A Boy at War Read online

  “He kept looking up, afraid the planes would come back. The sky was obscured by black smoke. . . . It was all unreal: the battleships half sunk, the bullet holes in the boat, Davi and Martin in the water.”

  DECEMBER 7, 1941: On a quiet Sunday morning, while Adam and his friends are fishing near Honolulu, a surprise attack by Japanese bombers destroys the fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  Even as Adam struggles to survive the sudden chaos all around him, and as his friends endure the brunt of the attack, a greater concern hangs over his head: Adam’s father, a navy lieutenant, was stationed on the USS Arizona when the bombs fell. During the subsequent days Adam—not yet a man, but no longer a boy—is caught up in the war as he desperately tries to make sense of what happened to his friends and to find news of his father.

  Harry Mazer, whose autobiographical novel, The Last Mission, brought the European side of World War II to vivid life, now turns to the Pacific theater and how the impact of war can alter young lives forever.

  They rowed hard, away from the battleships and the bombs. Water sprayed over them. The rowboat pitched one way and then the other. Then, before his eyes, the Arizona lifted up out of the water. That enormous battleship bounced up in the air like a rubber ball and split apart. Fire burst out of the ship. A geyser of water shot into the air and came crashing down. Adam was almost thrown out of the rowboat. He clung to the seat as it swung around. He saw blue skies and the glittering city. The boat swung back again, and he saw black clouds, and the Arizona, his father’s ship, sinking beneath the water.

  —from A Boy at War

  “Readers’ ready identification with Adam . . . makes his electrifying experiences during the attack all the more riveting. With clearly drawn, sympathetic characters and a gripping story, this memorable novel lends itself to booktalks.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “Expert work.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  HARRY MAZER is the author of many books for young readers, including The Wild Kid, The Dog in the Freezer, The Island Keeper, and Snow Bound. His books have won numerous honors, including Horn Book Honor List and American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults citations. He lives in Jamesville, New York, and New York City.

  Of the genesis of A Boy at War, Harry Mazer writes: “World War II was my war. It began for the United States with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I was a kid then, but I remember the excitement. The war was real the way my team, the New York Yankees, and their archrival, the Brooklyn Dodgers, were real, something to read about, bigger and more important than the boring stuff of ordinary life. Every day there was fresh news: battles to read about, places to locate on the globe, new words to sound out, and maps to pore over, the attacks and counterattacks marked with thick, curving arrows. I had no sense of the human cost of these battles. More than anything, I envied and admired the older guys from the neighborhood, home on leave in their crisp new uniforms. My greatest fear was that the war would end before I was old enough to take part.”

  Jacket illustration © 2001 by Rene Milot

  Jacket design by Paul Zakris and Mark Siegel

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  Simon & Schuster

  Books For Young Readers

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Also by HARRY MAZER:

  The Wild Kid

  The Dog in the Freezer

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Text copyright © 2001 by Harry Mazer

  Map on p. ii copyright © 2001 by Robert Romagnoli

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  is a trademark of Simon & Schuster.

  Book design by Paul Zakris.

  The text for this book is set in 11-point Janson.

  “Island of Oahu” on page 103 reprinted, by permission, from Hawaiian War Years, 1941–1945.

  © 1950 by Gwenfred Allen, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mazer, Harry.

  A boy at war : a novel of Pearl Harbor / by Harry Mazer.

  p. cm.

  Summary: While fishing with his friends off Honolulu on December 7,

  1941, teenaged Adam is caught in the midst of the Japanese attack

  and through the chaos of the subsequent days tries to find his father, a

  naval officer who was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona when the bombs fell.

  ISBN 0-689-84161-2

  1. Pearl Harbor (Hawaii), Attack on, 1941—Juvenile fiction.

  [1. Pearl Harbor (Hawaii), Attack on, 1941—Fiction.

  2. World War, 1939-1945—Causes—Fiction.

  3. Hawaii—History—1900-1959—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M47397 Bo 2001

  [Fic]—dc21 00-049687

  ISBN-13: 978-14424-7211-2 (ebook)

  FOR MY SON, JOE

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Author’s Note

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to Mary Pope Osborne and Ron Savage for sharing their memories of growing up in the military, and to Solomon Kaulukukui, Jr., for his patience and good humor in unfailingly responding to my many queries about Hawaiian life.

  Nobody, however young, returns from war still a boy.

  —SAMUEL HYNES, Flights of Passage: Reflections of a WWII Aviator

  “Drop me off here, Mom,” Adam said. They were a couple of blocks from the school.

  “Why? I don’t mind driving.”

  “Mom!” He couldn’t control his impatience. “This is high school.” Bad enough that he was registering late—it was already November and the term was half over. “Here,” he said. “Drop me off here,” and he hopped out of the car.

