Friday, January 31st, 2014.

Reading back that last entry, I've realized that there's a few things I didn't mention, so I'll cover them here. Staying up until five in the morning scraping the blood of your own ship girls off your arms, hands, and fingers tends to make you want to go to sleep right away to prevent yourself from losing all sanity. Now that I have the sanity to write with a clear head (somewhat), I'll finish what I didn't write in yesterday's entry before going into everything that's happened today.

Let me make this clear: This's the first time in a very, very long time that I've felt this infuriated at anyone or anything.

And as I've mentioned two entries ago, there's one very simple reason for the way I'm feeling right now:

This mission was needless.

Now that that's out of the way, I forgot to mention why the Abyssal fleet even had to fall back in the first place. Get a load of this, you won't believe it: they ran out of ammunition. While it might seem from my last entry that the fleet I sent out got their asses handily kicked, it's only half of the story: the girls shot down so many Abyssal planes that Wo-Class eventually couldn't launch any more planes. Apparently, even Ta-Class ran out of ammo by the end of it. You could see the battle yesterday as a miniature scale of a war of attrition, and technically, technically speaking, my fleet won because they outlasted the enemy. They also sank a ton of enemy destroyers and light cruisers and even a couple heavy cruisers as well - the estimated kill count right now stands at 152 Abyssal destroyers sunk and 47 damaged, 17 Abyssal submarines sunk and 20 damaged, sunk 35 Abyssal light cruisers (both normal and torpedo cruisers) sunk and 29 damaged, and 6 Abyssal heavy cruisers sunk and 1 wounded. All the other Abyssal ships were either moderately damaged or lightly damaged. No one landed a shot on Re-Class. Figures.

Yeah, they broke orders and shot to kill instead of shooting to maim and halt. But tell me if I give a damn.

From what I've been able to gather, the Abyssals simply gave up the fight because not only did they not expect the battle to go on for so long due to my fleet's sheer tenacity, but because they felt they'd done enough damage. That's how I've interpreted their retreat. I could very easily see them executing my entire fleet had they come more prepared.

Now, onto the things done today.

I woke up after about four hours of sleep and went straight to the medbay. Despite the medbay's great filtration system and air-freshening system, the place still smelled like blood everywhere. Akashi would normally be up at that time, but because she'd taken a lot of damage herself, she wasn't there. Mamiya and Irako were busy making breakfast specifically for the wounded, so it was just me tending to everyone there for a little bit before Ooyodo and those who managed to get out of the fight only lightly damaged came and helped me out.

Except for Kitakami.

I couldn't even start toady's paperwork and reports until after lunch. We worked in the medbay until Mamiya and Irako brought in lunches for us, and we fed the wounded first before eating our own. It was only with Mamiya and Irako volunteering to take my place in the medbay that I was even able to go back to my office in the first place to get started on the paperwork crap.

After that, I took the post-action mission report, scanned it, and clipped it onto the email that I sent to HQ. In the email, I informed HQ that I was hereby putting in a demand to be transported to the Tokyo HQ with the assistance of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, who are obligated to obey my command upon my request in accordance with the Moebius Four Armament Pact, to meet with those in charge of the mission. I described the wounds that my ship girls received in what was honestly a horrible idea of a mission, including the KIA designations of I-168 and Ooi. I also added, grudgingly, that the mission was a failure - no live Abyssal specimen was able to be captured.

This is the kind of military decision-making that makes me hate all the military brass that I come across. Because once you become the brass, you lose all touch with war. It's all bureaucracy, all politics. It's a rat race to do anything and everything you can to keep yourself on that high horse, and if it means doing so at the expense of others, so be it, they don't give a fuck. Power and money are drugs, because once you're hooked, you can't ever get enough of it, so you'll keep sacrificing other people and everything else around you to keep getting the same high - only with power and money, you can't ever get that same high as you would smoking meth or shooting heroin. At least with meth or heroin any other goddamn narcotic drug you actually do get high at some point.

After sending that email, which was my last order of business for the day in terms of paperwork, I headed back to the medbay to see if I could do anything else to help, but the others had done all the work already. Thankfully, no one looked like they were going to die at any time; all their conditions are at least somewhat stable. But it's not like the ones who were critically or heavily damaged are doing fine, either.

