“What?” I said, matching her whisper.
“Friend,” she said, even softer, and then removed her hand.
FORT RICHARDSON HID ITS BIGGEST SECRET FROM VIEW in a flimsy, leaking, large Quonset hut, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with rusting razor wire. A single MP was stationed at the gate to the mini-compound, right next to a little wooden placard that read “ 520” and nothing else.
I didn't have time to take in much more the first morning I reported for duty. Before I could finish studying the outside, the MP on duty told me to move along. I almost did, but instead, gave my name, told him my purpose, and waited while he gave me a long, exaggerated, head-to-toe inspection. Clearly, Gurley had handpicked him. He asked me to repeat my name. I did; he unlocked the gate, nodded me in, and then locked it behind me.
I had to admit: Gurley was doing a good job of intimidating me, and, I assumed, the rest of the base. Sure, everyone said they had top secret jobs, but how many worked in an outsized Quonset hut protected by fencing, razor wire, and a twenty-four-hour sentry?
A yellow bulb above a doorway directly before me seemed to indicate the building's entrance; the door itself had a small window that was blacked out. Inside, the darkness was almost total. I moved slowly; after our initial meeting in the bar, I was sure of an ambush. The door swung shut. I put up my hands to fend off the attack, but instead it came from below-a steel pipe of sorts to my shins. I staggered, cursed, and fell into a crouch, hands futilely-pathetically-around my head. “Stop!” I shouted, although that is probably me revising: I wailed.
No response. No second blow. At the far end of the Quonset hut, a door opened and light spilled out. I could now sense a vast open space. At the end of it, where the light was, an office had been carved out. The rest of the floor was devoted to all manner of war matériel, much of it unrecognizable. Giant tarps hung in odd profusion from the ceiling. Looking down, I could see that it had been some sort of a metal fitting, protruding from a cage the size of four or five milk crates, that had attacked me.
“Belk!” Gurley shouted from the office doorway. I lifted a cautious hand. “Always doing things the hard way, aren't you? That's the back door. The front door is over here.” As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see a door near the office at the far end of the building. But it was still too dark to see how I was supposed to get from where I was to where he was, so I started back toward the entrance I'd just come through, thinking that I'd walk around the outside. But before I'd made the door, Gurley threw some switch that illuminated the entire building. “It's an easier walk with the lights on,” he called, and then stepped back into his office.
I could see, but I couldn't move.
Gurley's Quonset hut looked like the official Army Air Corps circus tent. Ropes and tackle were everywhere. Strange metal-crates, for lack of a better word-lined the walls. Piles of sandbags appeared at regular intervals. And those tarps I'd seen-with the light, I could tell they were much more than that: great fabric teardrops, upended (or balloons, once I'd thought about it), all of them limply hung from on high.
GURLEY'S OFFICE WAS an even stranger sight. Tyrannically neat, of course. Everything was gunmetal gray-the desk, the lamps, the filing cabinet, and a locker against the wall. Even the walls themselves were covered in gray metal paneling. My first impression was that the army had stuffed Gurley into a giant footlocker. I later decided that the metal fixtures and smooth walls resembled something else: I had picked my way into a bomb.
Along the back wall, a series of clocks, each labeled with a Roman numeral-up to VII, I believe. But much more interesting was the map below the clocks. It stretched across the entire rear of the office. It was a map, mostly of the North Pacific-except that it extended all the way south to Hawaii, and as far east as Michigan -and it was the only untidy thing in the room. Bright pushpins spread across the map's rinsed-out blue, brown, and green like a virulent disease, appearing singly and in clumps.
“Fifty,” Gurley said.
“Looks like more than that, sir,” I said, still staring at the map. The truth was, it would have been impossible to count the pins. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. At first I took them to be army bases, but dismissed that idea. Then I decided that Gurley had marked the map wherever he'd struck a man. White for where he'd wounded them, red for where he had killed them. There was a cluster of red just outside Anchorage.
“Fifty men,” he said. Maybe I was right.
“What I am about tell you, no more than fifty men in the country now know.” I started to believe him, but wondered, as he took a deep, melodramatic breath, if Gurley had not delivered this line dozens of times before. I could see him savoring the moment; he had that slight suggestion of a smile I now know steals across some actors' faces before a favorite speech. If I were mapping my own path in the war, I would stick a pin right there to mark that moment, in that office, in the light of that smile, because that's when I should have seen how helpless Gurley really was. It was as though he thought of the theaters of war as theaters, and that his role in the war was exactly that, a role.
