A/N:

Just a little real talk here, not too much: as some of you may already know, I frequently lurk image board sites, mainly Danbooru, for Kantai fanart and webcomics. With the release of Kashima and more recently Iowa, I see that lots of people have been pretty hype about these two for quite some time, but I have to say I personally don't understand said hype. For some reason, those two just don't appeal to me, other than the fact that Iowa herself is American, and Kadokawa is now moving to include ship girls of differing nationalities.

Speaking of Iowa, here's a little story about her. Be warned, in my effort to make Iowa sound genuinely American in the 40's, the dialogue might come off as offensive. One of the critiques of a few of my more well-known stories of this collection, "I Know Why the Caged Crane Sings", was that the narrator used too much modern profanity to come off as genuinely WW-II-ish, so this is an attempt to rectify that. This story is not meant to be derogatory towards anyone; I'm just trying to make this little story sound as realistic as possible, but apologies in advance if there is any offense taken.

-Akyuu no Joshu

It's December 7, 1945. Four years since the Japs hit us.

I remember when I was under construction. The construction team, especially the head developers, were hard pressed to get me completed as soon as possible. I'm not too sure when it was that I exactly gained consciousness. See, ship gals like me, we aren't born. We look human, act human...but we were all built from some kind of...laboratory, or some other fancy word that scientists like to use. But I spent my time in construction inside of a glass chamber somewhere, unable to see, unable to move. But my hearing had been developed first, so I was able to hear. I think my construction team didn't realize that I could do so, because all I heard, everything I heard was about the war.

About how we were losing the war.

Ship gals aren't human. If there was anyone who tried to argue for that, for the fact that we were human, I'd laugh him off to the next state over. Saying ship gals are like human beings is like saying gophers and prairie dogs are the same. It's absurd, is what it is. There might be a whole lot of biological explanations that might prove that there a lot connections that we share, but in the end, in my opinion, the reason why I can't be called a human is because I don't die when I get shot by a bullet in the head. I've seen a lot of good men die out there in the field. North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, England...and now Hawaii, San Francisco, Los Angeles...

...now Des Moines.

By the time I was constructed and commissioned, I already knew the state of the war; my admirals and field commanders didn't have to drill it into my head. Thanks to the conversations of my construction crew and the lead developers and scientists in charge of it, I was mentally already equipped to deal with the situation at hand, when I first stepped out to sea on August 27th, 1942. London was nearly wiped off the map, and the rest of England was on the brink. North Africa was completely under the control of the Nazis and the Italians, and the Nazis themselves controlled all of continental Europe. Back then, at least the Ruskies were still powerful enough to stop the Nazis from marching right through their front door. My first task was to join the rest of the American naval personnel barely holding the line on the beachheads of southern Britain; my objective was to prevent the Nazis from gaining a foothold there. At the time, I didn't even know that the Japs had crushed our fleet at Midway with their carriers, and how they were steaming right for us with the Hawaiian islands as their first priority.

It's never a good feeling to enter the fight thinking you've already lost. Because then, you forget about what you're really fighting for. From what I hear from the grizzled veterans who have been fighting for all this time because God's been one cruel sonuvabitch, we entered the war thinking we were fighting to keep the evil Nazis and the evil Japs at bay. We were fighting to keep the world a safe place and keep it free from oppression and aggressive imperialism. We were fighting because we thought we were the good guys.

We still are the good guys. I still believe in that, with all of my heart. The only problem is that we've all seemed to forget that.

Because now, those of us who're still left to fight - those of us who still can fight - we're not fighting for a noble or higher cause anymore. We're not fighting to keep the world a safe place from the evil bad guys. We're fighting to stay alive. We're fighting because if we don't fight, we'll all die. We're fighting because we don't have a goddamn choice. We've stopped going into the fight thinking there might still be a chance we'd win. We just hope we don't lose too many to the point where we can't fight the next day when we fight now.

I was toted as America's greatest hope. The latter half of 1942 was the point of no return in the war. The Allies, as we were called, were beginning to lose traction, while the Axis, our enemies, were finally beginning to break through and turn the tide. I was the so-called "secret weapon" at the time of my launching. I was the one who would help the other gals in the fleet fend off the Germans from the shores of London and help the British break out and begin a possible counterattack into Germany. Little did we know they would send their own fleet, freshly transferred from the Russian front, to finish their campaign against England. After we lost London, the feelings of hope and anticipation that surrounded my arrival were already exhausted. Soldiers, even the other gals - after England went dark and we evacuated what remained of the Royal Forces, the Royal Fleet, and the British Royal Family out of the country, their faces changed from looks of relief to looks of disappointment and hatred. They genuinely believed in me, the hope that I had the power to put the chips of the war onto our side of the betting table after two years' worth of defeat and retreats. I believed in myself, too, but...somehow, I don't think one battleship by herself could have held off a German fleet that outnumbered us three to one, no matter how powerful I was. Their faces stayed the same for about a year before they started returning to normal.

England was my first campaign, and it ended in a total tactical failure and loss. By the summer of 1943, Great Britain was completely and firmly under Nazi control. Our next campaign was North Africa - back then, we had reports coming in that suggested that the Axis forces in North Africa were beginning to grow lax, so we decided to try our hand at breaking through their defenses in a three-pronged assault. I led the operation against Casablanca with the help of a few of the Royal Gals and ended up succeeding with heavy losses, but the other two parts of the assault failed and had to retreat. Within weeks, our weak hold on the town was broken when the German fleet arrived. It was that loss of Casablanca that created the constant joke that the rest of our military would make about the Navy. "When the German gals come a-firin', the showgals go a-runnin'". For about another two months, the gals and I had to endure that.

