I've Always Loved You, a True Story of ww2 in the Pacifix

Here are excerpts from my true ww2 story coming out in November:
I didn’t understand. I was only four.
Unaware that my life was reversing, like the tide before me, I played on the beach. The sun brightened the cloudless sky, turning it a silvered winter blue, perfect for Sunday, Daddy’s day off. As he and Mom raced to the sea, the foam slapped against the shore. One strap of her bathing suit slipped. In the water, she wrapped her arms around him, her neck pliant, her back limber. Despite the water’s chill, they rode the waves together.
Dripping and sleek, Daddy waded out of the water. His black hair shone with a blue iridescence. He dropped a few steps behind Mom, and watched her hips sway as she walked. Slowly they crossed across the sand, their white stucco house perched on the succulent-covered bluff ahead of them.
Relaxing on our picnic blanket, Mom examined her red fingernails for chips in the polish, and then turned over, the seawater glistening on her shoulders. With combs and hairpins, she tried in vain to tame her wild auburn hair. Untamed, her hair excited Daddy; it reminded him of women dancing in Old West cafes while patrons drank their whiskey. Her eyes were gray, pure gray - no little leopard spots of brown or hazel.
I sat next to the blanket and began digging. Deliberate as a fern unfurling, Daddy smoothed oil on Mom’s slim back and khaki-freckled shoulders.
“More on the right,” she said in her indolent voice. “That’s it . . . Up a little. To the left . . . Yes. I’ve got you pretty well trained.”
“That’s because you reward me.” The tones of a warm youth flowed through his voice, and, moving his hand to the small of her back, he began to sing, “Mary—Helen, Mary—Helen, my own Mary—Helen,” to the tune of the UC Berkeley fight song.
Daddy kneaded Mom’s shoulders, and then rolled over on his back. He winked at me. I knew what that wink meant: he loved me best.
“Nap time,” Mom said, so I ran away from her, heading toward the sea.
“Ann, come here this minute.” She caught up with me and grabbed my wrist. I had almost made it to the water. As we turned, an army officer appeared on the bluff. To me then that bluff rose immensely high, and the uniformed man seemed to tower up to the sky, looking down like a god in the corner of an old map, one who determined destinies at his pleasure. Actually, the bluff was quite small, but I had the perspective of the very young.
“Captain Ribbel, the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor. Report for duty immediately!”
Daddy quickly got to his feet, stood at attention in his bathing suit, and saluted the officer.
* * *
Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law sometimes don’t get along. Such was the case in the emperor’s family, where his hawk wife pitted herself against his dove mother. Though Japan allegedly teems with ten thousand kami spirits who reside in the rocks, fields, and trees, their holy presence could not save the emperor from the struggles of these two strong women.
He feared his mother, adored his wife, Nagako, whose patriotic haikus stiffened his resolve to fight with greater ferocity. However, his mother, Teimei Kogo, Dowager Empress Sadako, took a resolute antiwar stand. She dreaded the Americans and believed they would crush Dai Nippon. When she wasn’t lecturing him, her thin, dry lips trembling, she sent him haikus around themes of the traveler who seeks the seed of the green tree of peace or a moment of peace being a bar of gold. Worse, she called everything he did a “stupid mistake.”
He would point out that the pride of conquest united the Empire of Japan, and added that Westerners did not learn the customs of others, befriending only each other. Now Shinto priests migrate through the empire teaching Dai Nippon’s ancient ways. Asia for Asians. Instead of agreeing, she’d stare at him with hostile black smudge eyes that unnerved him.
He called her the world’s “most ungrateful mother,” while she referred to him as “delusional.” They scowled at each other, he with his thick eyebrows, she with her delicate arches.
