited back to their families after five months, eight months, looking gaunt and sad and exhausted. But a few men, like Kazuo, the government still required. The people inside the camp heard rumors of them, along with whispered accounts of how the war was progressing; of the legal cases of the reckless few who’d challenged the evacuation; of the Negro soldiers in Arizona protesting the internment—because of principle, and because they knew it could happen to them.

  Frank would stay and talk to his mother sometimes, but other times, to get away from her sadness, he would go walking by himself. He walked around and around the barracks, past the hundreds of families boxed inside, past the leafless skeletons of trees that reached out with their spindly, skinny fingers, through the shadow of the guard tower that stood a few hundred feet away from the barracks. He walked past the Buddhist church, a tar paper-covered building like every other except for the sign on the top and the white doors flung open like the arms of a loved one. Beyond the church he reached the edge of camp, the barbed wire, the long strings of metal with teeth. He looked out at the brown land and the mountains; saw the endlessness of California, ground and sky opening into each other.

  Since they had come to camp, they’d received two more letters from Kazuo. The first time he’d written from a prison in North Dakota, and the second time from another prison, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Frank kept talking and writing to the camp officials, who said there was a good chance that his father would be allowed to join them. But then, in April, almost a year after they’d been evacuated, they received a telegram one night after dinner. It said that Kazuo Sakai had died that morning, and instructed the family to advise the officials in Santa Fe by eight the next morning about what they should do with the remains. Kumiko sat on her cot and wept quietly. Frank stared at the words. Masako lowered her head for several minutes, and then looked at her son, eyes lit with anger and pain. She told him to tell the camp officials that she wanted her husband sent there, so she could look at him again, so they could bury him.

  Frank took this message to the Administration Office, and by eight the next night, after almost a year, his father was finally brought into Manzanar. Frank got word that he should go identify the body. Without telling his mother, he went to a room beside the jail. A body lay on a table under a dark gray blanket. The shape seemed odd, and when the official pulled the blanket back, Frank saw why. His father was lying on his side, his arms pulled behind him. When Frank walked around the table, he saw that his father’s wrists were swollen and red from whatever had been used to bind them. On the side of his head, just behind his ear, was a fresh wound, the huge bump discolored and caked with blood. Walking around to the front again, Frank looked into his father’s face for the first time in sixteen months. The lower lip was cut and swollen. There were lacerations all over the cheeks and forehead. And near the hairline, a thumb-sized dent. Frank reached forward, touching the place where the skull had been crushed. It felt like ice-cold clay. He stood back and felt no tears, just a slow, rumbling anger, a fast- sinking sorrow, a hard pride that his father’s face showed no signs of fear or pain; that he’d been strong and impassive to the end.

  “That him?” asked the official, disinterestedly.

  “Yeah,” Frank said. Then, looking the official in the eye, “What did he die of?”

  The official lit a cigarette. “Heart attack.”

  Kazuo wasn’t their only loss that spring. For the next month, Frank and Masako were so busy with burial and mourning that they didn’t see what was happening to Kumiko. She had been getting plumper and sicker for weeks; only when a camp nurse put a hand to her belly did Frank figure out what was wrong. After several days of tears and arguments, angry words volleyed back and forth between Kumiko and her mother, Masako began to accept the circumstances surrounding the birth of her about-to-be grandchild. But then three months before the child was due, Kumiko woke up screaming, and Frank carried her to the camp hospital. She died there giving birth, the blood draining out of her, the baby stuck and smothered between her small, unyielding hips. She was buried next to her father in the camp cemetery, when his grave was only seven weeks old.

  The hakujin soldiers had come around a few months earlier, distributing questionnaires to separate Japs from Americans, in order to determine who was still a loyal citizen. And when they came again, after Kazuo and Kumiko died, asking for young men to volunteer for the army, Frank signed up right away. His mother, who still remembered the green hills of her homeland and longed to see her brothers and sisters again before she died, begged him not to fight for the country that had claimed her husband and daughter. But Frank, despairing, needed simply to move, to be free. And he knew he was trapped. If he didn’t fight, he’d be branded, excluded forever, lose what little chance he still might have for making a life in his own country.

