Prologue: July 30, 1945
Lincoln Loud, USMC, stepped out onto the open top deck of the USS Indianapolis and paused to light a cigarette, the salty sea breeze blowing out the flame of his silver Zippo three times before he got it. He inhaled deeply and walked to the railing, being careful to watch his step: Save for a few running lights here and there, the ship was dark, the captain having ordered a blackout to avoid detection by Jap subs. There was moonlight to see by, but not much, and Lincoln was irrationally afraid of falling overboard. There was no worse fate in his mind than to be lost and alone in the dark vastness of the Pacific Ocean.
At the railing, Lincoln stared up at the moon and quietly smoked. Lincoln was a land creature and had only been to sea a handful of times, the first being when he was shipped out to Guadalacanal two years previously. That time, he was sea sick for days and thought he would die long before landing. He made it, though, and each subsequent trip became easier and easier. Now he no longer bent over the rail to puke with every pitch and yawn of the ship, but he still didn't like it much.
When he was given his current assignment, he almost requested a transfer to something else. He didn't, though, because this was big.
Very big.
Lincoln was the lowest ranking member of the Marine detail guarding the Indianaoplis's secret cargo and thus, didn't know what exactly it was. The sergeant in charge said it was something to do with a new weapon that would end the war in a single afternoon. Lincoln found that hard to believe, but it was something major; it came to L.A. by truck from the desert of New Mexico, guarded by fifteen men and accompanied by government men, one of them a scientist who impressed upon them the importance of secrecy and discretion. They were to guard the cargo with their lives, and if something were to happen to the ship, the cargo must make it off. "If it goes to the bottom of the sea." the scientist warned them, "the war will drag on for years."
That was something else that Lincoln doubted. The war was all but won. The Jap navy was broken and retreating to the Japanese home islands and the pilots were so desperate that they were crashing their planes into advancing American ships. A land invasion of Japan would be a hard slog, no doubts there, but it wouldn't take years. Once American boys were on the ground and moving on Tokyo, the Jap government would see the writing on the wall and surrender.
They had to.
It was only logical.
Some people said the Japs were illogical for flying their planes into ships, but it made sense to Lincoln. If there was an enemy navy on its way to his home country, full of pissed off Marines who'd fought some of the toughest battles in the toughest war to ever happen, Lincoln would be on edge too. Like those Jap pilots, he had a home and a family, and he'd do anything to protect it…even if that meant crashing his plane into a battle cruiser.
Or dying to save a box full of mysterious bomb stuff.
Rumors had run rampant on the ship for days. Everyone down to the lowliest mid-shipman had his own idea what was inside. Some of the boys thought it was a death ray like from those science fiction stories in the pulp rags. Others thought it was something new, something beyond description. Lincoln had to agree with the latter contingent. Whatever it was, though, it was incredible, and Lincoln was honored to be entrusted with its protection.
The cargo was supposed to be delivered a week ago, but a storm delayed them, and their destination was changed at the last moment because of damage from a last minute Jap bombing raid. They were to penetrate deep into enemy waters to make the drop. The sea around them was nominally safe and under American control, but there had been sub attacks nearby, and sightings of conning towers to both the north and south. Anything could happen, and Lincoln, for one, had spent the bulk of the trip gripped in paranoia. When he was on deck during the day, he would search for signs of subs, and in the night, he grimly waited for an alarm or an explosion. None of those things had come, however, and he had begun to relax.
It wasn't such a bad assignment, really. He didn't have much to do and the weather was nice. Over the past three years, he had come to love the tropics and as much as he missed Royal Woods, he didn't think he could ever move back to a frozen tundra with no palm trees. Palm trees were just tops.
Flicking his cigarette into the inky ocean, Lincoln pushed away from the rail and started down the deck. He stepped more carefully than before to avoid the humped forms of sleeping men who had come out here to escape the oppressive heat within. He was roughly amidships when a giant explosion rocked the Indianapolis. A massive cloud of fire and water rose up from the water, and the ship pitched heavily to one side. Lincoln was thrown violently to the deck, and men screamed in the dark. Seconds later, before Lincoln had even gotten a chance to get back to his feet, another explosion split the world. Lincoln's heart hammered in his chest and he crossed his arms over the back of his head to protect himself from falling debris.