Then, I headed to dorms, where Imuya's and Ooi's bodies had been brought after Mamiya and Irako cleaned their bodies. Atago had seen Imuya die in combat and quickly sailed over to where she fell and managed to pick her up before Imuya sank too far. Kitakami towed Ooi back, so at least we have their bodies. I found their bodies in their own futons and beds. You know you're a soldier when you look at a corpse like Imuya's and think nothing more of the situation than normal war shit. Instead of tragedy, it's just part of the job. Doesn't matter if you're an infantryman or an officer - you're paid to see corpses...to make corpses.

Kitakami hadn't left her room ever since she towed Ooi back and Mamiya and Irako put Ooi's body in her bed after cleaning it. Sitting in the dark in their room, Kitakami was sitting on the side of the bed to Ooi's left, resting her head on Ooi's lifeless left hand when I found her and turned on the light. At first, I just sat down next to Kitakami, taking off my naval officer's hat, not really saying anything. I could tell that Kitakami was crying throughout the night, because the wooden side of the bed was streaked with darker vertical lines.

This was a completely different Kitakami than the one I'm used to.

So just for the sake of talking, I asked Kitakami what Ooi meant to her. Because from my perspective, I only viewed Kitakami and Ooi as friends, with Ooi being the more protective one of the other while Kitakami was the laid-back one who didn't mind Ooi's pampering.

As soon as I asked that, Kitakami punched me in the face. She lifted me back up to my feet by my collar, and she screamed at me why I even thought of sending them on a suicide mission like that. She blamed me for the fact that Ooi got killed. If I hadn't sent them on that retarded mission, none of the girls would have ended up as they did, and most importantly, Ooi wouldn't be dead.

I calmly told her that I had already stated multiple times before they went off on the mission that it was going to be a dangerous mission and that I, too, disagreed with it but had to obey orders. Kitakami then asked me why I wouldn't simply just refuse to obey it. I was an American, and even if I disobeyed orders, the Japanese government wouldn't be able to prosecute me, most likely, because I was a foreign military officer, and that I knew all of this. If I knew this mission was probably going to turn out badly, why did I even send them off anyway?

I answered Kitakami that I had faith in them being able to complete the mission. I couldn't have possibly known that the battle they got into was going to happen the way it did: I had formulated the basic mission strategy around the information that was sent to me by HQ, regarding Abyssal movement patterns.

Kitakami simply hissed back at me that she'd prefer me to have no faith in them so that she would at least still have Ooi with her, alive, and not dead.

So I simply told her that I just came in to see I could do anything to make Kitakami feel better, to ask about the relationship between her and Ooi so that I could try to grasp what Kitakami was feeling, since I didn't quite understand their relationship fully.

And this was what Kitakami said to me:

"Of course you don't understand me and Ooi; what the fuck do you Americans know about friendship? All you Americans ever do is pretend like you make friends and bomb them all afterwards!"

I haven't heard a comment like that get underneath my skin so bad in a long time, either.

Not because it's not true - it is, to a certain extent.

But because Kitakami just described all Americans as backstabbing, lying assholes, which clearly isn't the case.

That, and I know that the only reason why Kitakami said that was to insult me racially, because there was little else she could do to insult me in any other way.

As soon as I heard that, I shoved Kitakami's arms off my collar, picked my hat back up, and told Kitakami that if that's what she truly felt, then I felt sorry for Ooi, not because she died, but because she died protecting someone who didn't have the maturity that I expected of her to be able to handle a difficult situation like this. I made sure to press it into Kitakami's face, that if Kitakami really hated me strictly because I was a dirty American, that I truly felt that it was a huge shame that Ooi wasted her life.

And with that, I left Kitakami in her room with Ooi.

I'm still really bitter about that one insult Kitakami threw at me. You could even call me butthurt or salty. It really got to me more than it should have, and I didn't see Kitakami again for the rest of the day. I don't know how well she took mine, though.

