© February 21, 2008 by Norman Stolpe
I sit in silence by a stream
to hear as dusk fades into dark,
safe assurance, fragile flashing
liquid leaping between the rocks.
Solid steady stones containing
the water’s fearless, joyful drop -
translucent praying - sprays and mists
float twig and leaf beyond tree tops.
The shapeless air and water sing
and dance, intone against each cliff,
each boulder to retune the hymn:
Be still and know that I am God.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
The Deer of the Dawn
© February 14, 2008 by Norman Stolpe
Saturday morning I savor the silence.
No six o’clock buzzing alarm interrupts
release from rhythm of “evening and morning.”
I hover timeless, awareness awaking.
In this seam between the here and the holy,
unborn generations without boundary
urge and tug me into morning with their song,
reverberate and echo Lauds in endless dawn.
Saturday morning I savor the silence.
No six o’clock buzzing alarm interrupts
release from rhythm of “evening and morning.”
I hover timeless, awareness awaking.
In this seam between the here and the holy,
unborn generations without boundary
urge and tug me into morning with their song,
reverberate and echo Lauds in endless dawn.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Lilies of the Covenant
© January 27, 2008 by Norman Stolpe
Texas January yard chores done,
The last red oak leaf sacks are gone.
St. Augustine grass dormant brown –
The lilies’ first green sprout is up,
Pushing off the withered winter stems.
“Way too soon!” my northern clock chimes.
Eight years now, I have seen them come –
These premature perennials.
“Restore my dry and frozen heart,
Packed hard and worn by many feet,
Fragile root hairs between the grit
And pebbles of my stifled work.
Am I more stubborn than the soil
That cannot stop a sprouting seed?
Relentless Spring, restore my soul!
By your steadfast love make me glad.”
Texas January yard chores done,
The last red oak leaf sacks are gone.
St. Augustine grass dormant brown –
The lilies’ first green sprout is up,
Pushing off the withered winter stems.
“Way too soon!” my northern clock chimes.
Eight years now, I have seen them come –
These premature perennials.
“Restore my dry and frozen heart,
Packed hard and worn by many feet,
Fragile root hairs between the grit
And pebbles of my stifled work.
Am I more stubborn than the soil
That cannot stop a sprouting seed?
Relentless Spring, restore my soul!
By your steadfast love make me glad.”
Monday, January 21, 2008
Do Not Destroy
© by Norman Stolpe January 21, 2008
Cut down the criminal,
And the noose leaves me hanging,
The mid-sentence silence strangling
Both justice and mercy.
Gagged on incomplete revenge,
Bitter wine lingers,
Rushing to deprive closure
Of draining the dregs.
Remove the criminal,
And violent deicide,
Human on human, slides
Forgotten and small.
The best vengeance is grace,
Surrendering naked conscience
To self-inflicted torment that pierces
For relentless repentance.
The best protection is grace,
Removing the motive for harming,
No longer left hanging,
Have I the courage to embrace?
Cut down the criminal,
And the noose leaves me hanging,
The mid-sentence silence strangling
Both justice and mercy.
Gagged on incomplete revenge,
Bitter wine lingers,
Rushing to deprive closure
Of draining the dregs.
Remove the criminal,
And violent deicide,
Human on human, slides
Forgotten and small.
The best vengeance is grace,
Surrendering naked conscience
To self-inflicted torment that pierces
For relentless repentance.
The best protection is grace,
Removing the motive for harming,
No longer left hanging,
Have I the courage to embrace?
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
The Dove on Far-off Terebinths
© January 15, 2008 by Norman Stolpe
The relentless pressure of terror
Bursts the nightmare scream.
Pulsing shrieks awaken a sunrise shaft
Slipping spring songs of sparrows
Through the screen where
Fog evaporates harmlessly.
The relentless pressure of terror
Bursts the nightmare scream.
