Thoughts Between Sets

It was another kamikaze. Again it looked like it was coming right at him straight out of the sun as he stood at his bridge station. His crew was firing everything at it that could shoot. Ack-ack, the mid air explosions from their anti-aircraft fire, pocked the sky around its target. The deafening din spiked into his skull. Everything he saw seemed to slow down as this one of Japan's Divine Wind came steady at him, as if standing at the center of the bull's eye.

There was nothing left he could do now that he had learned since becoming first an enlisted crewman turned officer, then captain of an LSM, an armor and marine carrying amphibious ship. This was the U.S gator navy, full-size ships which landed in the surf to deliver their deadly loads. This was the invasion of Okinawa after all, their first landing on Japanese soil---the enemy's homeland.

He could make out the Zero's markings now, crouching down into the false safety of the bridge's steel railing about to be gone forever.

The impact did not come. He could have reached up and touched the underside of the enemy aircraft as it passed over the bridge. He rose back up full of adrenaline and hope. The fighter cleared the ship's mast, circled tightly, and suddenly flopped down skimming across the ocean's swell crests shattering its prop and halting abruptly engulfed in spray, tail and fuselage settling back to the ocean surface. This enemy aviator had made a choice. The plane's canopy slid back as the pilot stood in his cockpit swinging one leg then the other out onto the plane's left wing. The aircraft would not float long in these seas.

Upon seeing this person who had risked an open ocean belly landing, when only seconds ago surely could have killed him and rained hell on his ship and its company, he felt a strange kinship despite the death and mayhem all around them both. He felt a responsibility to now help him. This after his Pearl Harbor, his Guadalcanal, his Saipan, his Iwo Jima, and on and on---all the young faces lost, some his friends, all the potential gone forever.

He ordered a rescue boat over the side to pick up this man who, in a moment had killed them all, and then given them back their lives. Around them still the chaos as the kamikazes screamed down and the ack-ack cracked the sky.

When they picked him up, he begged to see the ship's captain, this diminutive man-boy who did not look a warrior at all, but instead a schoolroom teacher. When brought to the bridge, he fell at the captain's feet, wrapped his arms around the captain's lower legs and, crying through tears of joy, thanked him in perfect English for saving his life.

The U.S. Navy captain with the Tidewater Virginia dialect and 9th grade education, was stunned to hear what this desperate Japanese aviator said next in clear American English, better English than himself, he thought.

He was in college at Harvard before the war and was called home to Japan as the war was about to begin. Things were beyond desperate in his country now. He had been given enough flight training to take off and fly the plane and only enough fuel to reach the U.S. Fleet off Okinawa. He had not wanted to die like this and especially for what his country had now become.

I squinted out through the early morning sun to the ground swell coming steadily at me only, it seemed, and thought about the day when I was fourteen, my Dad told me his story. He was the ship's captain that day, 26 years-old, about to turn twenty-seven, at the height of his young man's immortality. His enemy chose to live so my Father lived, so I live, and so do my children. It took a stranger to him from the other side of this world---one man's fear-filled decision balanced on a pin point to change so much. I'll never know him, but for his choice that day, I am grateful. Thankful for my life, I turned and paddled into the next wave.