Hello Friends! I have returned!

Updates... Grrrrr! I am so mad! has been weird lately. I log into my account and want to make some updates to my info and it won't let me! It keeps telling me ..."The pen name you have selected, Trixie, has been taken. Please make another selection." HELLO! I know I'm not Trixie! I'm Trixie21! So why can't I make my changes? To make it worse, it won't upload asterisks at all (which I happen to love using), multiple periods (except in sentence form) and it won't let you break a scene or section with more than one hyphen! Its enough to make a person crazy! Yes, I log in correctly and my page.Yes, I'm using one of the reccomended applications for uploading (IE). huff Okay, I feel a smidge better now that I have THAT out of my system...a little. Moving right along...

Snow Weaver ... I know. People can be soooo mean, can't they. And yes, I'm typing as fast as my inept fingers can possible type without making too many mistakes.

Tamara Raymond ... Welcome Tamara and thank you again so much for the great review and calling yourself a fan. I truly feel loved (sniff) and appreciated. (I'd like to thank all the little people for making this possible...) I'll be double and triple checking the spelling of my innocent typos so hopefully you'll be less of them in the future.

Anyway, please enjoy my humbly offered chapter 6, and as usual I look forward to reviews...lots of reviews...TONS OF REVIEWS!

LOL.

Trixie21

Okay, you all know the drill. I have to take up valuable space and time to say that I do not own any part that is the coolness of the Yu-Gi-Oh universe. That honor goes completely to Kazuki Takahashi. Authoress as she bows subservantly before her shrine of great creators... "We're not worthy! We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"

This Old Man: Sugoroku's Story

Part 1: Japan

6. For Better and Worse…

Captain Hanaka had pulled the strings of rank and with a few owed favors successfully had Sugoroku transferred out of his old grade school and placed into a special military school for particularly gifted boys and young men. Its role was two fold. First and foremost, it trained these boys to prepare for a life of military leadership through the use of superior intellect. Secondly, it doubled as a sort of think tank, encouraging the young minds to come up with new and fresh ways to engage in battle and win. This is where Sugoroku came in.

His clear, sharp, analytical and questioning young mind was perfectly suited to the task. The captain had seen this through the boy's game play and bored school life.

The positive to Sugoroku's attendance in this new school was also multiple. Here he was challenged daily in his school work and he, for the first time, was not always done before the others. His mind was encouraged to stretch to the limits of imagination in all that he did. He was given the chance to not only receive constructive criticism from his peers, but to offer his opinions and suggestions to their projects and tests as well. He learned more about tactical maneuvers, advantages and solutions then he could ever have known existed and through the use of maps and humongous battle boards he daily laid siege to his fellow student's armies and navies.

These 'battles' were monitored closely on a daily basis by a group of men who never spoke to the boys involved but instead scribbled madly in their notebooks the entire course of these projects.

In his mind, Sugoroku likened the battle boards to a giant game of Shoji, and even though there were fewer rules in regard to honorable combat in this venue, he imposed his own on himself.

As a matter of one instance… At the beginning of each new game, when he was given his starting set up positions, he insisted on knowing down to a man precisely how many people were in each group. In the basic stages, the land battalions rarely changed , though after a carry over of a game to the next day there were often fewer and fewer men. The sea battles were far worse though. Those he detested.

In the sea skirmishes, when a ship was destroyed, hundreds of men were lost and even though these were only mock simulations, this rankled against Sugoroku's personal nature. He took more care and time when plotting his routes through the sea and when asked why he explained that, "The men are in far more peril on the sea than land and since it was so their reactions may vary more."

"This," he further stated, "could affect the way the men took their orders, and dissent was a possibility when there was no clear and obvious safety line."

His teachers would carefully argue back, "But if it is the will of their commander to put themselves to death for their emperor, why should they question that?"

Sugoroku's answer?

"Because man is man. Man questions his world and all around him. By questioning it we learn to live longer and better. If we didn't question things, nothing would ever change and we would be no better than an animal."
"But what of solidarity? The men train and live with one another and they are a family to themselves, to you and to the country. Why should they not believe that everyone will do what they are ordered?"

"We may be one country but it only takes one man's thought to bring change. Did a group of men decide to 'invent' the first train? No. It was one man who questioned the use of horses forever as the main source of transportation. Once he thought up the idea others helped and worked as one, but I am sure they all had opinions and different ideas. Just like all of the students here. The way I decide to run my navy may be different than someone else. Though we run our navy for the same purpose, we are still individuals no matter what else happens. Besides, if I so easily dismiss the men to death, I am left with fewer to command within my navy."

From their corners of the table the recording men scribbled and whispered excitably over what the boy had said.

Sugoroku did not know that his words and ideas ran the edge of acceptable social morality within the empire. His independent nature had predisposed him to take human nature into account even if he did not understand it as such. But that independence set him apart and to be apart from the whole was a dangerous thing in their society.