  Frank packed what few clothes he had and took a train to Mississippi, to the boot camp full of Nisei from all over the western half of the country. And there, the west coast men, who were used to dry heat, sweated and suffered in the swamps and marshes that seemed to extend into the sky, making the air as lush as water. They trained for months and gradually, incrementally, Frank lost the last few traces of boyhood that were left after the deaths of his father and sister. He prepared for battle physically and mentally, talking to men who’d seen action already, reading everything the army gave him—including a small booklet entitled “The Jap Soldier,” which told him of the secrets, odors, and linguistic limitations of Japs in the Imperial Army. He and his new friends made up the 442nd, the all Japanese-American regiment, which was drawn almost wholly from the camps. They were quickly stripped of the illusion—if they had it at all—that their uniforms changed the way the hakujin saw them. When Frank’s company was finally shipped abroad on the Queen Mary, they slept in the crowded open troop berths below sea level while the Italian POWs being returned to Europe were given luxury cabins upstairs. If they were angry, if they were unhappy at being packed like prisoners while the enemy was treated l
ike guests of honor, none of them ever complained. They knew what was at stake. Although they never talked about it, even amongst themselves, they all knew the reason they were there.

  Frank’s unit—the American Japs—moved up the boot of Italy, fought at Anzio and Cassino, struggled up the long and treacherous road to Rome. They broke through the German line of resistance at the battle of the Gothic Line, accomplishing with four thousand men in half an hour what 40,000 “regular” American soldiers hadn’t been able to do in five months. Not that they got the credit—at least, not then. Later, Frank heard that Steve Yamamoto’s company had liberated a Nazi death camp, only to be shunted aside for the army cameras while hakujin soldiers walked through Dachau as if the credit was theirs. A few times, when they were on campaigns with other companies, hakujin soldiers called them dirty Japs, and Frank, and Kenny Miura, and Tom Kobayashi went after them, decking men who outweighed them by seventy pounds. Listen, motherfuckers, they would say. Who do you think is man enough to get the real work? And the hakujin couldn’t argue, because they knew it was true. Roosevelt, who had no love for the Nisei when they were still living in their homes, suddenly couldn’t get enough of them now, and the 442nd was asked to carry out the most difficult assignments; to take on the tasks that everyone knew were impossible or crazy. Kenny and Tom took pride in this, and Frank did as well, but he didn’t tell them what he suspected was the reason they were chosen—they were Japs, after all; they were expendable. The boys swallowed their fear and kept marching and tried not to cry when their flesh was ripped by bullets or land mines. They wrote faithfully to their families back in the camps; worried more about them than themselves. One morning, Frank read an article denouncing the 442nd, claiming that they were treacherous, but that they might be good soldiers because everybody knew the Japs could fight. And the editorialist was right, although not in the way he thought. Frank and his friends were such great American soldiers, ironically, because they were Japanese—because of their sense of duty, and integrity, and faith in each other. Because they knew that somebody always had their back; that if they got hit, their brothers would come in after them. Because the worst thing that they could imagine wasn’t death, or injury, or permanent disfigurement, but bringing shame upon their families. For the sake of their families, they would never be less than heroes.

  Frank’s war ended in France, when his battalion was sent to save a group of cowboys. The 1st Battalion of the 36th Division, from Texas, had gotten caught in a tangle of forest in the Vosges Mountains—there were a little over two hundred men up there, surrounded on all sides by Germans. The 36th Division general, a graying cattle-rancher with a John Wayne accent, kept urging Frank and the other Nisei soldiers on, anxious to reach his own men. But the task was impossible. Suicidal, and everyone knew it. With the trees, and the bushes, and the fading light, Frank could only see a few feet in front of him. Fire came from all directions, guns stuttering and popping, bullets ricocheting off trees. The 1st Battalion had left their machine guns behind as they scampered up the mountain, and the Germans had picked them up; so now the Germans were shooting with American guns, and you couldn’t tell who was shooting at what or where it was coming from. The soldiers, too, were mixed up and intertwined. There was no line of attack or retreat, the armies bumping surfaces, then merging, hundreds of soldiers shooting in all directions.

  Frank and his buddies were supposed to go nine miles. Frank’s eyes jumped and shifted everywhere, trying to fix on something. He occasionally caught a flash of white face, and that’s when he fired his tommy gun—other than the general, he knew all hakujin faces were German. To his right, Frank saw Tim Nakagawa go down without a sound, brains exploding, slow-motion and almost pretty, out into the smoke-filled air. He spotted the sniper who’d shot him and ducked behind a tree just in time to avoid his fire. Then he saw the sniper crumple and fall. He moved to another tree, stumbling over three bodies—two American, one German—grabbing the bark as if he could somehow crawl into it. “Push on!” he heard the general yell, and he did, catching glimpses of other Nisei sprinting and shooting, crouching behind bullet-torn trunks. Frank’s ears hurt and he smelled his own funk, and he was itching all over with fleas. A tank rolled past him, slowly, picking its way through the forest, and he ran over to it, bent double, and banged on the side. It groaned to a stop and the hatch slammed open, a dirt-caked hand emerging to drop .45 ammo into his palms. Kenny Miura, a farm boy from Northern California, had materialized by his side, and he held his hands out, too, cupped and together, as if waiting for Halloween candy. The soldiers in the tank, who had a periscope, warned them about two Germans behind the tree at ten o’clock, and Frank and Kenny dove back behind another tree, firing in that direction as soon as the tank moved out of the way. They stayed there, wrapping a quarter-way around the tree and firing, until they were sure the two Germans were dead. They moved on, slowly, from tree to tree, firing forward, behind, to the right, to the left, talking to each other all the time: You got it, man. You’re golden. But then, during one particularly long sprint between trees, Kenny Miura went down, and Frank reached the other tree before looking back. Kenny’s arm was about twenty feet behind the rest of him, but he was twitching and alive. He was losing blood rapidly, the dark red fluid pouring over the leaves and soaking into the earth. Frank got down on his belly and crawled over to where Kenny lay moaning. He reached him and pressed his shirt against the torn, bleeding shoulder. He started to drag him over to the second tree and heard someone yell, “Watch out!” And then there was an explosion that carved out his ears, and Frank saw nothing more for five days.

