Gaijin Cowgirl (14): Nobody dies smiling
Just one sliver of bone from each fallen comrade.
(Previous chapter, or start at the beginning.)
Moulmein looked like a pleasant colonial town facing the sea, its back to the low, stupa-crested mountains. A closer look revealed its seedy poverty. Piles of lumber along the harbor, once destined for Japan but left here to rot, filled the air with the fragrance of teak. Behind gutted British edifices a trail of smoke rose from a steam engine, marking the path of the new railway that led into the hills, built with the blood of countless prisoners. One of the train’s passengers, Staff Sergeant Yasuda, watched the town diminish like blood ebbing from a dying man.
The barge had taken four days to hug the coast, away from the deep seas where American submarines prowled. The previous night, Yasuda, under the Colonel’s orders, had overseen the transfer of the Buddha statue onto a railroad flatbed. As dawn traced pink lines across the sky, the exhausted crew had connected the flatbed between two cars used for troop transports and then repainted the sides and top with the red cross of a medical transport.
No wounded were placed on this train, however, only Yasuda, a team of Burmese coolies, and a handful of armed soldiers whom Takahashi appeared to know well. Their faces were a curious mixture of the cruel and the smooth, as if they had acquired the callousness of battle without having had to face the enemy. Just like their leader.
There was only one destination possible on this set of train tracks: Siam, or Thailand, as the military regime there now preferred to call it, a country occupied by Japan and still safe from the Allies.
Yasuda grew despondent as the hills grew larger and the sea vanished behind them. He was an engineer, a builder, not a destroyer. He had served his country. He had tried to retain his honor amid every new horror.
Whatever this new act was, it didn’t feel like something his countrymen would thank him for.
Slowly working through a pack of cigarettes, he wondered at what point the Colonel would have him executed. By now Yasuda had seen too many men who had laid eyes on the Buddha statue die to believe that he would leave this train alive. He couldn’t fathom what Takahashi had in store for his treasure, but it was obviously some form of sanctioned thievery. And Yasuda was only there to make sure the massive gold statue was moved intact from one point to another. When would he become dispensable? In Bangkok, loading it onto a ship to sail down the Chao Phraya to Japan? Or sooner, maybe just at the border, when the Colonel might judge them to be out of immediate danger?
The train chugged harder as the inclines grew steeper. The jungle closed in as huge ferns slapped inside the windows. Black soot from the locomotive wafted through the car, singeing the air thick with the musk of men sweating through dirty uniforms.
There was nothing to do but smoke, slowly and deliberately, his one and only pack of cigarettes. The Colonel had distributed them to everyone as they boarded. It had been a reward, Takahashi had said: “No one can get these anymore, so enjoy them.”
Yasuda savored each one as he stared out the window at the wild and dark jungle mountains. He exhaled little blue clouds and thought of Corporal Imai, and wondered if he was still alive.
“Don’t worry, Imai-san,” he mumbled, “you will be consecrated at Yasukuni Shrine.”
They had both signed up full of military fervor, for there had been no other choice. Japan faced a grave foreign threat and had to be defended. They had both done their duty in separate theaters, with Imai fighting the Chinese and Yasuda laying out bases, building bridges and demolishing enemy fortifications in Java, Malaya and then Burma, where they were fortuitously reunited. It seemed a happy omen just eight months ago that these two friends from Kyushu should be assigned to the same division.
But it was to be a shared curse. The tide of war had reversed and Mutaguchi decided to surprise the British at their Indian base of Imphal before they could rout him. The Japanese 15th had almost no supplies or provisions, but its successful conquest of Burma in 1942 had yielded plenty of British rations and petrol – “gifts from Mr. Churchill,” the men called them. And so that spring, as the rains had begun to pound down, the Japanese had attacked.
As the British retreated, they destroyed everything they could not carry. Bogged down in the despoiled mountains of northern Burma, bereft of any gifts from Mr. Churchill, the starved army was relentlessly ground to bits.
