Utterly True Memoirs

[Jerram]

And then there were only two of us, sitting on camp stools in the stifling tropical humidity, buzzed by clouds of black flies and bitten by mosquitos.  Three other stools remained, recently emptied.  My pilot companion had married into the family controlling one of the big industrial companies.  He should have been ensconced in air conditioned office instead of hunched over a wooden plank table in a tent far, far away.  Whether this was by guilt or patriotism I never asked.

Outside the depleted ground crew hastened to make the last ship airworthy.  The pungent stench of aviation gasoline  -- just enough for a one-way trip -- was followed by a crack-bang as the engine caught and sputtered, coughed then roared into life, only to die on the low octane, probably contaminated fuel.  Someone swore.  Another crack-bang and the engine fired again, this time a more or less sustained rumbling full of pops and backfires and a dense blue cloud of exhaust.  After ten minutes of warmup it settled down and ran smoothly.

"It's time," I said.  We stood up, I spun a coin on the table, it wobbled and fell.

"Heads, it's heads.  You are the lucky one."

He shook with emotion, "Such a final honor ..." he was barely able to speak as he handed me a diary and a last letter to his wife.  "Please, see that she ... ."

"Of course," I said, giving him a final parade ground salute as he wiped a tear of joy from his eye.

The crew chief ushered him out, gave him a scrap of paper with a heading.  He was strapped in the cockpit and the bomb-laden fighter zoomed down the runway towards the sea and the waiting enemy fleet.

He never made it, circling enemy fighters dove on him, sent his plane spinning into the jungle.

I pocketed the double-headed coin and memorized the address on the letter, then shit-canned it and the diary.

The second atomic bomb fell later that day and news of the surrender came over the wireless about a week later.  And after that I became a prisoner of war.

[Jerram]

We spent the next 10 or so days waiting for the Allies to send someone out to take possession of this small airstrip carved out of the jungle on the edge of nowhere but conveniently located next to a malarial swamp.  Ten days in which we destroyed the remaining already unflyable aircraft, disabled the small bulldozer that maintained the crushed coral landing strip, did our level best to keep from starving and buried our commanding officer, who finally succumbed to malaria or scrub typhus or fever of unknown origin, or anomie, or, or, something only the gods knew.  And that is how I, Warrant Officer Ko promoted himself to Lieutenant Ko.  In truth, the former officer's uniform was cleaner than mine and hung less loosely than my own, and the fact that I was wearing it when the Allied representative arrived by those little liaison planes called Piper Cubs to take charge of our little slice of stinking green heaven.

He was a genial Australian militia officer (named, of all things, Matilda) accompanied by three other ranks carrying surplus tommy guns. All full of vim and vigor, and all young enough not to have seen active service. 

He was either misinformed or did not keep up with the latest number of the Army Table of Organisation and Insignia for he saluted me addressed me as Major Ko.

[Jerram]

If my entirely unmerited promotion went unnoticed seems improbable, the reader should know that the Third Air Army had mostly collapsed as an organization even before war's end, and since then staff at all levels were busy destroying files, including personnel records. 

Matilda ("call me Walt") was also a stringer for Associated Press International with the newsman's eye for a good story.  Much later he was a director/producer of dozens of low budget sexploitation and teen scream movies working out of Hollywood.  But now he was fascinated by the potential of that grift I ran to keep myself among the living.  Not the actual story though, we played it straight and the double-headed coin was not mentioned.  Nor were the flies, mosquitos and malarial swamp.  He had me reenact that scene a dozen times with one of his men standing in for my late partner while he buzzed around looking through his hands at different camera angles.  Walt had a De Vry Standard cine cam flown in with a couple of fresh uniforms and a few other props and preserved the scene for history.  A still showing my final salute was popular in the Japanese press and the whole thing became a sort of movie trope, even appearing in Gozilla vs the Martians and in the American version, Never My Love where I was portrayed by Robert Redford.

The post-war months were marked by nothing but waiting.  There was no general roundup of POWs, the policy was to let us stay on our islands, there was nowhere else to go.  We were no longer starving, but repatriation would not begin until most of the Allied servicemen were brought home. 

That is, for most. That still appeared in the Japan Times, where it was noticed by one Mai Mitsubishi, widow of the late Sgt. Hiroto Mistubishi, who really should have checked that coin.

[Jerram]

My island stay ended suddenly.  One day I was straw bossing other POWs doing runway improvements, the next I was cleaned up and hustled aboard a big four engine transport to make the long trip to a Tokyo airfield.  There was no explanation from Walt Matilda and the flight crew, who, while not hostile, was bored and uninformative.  I guess the good widow had more pull than I thought.  This goes to show that the powers that run the show will never really change.  And if Mitsubishi Heavy Industries could make battleships for the Imperial Navy, it could make whatever war materials the Americans needed (and it eventually did).  So it goes, if the favorite daughter of a major shareholder wanted to meet the close and last friend of her late husband, well, that's what privilege was for.

I hadn't seen the city in years, on our approach from the air I saw large areas were flattened, burned out rubble although to my surprise the imperial palace and surrounding grounds had been spared.