Today Emperor Hirohito stood near a golden screen painted with a field of iris and summoned one of his most trusted kuramakus. He preferred kuramakus to ministers and commanders, because they could think. Today’s visitor recommended the emperor organize an asset-stripping plan for occupied countries, rather than letting the commanders continue to randomly loot and pocket the spoils. The Japanese had financial needs _ didn’t all conquerors?
The emperor smiled for the first time in too long. At last a superior concept. He would call his glamorous brother, Chichibu. The emperor trusted his Chichibu-san, unlike his other brothers.
This particular Yamato already realized the vanquished countries teemed with gold and treasure, so he delighted in taking charge of an operation codenamed Golden Lily. He pretended to need medical leave from the army owing to tuberculosis, and claimed he’d gone to a sanitarium near Mt. Fuji. His people prayed for his recovery, bowing before flickering candles and bowls of billowing incense.
Instead, in the dust of ancient roads, he walked through occupied China and Southeast Asia, his piglet hands clutching at goodies. His men took a dozen solid gold Buddhas, each weighing over a ton. He collected fine Asian art and appreciated jewelry, though not as much as his brother the emperor.
Once Chichibu gathered up a country’s bounty, he sent it off on fake hospital ships to various locations. With his cultivated taste and love of souvenirs, he did save some pretty jewels for his wife and daughters, not to mention a few objects to freshen up his palace.
His belief in the sacred also motivated him to collect religious artifacts for the emperor. Hirohito responded to esthetics, especially objects fabricated from gold or jade and encrusted with precious gems. He favored Shakyamunis, (Buddha, the lion of the Shakya tribe), Padmapanis, (queens of heaven), Tao-tieh (tiger-god) masks, and dragons.
In time Chichibu seized so much treasure, it became physically impossible to move it to Japan, so he conscientiously stashed it in the Philippines, hiding it in over two hundred church vaults, bunkers, and underground tunnels. The hills came to life with the sound of coins clinking. In Ipoh, Malaysia, he melted gold and created bars of bullion bearing the stamp of the Golden Lily logo he helped design.
The bounty still lurks in caves, and every so often, someone discovers a bit of it. A recently unearthed solid gold Philippine Buddha weighing close to a ton reportedly resides in a Zurich vault.
* * *
Daddy was to ship out to the bloody Pacific again. He and Mom acted uneasy, as if fear contaminated the air they breathed, the water they drank. His orders came: report for departure in forty-eight hours. I felt a thump of terror inside. Smiling, he tickled my cheek. Then he put on his army hat at an angle, speared a package of cigarettes with a knife, and thrust the knife in his mouth. “My corncob pipe,” he said, “just like MacArthur’s.” Then he shouted, his arms flailing, "I shall return!"
The next day, the morning sky shone pearl gray, turning the neighborhood walls creamy. Mom went downstairs and cooked bacon and eggs for us, unable to control her weeping. I started crying, too. “Please, Daddy, I don’t want you to leave me. When will you come home?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart, but everything will be OK.” His usual appetite for life’s richness had waned, and a sadness shone in his summer blue eyes.
Mom got a pair of scissors and snipped off a lock of his hair that she put in a pink porcelain box. Then we caught the ferry to Ft. Mason as seagulls wheeled overhead.
“Flying goats,” Daddy said. “They’ll eat anything.”
Mom tried to smile. My chilling dread deepened.
At Fort Mason, Daddy hugged us and turned toward the troopship, moving with his usual grace. Even among all the other men, he looked incandescent. I squinted to see him better. He paused at the gangplank, and, outlined in a soft light, raised his hand in farewell. Then he boarded.
Panicked, I screamed, “No!” But the ship glided slowly away. Puffs of smoke rose from its stack while it headed through the Golden Gate into the hell that lay thousands of miles away. The ship became a speck, and the speck disappeared.
* * ** * *
Daddy’s troopship moved through the South China Sea and Central Philippine Islands, but this time he experienced time as racing by, unlike before; it raced with increasing speed, never halting or allowing for a glance behind. He wrote in his diary:

