The Big Switch

Chapter 25

Things weren’t going well for the Soviet Union. The news broadcasts from Moscow did their best to disguise that, and their best was surprisingly good. Had Anastas Mouradian not been a frontline fighter, he never would have realized how rotten things looked.

But he was, and he did. It wasn’t even that the front kept moving east. The USSR was an enormous place. Trading space for time was an old Russian strategy, and now a new Soviet one. The way the Red Army and Red Air Force were making the trade, though…

Stas heard much more about all the Devil’s relations than he wanted to. Bad language about them filled the military frequencies. Among Russians, that was a sure-fire sign things were badly buggered up. And generals and colonels kept getting replaced, one after another. Nobody said anything about what happened to the men who were relieved. Mouradian could draw his own pictures. They weren’t pretty, which didn’t mean they weren’t true.

The replacements came in and gave enthusiastic orders. The Germans and the allies they’d seduced into campaigning against Socialism kept gaining ground regardless. In weeks or days or sometimes hours, the enthusiastic replacements got replaced themselves. Some of them probably didn’t even know why they went into the gulags, which didn’t stop them from going.

There were times-there were quite a few times, in fact-when Mouradian was glad to be only a lowly lieutenant. All he had to do was follow orders from above. As long as he did that, he was safe-well, as safe as any Soviet frontline fighter. He just had to worry about the Nazis and their allies. He didn’t have to worry that the NKVD would blame him for the next unauthorized retreat.

Josef Stalin spoke on the radio, something he seldom did. “Workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, you must not take one step farther back,” he declared. His Georgian accent was thicker than Mouradian’s Armenian intonations. Russians threw everybody from the Caucasus into the same pile. People from the Caucasus knew better. Georgia and Armenia bordered each other, but so what? Their peoples were as different as Magyars and Czechs. To them, it was obvious. To Russians… But what did Russians know? Georgians and Armenians were both dark, and both used peculiar alphabets nobody else could read. If that didn’t make them brothers… you weren’t a Russian.

“We must hold the enemy in place. The country is in danger,” Stalin went on. “Every wrecker and traitor we capture must and shall face the most severe punishment.”

Around Mouradian, heads in the squadron ready room solemnly bobbed up and down. Stas made himself nod, too, so as not to seem out of place. Anyone who paid attention to what he read and heard followed more than the mere words blaring out of the radio speaker. The most severe punishment was a government euphemism for execution, commonly by bullet in the back of the neck. And, by every wrecker and traitor, Stalin meant everyone who disagreed with him, even in the slightest or most trivial way. The show trials and purges before the war proved that.

“We shall fight for the Rodina! We shall fight for holy mother Russia!” Stalin declared. “Alexander beat Napoleon! Peter the Great beat the Swedes! We beat the Teutonic Knights-filthy, plundering Germans-when they invaded us! And our cause, the Russian cause, is just again! We will win again!”

Several of the flyers in the ready room banged their hands together and burst into cheers. The ones who did were Russians to a man.

As for Mouradian, he had to fight the impulse to dig a finger into his ear and see if the canal was clogged with wax. Stalin had mentioned the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union in his speech. He’d mentioned them, yes-and then he’d proceeded to forget all about them. Instead, he’d used as many symbols from Russian history as he could find. Not Soviet history-Russian. Stas had never dreamt he would hear a Soviet leader talk about holy mother Russia.

That Stalin himself was no more Russian than a Kazakh or an Uzbek obviously bothered the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR not at all. Holy mother Russia didn’t mean much to Stas Mouradian. That wouldn’t bother Stalin, either. Armenia was only a little place, jammed into the bottom left-hand corner of most maps. The vast expanse of Russia was the map.

Martial music thundered out of the radio. It wasn’t martial music Stas had heard before, which meant exactly nothing. Stalin had factories from here to Khabarovsk cranking out planes and tanks and guns and uniforms as fast as they could. He had swarms of collective farms cranking out food as fast as they could (and if he had to starve millions of people to force more millions to labor on those farms, he’d proved he would do that without batting an eye). Of course he would have conservatories full of composers cranking out martial music as fast as they could. If the composers didn’t feel like serving the Soviet Union that way, what would they do then? They’d start de composing, that was what.