  By the time he got everything straightened out in the office, his first-period class had started. The teacher was in the middle of a lesson. Adam stood in front of the class while Mr. Handler interrogated him.

  “Where are you from, Adam?”

  “No place,” Adam said. He was trying to be accurate, but it came out sounding sullen.

  “No place? I’ve never been to no place.”

  “I’m military,” he explained.

  “And where’s that? Pearl Harbor? Hickman Field? Or is it Fort Knox?”

  “America,” Adam said, stiffly. “The United States of America.”

  He was sorry the minute he said it. It sounded so phony and superpatriotic, as if he were going to snap his heels together and salute the American flag standing in the corner of the room.

  “Ah, America,” Mr. Handler said. He fixed Adam with a disapproving eye. “We are all Americans here,” he instructed, “and though we, in Hawaii, are still only a territory of the United States, we are Americans, and we will be a state. Now, answer the question. Your hometown, your place of origin, please.”

  He
didn’t have a hometown. He’d grown up in the military, and in the military you moved all the time. There was no one place. They’d lived all over, but no matter where they lived, it was always the same—military. Whatever you thought was a military base, that was his hometown.

  But it was too complicated to explain. Easier to say, “I’m from Adams Center, New York.” Which was not the truth, but not a lie, either. His grandfather Pelko had a farm there, and they visited him sometimes. Just before they got their orders to Hawaii, they had been there.

  “Adams Center, and your name is Adam? Are you pulling my leg?” Mr. Handler said. “Are you trying to be comical?”

  “No, sir.” Adam had his eyes fixed on an empty seat in the back of the room.

  Mr. Handler went to the blackboard and pulled down a map of the United States. “Show us where Adams Center is, Adam.”

  He couldn’t find it on the map, or the next biggest town, Watertown, either. “It’s not there.” None of this was making him look too bright. “It’s a tiny place,” he explained, and pointed to Lake Ontario. “It’s next to that.”

  “A tiny place next to a great lake,” the teacher said. “How many Great Lakes are there, class? Who knows their names?”

  Adam knew, but he was through answering questions.

  A boy with his head on the desk raised his hand. “Davi?” Mr. Handler said. The boy sat up. He had a thatch of thick black hair and a muzzy look like he had just woken up.

  Japanese or maybe Chinese, Adam thought, something like that. Maybe Hawaiian. He’d been reading about Hawaii. There were a lot of different kinds of people here—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Portuguese—and they were all mixed up. There were more Japanese, though, than any other group.

  “Five lakes,” Davi said, showing five fingers, and reeled off their names, as if they were almost too boring to say. “Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Superior.”

  “Sticky brain,” someone said.

  Davi looked around. “At least I have a brain.”

  “Class! Quiet. Adam, can you tell us something about Adams Center?”

  Adam was on his way to the back of the room. “It snows a lot,” he said.

  On the road to Aiea it showered twice, and twice the rain clouds came streaming across the volcanic Koolau Mountains. Curtains of rain spilled down the steep slopes. Water sprayed up from the bike wheels. Adam thought of taking cover, but he was intent on getting to Aiea to see if his father’s ship was back in port yet. He’d left on a training cruise ten days ago.

  The rain stopped as fast as it had started. The sun came out, and Adam was dry in minutes. He was used to snow in November and never seeing the sun for days at a time, but this was Hawaii, where the sun shone even when it rained.

  They’d only been there two weeks, but he liked it. He liked Hawaii. When you were a military brat, that was the drill. Whatever happened, you liked it. One year they’d moved four times so they could be with his father. Did he like it? Yeah, sure, he liked it.

  “Join the Navy and See the World.” That was what the posters promised, and it was true, because here they were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, two thousand miles away from the United States, on the island of Oahu, in the city of Honolulu, next door to Pearl Harbor, the biggest American naval base in the Pacific.

  He knew the facts, that was the easy part of moving. The hard part was making new friends. And here, in Roosevelt High, for the first time he was in a civilian school with civilian kids. He’d already figured out that they didn’t like military kids a whole lot. Well, okay. He got along anyway. He was good at sports, and he could give as well as take, so it wasn’t as if he was by himself. What he missed, though, was having one good friend.

  When he was younger, he had always gone to schools on the base, and all the kids were navy, like him. They knew about moving and the military, and how you didn’t pal around with kids whose dads were lower in rank than yours. It wasn’t a written rule, but it was a rule. The kids all lived by military rules, same as their fathers. They were in the military too, even if they didn’t have the uniforms.

  When Adam’s father got home, he was going to ask Adam how he was getting along. And Adam was going to say what he always said: “Everything’s super.” His father had no use for complainers and whiners. He always said, “Adam, you’ve got to take the cards you’re dealt. The important thing is how you play the game.”

