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By Root 1515 0

wounded for days, marching out into sunlight, to find, not cannibals and torture, but medicine and water and food. As the caves were exposed and the enemy obliterated, the Americans began to explore, shocked that the shattered remains of the dead were not always the worst that awaited them. In many of the caves, stolen American equipment and food was found, trinkets and souvenirs that showed very clearly that the Japanese showed no mercy either. Letters from American wives and mothers lay among the ruins in the caves, along with photographs of children, Bibles and notebooks, diaries, the forbidden journals written by American GIs who had kept them out of sight of their officers, personal thoughts recorded on burned pages that no one would ever read. Some of the caves held American weapons and K ration boxes, canteens and dog tags, what some must have thought the appropriate spoils of war. But the Americans responded in kind, gathering their own souvenirs, some with a horrifying disregard for the humanity of their enemy. On both sides gold teeth were pulled from the jawbones of the dead and dying, jewelry ripped from fingers and necks. Some of the wounded were killed by torture and physical abuse that caused comrades to turn away in disgust. The fight for Okinawa had brought out the worst in everyone involved, but in that it was not unique. The veterans had gone through this before, some of them itching to begin again. To some the end of the fight was anticlimactic, the stirring in their gut needing to be fed by a new fight, another invasion, more blood, more death to the enemy they knew only as the Japs. There was very little doubt among any of those men that the Japanese who awaited them on the next island, the next landing zone, felt exactly the same way about them.

ARA SAKI HILL, SOUTHERN TIP OF OKINAWA

JUNE 21, 1945

The American command had received no response to General Buckner’s letter, no hint at all that any Japanese officer was ready to offer a surrender of his troops. So the fights went on, mostly in isolated holes, ravines, and hillsides where Japanese troops had lost all contact with their senior command. The Americans had pushed all the way through the Kiyan Peninsula, entire units of Marines and soldiers reaching the southern coastline, finding they had no more enemy to pursue. In response the American command had declared that effective June 21, Okinawa was secure. But that designation meant very little to the Japanese, or to the Americans who engaged them, the sounds of various fights echoing still across the hills, pockets of resistance, clusters of Japanese who clung to their duty, who still offered a deadly strike against the unwary.

The men climbed the hill in a slow procession, some noticing with comfort the others out along the perimeter, formations of men in every direction, guarding the procession with rifles at the ready. The tanks stayed below, no sounds, the engines shut down, jeeps and trucks nearby, some men huddled there, groups who kept their talk low. To one side there was a chattering of machine gun fire, far distant, beyond another ridgeline no one could see. There was smoke as well, small arms fire, the faint thumps of grenades and mortars, a battle that seemed to contradict the strange peacefulness of this procession. But the order had come from above, General Geiger reinforcing his edict that the victory had been won, and so the ceremony would take place exactly as the commanders decreed it.

Adams moved behind Mortensen, walked in slow steps, saw a hand go up, holding the men back. Mortensen stopped, Adams beside him, the taller man seeming taller still. The ground to one side fell away, a sharp cliff that dropped to the ocean, the ships offshore seeming to stand in silence, observing the moment as did the Marines from the Twenty-second Regiment who moved up high on the hill. At the peak of the rugged coral ridge was a mound, and Adams felt the thick silence close by, the distant shellfire seeming to fade away for a long moment. He looked out across the far hills, smoky ridges