Pulsing shrieks awaken a sunrise shaft
Slipping spring songs of sparrows
Through the screen where
Fog evaporates harmlessly.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Forty Years Being There
© January 13, 2008 by Norman Stolpe
Cheer for my hometown Oakland Seals or the local Minnesota North Stars? I had been to a couple Seals games with my Dad as a kid growing up in Oakland. They were one of the signs that Oakland was coming of age, no longer in the shadow of San Francisco. But I was on a double date with a Minnesota girl. Even if she wasn’t much of a sports fan, I didn’t want her to think I didn’t like her state. A college student on January 15, 1968 I had only been in Minnesota a year. My housemate and his date weren’t either Minnesotans or Californians. An NHL hockey game was just a good opportunity to be with the girls.
Casually following the action on the ice was all I needed to do play-by-play for my date. I wasn’t all that interested in impressing her with my hockey knowledge. It was just an excuse for the conversation I was eager to cultivate. I didn’t know the players, not even the Seals’ players. “Wow! See that hit! The guy carrying the puck went right over backwards. … His head sure made a loud crack. … Hey, he’s not getting up, not moving.”
Everything stopped. The stretcher came out. After a long time, they carried North Star Bill Masterton off the ice. A crew came out to clean up where he had been lying. Was it blood? From junior high gym class football on asphalt playgrounds, I knew the ring of a head crack on a solid surface. At thirteen none of us had either the speed or mass for the kind of crack we had just heard.
Leaving the game, we turned on the car radio and heard that Bill Masterton had died. And we were there; we saw and heard it happen.
Those NHL expansion teams have matured, moved on. No Seals in Oakland or North Stars in Minnesota. The North Stars became the Dallas Stars. On January 13, 2008, now a resident of Dallas, Texas, I opened the Dallas Morning News sports section to a front page, color picture commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Bill Masterton’s death. His retired number 19 hangs in the American Airlines Center where the Dallas Stars play.
I read the key paragraph to my wife. “We were there with Ted and Ellie.” She laughed. “His name was Tim. You lived in the same house with him your senior year of college. I think you’re losing it.”
Two more weeks until our 39th wedding anniversary. I may well be losing it, but we’ve been there to see and hear it happen.
Cheer for my hometown Oakland Seals or the local Minnesota North Stars? I had been to a couple Seals games with my Dad as a kid growing up in Oakland. They were one of the signs that Oakland was coming of age, no longer in the shadow of San Francisco. But I was on a double date with a Minnesota girl. Even if she wasn’t much of a sports fan, I didn’t want her to think I didn’t like her state. A college student on January 15, 1968 I had only been in Minnesota a year. My housemate and his date weren’t either Minnesotans or Californians. An NHL hockey game was just a good opportunity to be with the girls.
Casually following the action on the ice was all I needed to do play-by-play for my date. I wasn’t all that interested in impressing her with my hockey knowledge. It was just an excuse for the conversation I was eager to cultivate. I didn’t know the players, not even the Seals’ players. “Wow! See that hit! The guy carrying the puck went right over backwards. … His head sure made a loud crack. … Hey, he’s not getting up, not moving.”
Everything stopped. The stretcher came out. After a long time, they carried North Star Bill Masterton off the ice. A crew came out to clean up where he had been lying. Was it blood? From junior high gym class football on asphalt playgrounds, I knew the ring of a head crack on a solid surface. At thirteen none of us had either the speed or mass for the kind of crack we had just heard.
Leaving the game, we turned on the car radio and heard that Bill Masterton had died. And we were there; we saw and heard it happen.
Those NHL expansion teams have matured, moved on. No Seals in Oakland or North Stars in Minnesota. The North Stars became the Dallas Stars. On January 13, 2008, now a resident of Dallas, Texas, I opened the Dallas Morning News sports section to a front page, color picture commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Bill Masterton’s death. His retired number 19 hangs in the American Airlines Center where the Dallas Stars play.