My sister, New Jersey, who had been deployed just barely in time to join me in the Casablanca operations, broke first. She punched General Eisenhower's nose in when he made a comment about how "the showgals of the Navy don't seem to be gettin' anything done". Consequently, she got scrapped, about three weeks after she'd first been deployed. Apparently there's no room for mutiny in the Navy.

By the end of 1943, the Ruskies went dark. All communications were suddenly cut, and for about a full year after that, we had no idea what the Ruskies were up to, what was happening to them. All we knew was that they had suddenly given up the eastern front, allowing the Nazis to march straight into Stalingrad for free and take it with ease. With that, it was believed Europe was beyond saving. With the Ruskies, there might've still been a chance. Without them, don't even think about it. It was by this point that we were officially all alone. It was North America against the world, for soon after Russia went dark, Mexico entered the war on the side of the Axis. The British Royal Family, operating temporarily out of Canada, ensured that Canada wouldn't turn against us too, but that was only a small consolation, because our forces in Hawaii, those magnificent bastards, they managed to keep the hands of the Japs off those islands for all that time until then. Oklahoma, West Virginia, California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Maryland, and everyone else there - their last Morse code message was "Hawaii will never be the Japs' as long as we're still afloat". Seeing that Hawaii was then used as the Japs' forward base for their campaign against the West Coast, I think it's safe to say we knew what happened to them.

Ever since 1944, we had been fighting to stop the Japs from getting a foothold on the West Coast. Some Jap detachments even tried coming up from the south through Mexico, with the help of the Mexican army, but our codebreakers managed to decode their radio transmissions just in time for us to figure out their plans down there, and thankfully they never tried that tactic ever again. But we were fighting a losing fight, and we all knew it. With our navy divided, half on the West Coast and half on the East coast, we could not defend either coast and were only delaying the inevitable. The brassheads were too patriotic; the last time we had ever conceded ground to a foreign country was to England, back in the war of 1812. They were proud, too proud. They thought by God's grace and might we could hold both fronts, so help us God. We couldn't. When it was clear that the Japs, with their back-to-back victories in San Francisco and Los Angeles, our two biggest cities on the West Coast, would consolidate their gains and exert control over the coast, we were pulled out and assigned to the East Coast instead so that we wouldn't end up losing both coasts.

Then, in earlier this year, in April, I was personally escorting President Roosevelt at the Little White House, his own personal little retreat where he once came for treatment for his polio. I had met the President for the first time on the day of my launching in 1942. Then, I didn't think so much of him. I certainly remember not feeling all too impressed. But when I was pulled from the front lines to help escort the President for a few days as he resided in his retreat home to rest, we became friends, as good as we could have become with only a few days. I came to learn that he was not unlike me; a man charged with the responsibility of keeping his nation safe from the forces of evil foreign powers and was doing everything he could to do just that, but because we were starting to become invaded, the rest of the country was overlooking all of his work and tarnishing his name. There was even talk of impeaching him because he was not, according to popular belief of the country, doing his job right. The nation didn't need an incompetent president who couldn't even keep the Japs and the Jerries at bay. He said that he knew what I was going through; he'd been reading the reports from the Navy and had a few of his aides report to him about the situation of us ship gals.

"We need to keep standing strong in the face of adversity," he told me. "So that one day, you can visit the state you've been named for, and I can give another one of my Fireside Chats. I miss those, Iowa. Maybe one day in the future I can have you beside me for one of them. You know, like a guest. I hear the radio shows these days are having special guests."

That was the last thing he ever said to me, because two hours later, he was dead. The doctors' autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a cerebral hemorrhage, but I was immediately accused of assassinating the president, because I was the only one who was at the Little White House at the time of his death. The country, which had been so adamant about getting Roosevelt off the presidency, now clamored for a scapegoat, and the Navy found one in me to appease them. Without even a court martial, I was instantly put on death row. Every day for about two weeks following my imprisonment, the guards threw the daily newspapers into my holding cell, and each of them was a different variation on the same theme of the whore of a showgal who swindled the president to death. For eight months, I was kept in solitary confinement somewhere, awaiting my eventual scrapping. Unfortunately, it never came.

Exactly twenty hours ago, I was released from death row. Without my presence and power, our forces on the western front could not hold the tide of the Japs back, with their own entire fleet of ship gals blazing trails across the land wherever they tread, and during my eight months of imprisonment, they made it all the way to my own home state of Iowa. Des Moines is the last stronghold of the American Midwest. If we lose Des Moines, we lose Iowa, and we lose the Midwest. And if we lose the Midwest, the Great Lakes will be vulnerable, and Canada will be at stake.

I've been ordered to lead the defense against the Japs at Des Moines. I have four battalions of four thousand men each, and they've already turned the city into the trenches of the previous war, like it's prairie season all over again. The Navy has denied my requests to bring in any of the gals because they're too busy dying to the Jerries trying to take New York City. I'm on my own, and in three hours, according to our codebreakers, the Japs'll attack the city.

This wasn't exactly how I imagined seeing my home state would go, but at least I've been able to see it at all. It's really all that I could ask as a ship gal. I'm going to fight and die right here in my own home state, in the capital city. Since I know that this battle is hopeless, and that the outcome has already been decided, being able to die here is truly a wish granted by God.

Even a whore of a showgal like me can die a patriot. They'll never take that freedom away from me.

And when I die, I can hope that I can be constructed again, somewhere else. A place where the war could've turned out better for all of us...