The roar and crackle of flames filled the night, and an alarm sounded, its piercing wail going up like the cry of a wounded animal. Lincoln pushed shakily to his feet and stumbled. The ship was already listing to the side and pandemonium was breaking out on deck. Terror clawed at Lincoln's chest, and hysteria threatened to overwhelm him.
His worst fear was coming true.
Men rushed up and down the deck, some to their battle stations and others in random and senseless directions. A few men tried to lower one of the boats, but it went over the side and one of the cables tethering it to the crane snapped. It dangled and scraped along the hull of the ship. Lincoln's heart rocketed into his throat when he remembered the cargo.
He had to get to it.
Shoving away from the wall, he joined the crush of humanity crowding the deck. The list was rapidly increasing, and water began to spill over the lower side, washing across the deck and dousing the flames. Oil and fuel gushed from deep within the hull and slicked the surface of the sea, burning in spots. Men leapt into the water; some made it clear, while others were consumed like damned souls in the Biblical lake of fire. Lincoln reached the gangway leading down into the bowels of the ship, extracted himself from the body politick racing along the deck, and hurried down a slanted set of stairs. The walls groaned in pain and shudders raced through the ship. At the bottom, he could hear the roar of water.
"Loud!"
At the end of the tilted hall, two of his fellow Marines struggled with the large metal box containing the cargo. "Loud! Give us a hand, damn it!"
Lincoln started toward them, but the lights flickered. His blood ran cold and he looked up at the ceiling. Groans and shudders, the roar of water getting stronger. Cold terror dug its claws into Lincoln and hiis chest began to heave.
He didn't mind dying for his country…but not like this, not trapped in a metal tube in the dark, water rising around him, no hope, no escape, no salvation.
"Loud!"
Water was rising in the hall; it was to the men's ankles now.
Lincoln hesitated. He couldn't just leave them.
The lights flickered again, and Lincoln's resolve crumbled. Turning tail, he ran back up the stairs, the angry shouts of his countrymen following him, ripping his heart and soul.
Lincoln reached the deck just as the ship plunged into darkness. The only light came from the flicker of the fires and the pallid glow of the moon. He was on the high side; it lifted higher and higher as the ship went into a roll. The Indaianpolis gave a pained groan and began to settle. Lincoln was one of the hundreds of men to scramble over the side and jump into the water. It closed around his head, then he broke the surface, mercoioifcully clear of the fires and oil slicks. He swam as hard as he could to clear the ship before it sank.
He came up some 500 hundred yards away. He looked toward the ship and glimpsed a flash of moonlight on its hull just as it slipped beneath the waves. Lincoln found a piece of wreckage and clung to it for dear life. Men struggled in the sea around him, and a thousand screams, yells, shouts, and calls assaulted his eardrums. Another man, an officer, appeared and held onto the same bit of flotsam. "Did you get an SOS off?" Lincoln asked.
"I don't know," the officer said, "the torpedo knocked out the radio. I hope it got through."
Hours later, the officer said, "It had to get through. We won't be here long."
They were there for four days.
Over a thousand men went into the water, but exposure, drawing, dehydration, and shark attacks whittled their numbers down. By day, the sun pounded relentlessly onto their heads, and by night, they shivered with cold. By sunlight, Lincoln occasionally saw fins lurking in the water; every so often, a man would be pulled under, and all anyone would ever see of him again was a little blood. Some men went insane as day two bled into day three. One man became convinced that his local malt shop had opened a second location under the water, and though a few of his comrades tried to hold him back, he swam down to find it, perishing beneath the surface. Another man thought he could swim the 5000 some miles back to Los Angeles. A few got it into their heads that the ship was intact down there, and that if they could reach it, they could have as much chow and water as they could stand.
They were right about the water part.
Lincoln's throat became raw and parched, and the salty air scrubbed his face and lips like sandpaper. His skin turned wrinkled. Open sores wept into the ocean, the salt stinging them. His face burned each day, and sharp hunger pangs cut through his stomach.
He almost wished he had gone down with the ship.
On day four, a navy plane on routine patrol spotted them, and a major rescue operation was launched. That night, at 2am, Lincoln was pulled aboard a destroyer. His legs were weak and his skin hurt, but he was alive.
He was alive.
They shipped him to a hospital in Honolulu and he believed, naively, that his time in the Second World War was over. He had been so injured that they would never send him back to the front.
Only he was wrong.