And the crazy thing was, the martial music worked. By the time the piece finished, Mouradian wanted to belt somebody in the chops-by choice, somebody in a field-gray uniform and a coal-scuttle helmet. He understood that he was being manipulated. Understanding it and being able to stop it were as different as tea and tobacco.

The squadron CO was, not surprisingly, a Russian. The Soviet Union held as many Russians as all its other peoples put together. And the USSR had sprung up like a flower fertilized by the Russian Empire’s corpse (some would say, like a vulture feeding on the Russian Empire’s corpse, but not-usually-Mouradian). It was no surprise that Russians still ran so much of the USSR. Depressing, sometimes, but no surprise.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky waited till the last strains of the brand-new martial composition had faded away. Then he stood up and said, “You all heard Comrade Stalin’s brilliant speech. He promised the Soviet people victory. We are going to deliver that victory, Comrades. We are going to use our wonderful new airplanes-the finest products of Soviet science and engineering-to show the Fascist hyenas and their plutocratic lackeys hell on earth. Less than the sons of bitches deserve, too.”

As the flyers had nodded for Stalin, so they nodded for the squadron leader. Anastas Mouradian made sure he wasn’t behindhand there. All the same, he got the feeling Tomashevsky hadn’t listened to the General Secretary so closely as he might have. Tomashevsky talked about the Soviet people, about Soviet science and engineering. That had been the Party line for a long time. By the way Stalin talked today, though, the line was changing. Stalin talked about Tsar Alexander and Peter the Great, about Russian victories over invaders from the west.

Stas had heard rumors that people in the northwestern Ukraine were welcoming the Germans and their allies as liberators. He didn’t know if the whispers were true. But anyone who repeated a story like that took his life in his hands. Stas did know the Ukrainians had little reason to love Stalin or the Soviet government, not after the way they were starved by hecatombs during collectivization. After that, even the Nazis might look good by comparison.

“Today, we fly against Velikye Luki,” the squadron commander continued. “The Poles and the French are staging through there, building up for an attack farther east. Our mission is to strike the train station and the railroad yards.” He paused, then asked, “Questions?”

“What are the German defenses like, Comrade Colonel?” Mouradian said. Even if the Poles and French were coming through Velikye Luki, the fighters above the place and the antiaircraft guns inside would be operated by Germans. He was as sure of that as made no difference.

Tomashevsky only shrugged. “It does not matter. We are to strike the city regardless.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Mouradian replied. Maybe the squadron commander had no idea what was waiting for them. Or maybe the Germans were loaded for bear. Before long, everybody would find out which.

Even if the Luftwaffe had Bf-109s patrolling over Velikye Luki, Stas knew he might get away anyhow in a Pe-2. He wondered how Sergei Yaroslavsky and the Chimp were doing in that ancient SB-2. Pretty soon, with any luck at all, they’d start flying the more modern bomber, too.

After his bold question, the mission turned out to be… a mission. Bf-109s did fly above occupied Velikye Luki, but not in swarms. There was a lot of ground fire, but there wasn’t a lot of ground fire. He watched in dismay as one bomber in the formation fell out of the sky and cometed groundward trailing flame and smoke. A couple of shell fragments clanged against his plane’s aluminum skin, but they did no damage he could find.

At Ivan Kulkaanen’s command, Sergeant Mechnikov let the bombs fall free. Stas could only hope they landed on the target or close to it. Bombing from 6,000 meters was not an exact science. You aimed them as best you could, you dropped them, and you got the hell out of there. Stas had sat in Kulkaanen’s seat. He knew how hard the job was. Once you landed, you made the after-action report sound good. That was also part of the job. Yes, another mission, all right. And how many more still to come?

Harbin held enough Japanese settlers to keep a daily newspaper in business. Copies came down to Pingfan, sometimes on the day they were printed, sometimes the day after. The local rag would never run the Yomiuri Shinbun out of business, but Hideki Fujita read it avidly just the same. Along with the radio, it helped remind him that there was a world beyond Shiro Ishii’s bacteriological-warfare camp.