They were a unit. A family. They were one and thus, supposed to work and live and die as one. His ideas presented his teachers with some unusual insight as to the freer mind and so instead of punishing or suppressing it, they allowed him his uniqueness.

They allowed it because it brought a new dimension to the tables.

Though his fellow students were all older then him by several years, they looked at Sugoroku in interest after that. They themselves, for the most part, held nothing against him either for his short stature or lack of wealth. As it was obvious he had it where it counted to be here at this school, they accepted him. He was indeed a challenge since the rest of them all thought as any well taught Japanese subject should, that solidarity was the key to all. For both sides it seemed the ideal set up. Sugoroku's thoughts challenged the other boys to fight his independence. Their strict view of existence as a group challenged Sugoroku to find ways around it.

The one downside to his position in the school however, was the continual scrutiny and discrimination by the headmaster. The man took no rest from it and daily made sure to remind Sugoroku he was a poor boy with no honored family name. He detested the boy completely and as Sugoroku's tenure persisted he began to loath the boy as well.

In his mind, Sugoroku's ideas were dangerous and should not be fostered, but rather be thrown back into the gutter where they belonged. It was people like the boy that he felt sure were driving the nation to ruin and he would have preferred to stamp out the rabble quickly rather than let it grow to maturity when it could become a true threat.

Since he could not eject the boy with out reason, because of the boy's military backing, he instead made Sugoroku's life as difficult as possible. He delighted in conjuring reasons for the boy to be kept after school for detentions and cleaning duties just about every day. It was, in fact, so common for the boy to come home after dark that his mother had adjusted her own cooking schedule to allow hot food ready for her husband when he came home from work and a separate time of hot food available for Sugoroku when he stumbled in the door, exhausted from school.

Somehow, Sugoroku held on and instead of focusing on the headmaster's persecution of him, he concentrated that much more on his studies.

Rarely did anything disturb him from his thoughts of school, but in early 1943 he made a most dramatic realization.

He had been on his way home from school quite late when he heard them. What began as an indistinct droning noise in the distance, grew in tone and depth, and it wasn't long before he was aware of what he was hearing. They were planes. Planes heading towards him.

Now, Sugoroku had seen planes before. There were bulky cargo planes that occasionally made their way across Tokyo to the airport at Haneda or the distant military landing strips. And, he had seen a few of their own Japanese fighters pass by on their way to carriers or bases. But their appearance was an occasional occurrence that happened rarely enough so as to cause most boys his age to stop and look up. This was exactly what he did.

To his astonishment, the planes he saw were not cargo planes or Japanese fighters. What he saw had little resemblance to either. They were someone else's planes. American planes. For a second he wondered why they were here.

Their silvery bodies sailed above him and then past and all at once he knew where they heading. Downtown Tokyo. The heart of their largest city. In only minutes time he heard the sound of several great booms and in the distance, in the direction of where the planes had been moving, pillars of smoke began rising as loud whistles were sounded from the center of the city.

The war, he realized, had come to Japan. But there was more. Much more. He had once thought that the battle games they had held in their school were merely mock simulations of things that could happen. In his mind they had been hypothetical possibilities. But in a moment it was clear they had in fact not been exercises in what could happen, but were exercises in what had happened and were perhaps even now going on.

Things were suddenly understood as he remembered the last year and a half of exercises.

It had begun for him with the battle games involving the possible ways of taking the Philippine Islands very nearly from the day he had walked in the classes for the first time. That had continued until May, when the emphasis was then moved to how to go though all the islands, methodically taking them all in turn. Next they had studied and tackled Malay. This was followed by Borneo and then New Guinea. They had most recently, been working on the taking of Australia and the smaller island chains between. This was only sporadically broken with the study of the occasional American attacks on their convoy lines; the worst having only been but a few weeks ago when a fellow student, commanding that battle's supply run, had lost all 22 ships in the Bismarck Sea.

He had been made to understand that the Americans were friendly with the many islands near Japan and had even had forces in the Philippians with more in Australia. So, it was no wonder when they had occasionally had game skirmishes with the American Navy, these which had been slowly coming closer and closer to Japan in the simulations. But never once had he ever considered that it was really happening! He had known that Japan was at war, certainly, but it had all seemed so…far away. Almost unreal.

It very nearly traumatized the boy to find how effectively his naïveté had kept him from seeing that these were things that had really happened! He could hardly believe the truth, even now that it faced him, that he was a part of a group that was being used to analyze the apparent outcomes and possibilities. He and his classmates had been devising strategies that could have possibly been used to carry on or even prevent the happenings. What if some of their suggestions had been used in real life? What if some of his own had?

If these maneuvers had really happened, then people had really died!

The thought sickened Sugoroku. The only thing that kept him from showing it in an any more real physical way was the memory that he had always plotted most of his campaigns to take the fewest of his own armies lives. But what of his enemies?

He did not even want to know.

Sugoroku went home that night and with head buried beneath his pillow and bundled sheets, he cried.

Next Chapter: The Things That Could Not Be Done…

R and R's gratefully appreciated: )