I sit for hours, while the nights become mornings and the miles fall away. Water, oblivion, sky, and water. Time seems more abstract now, the past more distant when I look back. Luzon. How much will blind me? Evade me? I’ve fought in combat patrols, but training’s not a promise.
The sea, the sky enlarge with time, and I shrink. My buddies and I are passengers on the same ferry, bracing for a ride, knowing we will fall off at different points. I see Mary-Helen hovering near me. Her image looks bright to me as a desert noon, and I want to reach for it.

A kamikaze hit a ship right next to Daddy’s, and flames seared the night with bright red and gold. The scene assumed a monster configuration as men tried to survive, their bodies specks of black against the maddening glow. The smell of smoke and metal filled his nostrils, and the odd idea came to him that even Mom’s perfume would never rid him of it.
He kept silent, feeling a sudden oppression; death could touch him soon. He would try to elude it, to fight, to fulfill whatever promise he had, but he could never have imagined anything like the sight of Luzon when it appeared on the horizon.
The island lay at the northernmost tip of the Philippine archipelago, and the island stretched about 450 miles north to south. Birds wheeled and hung above its hamlets, inlets, and deep green rivers, or called out from trees. The flowers, the leaves, and the sparkling waters caught the full light of the sun, as natives guided boats through gorges hacked out of the forests or tended rice paddies. At least half of the men stood ready to join the Allied troops.
“Strike Day,” January 9, 1945, dawned with a light but broken overcast sky and regular, gentle swells whose great beds of foam broke against the white sands of Luzon’s coastline. The guns of Allied naval fire support vessels bombarded the landing beaches, and then the lead troops waded through the swirling waters to the shores _ among them, Daddy.
They seized the Lingayan Airfield, and General Krueger descended the gangplank of the flagship USS Wasatch to take command of the Sixth Army ashore. Immediately reporters infested the region, but Krueger brushed their questions aside, “I would much prefer you drop the matter.”
At sundown, Daddy, a euphoric man, wrote Mom:

Well, my pet, it’s the end of the first day. Strike Day began with the thunder of naval bombardment - harrowing and beautiful to watch. I saw the whole show from the bridge of our ship.
I waded ashore about noon. Since then, the battle has been like a map plan at Leavenworth, but with sound effects and real ammunition. The Japanese apparently decided to withdraw and live to fight another day. Wonder what happened to their ‘invincible spirit?’
The Filipinos acted overjoyed to see us, and very hungry. Guerillas come out of the hills and fight with a strength and fury born of living under Japanese domination. They’re a ragged band, some arriving unarmed and barefoot, their teeth stained with betel nut. Among them are well-trained soldiers with names like ‘shooting squid’ or ‘blood angel.’
All of them help and will dig a foxhole for a GI in return for a cigarette; the GI just sits and enjoys it.
MacArthur smuggled arms to the guerillas right along, but the Nips purloined half of them. No matter. It won’t do them any good. They’re beat, and they know it.
Never saw so many kids in all my life, cute and happy little tykes. It’s been interesting to watch the natives returning to their simple homes. They fled to the hills when the battle started, taking the few possessions they could carry on their backs. The large families return, loaded in the carts. It’s a pitiful sight; in most cases, their simple thatched houses have been reduced to ashes.
Late in the afternoon, during an air raid, a shell fragment fell about ten feet from my hole. My friend Jim Williams worried a lot more than I did over that.
Well, my precious, I’m happy and busy. Writing will be spotty for some time, but I’ll do the best I can. Working about eighteen hours a day, but it’s fun.