He needed the reminder, too. When you dealt with maruta every day, when you sent them into the secret center compound and they never came out again, you really did start thinking of them as logs. The other choice was remembering that they were human beings, even if they were Russians or Chinese. Considering the kinds of things that happened to them in there (Fujita neither knew nor wanted to know the details: the broad outlines were more than bad enough), they would have been better off if they were made of wood.

The local paper was full of a rising tide of abuse aimed at the United States. Whoever wrote the stories roared out hatred against the country across the Pacific for refusing to sell Japan any more of the raw materials she needed. Roosevelt thinks he can bring us to our knees through economic warfare, an editorial declared. He has yet to learn that the Empire of Japan goes to its knees before no man and no nation. He has yet to learn this important fact, but we Japanese stand ready to teach him the lesson.

Shinjiro Hayashi read the newspaper, too. He was less enthusiastic about what he found in it than Fujita was. “Are you ready to fight another war so soon, Sergeant- san?” he asked. “We just patched up a peace with Russia, and the war with China goes on and on.”

“War with the United States isn’t our worry,” Fujita answered. “The sailors will carry the load on that one.”

“Some of it, sure, but not all of it,” Hayashi said. “The Philippines sit just south of the Home Islands, and who runs them? The Americans, that’s who. If war breaks out, we’ll have to take them away from the USA. Otherwise, they’re a perfect base for enemy ships and planes. And it won’t be the sailors who do most of the fighting down there. It’ll be bowlegged bastards like us.”

Fujita laughed. Neither he nor Hayashi was bowlegged, but he knew what the senior private meant. The Navy was the aristocratic service. The Army took peasants and turned them into men. It had done just that with Fujita. It had turned Hayashi into a man, too, even if he’d put on more airs than peasants before conscription-and some sergeants’ hard hands-knocked them out of him.

“All right. Fine. That’s the Philippines,” Fujita said. “But it will still mostly be the Navy’s war.”

“I suppose so, Sergeant- san,” Hayashi said, by which he meant he supposed no such thing but wasn’t stupid enough to come right out and tell Fujita he was wrong. “But if a fight like that starts, it won’t be a halfway affair. French Indochina, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies with oil and rubber and tin… When you grab, you should grab with both hands.”

“If you grab too much, your hands fill up and you trip over your own feet,” Fujita responded. “There’s such a thing as getting greedy, you know.”

“I suppose so,” Hayashi said again. “But sometimes you only get the one chance. If you don’t take hold of it while it’s there, you may never see it again. It’s like a chance with a pretty girl, neh?”

“You always grab with both hands then!” Fujita made as if to cup breasts in his callused palms. Both soldiers barked harsh male laughter.

A couple of days later, Lieutenant Ozawa summoned Fujita to his tent. He had a little coal stove in there for warmth, but it was fighting out of its weight against winter in Manchukuo. “I need your squad to take care of something for me,” the officer said.

“Yes, sir!” Fujita said, and saluted. He had no idea what Ozawa would tell him to do. That hardly mattered. Whatever it was, he and his men would take a whack at it. If the lieutenant wanted him to bring back a piece of rock from the moon, he wouldn’t fail through lack of effort.

But Ozawa had nothing so ridiculous in mind. “Take as many Russian and Chinese maruta as you need,” he said. “Build a new prisoner compound. Site it at least fifty meters away from any others. Make it of a size to hold, oh, about a thousand men.”

“Yes, sir!” Fujita repeated. For good measure, he saluted again, too. This was something he knew how to handle. “How soon do you need it ready?”

“Three weeks should be plenty of time,” the lieutenant answered.

Fujita considered. “That’ll be a little tight, sir, for running up all the barracks halls and everything. The weather won’t help us any.” If he didn’t get the job done on time, he wanted his excuses lined up in advance.

“You take care of it,” Ozawa said. “You don’t want me to assign the work to someone else, do you?”