The secret cargo he and his fellow Marines had been assigned to protect, he discovered, contained vital components for two atomic bombs that were to be dropped on Japanese cities. The bombs were so powerful, so awesomely destructive, that they would bring Japan to its knees and hasten the end of the war.
The most important pieces of those bombs were now at the bottom of the Pacific, and there was no way to produce more of whatever it was they needed to function until much, much later. For that reason, the feared and dreaded invasion of the Japanese home islands was to commence shortly.
The first phase began in early September. American ships and planes dislodged the last of the Jap holdouts on the Pacific islands and pressed on to Japan. The fighting was intense, the Japs driven to near fanatical desperation. The few remaining elite fighter pilots in the Japanese army were pulled from service and held back to run missions once the Americans invaded, and they were replaced by schoolboys as young as fifteen. These boys were hastily trained and sent to fly their planes into approaching ships. More boys were pressed into submarine service, and did much the same thing. The sub attacks were worse, as almost every sub that hit took out an entire ship. The seas around Japan became a killing field, with planes, ships, subs, wreckage, and men littering the water. Smoke clogged the air and the sounds of battle raged around the clock.
To the north, the Soviets fought their way through Mongolia and beat the Japanese Imperial Army back to the sea. The navy attempted an evacuation, but Russian artillery chopped their ships and planes to pieces. Several thousand Japs made it out, but those who found themselves trapped between the East China Sea and the advancing Bolsheviks were doomed. Many of the officers committed hari kari or led hopeless banzai charges to avoid being captured. The enlisted men who fell into Soviet hands, however, suffered a fate worse than death. Many were outright executed as "fascists," punished for their country's allegiance with Nazi Germany, which had done incalcuable damage to the Motherland in 1941-43.
While the dwindling navy and dying air force held off the hounds of war in both the east and the west, the army and civilian population of Japan frantically shored up the island. Every single Jap who could stand up under their own power was drafted into a civilian homeland defense force. Men and boys built a series of defenses along the coast and fishing boats were packed with explosives, their crews ordered to sail into American ships. Children carried buckets of sand for sandbags, old men trained with rifles as elderly as they were, and women dug tank trenches. The beaches up and down the east coast of the country became a tangle of barbed wire, mines, foxholes, and junk metal dropped into shallow depths to block American landing craft.
All of Japan became, almost overnight, a fortress under siege. Dread and paranoia ran rampant, along with disease and starvation. The only reason Japan had sought to conquer the Pacific was because it had very little natural resources of its own. They needed rubber, oil, and a whole host of other things that they could not produce themselves. At the end of World War I, Japan felt snubbed and insulted by the other allies, and decided to isolate itself from the world. Like Hitler's Germany, Japan wanted to become 100 percent self-sustaining so that it would not have to rely on anyone else. The Germans wished to distance themselves from the mud people who inhabited non-Aryan cesspools and the Japanese wanted to avoid having to subject themselves to the sneaky betrayals of back-stabbing round eyes.
Because the home islands could not support a vast, industrialized hermit society by the 1930s, the Japanese resolved to take what they needed by force.
Now that they had been driven from all those islands and their supplies had been cut off, they were on the verge of military collapse. Shortages of fuel were endemic during the early autumn of 1945. What little oil the nation possessed was given first to the military, and then to armaments factories. Everyone else was forbidden from using fuel; if they had any, they were to turn it over to the government. Those who were caught hoarding the stuff were imprisoned or shot.
That wasn't the beginning of the Japanese government's oppression and it certainly wasn't the end. Boys as young as eight and nine were dragged away by soldiers and formed into special battalions who would combat the Russians and Americans. Any parents who objected were shot. Food was heavily rationed, and each soldier was allowed a generous 1,500 calories a day. The factory workers, farmers, and defense militias were expected to get by on 1000. The sick, the old, those who couldn't aid in the defense of Japan were given nothing.
During this time, the American Pacific Fleet was gathering its strength in the east and the Red Army was massing in Mongolia. Engagements were limited to skirmishes on the high seas and to air raids on major Japanese cities. Tokyo was heavily bombed every night, and Russian ships trowled the East China Sea, laying mines and decimating any Japanese resistance. A few wooden fishing boats managed to slip past radar by night and crash into Russian destroyers. In one particularly embarrassing incident, a Soviet battleship took a direct hit to the magazine and blew sky high. It went down with a heavy loss of life and the rescue ships were strife by Zeroes. In the American zone, Japanese submarines scored a few impressive hits, sending three ships to the bottom and severely damaging five more.