  Kamehameha Highway was a hilly two-lane road all the way to Aiea. Adam rode his bike around to the back of the sugar mill, where he could see the whole harbor. He’d been here before, and he liked the view—the spread of the harbor, Ford Island in the middle, and beyond it, hills of green sugarcane, and beyond them, almost floating in the sky, the huge, shadowy Waianae Mountains.

  The harbor was full of ships. Submarines, cruisers, destroyers. There was a naval air station on Ford Island, where the big PBY patrol planes were based. Battleships were moored in pairs alongside Ford Island. Battleship Row. That’s where he looked for his father’s ship, the Arizona. He knew where it was moored, and there it was, the signal flags snapping in the wind.

  He stood, straddling his bike, and saluted. He did it impulsively. It was corny, true, but he was really happy to see his father’s ship. A lot of corny things were true. The military was corny, all the spit-and-polish stuff, but it was true, too. He had been on the Arizona on family days with his mother and sister, the officers and enlisted men in dress whites, standing at attention under the giant fourteen-inch guns, and the Arizona band playing.

  Afterward, there were movies and ice cream on the fantail, and Adam’s father taking him around, embarrassing him by introducing him to every officer as “a future navy man.”

  He watched a motor launch leave the Arizona and head across the bay toward the navy yards and the main docks. The boat, trailing a long frothy wake, was loaded with white-capped sailors headed for shore leave. His father might be among them, or he might be home already. Officers with families could live off ship when they were in port.

  Adam started back to Honolulu, pedaling hard. It was exciting when his father came back from a cruise, but it was tense, too. His father liked them all there to welcome him: his crew lined up to greet their commander. If Adam was late, things could get off on the wrong foot. It would take him an hour to get home. He stood up on the pedals and pushed harder.

  “Daddy’s here,” Bea screamed. They were all in the garden. His mother was wearing a silk dress, a pink flower in her hair. His father was stretched out on a lawn chair in his dress whites with the high collar and the single row of neat, shiny buttons. He’d taken off his shoes and socks.

  “Dad,” Adam said, and he saluted because he knew his father liked that.

  “Your hair,” his father said.

  “Sorry, sir.” Adam brushed his hair quickly to one side. In a second it was going to fall back the way it always did. His father’s hair was blond and wavy and stayed put. Adam’s was dark, and it flopped all over the place. He never thought about how it looked except around his father.

  When his father was home, everything Adam did was with him in mind. It wasn’t that his father demanded things or gave a lot of orders. It was just that he was there, and that changed everything.

  “Ten days and look at him,” his father said approvingly to Adam’s mother. His father wasn’t big, but he had a big presence and a big voice, too. “What have you been feeding him, Marilyn?”

  “I hadn’t noticed, but you’re right. He is taller, isn’t he?”

  “Wiggle them, Daddy.” Bea was leaning over their father’s knees, examining his bare toes. “Say the five little sailors.”

  It was a story his father told. “The big boy toe is Rip,” his father said, “then comes Lip.” Bea touched each toe as he named it. “Then Chip, then Hip, and little bitty—”

  “Bip,” Bea said. “Now tell the girl toes.”

  “Five little tarts. Suzi’s the biggest, then comes Doozi, then Choozi
, then Bloozi, then—”

  “Bea! Me!” she said loudly. “Then they get married. Say that part, Daddy. Say it fast.”

  “Rip to Suzi, Lip to Doozi, Chip to Choozi, Hip to Bloozi, and Bip to—”

  “Me!” Bea yelled.

  They all laughed. Adam’s mother went into the kitchen to make a pitcher of lemonade.

  “How’s school?” his father asked.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Making friends?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Civilian schools are different, aren’t they?”

  “It’s not that bad,” Adam said.

  His father picked up Bea and marched around with her. “What if I walked around my ship this way, Bumble Bea, in my bare feet? What do you think my men would say?”

  “No bare feet in the navy, Daddy. That’s against the rules.”

  “Dad, can I have the keys to the car?” Adam said. His father was in such a good mood.

  “What for?”

  “To practice my driving.”

  “Since when do you take the car?”

  “Just around the house,” Adam said. There was never any traffic up here. His mother had let him practice a few times while his father was away.

  “You don’t drive alone till you get your license.”

  “I don’t go anywhere,” Adam said. “Honestly, Dad. Just up and down the street around the house. I stay real close.”

  “Don’t even think of it,” his father said, but a moment later—he was in a really good mood—he reversed himself. “Okay, get the car keys and let’s see what you can do.”

  Adam got behind the wheel, and his father took the passenger seat. “Always put the car in neutral,” his father said.

  Adam nodded and turned the key. The needles moved on the gauges—the gas, the heat, the oil, and the ammeter, which showed the electric charge. He pulled out the choke.

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I thought—”

  “We just drove in, so the engine is still hot.”