Sunday, February 2nd, 2014.
Received an email from HQ with some more satellite surveillance photos telling me that the particular enemy fleet my fleet had run headlong into was supposed to be a highly unlikely occurrence, that the enemy fleet just happened to deploy the brunt of their firepower on that day. They requested that I send out my fleet again for missions, not capture missions, as soon as possible, because that was supposed to be some kind of freak accident.
I told HQ that either they send me more reinforcements, especially submarines and carriers, or consider the Okinawa forward base as invalid for at least two weeks.
In other words, I told HQ to go fuck themselves.
Understandably, they didn't reply back at all for the rest of the day.
Bastards.
Akashi's been up day 'n night since the day of the failed capture mission, too busy working on replacement limbs and eyes for those who needed them. Despite being heavily damaged herself in combat, Akashi's been just tanking them and working on them, only stopping to eat, go use the restroom, and sleep, and when she does sleep, she doesn't sleep in the light cruiser dorms like she's been assigned with Ooyodo, she sleeps right there in the room next to the infirmary, which she calls her "shop" since she develops and builds stuff in there.
What a trooper.
Ooyodo's been constantly begging Akashi to not work so hard when she's in such a condition, but I think she's starting to give up, because every time I've stopped by the medbay to help out, I see Akashi treating some of our wounded girls while Ooyodo treats Akashi's wounds. It's like watching a field medic treat a wounded soldier out on the field while another medic's on his back treating him. Medic-ception, basically. Pretty soon X-Hibit's gonna come in with some pimped out car and tell us "Yo dawg, I heard'ja liked medics..."
Because of my personal liking to Samidare, not surprisingly, I found myself treating her the most out of the girls in the medbay, though not by much, since so many girls needed attention. Because Samidare's arm got chunked off by that piece of shrapnel, she couldn't eat properly, so I made especially sure to feed her properly.
I know that the normal me shouldn't ever feel this way, but I felt really fuckin' depressed whenever I've been working in the medbay treating everyone. Sitting in a room filled with teenage girls sporting horrendous wounds, always thinking that you can just barely smell the overpowering stench of blood so strong that you still feel like it's in the air even days after the medbay's been cleaned and washed of the blood, it just makes you really, really depressed. You know how in American media or international media, when they show pictures of innocent civilians killed or scenes of collateral damage inflicted by military forces (predominantly American forces, because let's face it, everyone fucking hates Uncle Sam by now)? That's basically what the medbay looks like. Innocent teenage girls, missing limbs and eyes and bandaged up, looking like they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Well, if I put it that way, it'd actually be true.
Given how I've been trained, that isn't what I'm supposed to feel. I'm responsible for many of the injuries and deaths of my men, ordering them to similarly insane and needless missions that we all knew not everyone was gonna get out of alive or in one piece. So why should it be any different here? I'm still an officer giving orders to my soldiers, and on top of which, I'm a goddamn American, motherfucker, we're not supposed to discriminate or show any special favor towards any particular circumstance just because we want to, because that's what America stands for, goddamn it.
In case you couldn't tell, the whole bullshit about American ideals was supposed to be sarcastic. Just wanted to make that clear.
I know for a fact that I've talked about this before, but I'll keep repeating this until I find the answer, 'cause I haven't found it yet. Is it because my soldiers are girls? Teenage girls who look like they shouldn't even belong here? Or is because they're girls, so as a man, I feel obligated to take care of them much more closely than I would my troops in the Navy? Or maybe, is it because I'm out of my element, living in a foreign base and surrounded by foreign soldiers and a foreign culture? I mean, I thought I was the same person comin' here, but more and more, I feel as though that's not really the case. I really feel like the softer side of me's coming out, I really do. It's not necessarily something I'm ashamed of, but it does disturb me that if I treat my girls this way, I'll have to treat my men in the same or similar manner when I go back to the American Navy. And I certainly don't want to have to babysit grown-ass men like this.
So basically, I need to set my mind on indiscriminate treatment, or circumstantial treatment. Which one's it gonna be, huh?