* * *
On the “bright island where the frangipani grows,” Daddy crossed over into another experience. After the unopposed landing, the Americans faced devastating bombardment, as Yamashita’s troops opened fire. Mortar shells blew the tops off palm trees, ruined roads, filled the air with steam and dust. The deafening sounds of weapons enlarged the grand and terrible events.
The screams of the wounded combined with the “banzais” the Japanese shrieked at the top of their considerable lungs, and sometimes they shouted taunts: “Hello, hello. Where are your machine guns?” or “Surrender, surrender. Everything is resistless.”
Daddy said, “Give me a moment, and I’ll think of a swift, incisive reply.”
He tried to keep his friends alive with humor, joked that MacArthur appeared at battlefields riding in a jeep, Eleanor Roosevelt by his side. In his diary he wrote:

Ammunition’s running low. Strikes in the ports hamper transportation and unloading. Oxen-drawn carts loaded with pigs or chickens help move weapons, and water buffalo tote signal equipment for us field artillery units. A flu epidemic rages, but I won’t catch it. I never get sick. Guns, blood, noise, and heat. Will I ever again be able to experience a day without dread? In battle, men learn who they are and what they can do. The chaos and exhaustion deranges some of them. Their teeth chatter, they scamper around aimlessly. One burrowed into a cave and got blown up. You figure they’ve gone beyond little lectures on the dream of peace.


Night fell, and he climbed into his foxhole with Jim. Feeling the warmth of a good man next to him made it better. They rotated eating, sleeping, and watch in four-hour shifts, saying nothing. One word, and a Japanese might hear and toss a grenade or satchel charges, incinerating them. Fires were forbidden, so they lit cigarettes with special black lighters and ate cold K-rations: cheese, crackers, lemonade powder.
After breakfast, Daddy gave the men a pep talk to muster enthusiasm. “Strength under siege,” he would say, “it’s important, and you men have it.”
His words energized them but could not offset the sight of the crosses that sprang up every day.
A week after landing, they moved west under heavy artillery and mortar fire, crawling along, staying clear of each other as if contact represented danger. Daddy prayed. He kept moving.
One morning the firing subsided for a few minutes, and he wrote home:

Thank you for saying the shower will be all mine at home. I’m sick of not being able to sing in it, and when I return, I’m going to sing until the hot water runs out, wait for it to reheat, and sing again. I plan to shower and sing for a year. And hold you, my precious. How long it has been.
We’re rolling right along. It’s amazing. There’s hardly a Nip standing around here.
Today the gulf kicked up, and one LST (landing ship tank) broached; we lost some pontoon bridge materials, and the rough surf made unloading impossible. Do you think that slowed us down? Never.
We secured the Manila railroad and the strategic Route 3 from Bambam to Mabalcat, sealed off Bataan. Ready to slow down and take a rest? Not us. We seized Calumpit, crossed the Pampanaga River twenty-eight miles from Manila, and, to the west, secured Subic Bay. I don’t mean my battalion did all these things at once. The Sixth Army has others, but we’re the toughest.
As the Seventh Fleet glided into Subic Bay, Filipinos planted Old Glory on the shoreline, and a brass band played the Philippine and American national anthems. Filipinos gave the GIs cowrie shells as tokens of esteem. Remember when Montezuma gave them to Cortez, along with some feathers? Cortez was so disappointed he arrested Montezuma and kept him incarcerated until he came up with some gold. Sounds like something Hirohito would do.
You’re probably wondering if our K-rations have improved. No! Tonight’s arrived in rain—drenched cartons that turned the ‘food’ into soggy mush. Whoever devised them preferred a life of making mistakes to a life of idleness. Maybe he was a spy. Some day I’ll die of overeating, but not here.
Speaking of, Jim Williams told me the food planners ‘noodle around with ideas.’ Ideas? How to prevent weight gain ranks first. When I get home, I’m going to eat like a starved elephant on a peanut farm.
We’re winning, but revenge is not as sweet as advertised. It’s more enemies wronging each other, leaving behind hatred. I keep my humanity by holding my memories of home: the small beige owl in our garden, poppies dancing on spring green hills, the pale color and fine texture of your skin.
The sky turns from blue to lavender to pink in the sunset. This time of day always makes me homesick.

