Free The Lonely War by Alan Chin Page B

deserves.”
    Hearing the officers’ comments, Andrew felt the hot knife of indignation slide into his gut. He tilted his binoculars upward to scan the starlit sky. Through the firmament and beyond the myriad of familiar shapes—the Hunter, the Bear, the Pleiades—and even beyond the dim specks from the most distant stars, he surveyed the darkest regions of the unknown. His mind emptied and he felt himself become the unknown until a voice echoed in his head.
    “Begging your pardon, sir,” the voice said, sounding vaguely like his own. “My father had business dealings with the Japanese government for twenty years and he knew quite a bit about the Emperor. He said that Hirohito is a pure man, free of all vanity and pride, and he is only concerned with the well-being of the Japanese people.”
    Andrew knew he’d trampled on military etiquette, but his indignation had forced him to speak.
    Mitchell stared at Andrew.
    Stokes’s fingers tightened on the railing in front of him and he held his breath. An immediate sense of danger gripped the air. Andrew had vaulted over that gulf that separated enlisted men from officers, and he hung suspended over that chasm, Icarus-like, soaring too close to the sun. Stokes let out his breath, unable to hold it any longer.
    “You’re suggesting that the Japanese supreme leader is an honorable man? Pure?” Mitchell said. “He slaughtered a million Chinese and bombed Pearl Harbor! The man’s a fanatic, no better than Hitler.”
    Andrew stepped closer to Mitchell, drawn by the timbre of the man’s voice. He knew Mitchell should have reprimanded him for expressing a personal opinion, so Mitchell must have been intrigued by his statement. That bolstered his courage and allowed him to continue.
    “Sir, the Japanese people regard Hirohito as a god, a deity. He does not rule Japan, he reigns over it, which means he abstains from politics. From everything that I’ve heard, he loves and guides his people with compassion, much like the Buddha. I believe that the resolution for war came from the military-controlled government, not Hirohito.”
    “You’re telling me he’s not a warmonger? My God, he comes from a feudal background. They’re all warmongers, all the leaders of Japan.”
    “Sir, Hirohito’s grandfather, Emperor Meiji, once wrote:
    All the seas, everywhere,
    Are brothers one to another.
    Why then do the winds and waves of strife
    Rage so violently through the world? ”
    Mitchell shook his head. “Regardless, what they did at Pearl was cowardly and monstrous.”
    “Sir, in 1924, Japan was strapped with overpopulation and an extreme depression. They used territorial expansion into Manchuria as a solution, transforming a bandit-infested wilderness area twice the size of California into a prosperous nation. That solved unemployment, overpopulation, and produced raw materials for the homeland. But of course, war always goes beyond politics, because once begun, war becomes self-serving. Victory compelled the military to go further. They dreamed of creating one great Asian nation, a brotherhood of all Asian people. That meant driving out the French, English, Dutch, and Americans. But typical of most military leaders, they saw coercion as the only means to their glorious end.”
    “Sounds like you approve.”
    “I approve of Asia freeing itself of Western domination, but not of Japanese methods. My mother’s family lived in Nanking. When the Japanese invaded the city, the atrocities lasted a month. A third of the city was gutted with fire. Twenty thousand soldiers were marched from the city and massacred, twenty thousand! As many women and girls were raped and mutilated. Over three hundred thousand civilians were slaughtered. My family was wiped out.” Andrew paused. “No, Lieutenant, I don’t approve at all.”
    “If that happened to my family, I’d want to kill as many Japs as possible.”
    “You mean to say, you’d kill as a justified means of revenge? Sir, what makes