The Japanese army had taught the world a new type of brutality: to Americans and Filipinos on the Death March of Bataan; to Chinese in the rape of Nanking; to Allied prisoners of war and Asian coolies used as slave labor to build the railroad to Burma – and finally to itself in the Imphal campaign that left sixty thousand of its own young men face down in the mud.
Yasuda smoked and glanced out at the covered cargo of gold. His mind switched between the fantasy of killing Takahashi, and immersion in the sorrow of his return from the front lines: the horrible retreat, clinging to a makeshift raft with Imai as they floated down the Chindwin River swollen from monsoon rains. Then, as Imai came down with dysentery, they caught up with the shattered army, a long line of broken twenty-year-olds stooped like ancients. How many men had he passed – battle-hardened veterans, conquerors of Western armies – now collapsed by the wayside, too weak to do anything but watch their existence fade from sunken eyes? The weak were encouraged to discard any extra food or ammunition, keeping only a single grenade. Officers and medical teams stopped trying to organize the men back into something resembling an ordered army. A grenade was the only solace they could give.
“Excuse me,” men would mumble, “I regret dying,” as they accepted the officers’ gift and waited until they were alone to use it.
In the darkness on that train, lit from within by two lanterns with the windows covered, Yasuda ignored his growling belly and the restless coughing of the coolies and guards. Instead, crouched in a corner, he withdrew a folded cotton rag from his breast pocket and laid it on the floor before him. A guard looked at him strangely. Yasuda grinned up at him. “Been in battle?”
“Of course.”
Yasuda unfolded the rag. The guard peered down at the clutch of white sticks. Then he looked away, suddenly aware of what they were.
Yasuda gazed down at the bones. Each was the finger bone of a Japanese soldier that Yasuda had cut off and burned. He had done it five times for five men, and had seen others doing the same to dead comrades all the way across Burma. It was impossible, with so many dead and no hope of return, to cremate the bodies at their local villages and allow them to be honored as ancestors. The living ones chopped off a dead man’s finger and cremated it to save the bone. Just one sliver of bone from each fallen comrade, to be buried back on Japan’s sacred soil.
“What battle were you in?” Yasuda challenged the guard with a sharp laugh.
“Shut up,” said another soldier. “You’re a madman.”
The door opened and Takahashi entered. The soldiers except Yasuda snapped to attention. The Colonel froze, eyes narrowing in disgust. With a steady voice, he said, “You disrespect the dead, Staff Sergeant.”
“Tell me, Colonel, did you see what happened to us in Burma?”
“I know what happened. Now put those relics away.”
Yasuda carefully folded the rag and returned it to his pocket. “Have you ever seen two Japanese soldiers embracing each other in the mud as dozens of their comrades stagger by?”
“Enough, Yasuda.”
“Have you seen what it is like when they have nothing left but that one grenade, when that is the only solution?”
“They were brave men,” the Colonel said.
“How many double suicides did you witness, Colonel?”
“Suffering is honorable, Staff Sergeant, when it is necessary to defend civilization.”
“They say you organized comfort women. That you never served on the front lines. Yet you are a man of authority, Colonel.” Yasuda knew he was insubordinate, and sensed Takahashi’s hackles were up. Would the Colonel shoot him now?
After a pause, the Colonel said, “My role organizing a little relief for you soldiers, a little female company, is tatemae, nothing more. You should have realized that.”
“And stealing that Buddha is honne?” Yasuda demanded, using the term for a thing’s true nature, as opposed to its deceiving appearance. “That is the mission that is more important to you than the dead youth of the 15th Army?”
Takahashi allowed himself a thin smile. Then, to Yasuda’s surprise, the Colonel recited a tanka:
“Kakaru toki
sa koso inochi no
oshikarame
kanete nakimi to
omoishirazuba
[Had I not known
that I was dead
already
I would have mourned
my loss of life]”
Yasuda bowed his head as he digested those words. Then he said, “I accept your advice, Colonel. I have felt dead for many days now.”