"These are the times that try men's souls" as Thomas Paine once wrote. When shit hits the fan, people always become on edge. They turn into the kind of people they really are: the basic, the true selves that they've covered up with years and years and layers and layers of superfluous personality and mannerisms. When shit hits the fan, all those layers get stripped off, leaving people naked and bare, scared of dying or scared that something will happen to them or scared that they won't know how to cope with the worsening situation. Scared enough that revealing their true selves to those around them, the world and their peers around them, is worth the risk of otherwise dying or feeling inescapably alone or abandoned. Some people are better at handling tough situations - soldiers and veterans like me, for example - not that I'm completely unbreakable, I know I've got a breaking point too. And for some people, getting into these kinds of tough situations actually make them into better people because of the resolute goodness they have within them that somehow they haven't been able to show due to their own extenuating reasons.

Kitakami, from what I can tell from earlier today, isn't one of them.

Obviously, I don't know everything that there is know between them. I know that with the limited knowledge that I have about them, with only my own observations, I cannot judge neither Kitakami nor Ooi nor even their relationship with one another.

But the fact still remains now that I think Kitakami has no idea how to cope with her situation. My image of her used to be that Kitakami was a chill girl who hung around a lot with Ooi and got along with just about everyone, including me, just fine. Now, no longer. While I still feel sympathetic to her because she lost a friend who was clearly very dear to her, the fact that she's exemplified the behavior of just another stereotypical foreigner outside of the United States who thinks that all Americans are evil Satanists and are plotting to take over the world has greatly betrayed the respect I had for her. I will not claim for sure that that's the true kind of person Kitakami is, but let me tell you: as an American who greatly disagrees with a lot of things that my government does and orders me to do and tries to do his best to keep a sane, rational mind in a career filled with insane, inhumane, and irrational decisions and occurrences, Kitakami's insult has struck home.

To put it very bluntly, I think Kitakami's a fucking bitch.

I tried to see if I could do something to help her deal with Ooi's death, but if she's going to reject me that hard and that caustically, then let her deal with it on her own, or let the other girls do it. I'm sure her fellow Japanese comrades are more entitled to cheering her up more than I am. It's very clear, to me, anyway, that anything else I do for Kitakami will be an utter waste of time, and I don't like feeling like I've wasted my time.

I went back to my office after all that to see if HQ had sent me a reply, which they did. They informed me that a JMSDF helicopter would be enroute to our base and arrive at around 0930 hours, to both pick me up and pick up the bodies of Imuya and Ooi. They said that they regretted to hear that the mission had turned out to be a failure, that many people back at HQ also believed that a capture mission was folly. Well, at least it seems like I have a lot of people on my side for once - if they're telling the truth and not bullshitting me like every other government correspondent writes. I suppose I'll find out for myself if a lot of people back at HQ really do feel that way once I head over there myself.

So after reading the email, I tapped the PA system on from my desk and announced that tomorrow at 0930 hours, a helicopter would arrive from the mainland to pick up me and the bodies, that I was going to pay an emergency visit to the Tokyo Headquarters to meet with the brass and find out the reasoning behind this disaster of a mission. I announced that there would be no further missions and no further training until the rest of the fleet fully recovered, essentially declaring the base to be in a state of forced vacation until further notice. I also announced that because of these announcements, whoever wished to see the bodies of the fallen one more time before 0930 hours tomorrow morning must do so before that time. But even as I turned off the PA system, I knew that that last announcement was only meant for Kitakami - it's not like anyone else would want to do so more than Kitakami would.

Against the advice of the other ship girls, I skipped dinner and instead worked from around 1700 hours to 0100 hours on the dockyards (the bathhouse) with anyone who wasn't moderately damaged or worse. Error, Kiyoshimo, Ooyodo, Suzuya, Kirishima, Mamiya, and Irako all worked with me to get the baths done as quickly as possible. At the rate we're going, we should have them done by sometime in the middle of next week.

Just before heading back to my room to write this entry and go to sleep, I walked out to the piers and sat down in the same place that I sat yesterday night waiting for my fleet to come back home. The past twenty-four or so hours has been rough, I'll be honest, a lot rougher than I'd ever thought it would get here. To my surprise, Error and Batsubyou came out to see me, and Error handed me a bottle of strawberry Ramune. Error doesn't say much of anything, so we just sat there, petting Batsubyou, drinking our Ramunes together, and watching the moon rise.

Pretending that like the moon above us, our problems would eventually be sucked up by the black sea of forgotten, terrible memories that we all wanted to forget but would be regurgitated again and again, night after night, until the moon is no more.