American and Soviet leaders met in Manilla in late September to discuss plans for the invasion. The Soviets would invade the north island and the Americans would take the south island. Tokyo was declared a joint occupation zone where both sides would hold power. Western leaders, however, feared that Stalin would order his troops to rush into Tokyo, taking it before the allies could reach it, much the same way he had with Eastern Europe. Churchill and FDR had been too accommodating, too willing to let the Russians take a leading role. Now that Hitler was vanquished and Stalin - who was little better - held most of Europe in the palm of his hand, the leadership of both countries realized their grave mistake.
This time, they wouldn't be such pushovers. Even before the land invasion began, American and British leadership was planning a way to outmaneuver the Soviets. It was decided that after the war, no matter what, the occupation of Japan would last for no more than a year, after which time all allied powers would withdraw their forces. If the Soviets didn't comply - which the British and Americans expected them not to - then military force would have to follow. The west had learned its lesson about appeasing mustachioed dictators and would not make the same missteps that it had with Hitler.
November 1, 1945 was set as the day on which the invasion would begin. When the allies landed on the coast of France just a year and a half before, it was called D-Day, which was a general military term denoting the day on which something happened. The landings on Japan would take place on X-Day.
While the war raged on in the east and the Big Three met to discuss plans for the defeat and eventual occupation of Japan, Lincoln Loud was recuperating in a Hawwian hospital commanding a tropical view of the sun-dappled harbor. Palm trees framed the wide, airy window and sunlight streamed through the open sash, the salty sea breeze stirring the white curtains. Many a day, Lincoln sat in a chair by the window and gazed out at the ships coming and going from the harbor. When he first arrived at the hospital what seemed like a lifetime ago, he couldn't see water without sweating and beginning to panic. Every time one of the nurses opened his window, he would close it again because the smell of the sea stirred horrible memories in his consciousness. At night, he dreamed of sharks, thirst, and ocean, and during the day, he struggled with the physical impact of his four days in the Pacific. The wounds upon his body were beginning to heal, but the mental scars remained.
He could not stand to be wet: He would launch into a raving fit if even the smallest amount of water touched his flesh, and his entire body would burn like he was being spit roasted. The doctor said that it was all in his head. Maybe it was, but water repulsed him, and he vowed to forsake the stuff from here on out. That, of course, presented a problem, as he was compelled to bathe for sanitary reasons. Every other day, a pair of muscular orderlies in white would come into his room, and Lincoln's heart would seize. He would jump out of bed, shoulders hunched like a gorilla, and jerk his head around in search for some means of escape.
There was only the window.
Still being in sorry shape from his ordeal, he was never quick enough to reach it and dive out before the orderlies could catch him. He would thrash, kick, and cuss, but they'd drag him to the big metal bath tub next to the cafeteria anyway. His cussing would turn to high, throat-ripping screams of pain and terror, and in a flash, he would be back in the ocean, the salt stinging his open wounds and men dying all around him. The orderlies would scrub him with rough, scratchy sponges, and his skin would ache and burn for hours after they hustled him back to his room.
Out there in the open water, he had lost weight, going from skinny to downright cadaverous. Putting it back on was hard because, for a while, he was rarely ever hungry. At first, he could only eat small amounts of food - some broth here, a piece of bread there - and it hurt his stomach. He gradually improved in that arena, but even now, he was unable to eat very much without feeling like someone was stabbing him in the guts. His skin was also healing. There was no physical reason for it to hurt, but it was still a semi-permanent shade of brown from soaking up so much of the tropical sun. When he was rescued, he was covered in sun blistered and his face was so badly burned that he couldn't lay on either cheek for over a month. His skin peeled in long strips from his body, and even the touch of the sheets against it made him cry out in agony.
That was then, however, and this was now. He was better in both body and mind, and he was beginning to become restless. He was waiting to be discharged and sent back home. The prospect excited him, but it also scared him. He was twenty years old but had lived three lifetimes over the last two years. He knew nothing but the Corps and despite his experience in the Indianapolis disaster, he enjoyed it. He didn't know if he wanted to make a career of it, but sitting there by the hospital window and staring out at the harbor, he had no idea what he would do with his life once he got out. Nothing appealed to him. Being a telephone operator? Pumping gas? Police work?
