Free Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley Page B

for Kazuko but the crowd was immense. Jimmy just sat there, not next to me but up next to his brother-in-law, in the seat ahead. The buses began to move before I was ready for them. They went in a direction I did not know, out into the endless city. Our
comrades were quiet, their hairless heads dimly shining. There was a corporal in the front who kept talking to us. We were going to train in some place I’d never heard of. We were heading for parts of Japan where neither Jimmy nor I had ever been.
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    LONG AFTER JIMMY AND IKE AND I FINISHED OUR TRAINING, long after we’d been assigned to a unit and left Japan, I got a letter from Harry, my father, his last. The letter came through Kazuko, tucked deep within one she’d written to Jimmy, and the danger of it was that it was written in English. We were in the Philippines and there were American prisoners everywhere. We were members of a backup unit, and our job was to set up local administrations, to keep the people under control, to let them know that the rules were to be obeyed and that we’d come down swiftly upon the heads of violators.
    Amazingly, Ike had been true to his word. He had kept us together throughout it all. Ike was a sergeant, and whenever he had to take someone on a small neighborhood patrol with him he chose the two of us. In certain sections of these little towns, we’d worry about snipers. The Japanese weren’t very popular with the Filipinos. The Americans had been occupiers too, but apparently of a variety less rigid, less repulsive to the native population. There were very many bands of mountain guerrillas, and though the invasion was over, though the Japanese victory was secure, many of our men had been killed and we weren’t taking any chances.
    It was on one of these patrols, on one of the dark mud streets, that Jimmy took the letter out and gave it to me. We almost never spoke English, but when he handed it to me he said, “This came. Kazuko took a great chance getting it to you.”
    The envelope was creased and bent but it was mail, and it was from home. Father had written the address in Japanese and, who knows how, had found some way to post it. As near as I can remember, it was February when Jimmy gave me the letter.
    I stepped into a poorly lit shack, a little store where
townspeople could buy bits of things, ingredients for the making of a meal, a notebook, a little candy. The woman who ran the store was silent when she saw me. She kept her back against the wall, her eyes on my uniform, on the big gun that I carried.
    I sat at a square table and she immediately brought me tea. This is what the letter said:
    My dear Teddy:
    This is an exercise to make me stop thinking of you because I know the letter can’t find you wherever you are. Are you surprised to hear from your old man? Not so old though, ’cause I’ll be leaving in the morning for Europe. You should see me all dressed to kill like I used to do when I was young. Even farmers canfight, says your mother, even grocers, say your cousins and your uncle’s wife. The ironical world is folding in upon us, isn’t it, Teddy? You remember how you used to help on the farm? No problem no longer though for the farm is gone. Your uncle’s store too, such a popular hangout for you and that Jimmy, has got boards nailed around its windows and the sign is down. Things have been hard here but I bet they are harder there, for you. Your mother has thought out loud that you are dead. What a joke, right? She saved all the little parts of you she could find when we left the farm and she made a little altar out of them. I feel you are fine but I let her keep the altar anyway. Your mother will be staying here (we are living not too far from the farm now with all the other Japanese they could round up) while I and your uncle and many of the other men go fight. The army won’t let us fight in the Pacific, but that’s ok because we don’t want to