The next day Daddy rode the Bambam River boat, a ride from hell with Japanese bullets whizzing by the entire time, killing men right and left, knocking them overboard until they turned the water red.
* * *
Aboard the Nashville, MacArthur waved his corncob pipe at General Krueger and famously hollered, “Go around the Nips, bounce off the Nips, but go to Manila!”
Krueger told him that Yamashita wanted a mad dash to Manila. It was premature and could unnecessarily cost lives. He explained the logistical problems: the need for support troops, improvement of communication facilities, railroad and bridge construction, supplies, and reinforcements.
“Nonsense,” MacArthur replied. He demanded Krueger divide his artillery battalions between Clark Field and Manila with no further argument. Most, of course, would head for Manila for MacArthur’s birthday celebration. Krueger insisted the insufficient Clark Field troops would outrun their supplies, since the enemy destroyed all the relevant bridges. Outnumbered and surrounded, they would die from pulverizing enemy artillery fire.
Later, in “From Down Under to Dai Nippon,” Krueger wrote that MacArthur "did not seem very impressed by my arguments . . . He did not take seriously the danger of our troops’ overextension."
MacArthur pulled rank and commanded Krueger to obey him. With sadness and foreboding, Krueger sent a large group in two “flying columns” on the road to Manila, and, on January 24, he ordered a few battalions, including Daddy’s 143rd, to change the axis of their attack ninety degrees and advance toward Clark Field.
Here the wide, patterned farmland fell away; mountains, inflexible in their demands, continued for miles. Their rocky crags remained constant and yet never the same, and their jagged peaks surrounded Clark Field. The dangers Krueger feared proved all too real. Imperial General Tsukada, a devious tactician with an onion-shaped head, arranged the Kenbu defense along the ridges, some a thousand feet high. His machine guns, mortars, and heavy artillery lurked in caves on the high ground. The pillboxes, some three stories high, contained within their concrete walls 150-millimeter mortars, 20-millimeter, 40-millimeter, and 90-millimeter cannon. The Japanese could look down at the Americans struggling along and open fire.
Stranded, outnumbered, our men fought against overwhelming odds. From above, the Kenbu group pinned down Daddy’s battalion. Heavy artillery fire from the far side of the Zambales Mountains slaughtered our men in the rear lines. Roaring masses hit them, and they felt agonizing bolts of pain run through them, saw blood, their blood _ everywhere _ their bodies ripped like pieces of cloth, and they writhed, begging God to stop the pain. Some kept feeling it as they cried out, kept feeling their pain and their heartbeat and their breath, and the metal and the fire, and then nothing.
Our men on the front lines took more blasts from interlocking fields of fire anchored in pillboxes and connected by trenches to well-placed machine gun nests. The barrage raged twenty-four hours a day. Heavy Kenbu artillery blazed over the terrain, shredding men with shrapnel. Tracers blazed arcs of flame that illuminated the mud and blood of the mountains, and their fire bound itself to soldiers, consuming them. Glitters from flamethrowers burst against the blue sky of day or the black of night, gold arcs streaking and blossoming into more yellows and vermilions.
General Rapp Brush called frequent staff meetings to debrief and revise tactics. He, Daddy, and the others met in a secured headquarters area behind Allied lines. On February 12, Rapp said, “We’ve got to find the artillery positions on the reverse side of Sacobia Ridge; the heavy, concentrated fire there’s raising hell with our troops, but you know that first hand. Chewing up our armored vehicles. We need to send Jim Williams up on a reconnaissance flight with a spotter.”

He paused, studying faces, then nodded at Daddy. “Assign the job to someone in your unit.”

“I’ll go, myself,” Daddy said. “I think I know where the heavy artillery is.”

“No. Send one of your men.”

Daddy stood up. “It’s not a kamikaze mission. Jim can really maneuver planes; they dance with him.”

“I want you to delegate this. There’s a lot of anti-aircraft fire in the target area.”
“Is that an order, sir?”
Rapp hesitated.
“Then Jim and I will go.” The decision made, Daddy wrote in his notebook: “Feb. 14, 5:30 p.m., Hangar K.”