Part of Fujita wanted just that. But if he admitted it, he wouldn’t get any other interesting work as long as he stayed at Pingfan. Not interesting in the good sense of the word, anyhow. They might give him things no one else wanted to do or was able to do, and then blame him when he had trouble. That wouldn’t be good. And so, with no hesitation the officer would notice, he replied, “No, sir.”

“All right, then. Three weeks. See to it,” Ozawa said. “Dismissed.”

Fujita didn’t even mutter under his breath till he left the tent and the lieutenant couldn’t hear him any more. You didn’t want to give the jerks who ordered you around any kind of handle to let them screw you even harder. They already had enough advantage on account of their rank.

He told Senior Private Hayashi about the new assignment and directed him to gather up the labor they’d need to construct a new compound. Hayashi might have had his own opinion about people whose rank let them give orders. If he did, he also had the sense not to put it on display.

Laying out the barbed-wire perimeter around the new compound was easy. Any maruta could handle it, because it needed no skill. But the barracks required people who could use hammer and saw, chisel and plane. The prisoners clamored for the work, because they knew they’d get fed a little better while they were doing it. They also wouldn’t have to go into the secret inner facility while they were working. Hayashi efficiently weeded out the ones who were only pretending to be carpenters. He and the other Japanese soldiers beat up some of them to teach them not to play stupid games with their betters.

Chinese and Russians, forced to work together, screamed and gestured at one another, trying to communicate without a common language. Hayashi knew a little Chinese; no one in Fujita’s squad spoke Russian. He had drawings to show what he required. Those pictures were worth an untold number of words. The barracks rose on schedule.

The next interesting question was, who would live in the new compound? When new shipments of Chinese came to Pingfan, they got dumped in with their countrymen. Those barracks grew insanely crowded? So what? The same had been true of the Russians, though no new Red Army men were coming in now that peace with the Soviet Union had been arranged.

Didn’t a new compound argue for a new kind of prisoner? So it seemed to Fujita. Lieutenant Ozawa either didn’t know or didn’t want to talk about it. You couldn’t properly grill officers, however much you wanted to: one more proof that they weren’t good for much.

Pete McGill got something he never expected in a million years: a combination Christmas and get-well card from the leathernecks of the Shanghai garrison. Almost everybody signed it, even guys he couldn’t stand and who he knew couldn’t stand him. Herman Szulc wrote, You don’t know how lucky you are to get away. Max Weinstein said, Power to the proletariat! If he’d told that to Pete face-to-face, Pete would’ve wanted to punch him in the snoot. Seeing the cramped scrawl on the card only made Pete miss the stubborn pinko.

More air-raid alarms sounded in Manila these days. At first, they’d panicked the Filipinos. Now the locals ignored them. So did Pete. He was up and about, but not exactly swift. Even though the Boise had accepted him aboard, he remained on light duty. There were times when he wondered if somebody’d pulled strings to get him out of the military hospital, but he didn’t worry about it.

He still wished he were back in Shanghai with the men he’d known for so long. If the Japs did jump, the leathernecks in China would get it in the neck. They couldn’t very well do anything else except run-and running wasn’t Marine Corps style. They’d make the best fight they could, but when there were hundreds of them and zillions of little yellow monkeys… Even the hero of a bad Western shoot-’em-up couldn’t blast that many redskins before they got him.

Pete remembered the bet he’d won from his buddies by barging into a line of Jap soldiers and watching a movie with them. The samurai warriors in their movie wore funny clothes and had funnier haircuts. They used swords instead of six-shooters. They spoke a language he didn’t begin to understand. Such minor details aside, the flick might have been a grade-C Hollywood oater.

Whenever Pete heard airplane engines over Manila, he got nervous. The Japs bombed the crap out of Chinese cities every chance they got. If they decided to mix it up with the USA, of course they’d do the same thing here. They’d have to be nuts not to.

For a wonder, the American government seemed to realize as much. Some of the engines Pete heard belonged to P-40 fighters. People said those would blast the Japs’ scrap-metal planes out of the sky. Others came in pairs on fat-bellied B-18 Digby bombers. If the Japanese did come, flying to their bases and blowing them sky-high looked like a pretty decent plan.