He knew one thing: He sure as hell didn't want to stick around and take part in the invasion of Japan.
It kicked off on October 28, several days earlier than planned. That was because the Soviets took an unfair head start. They launched a massive assault from Korea comprising hundreds of ships ferrying thousands and thousands of Red Army soldiers.
Shockingly, it was a disaster.
The Soviet high command was flush from the recent Russian victory over Nazi Germany and wrongly believed that it had become the best fighting force on the earth, that its boys could do anything they set their minds to. The Russian soldier was tough, no doubt about that, but the Soviets had never undertaken an amphibious assault on such a massive scale. The logistics of ferrying so many troops across the open sea was a nightmare to begin with, but it was made even worse in this case by poor planning and inept leadership. There was confusion about where the landings were to take place, and part of the fleet went to the wrong place, where they met heavy resistance. Without the expected back-up from battleships and air planes, with no supplies and a strategy that had made no room for errors (because errors were for capitalist swine), the troops were massacred on the beach.
As for the rest of the fleet, they were dogged by the best pilots Japan had to offer and met with a tiny force of the Japanese Imperial Navy. Subs took out two troop transports, sending some 10,000 Russians to the bottom, and a few of the other ships were knocked out of action by kamikazes. At night, the fishing boats, which didn't show up on shoddy Soviet radar, played hell on the ships, crippling many and sinking several. The Russians, however, fought doggedly on, and their planes soon took control of the skies, pushing into Japanese air space and carpeting ports and villages with curtains of bombs. This led to dogfights over the land of the rising sun, and even though it was shattered and stretched to the limit, the Japanese air force proved better than the Russians at aerial combat. The Japs had been relying on it for years, whereas the Russians had done very little of it on the Eastern Front.
When the armada reached Japan, it found that the landing spot it had picked was characterized by slippery rocks, sheer cliff faces, and narrow beaches with few access points to the land above. Calling it off now was impossible, so the Soviets landed.
What followed was a bloodbath of historic proportions. Having the high ground, the Japanese were able to fend off wave after wave of attacks. The Russian battery played hell on their positions, but they were able to quickly entrench themselves and focus on the troops coming ashore. They picked off hundreds, thousands of soldiers from above; before long, the beach and surf were both littered with stacks of dead bodies. It took three days for the Russians to blast the Japs out of their holes and push inland. By that point, they had suffered staggering casualties while inflicting hardly any of their own. Historians would later be reminded of General Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, where American forces suffered 71 casualties while inflicting 2000 on the British.
The joint American-British invasion began on October 30, the date having been moved up two days to contest the Russians. It fared a little better, but a large detachment had been broken from the main column and sent toward Tokyo in order to take it before the Russians could, so it was somewhat weakened. The main thrust of the attack swept into the south island and set ashore at four points around Osaka, the plan being to split the south island in half. They could not land directly in the heart of a major city, so most of the landings took place just to the south. At the same time, planes and battleships blasted the city, setting much of it ablaze and sending its inhabitants fleeing.
Resistance was stiff, but the terrain was more favorable than that in the north, so the landings were complete by November 2. Thousands of troops and tons of supplies were quickly shipped in, and allied troops fought their way inland, establishing bases and supply routes.
Things did not go smoothly from there.
Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who attacked Pearl Harbor, is reputed to have said, "I would never invade America, there is a gun behind every blade of grass." The Americans and British quickly found that the same held true for Japan. Aside from the regular army units and the highly organized (though sparsely trained) civilian militia units, regular people heeded the Emperor's call to arms. Attacks of all kinds were common, and the death toll mounted. The Allies quickly came to realize that they never knew where death and danger were coming from, and paranoia took hold.
It was into this maelstrom that Lincoln Loud was thrust on December 3, 1945. He expected to be sent home, but the situation on the front was such that all able-bodied men, even those who had spent four days in the open ocean and had nearly gone mad, were needed for service. Already, American boys were being slaughtered by the thousands and the battle was proving every bit as gurelling as everyone had feared. When Lincoln found out that he was being shipped to the front, his heart dropped to his feet. Had he been a weaker man, he would have stalled, or fled, or begged for a deferment. He was not a weak man, however. He had a responsibility, indeed an obligation, and his father had raised him that a man never runs from his problems, but faces them head on.