The Company man, an amiable fellow who might have been cut from the same cloth as Matilda, met me on the tarmac and led me to the office of an American army captain, who took my vitals and marked me down as a potential interviewee for a survey the Americans were spinning up to evaluate the effectiveness of the air war.  I'd starved and still suffered bouts of malaria for lack of medicine for nearly two years, so I guess the air war was effective.

The Company man booked me into the Hotel Blossom and left me with a bottle of Tennessee whiskey and a promise that I'd be picked up promptly at 11.00am the next day and taken to meet Mai.

I hadn't slept on a mattress in a dog's age, and despite the whiskey, couldn't sleep on this one.  Later I found out that I wasn't alone with this problem, like many other veterans, I was more comfortable sleeping on the floor.

Fortunately so, because sometime after midnight this saved my life.

[Jerram]

Every I-was-there-jungle basher movie set anywhere from India to Mexico, featuring everyone from King Kong to the late war features the same soundtrack of screaming birds, chattering monkeys and growling tigers.  One might wonder how anyone could sleep at night, and in truth, for the first six weeks, no one sleeps.  After that, the mind acclimates and filters out that raucous cacophony. 

But there are two things that brings any survivor wide awake and reaching for the nearest gun or hole.  The first is silence, which you assume is a careless enemy soldier intruding on the normal nighttime routine of the jungle.  The second is anything wrong out of place, however minor: a kazoo in a symphony orchestra, or the hum of an enemy aero-engine (for years I'd mentally looked for cover at the sound of Pratt & Whitney engines).  Or, the click of a lock being turned and a door eased open.

If I hadn't been on the floor the katana would have taken me.  The first stroke cut deeply into the bed's frame, I could smell the singed wood.  I rolled under the bed and a second stroke decapitated the whiskey bottle at the neck, alcohol abuse at its worst, whiskey valued at thousands of Yen sprayed the room.

My would-be assassin slipped on the wet floor in the middle of his backswing, yelped an oath.  Before he could recover his balance another figure entered the room.  Gods preserve me I thought, all the demons from hell are loose tonight.  A Nambu pistol barked, once, twice, a third time before it inevitably jammed, bright flashes caught the swordsman stumbling towards the window, red blossoms of death on his chest, last seen falling out the fourth floor window to crash onto a moss garden below.

The electric lights snapped on.  I turned to my savior, a Caucasian woman in traditional Japanese attire who spoke in perfect Japanese with a heavy American accent:

"Ah, the not-so Major Ko, yes?"

The Nambu was levelled at my chest.

[Jerram]

The woman knelt down at eye level, I felt like a mouse being sized up by a hungry cat armed with a knife and fork.  The Nambu's muzzle, from which wisps of smoke still curled, looked three times bigger than it should have.  And she held it rock steady.

"Who? ... ."

She must have misunderstood my meaning, for her eye flicked up at the shattered window.

"Him?  Yon stiff with the pigsticker dingus?"  I swear she spoke like that, perfect Japanese with a horrible hardboiled detective patois.  "I've been following him tailing you.  That busted flush is a former Kempeitai [the much feared Army secret police - ed.].  One of those hoodlums who can't accept the surrender and the new way of doing things. We expected as much.  We'll pinch the rest of his mob soon enough."

I didn't dare ask who "we" was, but she must have sensed my confusion.

"Me?  Don't be a bunny, Major Ko, or should I say Warrant Officer Jobe, You're behind the 8-ball because of me.  I am the widow of your former comrade-in-arms, and you can call me Mai."  

"And you owe me a letter and a diary. Capice?"

[Jerram]

She had me dead to rights, her weasel of a husband must have talked about me more than I realized, and I got the impression that the diary and letter meant more than a last-goodbye.  But why did he appear in downtown Nowhere at the end of the war?  I'd wondered that before, and could think of no other reason at the time than he didn't want to be in Tokyo.  That still made sense now.  Did he embezzle Company funds?  Ravish a geisha house?  Was this a grift?  Who did she or he or they work for?  The Company, sure, but who else?  Yakuza?  the Navy?  the Russians?  American intelligence? 

"Well, Major?"

I've always been a quick thinker, which explains my unlikely longevity as a combat pilot, meaning I thought well enough to avoid dogfights with second-generation Allied fighters and always come home with empty magazines.

"You'll notice I arrived with nothing more than the shirt on my back.  Everything else was stolen by those evil flight crews who brought me here."

She clearly didn't believe me, but who could say otherwise?  Anyone in the American supply chain was likely no less the rapacious thieves as their Japanese counterparts.

"But you're not Japanese," I said, hopefully distracting that line of inquiry.

"My people will look into those airmen later.  And ... yes and no.  I was born in Japan, to missionaries from Arizona.  I was taken in as a child by a wealthy family after my parents died in an earthquake.  These things happen, my grandfather was kidnapped as a young boy and raised by Apache Indians."  Now she spoke with in the Tokyo dialect, flawlessly.  "Sometimes being Japanese is a state of mind and and more importantly, of soul.  When war came, the Company vouchsafed me."