The American government also waved its magic wand and turned Philippine Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur back into American General Douglas MacArthur. Some of the guys Pete drank with off duty applauded that. Others just jeered. The longer soldiers had served under MacArthur, the more skeptical they seemed. Pete leaned toward the doubters. MacArthur belonged to the Army, didn’t he? Of course that meant he was likely to screw things up.

Christmas came. So did New Year’s. Pete got a wire from his folks in the Bronx. That was nice, but it might as well have come from another world. The card from the fellows he’d served with meant more to him.

Foreign news didn’t get any better. No one would confuse 1941 with the Millennium, not any time soon. The Nazis and their little friends kept bashing heads with the Reds. The Japanese kept banging away in China. Their foreign minister said, “No power can accept the dictates of another without becoming a slave.” That was the translation, anyhow. Maybe it sounded friendlier in Japanese, but, again, Pete leaned toward the doubters. Then the foreign minister clammed up altogether. Nobody at all took that for a good sign.

Manila went right on having air-raid drills. The day after New Year’s, a nervous antiaircraft-gun crew opened up on a Digby. They shot it down. That was good news as far as gunnery went. Pete didn’t suppose the other Digbys’ flyers thought so. If a bunch of jumpy, half-trained American soldiers could knock a B-18 out of the sky, what would Jap veterans do to them? What would Jap fighters do to them? Those were… interesting questions, weren’t they?

The second Sunday of January was the twelfth. The night before, Pete had gone out and got crocked. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d got crocked on Saturday nights in the Far East. He couldn’t remember what all had happened on some of those nights, either. That was the point, for him and a swarm of guys just like him. If getting crocked on Saturday night wasn’t a great American military tradition, he didn’t know what would be.

Maybe waking up on Sunday morning feeling like death. Pete lived up to that one, in spades. “The fuck?” he muttered, trying to figure out exactly what kind of ungodly racket had ripped him untimely from the womb of sleep-and from the oblivion of all the cheap whiskey he’d poured down the night before.

He didn’t need long to figure out what the racket was: all the air-raid sirens in town were going off at once. “Jesus H. Christ!” groaned the guy in the bunk above his. “Has to be that cocksucking MacArthur. He’s the only asshole big enough to boot us out of the sack at sunup on a fucking Sunday morning!”

If MacArthur was that big an asshole, Pete was all for stringing him up by the balls. He was also all for gallons of hot coffee, a handful of aspirins to finish corroding his stomach lining but quiet his pounding head, and some more ZZZs after the sirens quit screeching.

If they ever did. A moment later, antiaircraft guns added a bass note to the cacophony. More Digbys? Pete wondered vaguely. Some of the guys at the guns would catch hell.

Or would they? If those were Digbys overhead, they were fighting back. Bombs crumped down. They didn’t land that close to the cruiser-but they weren’t that far away, either.

“Holy motherfucking shit! I think we’re under attack!” exclaimed the Marine in the upper.

“Nothing gets by you, does it, Sherlock?” Pete said.

“Huh?” the other guy said. It wasn’t a brilliant comeback, but Pete didn’t gig him for it. Instead, he scrambled out of the bunk, trying to find out what the hell was going on. He didn’t forget his hangover-he would have had to be dead for real to do that-but he did shove it aside. For once, he had more important things to worry about.

Klaxons hooted. “All hands! Battle stations! All hands! Battle stations!” boomed from the loudspeakers.

On light duty, Pete didn’t have a battle station. He got topside as fast as he could anyway. The sky was full of planes and puffs of antiaircraft fire. Shrapnel started pattering down. He suddenly wished for a tin hat. Some of those chunks of shell casing could put your lights out for good if they came down on top of your head.

Most of the planes overhead had unfamiliar lines-but not that unfamiliar, not to him. He’d seen them every now and then in China. He’d seen the big red meatballs on their wings and fuselages, too. Sure as hell, they were Japs. He didn’t know why he should be so surprised and outraged, but he was. The Philippines belonged to the US of A, God damn it to hell! Those enemy warplanes had no business coming here, no business at all.