He had paused after his “Fifty men” preamble, and now leaned forward to deliver the coveted secret. “The Japs,” he intoned, “have reached North America.”
I sat back: I think I was supposed to be frightened, but instead, I was confused. “The Aleutians, you mean?” A lot more than fifty people knew about that debacle.
Kiska and Attu, two brutally wet and cold islands at the end of the Aleutian chain, had been occupied by Japanese troops in 1943. The islands were of little strategic value, except in the sense that Roosevelt was enraged that the Japanese were occupying American soil. The U.S. had stumbled in its initial response; America 's Army, Navy, and Air Corps all fought each other for a while before turning their attention to the Japanese. Then the weather set in. Then the Japanese dug in. Three thousand Japanese on Attu held off an American force triple their size for days. The Japanese eventually lost, but they fought to the last man, or just about. Just twenty-eight of the three thousand Japanese soldiers on Attu survived to be taken prisoner. Most of the patients in their field hospital committed suicide. Those who couldn't, or wouldn't, were killed by their doctor before he killed himself.
After the bitter slog on Attu, the U.S. brought in even more forces for the assault on Kiska, where the main Japanese garrison was located. Tens of thousands of Americans stormed ashore, guns blazing, only to discover that the Japanese had abandoned Kiska two weeks before. More than one hundred U.S. soldiers still died, all from friendly fire.
So, if the Japanese had returned-well, I couldn't speak. This is why the colonel back in California had laughed when he heard I was being taken to Alaska. The Aleutians! It was where the world ended, careers ended, lives ended. Suicides were rampant. So were courts-martial. GIs sent there weren't even told of the destination until they were safely aboard ship and through the Golden Gate, a practice Gurley himself surely approved of.
“The Aleutians?” he said. “Good God, Belk. This means you're literate-you do read, and read the papers, to boot-” He feigned awe, and then resumed. “But no. Hell no. I'm not talking about the Aleutians -the islands or the swarthy Lilliputians who populate them. I'm talking about the fucking homefront, my brother-in-arms. The watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.” He started tapping the map. “ Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana.” His eyes grew wider, his voice deeper. He was a prophet. A leader. The Wizard of Oz.
I should clarify: recognizing his theatricality wouldn't have immunized me against it. I think I'd have to be as unconscious as Ronnie here to have resisted Gurley's performance. But I wasn't unconscious, I was alive, and I shivered-
the enemy is here! Japs all around!
-and you know what? It was wonderful. It was wonderful the same way it's wonderful to flinch at some frightening point in a book or a movie; there's a certain dizzy pleasure that comes with knowing you've succumbed, you've been duped.
And, back then, it was a lot more than that: it was wonderful to know the war was real. You had to be young to think this; the country had to be younger, too. But that's the way it was with kids like me: it was wonderful to know that this enemy we'd read so much about was really out there, that I would finally get to fight, and that Gurley would somehow wave a magic wand, take me through a back door, and usher me right into the middle of all of it.
All of it: Japanese soldiers, hiding in trees, leaping out of mailboxes late at night. Bombs in the sky. Balloons in the clouds. A giant red rising sun on a white field, strung between the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. But gradually, as Gurley rambled on, talking more to himself now than to me, my excitement began to give way to a kind of panic.
What he was talking about was preposterous. Evidence of Japanese activity in a dozen states or more? And nobody other than fifty men (fifty-one now?) knew about it? I looked around the office; I looked at Gurley as he stared at the map with red-rimmed eyes. I wondered if fifty men now knew what
I
thought I knew: here, in this lonely Alaskan outpost, Captain Thomas Gurley U.S. Army Air Corps, had gone mad.
And he'd dreamed himself up a new front line in the process. Even as a work of insanity, it was impressive: his line stretched clear across North America-through Canada and into Michigan. He rattled on, and I marveled at the performance, and at the magnitude of the fiction. I began to wonder which would come first: my transfer away from Anchorage, or Gurley's? Who would assume his post, and its attendant, if imaginary, duties?