I read the key paragraph to my wife. “We were there with Ted and Ellie.” She laughed. “His name was Tim. You lived in the same house with him your senior year of college. I think you’re losing it.”
Two more weeks until our 39th wedding anniversary. I may well be losing it, but we’ve been there to see and hear it happen.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Someone Else to Meet in Heaven
© November 9, 2004 by Norman Stolpe
When Candy and I read Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven, I couldn't escape thinking about Eddie's Japanese captors in World War II. Surely the themes Albom explores with the other people whose lives intersected with Eddie's also apply to those Japanese soldiers. As I thought about that, this story began to emerge. I myself found unsettling the realization that soldiers on both sides in a war may have similar motivations of duty and love of country, without understanding much less engaging in the political and ethical issues that bring countries into conflict. This story is not about judgments of nations in history or even about the morality of war. Rather, it is about how ordinary people's lives are radically changed by seemingly insignificant slips of fate and the imperatives of life's little decisions.
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always they feel they are supposed to.
It was like that for San. He had heard the older men talk about the humiliation Japan had experienced at the hands of the Russians, the Chinese and the Koreans. But he was less interested in recovered glory than the opportunities for prosperity in the expanding Japanese Empire. He didn’t try to figure out what it might mean that the Emperor Hirohito was divine; but the prospects of sharing a thriving future with his country as the hub of the Pacific inspired him.
San didn’t understand or ever care about the war in Europe, except that it might draw Japan’s newest rival in the Pacific, the United States, away and allow Japan a better chance to expand and flourish. So when the Japanese military began to push the United States out of the Pacific and back to North America, San believed he had to go. When he was called to military service, he wanted to go. When he saw the love that blended pride and anxiety in his parents’ eyes as he said good-bye and joined his two older brothers in the service of his country, he knew he was supposed to go.
San was assigned to a unit that went south to drive the invaders out of the jungles and off of the islands of the Philippines. Fighting in the jungle on desolate islands was not easy. Spotting the enemy before they spotted you was nearly impossible. When fighting was fierce, soldiers often lost communication and became separated from their units.
In one particularly chaotic firefight, San and three others from his unit became disoriented in the jungle. They tried to interpret the sounds of airplanes, bombs and gunfire to find their way back to their unit, all the while keeping a lookout for enemy soldiers who might be lurking among the dense foliage.
Exchanging glances and motioning each other to keep silent, they came up behind five soldiers from the United States dug into foxholes with their backs to them. “Shoot them or take prisoners?” they silently queried each other. “Prisoners,” they agreed. When San put the barrel of his rifle at the base of one soldier’s skull, the soldier in the foxhole cowered and began weeping loudly. An angry, scolding shout in a language San could not understand came from another foxhole. They were no longer four lost soldiers. They were the captors in charge of five enemy prisoners.
After tying their prisoners’ wrists and confiscating their weapons, they resumed their uncertain march to rejoin their unit, guided by the erratic sounds of war. Shortly before dark they arrived at the camp their unit had been using as a temporary base of operations. No one else was there. Whether for defensive or offensive purposes, their unit must have moved on, abandoning this site, but still leaving it intact with sufficient provisions for a brief stay.
One small bamboo barracks on stilts had only a single entrance and would be a secure place where they could take turns guarding their prisoners. Staying there for a while seemed the wisest option as the war seemed to have moved away from them. They heard no airplanes, no explosions, no gunfire. The jungle was empty, no soldiers of either side, no villagers, no one. After a couple of days, they began taking turns making ever more distant forays to seek some contact with some Japanese military, even if it wasn’t their unit. The food at the camp would run out. They were responsible to hand over their prisoners to the proper authorities and rejoin their unit, wherever it was now.