Overhead, a brightly painted Peashooter dueled a Japanese fighter. Americans laughed at the shit the Japs manufactured, but the plane with the meatballs was far faster and more maneuverable than the (admittedly obsolescent) American machine. The Peashooter spun toward the ground, trailing a plume of fire and smoke. No parachute blossomed in the muggy air. Scratch one American flyer, Pete thought.

Then the Japanese fighter’s pilot spotted him and the other Marines and sailors on the Boise ’s deck. He dove on them, machine guns blazing. Pete couldn’t move fast no matter how much he wanted to-and he wanted to one hell of a lot. Bullets spanged off steel. Wounded men screeched. The fighter roared away at not much over stack height.

Something not nearly far enough away blew up with a rending crash. Of course the Japs were coming after the Far East Fleet. Small as it was, they were bound to have carriers offshore. They’d want to make damn sure nobody could go after those precious ships.

They knew how to get what they wanted, too. A bigger explosion followed the first one. An enormous cloud of black smoke toadstooled up into the sky.

“Rifles!” yelled another Marine coming up from below. “I’ve got rifles, so we can shoot back at the lousy yellow bastards!”

Pete gratefully grabbed a Springfield. You could shoot down a plane with a rifle. (You had to be mighty goddamn lucky- mighty goddamn lucky-but you could.) And even if you didn’t shoot anything down, you were trying to. You were in the fight. No-you were in the war. It had taken almost two and a half years, but the United States was finally in the war.

War! The headline on the Philadelphia Inquirer took up most of the space above the fold. Peggy Druce had to turn the newspaper over to learn that Japan had launched attacks on the Philippines and Hawaii, and was also moving into French Indonesia and British Malaya.

It wasn’t that she didn’t already know some of that-she and Herb had been glued to the radio ever since news of what was going on halfway around the world broke here in the States. But the paper had more details than the hasty radio bulletins she’d heard before, many of them delivered by men who sounded as if they could hardly believe the copy they were reading.

She brought the Inquirer in to her husband, who was eating fried eggs and buttered toast and getting down a second cup of coffee heavy with sugar and almost white with cream. She remembered some of the rationed breakfasts she’d had in Europe, and what passed for coffee in Germany. Americans didn’t always understand how lucky they were.

She handed Herb the front page without a pang. She’d glanced at the headlines, and he’d fill her in on anything important she might have missed. He took the Inquirer with a word of thanks. As soon as he had it in front of him, he lit a cigarette. Breathing out smoke, he said, “Lord, what a mess!”

Peggy nodded but didn’t answer. She’d been in the middle of such an exploding mess. Herb, of course, had seen and done even worse things when he went Over There a generation earlier. That wasn’t quite the same, though. The mess then had already exploded by the time he got to it. He knew what he was supposed to do and how to go about it. Things now were up in the air, as they had been when Peggy found herself too close to the German border as Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. Some of those things had been machine-gun bullets and 105mm shells and 500kg bombs. They’d come down, much too close to her head.

“Looks like Manila got caught napping,” Herb remarked, exhaling more smoke. “Hawaii’s not so bad. We were ready for ’em there-but why didn’t we spot ’em while they were on the way, darn it?”

“Maybe they came from a funny direction,” Peggy said.

“Maybe they did-but we ought to be looking every which way at once when there’s liable to be a war on, don’t you think?” Herb opened the Inquirer to get a look at the inside pages. He shook his head. “We were ready in Hawaii, and we still lost a carrier and a battlewagon and some of the fuel store we’ve got there.” He held up a page with a photo for Peggy. She supposed it was smoke from burning fuel oil or whatever the hell. It looked more like a volcano going off.

“What about Manila?” she asked.

“It’s a lot closer to the Japs, and it got hit a lot harder,” Herb answered. “They’ll probably try invading the Philippines if they haven’t already.” He went to another inside page. “MacArthur says, ‘We shall prevail.’ That sounds pretty, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does,” Peggy said. “I wonder how he expects to do it, though.”

“Ha!” Her husband finished the toast and stubbed out his cigarette. “There’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right.”

“What does FDR have to say about it?” Peggy asked, adding, “There wasn’t anything on the front page.”

