Southland (14 page)

“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 like 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.

The next year, when the Nisei soldiers were invited to Washington, D.C.; when they marched around the Mall and then gathered on the ellipse in front of the White House, Frank did not go with them. He did not hear—although he read about— President Truman’s words of praise and thanks for the 442nd, the most decorated unit in American history. He couldn’t listen to the man who’d allowed atomic bombs to melt and disintegrate the long lost cousins and siblings, parents and grandparents, of the soldiers he now deigned to honor. Frank’s mother was concerned about her son’s injuries, his silent brooding, but she was ecstatic over the simple fact that he was alive. All over the country, old white men with stripes on their uniforms were pinning medals on the mothers of dead soldiers. The year before, at Union Station, she had watched the Yamamotos meet the coffin of their only son.

The Sakais slowly got used to their house again, which seemed so empty now without Kazuo and Kumiko. It had received some abuse the three years they were gone—broken windows, a little graffiti—but nothing was stolen, and Victor had kept the lawn mowed. Because it was just the two of them; because they needed the money; because the neighborhood was starting to fill, Frank sold all the land except the plot where the house stood. He opted not to sell the house itself because he wanted to stay in Angeles Mesa, thus avoiding the humiliation of the Yamamotos and the Haras, who tried to buy houses in the South Bay and Westside and were turned down by thin-lipped realtors. When his wounds were healed—at least the ones on his body—he went down to the Mesa Corner Market. Old Man Larabie welcomed him back, knowing he was doing a kindness not just by paying Frank, but by keeping him busy. And Larabie needed the help—business was booming, local people had money, and others were driving into the neighborhood every day to work at the new stores and offices on Crenshaw. Frank took classes at UCLA on the GI Bill, but after he got not one callback from his interviews for summer jobs, he quit school and started working full-time. He and Larabie worked side by side for three years, Frank making the daily trip to the wholesale fruit and vegetable market and thinking of his father every time. And when Frank informed his boss that he was planning to marry, the old man told him he was retiring and offered to sell Frank his store.