After a couple of weeks, as San was making one of these excursions, he heard what he thought was a truck motor. Moving cautiously, lest he be seen if it was an enemy vehicle, San crept closer and closer until he recognized not only the Japanese Rising Sun flag but also a friendly Japanese face. San ran out of the underbrush onto the rutted dirt road, wildly waving his arms. San embraced the driver and hurriedly tumbled out their story. The driver asked, “Can you get your prisoners back to this road?”
“I’m sure we can,” said San. “We’re less than half an hour walk from here.”
“Good then. Follow this road the same direction I am going. In two or three hours you’ll come to a coalmine where POWs are digging coal out for us. Officers are there who can tell you what to do next.”
Nine weary soldiers walked into the compound of the coal mine. Four relieved to find friendly faces and five more anxious than ever about what awaited them.
“We haven’t heard from your unit for weeks,” the officer in charge of the coalmine told San and his companions. “Our only communication comes when we send a truck load of coal to the coast every few days. We’re shorthanded, so I want you four to stay here and help us. Since you have already managed your prisoners, they will be your special charges.”
“We really don’t know anything about being guards or about coalmines,” San answered.
“Doesn’t matter much. We’re all pretty much figuring it out as we go here anyway. Besides, I don’t know where to send you and don’t have any way to get you there.”
San was troubled at the words of the officer. This was nothing like the order and efficiency he had come to expect in the Japanese Empire.
After a while one of the prisoners got sick. The one with hair the color of berries could hardly stand to work in the mine. But they didn’t have any secure place for sick prisoners or any way to care for them. One day he was so weak that no amount of prodding or shouting could get him on his feet to work. As they struggled with him, one of the other prisoners started shouting.
Ni began a desperate, sarcastic laugh. “I was the one who said we should have just shot them in their foxholes. War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it. No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you don’t think about who you’re shooting or killing or why. If you want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think. It’s the thinking that gets you killed. Now I have to shoot him anyway.”
Weeks at the coalmine began to stretch into months. Boredom plagued the guards even more than the prisoners, who had the physical labor of the mine to occupy them. An uneasy familiarity grew in the relationships between the prisoners and the guards. Neither trusted the other, but the routine of their established roles allowed a measure of relief from the tensions between them, even though neither made any effort to connect at a personal level. Ni said to the others, “We don’t want to know their names, and we don’t want them knowing ours.”
Absentmindedly San picked up a couple of fist-sized stones and tried to juggle them. The prisoners were relaxed and staying away from the gate San was guarding. After some time San noticed one of the prisoners watching him with obvious amusement. Slowly the prisoner walked over to San, gesturing, talking and laughing. Of course, San could not understand what the prisoner was saying, but from the gestures San could tell the prisoner wanted to show him how to juggle.
The two stones moved smoothly through the prisoner’s hands. He stopped and motioned for three more stones. What an entertaining diversion! First one, then two stones went high in the air as the other three circulated in increasingly intricate patterns. By this time the juggling prisoner was singing with a rhythm that matched the movements of the stones and the other prisoners had gathered around for the entertainment.
The stones were now going up so high that San and the three other guards, who had also come close to see what was going on, had to crane their necks to watch them. Then without warning, the juggling prisoner hurled a stone that struck Ni squarely in the face. Blood sprayed from Ni’s mashed nose and dribbled from his mouth and ears. Ni fell to the ground stunned.
“Treachery!” screamed San as the juggling prisoner’s next stone struck Ichi on the chin. From the loud, hard cracking sound, San knew that Ichi’s jaw was broken. He saw Ichi’s eyes role back in his head as the blow rendered him unconscious. In the quick moment it took for San to see what was happening, he drew his pistol and tried to shoot the prisoners, but two of them tackled him around the knees, and his shots were wildly useless. San was sure the first blow of one of those juggling rocks had fractured his skull. He thought, “Ni was right. We should have shot them in their foxholes when we had the chance. Now none of us will go home.” Then came the second blow and everything turned red, then black.
------------------------------------------------------
“So did all of you get back home?” San asked Eddie.