Herb nodded, acknowledging that she’d looked as she brought in the paper. He settled his bifocals more firmly on his nose as he looked for an answer. He grunted, not much liking what he found. “A White House aide says, ‘Obviously, we are at war. Obviously, we didn’t want to be.’ ”

“Our goldfish could tell us that much, and we haven’t got a goldfish,” Peggy said.

“Yeah, I know.” Herb nodded. Then he let out a different grunt, one that said Now we’re getting somewhere. “The President’s going to address Congress at noon. Emergency session. It’ll go by radio all over the country.”

Peggy wondered how many people would miss church to hear him. It was still Sunday morning here-still very early Sunday morning on the Pacific Coast. It had been Sunday morning for quite a while in Manila, though. Hawaii had got hit at midday Saturday, their time.

When Peggy remarked on that, Herb grunted one more time, now as if to convey Well, what do you expect? “Some of the guys there were still sober, I bet,” he said. “Odds are that’s why they did better.”

“Why does everybody get smashed on Saturday night?” she wondered.

His look told her she could have asked a better question. She thought he’d grunt yet again, but he fooled her: he only rolled his eyes. “You’re in the service, what else is there to do?” he said. Then, slowly and deliberately, he lit another cigarette. His cheeks hollowed as he took a deep drag. When he let it out in twin streams through his nose, he looked like a locomotive venting steam. Peering down at the paper rather than at Peggy, he went on, “If they’ll have me, hon, I’m going to put the uniform on again.”

“Oh, no!” But that was dismay, not surprise. Peggy knew him too well for such a thing to surprise her. She did take her best shot at changing his mind: “You did your bit the last time around-your bit and then some.”

Herb chuckled sourly. “If they have to stick a Springfield in my paws, the USA’s in deep water, all right,” he admitted. “But I know some stuff I didn’t back in 1918. All kinds of things’ll run smoother if somebody like me who knows the ropes is there to keep an eye on ’em.”

She imagined swarms of canny, successful middle-aged men with gimlet eyes and skeptical stares descending on war plants all over the country and telling Army regulars how to do their jobs better. “If you think the regulars will thank you for it, you’re nuts,” she predicted.

She squeezed another chuckle out of him. This one might in fact have been amused. “They may hate us, but they’ll need us.”

Maybe he was right, maybe wrong. Maybe the Army wouldn’t take him back. Peggy hoped it wouldn’t and feared it would. She said, “I don’t remember the last time I wanted a drink so bad first thing in the morning.”

To her amazement, Herb built her a strong one and himself one stronger yet. “What the dickens?” he said. “We don’t go to war every day, thank God. And if we get sleepy later on, so what? It’s Sunday.” Ice cubes clinked as he raised his glass. “Here’s to the USA!”

“To the USA!” Peggy echoed. The bourbon hit her hard in spite of her morning coffee. But Herb couldn’t have put it any better. What the dickens? So what? They both had another hefty knock after the first one. The newspaper stopped being interesting. Reading felt like too much effort. And, on the morning the United States found itself at war, the funnies weren’t very funny.

Peggy turned on the radio. She and Herb took turns spinning the dial. Music and prayers-many of them hastily and badly written to take account of suddenly changed circumstances-and confused war news came from one station after another. Peggy didn’t worry about any of it. She was paying attention to the state of the nation, which was what the times called for.

A little before noon, Herb turned the dial to 610 for WIP, the Mutual Broadcasting System’s local affiliate. No doubt most stations would carry FDR, but you could count on that one. Right on the hour, an announcer spoke in hushed tones: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States addressing a joint session of Congress… Here is the President.”

“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday the Empire of Japan attacked American possessions without warning or provocation,” Roosevelt said, his voice raspy with anger. “The Empire’s despicable action shows that its leaders think us weak and irresolute. Like it or not-and no sane man can relish war-we are at war with the Japanese. They have started this fight. We will finish it, and we will win it.”

A great cheer rose from the members of Congress. FDR went on to ask them to make a formal declaration of war against Japan. That cheer told Peggy he’d get exactly what he asked for.