“Oh, yes, but without honor, Staff Sergeant. Yours will not be a contented death.”
The engineer dared to look his superior in the eye. “Nobody dies smiling, Colonel. I’ve learned that much.”
* * *
Takahashi silently fumed as he clambered over the cargo and entered the first car. That engineer was trouble. He should have taken care of Yasuda in Rangoon but he had been so desperate for the technical assistance and able-bodied men that he had let him remain. And now to be insulted in front of his guards! But he needed Yasuda to manage those Burmese laborers, at least for a few more days.
He felt he had lost face, but his work came before even this. Prince Chichibu was his master and Operation Golden Lily his calling. Japan’s military adventure was doomed but it had amassed a fortune over four years of plunder that had never been equaled by any king or khan. And this final magnificent catch, once melted down beyond recognition, would crown this achievement and help leave Japan’s rulers and their loyal servants financially secure for all time.
Takahashi took a nap up front, where a section with a bed was curtained off from the soldiers half snoozing and half keeping a bleary watch out the windows. The men stared uselessly into the black jungle with nothing to do but listen to the chugging engine and wait. Soon they would be out of Burma, soon they would be safe.
When dawn broke, Takahashi did not know which side of the border they were on. He could plainly see, however, that the mountains had risen to a considerable height. The tracks wound near Three Pagodas Pass, high in the limestone peaks. Hints of a river glinted below. The train crossed a newly erected bridge of wooden beams. They were several hundred feet above the still-dark jungle.
“Sir, the engineer is coming.”
Takahashi grunted as the train passed over the bridge and continued to hug the side of a mountain, the sound of its weight on the tracks reverberating clackety clack clackety clack. He moved to the door and looked out the window. Yasuda was climbing over the cargo, one hand clutching the netting as the other was held protectively at his waist. The Colonel snorted. Yasuda and his bones.
He turned away and addressed the cook, who rode up front with him. “How about some tea, soldier?”
“Yes sir.” The cook squatted by a portable stove.
Takahashi waited impatiently. Daylight brightened. They approached another valley. The water was taking a long time to boil.
Where was that fool engineer? Takahashi looked back out the window. He couldn’t see Yasuda. And that bothered him.
One hand on his holster, Takahashi opened the door and felt a rush of cool morning air. They were now starting across a bridge, this one even achieving a dizzier height, and he felt suddenly naked there on that train, alone among the green mountains and the sky.
Yasuda knelt only two meters away, where the flatbed connected to Takahashi’s car.
“Yasuda, what are you doing?”
The engineer looked up at him, eyes desperate and afraid, and then Takahashi saw the grenade wedged at the coupling.
The train seemed to sway on air.
“Yasuda! Stop!” Takahashi bellowed, drawing his pistol.
The engineer merely grinned as the train lurched onto the bridge. Yasuda raised his hand to reveal the pin between his fingers.
Takahashi dived back into the car. Clackety clack clackety—
The explosion caused the entire train to shift unsteadily on the narrow tracks. Hot metal debris blew through the door. Takahashi saw it all: the coupling blown apart, Yasuda’s body half blown to mist and the rest thrown into the sky. That thin, shoddy bridge shuddered; everything swayed. The engine and its single remaining car with the Colonel reached the safety of the next mountainside even as the shorn flatbed and rear car jackknifed across the tracks. Beams of wood blew out; momentum launched the flatbed over the edge. The precious cargo, still in its gray netting, slid free. The entire wreck thundered into the thick foliage of the mysterious valley far below.
Someone pulled the brake. The train slowly screeched to a halt. Takahashi and his soldiers leapt out the back and raced back along the tracks. The great teak beams of the bridge jutted over space, their shredded ends resuming on the far side. Steel railings pointed crazily at nothing.
In the valley below there was no sign of the reclining Buddha. The jungle interior, impenetrably black beneath that emerald canopy, had swallowed it.
(Next chapter.)