With that in mind, he packed onto an overcrowded troop transport with 10,000 other boys and started for Japan. The weather was calm and placid for the first couple days, and Lincoln could see why the Pacific had gotten its name. Ten days out, and steaming through the same area where the USS Indianapolis had gone down, a terrible storm blew in from the south. Gray, massive waves battered the ship and rain lashed across the deck like a whip; men who went out in it came back with welts. Two didn't come back at all, washed overboard and lost for all time in the sea. Thunder crashed, lightning flashed, and Lincoln held onto his rifle for dear life, sure that the ship would sink, and that once again, he would be tossed into the open ocean…only this time he would be alone.
For three days, the ship was tossed and beaten, but finally, it came through the other side unscathed, and the sea went back to being placid. The storm clouds cut off in a long, perfectly straight line across the heavens, and the moment the ship crossed it, the sun was shining and the waves lapped gently at the hull. If he hadn't seen it himself, Lincoln never would have believed it.
The next afternoon, the ship docked at Osaka, which had finally been liberated after weeks of fierce hand to hand to combat. Lincoln didn't know what to expect, but the blasted, rubble-strewn hellscape he was greeted by sure wasn't it. Only a few buildings still stood in the downtown section, all the others were either bombed out or reduced to massive heaps of rubble. Much of the city had been flattened and what remained was fire scorched ruins: Seen from the ship, it was put Lincoln in mind of a cemetery, and not a particularly well-kept one either.
The brass told Lincoln and the others that the city was liberated but Lincoln quickly found that that was a lie. There were still pockets of resistance around the city, and on Lincoln's first day in Japan, he was assigned to a unit whose duty was to flush the defenders out of the network of sewers beneath the city. Down there, it was dark and damp, like a crypt, and you had to hunch over because there wasn't enough space to stand. He and three other men descended into that subterranean hell with flashlights and .45 automatics. They crept through ankle deep sewage and traded potshots with Japs who seemed to materialize out of nowhere, then go back there just as quickly as they had appeared.
Lincoln was not a claustrophobic man, but after hours down there, with the constant drip of water in his ears and paranoia clawing at his chest, he felt like he would go crazy if he didn't see the sun. At one point, he and the others chased a dark shape for several thousand feet, their bullets chipping stonework and tearing through man made waterfalls. Lincoln, nearly feral at this point, was the first to catch up with their quarry. He grabbed him by the back of his shirt and flung him to the ground. The figure splashed in several inches of standing water and rolled onto his back. That's when Lincoln saw that it was a boy of no older than fifteen. His slanted eyes were filled ewith terror and his dirt streaked face was the color of sour milk.
There were no POWs in the chambers. The highest ranking leatherneck, a Gunny, shot the boy in the head. His blood splattered Lincoln's face and he nearly puked on his shows. He understood why it had to be done, but that didn't make it any easier to stomach. It was necessary, he told himself, and that was true. That Jap may have been just a boy, but he would have killed Lincoln or one of the others just the same.
He didn't like it, though.
Lincoln was down in the tombs (as the men said) for much of December, and into January 1946. Some days he and his unit stayed down there, sitting up on raised catwalks with their backs against the slick walls to sleep. Lincoln had no idea what was going on "up there" after a while, and he stopped caring. His entire world revolved around the tombs, and as far as he was concerned, nothing else existed.
Until it did.
Lincoln's unit flushed out the last of the Japs on January 9, and for the first time in what felt like decades, Lincoln emerged into the world. He learned that the American invasion of Tokyo had been beaten back and that thousands of Jap soldiers and civilians had fled into the countryside, where they waged unrestricted guerrilla warfare on the allies. American POWs were instantly killed, and convoys were attacked by marauding gangs regularly. In the north, the Russians were bogged down in the snow of an unusually intense Japanese winter, which Lincoln found deliciously ironic. Thousands of Ivan's men froze or starved to death because they weren't equipped for cold weather, just like the Germans hadn't been when they invaded Russia. Being on their home turf, the Japs had the advantage anyway, and they made good use of it. Apparently conditions in the Russian camp were terrible and a lot of the men were deserting or rebelling against their own officers. Lincoln thought there was more to it than just that, but he didn't know, nor did he care.