  When he first woke up, he saw two people hovering over him. They were in a flapping tent and the voices and artillery were loud. Then a needle in his arm, and he was out.

  When he woke up again, he was in a different, larger tent, and he heard no noise outside this time, just the moans of the people around him and the cheerful chorus of male voices from a nearby radio: “And we’ll have those Japs down, on their Jap-a-knees!” He felt an odd, all-over pain and tried to move. Then he looked down and saw that he was coated in plaster—he had casts on both legs and a body cast up to his armpits. A nurse walked by and he called out to her.

  “What happened to the 36th?”

  She came over to the bed, smiling at him. “The Lost Battalion,” she said. “You boys saved them. No one quite knows how you did it.”

  “The 442nd,” he said. “Did we have a lot of casualties?”

  She nodded. “About eight hundred.”

  He felt hot and nauseous and dizzy, and faded out again. Only later, after he’d been shipped to the hospital in Rome, did he think about that figure. Eight hundred casualties. Eight hundred men sacrificed to save a battalion of two hundred.

  In Rome, a doctor told him that he’d been thrown against a tree by the force of the grenade and had broken both his legs and three ribs. He had shrapnel wounds all over his arms and back, and he’d lost part of his left middle finger. But he was lucky. Kenny Miura had gotten the brunt of the explosion, and there was nothing left of him to ship home. Frank contemplated this information. The nothingness where once there was Someone. The sheer luck that had determined that he should survive.

  Frank slept on and off for two weeks. Ate. Dictated a letter to his mother. Shifted in his body cast to try and relieve his itching back. When he was strong enough, when the fever was lower, he talked to his fellow patients. He tried to get word of others from the 442nd and learned that most of his friends were dead. At one point his body cast was removed with a saw, although he was too weak to enjoy the new freedom. At another, a doctor came in and noticed that his big toe was turning black, and that the others looked gray and dull. He instructed the nurses to prepare for immediate surgery to stop the progression of the gangrene, which was advancing up Frank’s foot like an enemy army. When they lifted him off the bed and onto a litter, he saw why his back had been itching and uncomfortable: on the bed was a swarming mass of maggots, their
bodies inch-long, white, and wriggling. A wave of nausea swept through him, and he didn’t feel any better when the nurse told him that the maggots had been put there intentionally, to eat the dead flesh on his back. He went out again, and when he came back to, a third of his right foot was gone. He stayed there in the hospital for three more months, healing, brooding, learning to walk. Hearing by word of mouth—because it wasn’t mentioned in the papers or on the radio—how the 442nd was doing.

  By the time Frank was finally flown home—through Florida, then San Diego—he thought the gangrene had progressed to his heart. He felt numb and spent whole evenings just staring at the walls. His mother had just been released from Manzanar, and together they stayed in the old house in Angeles Mesa and waited out the end of the war. Frank went to the VA hospital for pain killers and physical therapy, and he was there, on August 14, 1945, in the waiting room full of maimed Nisei veterans, when the doctor burst in, beaming.

  “It’s over!” he shouted. “The war’s over! Japan surrendered!”

  The doctor was a kind man, one of the few white military men who believed that the treatment of Japanese-Americans had been unjust, and he was glad to be able to pass on such happy news. But to his utter surprise, not a single man cheered. Not a single man clapped his hands together or laughed in exaltation, or even spoke at all. Frank wanted to lower his head, but he refused to let it sink. He didn’t hide the tears, though, that had been building for months. He thought of all the friends—Kenny, Steve Yamamoto, Tom Kobayashi, so many others—who didn’t live to see that day. And as he saw the trembling lips, the falling tears of his fellow veterans, he knew that they were thinking of their friends, too.