I'll think about it later. Getting these girls better as quickly as possible's the highest priority, because without them, our fleet strength is literally cut in half.
That, and the ship girls who haven't been critically damaged are going to heal up back to full health tomorrow. The problem is that lots of 'em are the newcomers, and if you've noticed by now, all five of my starter ship girls are basically out of commission for now with the kinds of wounds they've taken. This means that they can't lead the other destroyers or show the newcomers how the fleet here operates, so in-fleet leadership is greatly lacking. It's not that I don't have faith in the newcomers' ability to step up for their wounded comrades, it's just that I want to make sure they don't follow in their blood-stained footsteps.
Anyway, after I finished helping Samidare eat her dinner, she started crying silently. I asked her what was wrong, if something was hurting. She told me that she was sorry for forcing me to always have to devote lots of my valuable time in the medbay treating her and everyone else (I think Samidare's painfully aware of this since she got heavily damaged before too, and that time I looked after her too), and that she never knew that an Admiral like me who came into the medbay every single day when someone in the fleet was hurt to treat them even existed. I told her that I thought of it as a way to rectify my decision to follow through with the order to send them all on that stupid capture mission when I clearly didn't need to. Not only was it because I wanted to take care of them, but it's also not like I have a choice, if I'm even a shred of a decent human being.
Whenever I wasn't in the medbay, I was in the new bathhouses working with the girls who could work on getting them up and running as soon as possible. We just test-ran the water circulation system, which, to our relief, worked out perfectly the first time, drastically speeding up the process by which we can finish the bathhouses, so instead of waiting until this Wednesday or something, we might even complete the docks by Monday night or Tuesday morning, depending on how well everything else goes. At least something's going our way.
After quickly checking my email after dinner that nothing else from HQ had come, I headed over to the medbay but found everyone inside to be sleeping, so I decided not to enter for fear I might wake someone up. I wasn't necessarily feeling depressed or anything like that, but I certainly was in no mood to be playing games on my desktop or watching anime. I grabbed another bottle of Ramune from the mess hall kitchens since Shinsengumi's closed for the time being while Houshou's recuperating and headed out to the pier. Unfortunately, there wasn't any moon out this time - the clouds were covering it, so I could only see the circular haze of moonlight up in the sky.
It wasn't long before Kiyoshimo, the destroyer girl who looks up to the battleships, found me and came over to me to ask me what I was doing. I told her that I had intended to moongaze for a while with some Ramune, but seeing that the night skies were cloudy, my plans had been foiled. Kiyoshimo offered to keep me company, which I accepted. Because Kiyoshimo had only been lightly damaged, she only needed a gauze wrap around her left shoulder and upper arm, where she'd been struck by a single 5-inch shell and nothing more.
She asked me how I was feeling after that day, so I proceeded to tell her what was on my mind. I told her about my feelings about the mission, how I felt it wasn't a good idea but sent the fleet anyway in the hopes that they would carry out the orders and nothing majorly bad would happen. I told her about how I had flown to the mainland HQ and the Ministry of Defense to try to understand the reasoning behind the mission and see if I could acquire reinforcements to replace Ooi and Imuya, and how that turned out wonderfully bad. I told her that I felt so many things about our current situation that I didn't know what to think of it at all - just that we're in deep shit now.
Kiyoshimo also admitted that she felt guilty for being only lightly damaged while all her senior destroyers (she's referring to my starter destroyers) were pummeled. She said that if anyone needed to be sunk first, it should've been her, because at least in that case, the other destroyers who got critically damaged wouldn't have to sit in the medbay suffering from whatever wound they received.
Kiyoshimo kept saying, "If only I were a battleship, I could've done this or that" kind of stuff. If she were only a battleship, she'd be much stronger and be able to fight more efficiently so that her comrades wouldn't get so badly wounded, killed or sunk.
So I asked her why she was so obsessed with being a battleship. I expressed my observation that when we'd first received her at base, I had noticed her gazing at Hiei and Kirishima, our two battleships. Clearly, I wondered aloud, Kiyoshimo had an obsession or an overpowering admiration of the battleship girls.