What a world this was, wartime Alaska. Half-naked palm readers, rampaging drunken sailors, lunatic captains raving in darkened Quonset huts, and me. If I had been older, I would have been too scared to speak.
But I was young, stupid, and, once the panic subsided, bemused, so what I finally said was “Incredible.”
Gurley frowned, furious. I was not as good an actor as he. “Not enough for you,” he said.
“No, no, it's-incredible. You've-you've come up with quite a, a map.” I tried furrowing my brow, but it was no use-I don't even think I knew what the
word furrowing
meant back then.
Gurley would have known, though, and he knew I was mocking him. He scrambled across the desk, right over the top, growling and sputtering.
For a minute, I feared (even hoped) that I had provoked the inevitable and total breakdown. I calculated whether I could get to the door before him and raise the alarm with the MPs. I decided to jump clear. He jumped after me and then fell horribly short. I took a moment to take in the scene: he was sprawled at my feet, while the better part of his left leg was separated from him, dangling off the desk.
He extended a hand, and I hesitated, unsure what horror had just happened and what horror would now follow.
“You didn't hear a word I said, did you, you sanctimonious shit?” he hissed. He closed his eyes for a second; I could see the mask fall, instantly. But then his eyes opened, the mask was back, and it had all happened too quickly for me to see what had been revealed. He extended a hand to me, and I automatically hauled him up. He teetered back to the desk and leaned on it. On the floor behind him lay two red pins that had fallen from the map.
Gurley recovered his artificial leg and regarded it for a second. “Maybe I should just beat you with this instead of going through it all again.” I stared at the leg, then at Gurley. What part of him would fly apart next? “Here's the short version: the Japs are bombing North America. Believe the map, or believe this, you insolent fuck.” He hiked up the pant leg that was missing a leg below the knee and revealed a stump that looked more rock than human-angry purple and brown, mottled with scabs. He spent a moment trying to get the leg back on, and then gave up, letting it clatter to the floor. He hobbled around to the back of the desk and fell into his chair.
I slowly bent down and picked up the leg. It was heavier than I imagined, and it took two hands to place it on the desk with any care.
“Exhibit A,” he said, nodding to the map. “The past.” He dragged his leg back across the desk. “Exhibit B, the interminable present.” Then he took out a small key, unlocked a desk drawer, and drew out a small, leather-bound book, about the size of a priest's breviary. “Exhibit C,” he said, brightening again. “The future.” He looked at the book for a full minute. He didn't open it. Then he looked at me.
“Let's start at the beginning,” he said, and with that, began to recount the history-his history-of the balloon program to date. The first, mysterious explosions and fires. The eventual discovery of an intact balloon. The determination of the balloon's origin. The recovery of ever-growing numbers of balloon shrouds and payloads, evidence of which sat just outside the office.
“And the most recent chapter, August 1944, wherein a certain bomb disposal sergeant looks on, dumbstruck, while a balloon sets fire to a golden hillside. Said fire roasts alive several men.” He sat back. “Sergeant? Am I missing anything?”
“Sir?” I asked, but even as the word was coming out of my mouth, my mind was finally making the connection. It seems odd to me now that it took that long, but of course, the balloons-as patent an impossibility as there ever was-were still new to me then.
I almost leapt from my chair: “The weather balloon! Fort Cronkhite! Sir, I-”
“Failed in your first encounter?” Gurley suggested, somehow managing a face that was half sneer, half sympathy. That wasn't what I was going to say-I had no idea what I was going to say-but his words had all the effect of his having reached over and pulled the pin from a grenade I hadn't known I was carrying.
What a cruel thing to put on a child-sure, I was a young man, a soldier in uniform, but I had the wild conscience and boundless shame of a Catholic kid, one raised by nuns, no less-and how sinister of Gurley to attempt to make the death of those soldiers on the hill my legacy, my burden.
Hours, days later, when I thought about it, I realized his gambit was only that; I knew nothing about the balloons that day in California. And if I had? I was too far away to do anything. But it didn't matter. Gurley knew what he was doing. He'd planted a seed, an irritant, deep inside me that I could smother with excuses but would still know was always there. The fact was, I had known-felt-that something was wrong, that it wasn't a weather balloon. The fact was, I'd gone running toward it. The fact was, I hadn't made it there in time.