“No, just three of us. A landmine got our captain. He was checking around a bend in the road to be sure it was safe before we drove the truck there.” Eddie noticed that they could understand each other now. Did that mean San was speaking English? Or was he speaking Japanese and didn’t know it? Or maybe language just works differently here in heaven.
“The war must have been over quite a while before you got here.”
”Yea,” said Eddie. “It didn’t take long for Japan to surrender after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“Atomic bombs?”
“Yea. Instead of regular chemical explosives, these things are a nuclear reaction out of control. Besides the explosive power of thousands of regular bombs, lingering radiation burns and poisons for years. Just two bombs a few days apart did what thousands of guns, ships, airplanes couldn’t do in years. Ended the war.”
“These were dropped on cities? On civilians?”
“Yea. Thousands died in just a few moments. And thousands more kept dying for a long time. I don’t really understand how they work. Too complicated for me. I don’t understand how our countries decide to do war. I just tried to do a good job at what I’m supposed to do. But I was sure glad when the war was over.”
“Our countries must really hate each other after all of that.”
“Oh, there were bad feelings for a long time, but before long there was what they called a cold war with communism in Russia and China.”
“But they were you allies when our countries were at war.”
“Yes, but after the war was over the United States helped Japan recover, Germany too. Now our countries are very friendly. Old scars still hurt on the anniversaries of the bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. But those pains also remind us how much better it is to share peace and prosperity.”
“So since Japan lost the war, the United States must really run the Pacific now.”
“Japan and the U.S. are big trading partners now. We still compete economically, and for quite a while Japan was doing a lot better than the U.S., but that’s kind of slowed down lately. Both countries are a lot more prosperous that they were before the war.”
“So what did you do when you got back home?”
“I married the best woman in the whole world. We could never have children, and she died many years ago.”
“I was married for a couple of years before I went to fight. We just had a baby girl, but I never saw her. My wife sent me a letter to tell me she was born. I got it just before we captured you and your friends. After we got separated from our unit we didn’t get any more mail. We were probably listed as missing in action while we were guarding you at the coalmine.”
“Since you got here, to heaven, you know, has anyone come to tell you what happened to your wife and daughter?”
“No. I assume my wife married someone else and had more children. My daughter is probably a grandmother by now. But I don’t know anything. Do you think I’ll find out?”
“Well, I met five people here who helped me understand my life. They told me things I didn’t know. And I got to tell my wife what had happened to me after she died. She didn’t seem to know those things, but it seemed to matter a lot more to me to tell them to her than it did for her to learn them. She seemed to already understand her life by the time I got here.”
“So do you suppose one of us has a lesson to teach the other one?”
“Maybe, but I don’t feel like I have a right to teach you anything. You were the kindest of our guards, and I took advantage of your kindness, so I could kill you and escape. We were both young men, confused but trying to serve our countries the way we were supposed to. But there in the jungle, we weren’t thinking about what our countries were fighting for. It was just kill or be killed.”
“We could have shot you in your foxholes instead of taking you prisoners. That’s what Ni said we should have done. If we had done that, then you would have been here waiting for me when I went home to my wife and daughter. I would have participated in the peace and prosperity you say our countries have shared since the war. That’s what I had hoped the war would bring to Japan. But somehow it didn’t seem right to shoot you when you weren’t shooting at us. Taking you as prisoners was the right thing to do.”
“Was it right for us to kill you so we could escape?”
“I can’t tell you that, but if I had been your prisoner, I think I would have tried. You couldn’t know it, but we had word that a major U.S. attack was coming, so prisoners and guards were being moved to the coast. We hoped to be taken back to Japan. We were just about the last ones left out at the mine when you escaped. We expected the truck to come to get us in a couple of days. Who knows what might have happened. We knew POWs were being executed if there were no facilities to care for them. They might have shot us as deserters, since we had stayed with you at the first camp so long and couldn’t fully account for ourselves. Maybe you were supposed to go home and live your life. Death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. You said you met five people here in heaven who taught you lessons so you could understand the meaning of your life.”