After being in the tombs for so long, he was hoping for a quiet post in Osaka, guarding trains or the officers' mess, but instead, he was immediately joined to a mobile unit grinding its way to Tokyo. They left Osaka on January 13, which seemed like a bad omen to Lincoln. They followed dirt roads north toward the city, passing through the Japanese countryside during the height of the winter rainy season. It was cold and wet and all along the route, Japs fired at them from cover. Two days out, a car packed with explosives slammed into one of the tanks and disabled it, killing five men. Later, they were ambushed from the hills by a squad of civilian defenders. Lincoln crouched behind a Jeep and fired wildly into the forest sloping away from the muddy road, barely able to make out the shapes of the fighters through the trees.
Worse than the constant harassment by small arms fire and hidden artillery were the signs of brutality they stumbled across. Every so often, they would find heads of American boys shoved onto pikes and jammed into the earth like a grizzly road sign. They fought their way into one village and found a group of American POWs who had been tortured so badly, so inhumanly, that everyone in Lincoln's unit, Lincoln included, was outraged to the point of revenge. They herded all of the villagers into a shinto shrine and shot them, then burned the village to the ground. "We just committed a war crime, boys," the cigar-chomping commander said, "but sometimes you gotta break the rules."
He was right, Lincoln decided. On that march north, he became hardened to war. Back in Osaka, he cringed at the killing of a fifteen year old boy in the tombs, but over time, he numbed to violence and death. Twice, a woman and a little boy approached them in civilian clothes. The woman always dropped to her hands and knees to reveal a machine gun strapped to her back, and the little boy unfailingly grabbed hold and opened fire, killing people Lincoln had come to know and consider brothers. The third time they saw a woman and a boy on the road, the former about 80 and the latter 6 or 7, they gunned them down before they could do anything.
If they were going to do anything.
The closer they got to Tokyo, the worse things got. They fought their way through industrial cities, going from building to building and fighting the Japs where they found them. The Japs were frenzied by this point and almost each one fought to the death. Some only had swords and machetes; Lincoln watched many boys get hacked to pieces. They Japs also set boobytraps along the roads, and if you weren't careful, you'd step into one. Lincoln watched boys blown to pieces by hidden bombs and skewered on spikes hidden in the ground. Every inch of road they covered teemed with potential death, and the men were in a constant state of high alert.
Closer to Tokyo, they encountered regular army troops who had formed a giant ring of defense around the city. They were dug into a series of bunkers, trenches, and foxholes, and had the aid of heavy artillery and the final remnants of the Japanese air service. Lincoln's unit hooked up with several others and they formed a massive front line that stretched nearly from one end of the island to the other. On March 5th, a thousand American guns began to fire at once, the shells splashing to the ground and kicking up waves of dirt and dust. The defenders were so deeply entrenched that the salvo did little to dislodge them. Dogfights between Japanese and American planes took place overhead, and the final ships in the Japanese navy duked it out with British destroyers to the north. The barrage rolled through the world like thunder, and Lincoln imagined that it would ring through his head for all time.
On the other side of Tokyo, the Soviets were on the move. They had secured several landing sites and taken vast swaths of the northern island. They were far more brutal to the Japs as winter turned into spring than the Americans in the south were, and the fighting was quick but deadly. Orders came down on March 18 that the Americans were to take all of Tokyo as quickly as possible, thus denying it to the Russians. That was a tall order as fighting on the southern front had devolved into trench warfare the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Mons and Verdun. The Japs, in their desperation, had resorted to using chemicals. You'd be in your trench, hunkered against the weight of a thousand Japanese shells, when the world would go silent. Someone would cry out a warning, and if you raised your head over the rim of the earth, you would see a cloud of yellow or green smoke swifting approaching. If you didn't get your gas mask on in time, you were a goner. Lincoln watched many, many boys suffer protracted and excruciating deaths at the hands of the gas. Their eyes, nose, and ears would begin to bleed, and their lungs would erupt in flames. They would claw at their throats, ripping long strips of flesh away, and then sink to their knees, where they died in standing water.
Disease and trench foot plagued the ranks. Lincoln was always cold, always damp, his socks soaked and squishing in his boots. It was almost as bad as being out in the open ocean had been, only at least there, it got warm during the day. Here, the chill settled into your bones and never left, no matter what you did.
On April 2, with the Russians fifty miles north of Tokyo and swiftly advancing, the Americans managed to shatter the Japanese lines and pour through. The men were all so sick, miserable, and angry, that Japanese officers were instantly and summirally executed, and Japanese enlisted men were beaten and tortured.