Kiyoshimo explained to me that during the war, she had participated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, assisting the battleship Musashi. She'd watched Musashi get absolutely wrecked by American airplanes and torpedoes - turns out that according to Wikipedia, Musashi tanked around nineteen torpedoes and seventeen bombs before finally going down - and she'd rescued some of the survivors after Musashi's captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. She had been captivated by Musashi's astonishing display of resilience and power, and she saw Musashi's sinking, while tragic at the time, as a powerful symbol of unwavering resolution and honor, a heroic last stand against a hopeless situation. That's why she was so into battleships, that she was envious of their power and strength and wanted to be all that they could be, but because of her physical limitation as a mere destroyer, she couldn't hope to match their capabilities.
I asked her, if that's what she felt, what she thought of that failed capture mission from the day before. Kiyoshimo said that if she'd been one of the destroyers who was critically injured, then she'd be happier, because it would mean that one of the other destroyers would have taken her place as one of the lightly-damaged destroyers. She said that a hero couldn't come out of a battle with only light damage or unscathed, since that would seem like she didn't do anything at all.
"Wounds are a warship's pride, after all!" Kiyoshimo said.
But she added that she was sad because she knew she'd never reach the potential that battleships had. She'd forever be stuck as a destroyer, having the spirit of a battleship within the body of a destroyer, as she described it. There had even been times before in training that she'd pretend she was a battleship, doing things only battleships were able to do and getting punished for it, either physically in training or by her superiors back in the mainland.
She had a desire to do great things, heroic things, but the harsh realty of it all was that she wouldn't ever be able to do those great or heroic things. Good intentions, but stifled from conception.
I told Kiyoshimo that we were basically in the same position. I, too, had been trying my best to get acquainted with the girls of the fleet, do my best as a foreign officer, especially an American officer commanding Japanese warships of the World War II era, and that I was trying my hardest to do what I could for them. But because of my position as a mere officer and with no actual influence over the Japanese government or the members who ran it, there was only so much that I could do for my fleet to make sure that all the missions I sent them on won't end up like that abysmal capture mission. I, too, wanted to be a battleship, so to speak, the top-dog, not because of the power of the strength of the position but like Kiyoshimo, who wanted to be a battleship to be able to better fight and protect her comrades, but because I wanted to ensure the safety of my fleet.
Kiyoshimo tried to cheer the both of us up, saying that we mustn't let reality, no matter how harsh and impossible, stop us from becoming battleships. Even if everyone else, our peers, our superiors, the rest of the world says that we can't be what we want to be, there still lies the fact that we can't stop trying. She said that even if we knew ourselves that we'd never be what we wanted to be, there wasn't any harm in trying.
It sounds so fucking cliche.
It sounds like something straight out of a shounen manga.
It sounds so cringe-worthy.
But it's so fucking true.
Because what other choice do I or Kiyoshimo have? Give up and bend over so that the world can shove its sixteen-inch reality dick into our asses? No, of course we're not gonna do that. Because fuck the rest of the world - if we're not happy with the way things are, we're going to fucking change it.
I thanked Kiyoshimo for coming out to talk to me. I pledged to do everything I could to see if there was any way for destroyers, too, to achieve the kind of firepower that battleships could. Kiyoshimo was overjoyed and was thoroughly pleased with herself that she was able to raise my spirits in the end. I petted her head to see if she liked it, since some of the destroyers like Inazuma really liked head pats, and Kiyoshimo was no exception.
Maybe she's quirky, maybe she's overly optimistic for my tastes, but Kiyoshimo is an honest and straightforward girl. She's cheerful and hopeful in the face of a shitty situation and a harsh reality, and she's fully aware of this herself. This makes me kinda ashamed of myself, to be honest - even though I have the power or the potential to break my conceptual limitations, Kiyoshimo never will, yet I feel like she's better off than I am.
In other words, even though technically speaking she should be in a lower position than me, Kiyoshimo's something that I'll never become.
I wonder if I'm okay with that.