“I never did get on track after the war. I did get married, and my wife was wonderfully loving. But I was wounded. The first wound was a bullet that shattered my leg and left me with a limp that got worse and worse all my life. The second wound was to my spirit. I felt defeated and trapped. When my father had a heart attack, I took his job as a maintenance man at an amusement park. As a kid growing up, I liked helping him and getting to know the people there, but I never wanted to spend my whole life at Ruby Pier – that’s what it was called. I did what I was supposed to do, but I didn’t think it mattered. My lame leg and recurrent nightmares never let me leave the war behind. The five people I’ve met here have sorted that out for me. But I have no right to be teaching you one of your lessons or making sense out of your life. Neither do I have any right to think that your purpose in any way depends on passing something to me.”
“Perhaps we are sharing the discovery of a lesson together. Not only does war prompt people to do monstrous things, it causes people to see each other as monsters. It goes beyond the perceived threats and causes that drive nations to war, to seeing each other as individual monsters. Ni laughing in despair when he shot your sick friend because we had no way to care for him. You using your juggling skill, learned at the amusement park, to kill the guard you thought was more kind than the others. Now we meet in heaven to be friends, not just by some act of cosmic grace that transcends and transforms the distrust and hatred that defined our brief but formative relationship, but to share the realization that outside of heaven, in the temporal realities of economics and politics, our nations and our peoples are not monsters to each other but partners, friends. We share one story, just viewed from different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle seems to end happily, the other badly. Who is to say which is which?”
When Candy and I read Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven, I couldn't escape thinking about Eddie's Japanese captors in World War II. Surely the themes Albom explores with the other people whose lives intersected with Eddie's also apply to those Japanese soldiers. As I thought about that, this story began to emerge. I myself found unsettling the realization that soldiers on both sides in a war may have similar motivations of duty and love of country, without understanding much less engaging in the political and ethical issues that bring countries into conflict. This story is not about judgments of nations in history or even about the morality of war. Rather, it is about how ordinary people's lives are radically changed by seemingly insignificant slips of fate and the imperatives of life's little decisions.
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always they feel they are supposed to.
It was like that for San. He had heard the older men talk about the humiliation Japan had experienced at the hands of the Russians, the Chinese and the Koreans. But he was less interested in recovered glory than the opportunities for prosperity in the expanding Japanese Empire. He didn’t try to figure out what it might mean that the Emperor Hirohito was divine; but the prospects of sharing a thriving future with his country as the hub of the Pacific inspired him.
San didn’t understand or ever care about the war in Europe, except that it might draw Japan’s newest rival in the Pacific, the United States, away and allow Japan a better chance to expand and flourish. So when the Japanese military began to push the United States out of the Pacific and back to North America, San believed he had to go. When he was called to military service, he wanted to go. When he saw the love that blended pride and anxiety in his parents’ eyes as he said good-bye and joined his two older brothers in the service of his country, he knew he was supposed to go.
San was assigned to a unit that went south to drive the invaders out of the jungles and off of the islands of the Philippines. Fighting in the jungle on desolate islands was not easy. Spotting the enemy before they spotted you was nearly impossible. When fighting was fierce, soldiers often lost communication and became separated from their units.
In one particularly chaotic firefight, San and three others from his unit became disoriented in the jungle. They tried to interpret the sounds of airplanes, bombs and gunfire to find their way back to their unit, all the while keeping a lookout for enemy soldiers who might be lurking among the dense foliage.
Exchanging glances and motioning each other to keep silent, they came up behind five soldiers from the United States dug into foxholes with their backs to them. “Shoot them or take prisoners?” they silently queried each other. “Prisoners,” they agreed. When San put the barrel of his rifle at the base of one soldier’s skull, the soldier in the foxhole cowered and began weeping loudly. An angry, scolding shout in a language San could not understand came from another foxhole. They were no longer four lost soldiers. They were the captors in charge of five enemy prisoners.