American ships and planes had been battering Tokyo for weeks and when Lincoln and his men moved it, there was nearly nothing left. Still, the Japs fought on. Lincoln fought through mazes of rubble, plunking Japs hiding behind bits of standing walls and wrecked cars. He fought hand to hand when he had to, and he took great pleasure in watching the gook bastards die. After all the pain, all the death, they had inflicted on him and his boys, they deserved it. The whole stinking country deserved it.
The Soviets kept coming from the north, hoping to grab as much territory as they could and expecting to be allowed a slice of Tokyo the way they had been allowed a slice of Berlin. Lincoln heard stories about how the Russians would launch an attack against the Americans to drive them out of the city, and he didn't know whether to be excited or horrified by the prospect. He knew nothing but war now, could do nothing but wage war, and the idea of fighting forever appealed to him.
It also scared him. He wanted to go home, but how could he ever go home? How could he ever forget the things that he had seen and done? How can a man go back to living a normal life after fighting in the Battle of Tokyo?
On April 15, almost one year after Nazi Germany surrended and the war in Europe came to a close, the Japanese government officially capiitulated. There was very little of the government actually left and they had lost control of the country, which even now was made up by isolated bands of soldiers and civilians fighting from hills, forests, and valleys. The regular army laid down its arms on the 18th, but many men had left to continue the fight. Lincoln was dispatched to a dense jungle region to help flush them out, and passed the rest of the spring on patrols and search and destroy missions.
In the north, the Soviets, who had made it to the outer rim of the Tokyo suburbs before stopping to quickly consolidate its power. They accused the west of trying to conquer Japan and turn it into a fascist puppet state, so, in response, they turned everything north of Tokyo into a red puppet state. The newly formed Japanese Communist Front was swept into power by winning local elections in July 1946 and they declared the Socialist Republic of Japan on August 1.
Lincoln heard all of this on the radio, but it might as well have been happening on another planet. His life had become running through the jungle and calling in airstrikes against deep rooted targets. He fought in rice paddies, on jungle trails, in forests, on mountains. Emperor Hirohito made repeated calls for combatant Japanese to lay down their arms; every time he did, a few more surrendered, but fanatics fought on.
In late 1946, Lincoln was granted furlough and went home to Royal Woods. It was strange to be back in the states and not surrounded by danger all the time. It was…nice.
But he was always on edge, always waiting for something to happen.
In January 1947, he went back to Japan. He was on ship when the news broke that the Red Army had moved on Tokyo. Diplomatic relations had broken down, apparently, and the Russians wanted to "liberate" the city from the fascist American hoards who had taken it. Lincoln suspected that, like him, the Soviets had spent so much time at war that they didn't know what else to do with themselves.
The fighting was limited at first, but quickly heated up. Tank battles raged in the streets of Tokyo and gangs of men clashed along the new front. On the night of January 9, Lincoln was posted to guard duty in south Tokyo - a boring post which he hated - when a double flash split the sky open. A massive sun appeared on the horizon, growing and mushrooming until the whole of heaven was consumed by its spreading light.
At long last, Lincoln found out just exactly what was in that box that sank with the Indianapolis back in July 1945.
The makings of an atom bomb.
6,000 Soviet troops were wiped out in an instant qand 10,000 more died in the coming days. Stalin met with Churchill and Truman and they worked things out. Stalin used the government of North Japan as a scapegoat, and placed it under direct Soviet rule. By the end of the summer, it was officially absorbed into the Soviet Union as the North Japanese SSR.
The last of the guerilla fighters surrendered by the beginning of 1948, and peace was had at last.
Lincoln decided to stay in the military…just in case another war came along.
Soon, it did.
Korea.
By the end of the Korean conflict in 1953, Lincoln was a Gunnery Sgt and in control of his own platoon. He married and he and his wife went from base to base across the country in the fifties. He fathered three children that he didn't spend much time with. He chafed at civilian life and prayed for another war.
He got it in the form of Vietnam.
It was just like fighting the Jap guerillas, and he took to it like a duck to water. He signed up for five tours in country. When he took a fatal bullet to the chest in 1972, he was happy. Happy that he wouldn't have to go back to America, happy that he wouldn't have to suffer civilian life - which had gotten worse since all those fucking hippies took over - happy that he got the honor of dying while doing what he loved.
He was buried with full military honors. The hometown paper called him a hero.
Others, his children included, called him a broken man.
Which one he really was is up to the individual to decide.