pitched our tents low in the shelter of the dunes, and for supper we ate dry crackers and cold canned meat. Darkness swiftly covered us when the sun sank beneath the horizon, and the sky was filled with an incredible number of stars. Mixed in with the roar of the Khalkha River, the sound of wolves howling came to us as we lay atop the sand, recovering from the day’s exertions.
Sergeant Hamano said to me, “Looks like a tough spot we’ve got ourselves in,” and I had to agree with him. By then, the three of us—Sergeant Hamano, Corporal Honda, and I—had gotten to know each other pretty well. Ordinarily, a fresh young officer like me would be kept at arm’s length and laughed at by a seasoned noncommissioned officer like Sergeant Hamano, but our case was different. He respected the education I had received in a nonmilitary college, and I took care to acknowledge his combat experience and practical judgment without letting rank get in the way. We also found it easy to talk to each other because he was from Yamaguchi and I was from an area of Hiroshima close to Yamaguchi. He told me about the war in China. He was a soldier all the way, with only grammar school behind him, but he had his own reservations about this messy war on the continent, which looked as if it would never end, and he expressed these feelings honestly to me. “I don’t mind fighting,” he said. “I’m a soldier. And I don’t mind dying in battle for my country, because that’s my job. But this war we’re fighting now, Lieutenant—well, it’s just not right. It’s not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the finish. We advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. Then the Chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian population, and we don’t even know who the enemy
is.
So then we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out ‘renegades’ or ‘remnant troops,’ and we commandeer provisions. We have to steal their food, because the line moves forward so fast our supplies can’t catch up with us. And we have to kill our prisoners, because we don’t have anyplace to keep them or any food to feed them. It’s wrong, Lieutenant. We did some terrible things in Nanking. My own unit did. We threw dozens of people into a well and dropped hand grenades in after them. Some of the things we did I couldn’t bring myself to talk about. I’m telling you, Lieutenant, this is one war that doesn’t have any Righteous Cause. It’s just two sides killing each other. And the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology. For them, there’s no Nationalist Party, no Young Marshal Zhang, no Eighth Route Army. If they can eat, they’re happy. I know how these people feel: I’m the son of a poor fisherman myself. The little people slave away from morning to night, and the best they can do is keep themselves alive— just barely. I can’t believe that killing these people for no reason at all is going to do Japan one bit of good.”
In contrast to Sergeant Hamano, Corporal Honda had very little to say about himself. He was a quiet fellow, in any case. He’d mostly listen to us talk, without injecting his own comments. But while I say he was “quiet,” I don’t mean to imply there was anything dark or melancholy about him. It’s just that he rarely took the initiative in a conversation. True, that often made me wonder what was on his mind, but there was nothing unpleasant about him. If anything, there was something in his quiet manner that softened people’s hearts. He was utterly serene. He wore the same look on his face no matter what happened. I gathered he was from Asahikawa, where his father ran a small print shop. He was two years younger than I, and from the time he left middle school he had joined his brothers, working for his father. He was the youngest of three boys, the eldest of whom had been killed in China two years earlier.
Sergeant Hamano said to me, “Looks like a tough spot we’ve got ourselves in,” and I had to agree with him. By then, the three of us—Sergeant Hamano, Corporal Honda, and I—had gotten to know each other pretty well. Ordinarily, a fresh young officer like me would be kept at arm’s length and laughed at by a seasoned noncommissioned officer like Sergeant Hamano, but our case was different. He respected the education I had received in a nonmilitary college, and I took care to acknowledge his combat experience and practical judgment without letting rank get in the way. We also found it easy to talk to each other because he was from Yamaguchi and I was from an area of Hiroshima close to Yamaguchi. He told me about the war in China. He was a soldier all the way, with only grammar school behind him, but he had his own reservations about this messy war on the continent, which looked as if it would never end, and he expressed these feelings honestly to me. “I don’t mind fighting,” he said. “I’m a soldier. And I don’t mind dying in battle for my country, because that’s my job. But this war we’re fighting now, Lieutenant—well, it’s just not right. It’s not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the finish. We advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. Then the Chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian population, and we don’t even know who the enemy
is.
So then we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out ‘renegades’ or ‘remnant troops,’ and we commandeer provisions. We have to steal their food, because the line moves forward so fast our supplies can’t catch up with us. And we have to kill our prisoners, because we don’t have anyplace to keep them or any food to feed them. It’s wrong, Lieutenant. We did some terrible things in Nanking. My own unit did. We threw dozens of people into a well and dropped hand grenades in after them. Some of the things we did I couldn’t bring myself to talk about. I’m telling you, Lieutenant, this is one war that doesn’t have any Righteous Cause. It’s just two sides killing each other. And the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology. For them, there’s no Nationalist Party, no Young Marshal Zhang, no Eighth Route Army. If they can eat, they’re happy. I know how these people feel: I’m the son of a poor fisherman myself. The little people slave away from morning to night, and the best they can do is keep themselves alive— just barely. I can’t believe that killing these people for no reason at all is going to do Japan one bit of good.”
In contrast to Sergeant Hamano, Corporal Honda had very little to say about himself. He was a quiet fellow, in any case. He’d mostly listen to us talk, without injecting his own comments. But while I say he was “quiet,” I don’t mean to imply there was anything dark or melancholy about him. It’s just that he rarely took the initiative in a conversation. True, that often made me wonder what was on his mind, but there was nothing unpleasant about him. If anything, there was something in his quiet manner that softened people’s hearts. He was utterly serene. He wore the same look on his face no matter what happened. I gathered he was from Asahikawa, where his father ran a small print shop. He was two years younger than I, and from the time he left middle school he had joined his brothers, working for his father. He was the youngest of three boys, the eldest of whom had been killed in China two years earlier.
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