After tying their prisoners’ wrists and confiscating their weapons, they resumed their uncertain march to rejoin their unit, guided by the erratic sounds of war. Shortly before dark they arrived at the camp their unit had been using as a temporary base of operations. No one else was there. Whether for defensive or offensive purposes, their unit must have moved on, abandoning this site, but still leaving it intact with sufficient provisions for a brief stay.
One small bamboo barracks on stilts had only a single entrance and would be a secure place where they could take turns guarding their prisoners. Staying there for a while seemed the wisest option as the war seemed to have moved away from them. They heard no airplanes, no explosions, no gunfire. The jungle was empty, no soldiers of either side, no villagers, no one. After a couple of days, they began taking turns making ever more distant forays to seek some contact with some Japanese military, even if it wasn’t their unit. The food at the camp would run out. They were responsible to hand over their prisoners to the proper authorities and rejoin their unit, wherever it was now.
After a couple of weeks, as San was making one of these excursions, he heard what he thought was a truck motor. Moving cautiously, lest he be seen if it was an enemy vehicle, San crept closer and closer until he recognized not only the Japanese Rising Sun flag but also a friendly Japanese face. San ran out of the underbrush onto the rutted dirt road, wildly waving his arms. San embraced the driver and hurriedly tumbled out their story. The driver asked, “Can you get your prisoners back to this road?”
“I’m sure we can,” said San. “We’re less than half an hour walk from here.”
“Good then. Follow this road the same direction I am going. In two or three hours you’ll come to a coalmine where POWs are digging coal out for us. Officers are there who can tell you what to do next.”
Nine weary soldiers walked into the compound of the coal mine. Four relieved to find friendly faces and five more anxious than ever about what awaited them.
“We haven’t heard from your unit for weeks,” the officer in charge of the coalmine told San and his companions. “Our only communication comes when we send a truck load of coal to the coast every few days. We’re shorthanded, so I want you four to stay here and help us. Since you have already managed your prisoners, they will be your special charges.”
“We really don’t know anything about being guards or about coalmines,” San answered.
“Doesn’t matter much. We’re all pretty much figuring it out as we go here anyway. Besides, I don’t know where to send you and don’t have any way to get you there.”
San was troubled at the words of the officer. This was nothing like the order and efficiency he had come to expect in the Japanese Empire.
After a while one of the prisoners got sick. The one with hair the color of berries could hardly stand to work in the mine. But they didn’t have any secure place for sick prisoners or any way to care for them. One day he was so weak that no amount of prodding or shouting could get him on his feet to work. As they struggled with him, one of the other prisoners started shouting.
Ni began a desperate, sarcastic laugh. “I was the one who said we should have just shot them in their foxholes. War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it. No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you don’t think about who you’re shooting or killing or why. If you want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think. It’s the thinking that gets you killed. Now I have to shoot him anyway.”
Weeks at the coalmine began to stretch into months. Boredom plagued the guards even more than the prisoners, who had the physical labor of the mine to occupy them. An uneasy familiarity grew in the relationships between the prisoners and the guards. Neither trusted the other, but the routine of their established roles allowed a measure of relief from the tensions between them, even though neither made any effort to connect at a personal level. Ni said to the others, “We don’t want to know their names, and we don’t want them knowing ours.”
Absentmindedly San picked up a couple of fist-sized stones and tried to juggle them. The prisoners were relaxed and staying away from the gate San was guarding. After some time San noticed one of the prisoners watching him with obvious amusement. Slowly the prisoner walked over to San, gesturing, talking and laughing. Of course, San could not understand what the prisoner was saying, but from the gestures San could tell the prisoner wanted to show him how to juggle.
