1942

Jake had just put on his trousers and was deciding whether to eat breakfast in town or at the officers’ club when he thought he heard thunder. At first, he ignored it, but it was sunny out; why the thunder?

As he pondered this, the sounds got closer. “Oh, shit,” he muttered. Somebody was going to get in a whole lot of trouble for scheduling gunnery practice on a Sunday morning in December.

Then he was on the floor and gasping for breath while his ears rang from the shock of an explosion. His small room was full of dust, and something cut his arm.

Jake got up and ran down the stairs and outside, where other officers were gathering, shock and disbelief on their faces.

“What the hell’s going on?” Jake yelled, and no one answered. Had some asshole dropped a bomb or plunked a shell down on the wrong spot? He felt a twinge of sorrow for the poor bastard. Then a plane flew overhead, and he saw the rising sun on its wing.

“Japs!” someone yelled. “We’re being attacked by the Japs!”

Another bomb landed nearby, and he felt the concussion. Jake ran in the general direction of the airfield, dreading what he would see when he got there. He knew that the planes on the ground were vulnerable. Nobody was prepared for an attack.

He arrived just in time to see a Jap plane peeling off from a strafing run. It passed over his head by no more than a hundred feet, and he saw the pilot’s face. It looked like the monkey-faced bastard was grinning.

Jake wrenched his eyes back to the runways, where so many planes had been parked nearly wingtip to wingtip in anticipation of a saboteur’s attempt to sabotage them, which General Short feared in these tense times. Jake had said it was a bad idea, and now, as he watched them burn and explode by the dozens, he knew he had been vindicated and hated the fact.

Across the runway, a pair of 37 mm antiaircraft guns pointed uselessly at the sky while their crews watched the destruction. Angered, he ran across the field to the guns, dropping to the ground when another Jap plane streaked overhead. He comforted himself with the thought that a single man foolish enough to dash across a runway wasn’t much of a target for a Jap in an airplane.

He reached the guns, where a sergeant saluted him quickly. “Sergeant, who are you and why the hell aren’t you shooting at them?” Jake yelled, his voice shaking in anger.

The sergeant shrugged in utter disgust. “I’m Sergeant Steinmetz and I’ve got no ammo and no one will give me any.” He pointed to a storage shed. “Our ammo’s in there, and the asshole in charge will only give it to officers. I guess he thinks it’s his and not the army’s.”

“Then where is your officer?”

“Sir, I have absolutely no idea where Lieutenant Simpkins is.” The look on Sergeant Steinmetz’s face told Jake that Simpkins was not sorely missed. It occurred to both men that the Japanese attack had stopped, and there was a dreadful silence punctuated by periodic explosions and the distant wail of sirens.

Jake wiped a dirty handkerchief across his sweaty brow and then over his close-cut dark hair as he turned and looked out over the ocean. From where he stood, the sea to the south looked marvelously tranquil, even normal. He turned again and saw the ruins of Pearl Harbor and the smoking, burning death of America’s military strength in Hawaii. Jake was an intelligence officer and, like others, had pondered the meaning of the “war warning” they’d recently received from General Marshall in Washington. He wondered if the Japs had attacked other areas on Oahu. Logic said they had.

Jake was angry at the total stupidity of it. He gathered the sergeant, commandeered a truck, and drove to the storage shed, where Jake bullied a poor supply sergeant into releasing some ammunition to them. Just for the hell of it, he also grabbed a. 45 automatic and a couple of clips of ammunition. Having a weapon on his hip just made him feel better.

But by the time they’d returned and loaded their guns, it looked like the fighting was over. The dose-packed planes on Hickam’s runways were charred ruins, and some of the hangars and other buildings were burning. The dead and wounded lay on the ground, and other soldiers had begun to tend to them. Behind their position, they saw numerous churning clouds of black smoke that came from the warships in the harbor itself. A lot of good people had died this December 7, many of them his friends. Many of them guys he’d played football with the day before.

A staff car pulled up behind his guns, and a neatly dressed young lieutenant jumped out and ran over. On seeing the bars on Jake’s collar, he stopped and saluted.

Jake returned it briskly. “Are you supposed to be in charge here?”

“Yes, sir. I’m Lieutenant Simpkins.”

Jake didn’t recognize him. Pearl was a large base, and he’d been back for only a couple of months. “Where the hell’ve you been?”

Simpkins grimaced. “I was off base, sir, and the bombing woke me up. It took some time for me to get here.”