The two stones moved smoothly through the prisoner’s hands. He stopped and motioned for three more stones. What an entertaining diversion! First one, then two stones went high in the air as the other three circulated in increasingly intricate patterns. By this time the juggling prisoner was singing with a rhythm that matched the movements of the stones and the other prisoners had gathered around for the entertainment.
The stones were now going up so high that San and the three other guards, who had also come close to see what was going on, had to crane their necks to watch them. Then without warning, the juggling prisoner hurled a stone that struck Ni squarely in the face. Blood sprayed from Ni’s mashed nose and dribbled from his mouth and ears. Ni fell to the ground stunned.
“Treachery!” screamed San as the juggling prisoner’s next stone struck Ichi on the chin. From the loud, hard cracking sound, San knew that Ichi’s jaw was broken. He saw Ichi’s eyes role back in his head as the blow rendered him unconscious. In the quick moment it took for San to see what was happening, he drew his pistol and tried to shoot the prisoners, but two of them tackled him around the knees, and his shots were wildly useless. San was sure the first blow of one of those juggling rocks had fractured his skull. He thought, “Ni was right. We should have shot them in their foxholes when we had the chance. Now none of us will go home.” Then came the second blow and everything turned red, then black.
------------------------------------------------------
“So did all of you get back home?” San asked Eddie.
“No, just three of us. A landmine got our captain. He was checking around a bend in the road to be sure it was safe before we drove the truck there.” Eddie noticed that they could understand each other now. Did that mean San was speaking English? Or was he speaking Japanese and didn’t know it? Or maybe language just works differently here in heaven.
“The war must have been over quite a while before you got here.”
”Yea,” said Eddie. “It didn’t take long for Japan to surrender after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“Atomic bombs?”
“Yea. Instead of regular chemical explosives, these things are a nuclear reaction out of control. Besides the explosive power of thousands of regular bombs, lingering radiation burns and poisons for years. Just two bombs a few days apart did what thousands of guns, ships, airplanes couldn’t do in years. Ended the war.”
“These were dropped on cities? On civilians?”
“Yea. Thousands died in just a few moments. And thousands more kept dying for a long time. I don’t really understand how they work. Too complicated for me. I don’t understand how our countries decide to do war. I just tried to do a good job at what I’m supposed to do. But I was sure glad when the war was over.”
“Our countries must really hate each other after all of that.”
“Oh, there were bad feelings for a long time, but before long there was what they called a cold war with communism in Russia and China.”
“But they were you allies when our countries were at war.”
“Yes, but after the war was over the United States helped Japan recover, Germany too. Now our countries are very friendly. Old scars still hurt on the anniversaries of the bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. But those pains also remind us how much better it is to share peace and prosperity.”
“So since Japan lost the war, the United States must really run the Pacific now.”
“Japan and the U.S. are big trading partners now. We still compete economically, and for quite a while Japan was doing a lot better than the U.S., but that’s kind of slowed down lately. Both countries are a lot more prosperous that they were before the war.”
“So what did you do when you got back home?”
“I married the best woman in the whole world. We could never have children, and she died many years ago.”
“I was married for a couple of years before I went to fight. We just had a baby girl, but I never saw her. My wife sent me a letter to tell me she was born. I got it just before we captured you and your friends. After we got separated from our unit we didn’t get any more mail. We were probably listed as missing in action while we were guarding you at the coalmine.”
“Since you got here, to heaven, you know, has anyone come to tell you what happened to your wife and daughter?”
“No. I assume my wife married someone else and had more children. My daughter is probably a grandmother by now. But I don’t know anything. Do you think I’ll find out?”
“Well, I met five people here who helped me understand my life. They told me things I didn’t know. And I got to tell my wife what had happened to me after she died. She didn’t seem to know those things, but it seemed to matter a lot more to me to tell them to her than it did for her to learn them. She seemed to already understand her life by the time I got here.”
“So do you suppose one of us has a lesson to teach the other one?”
“Maybe, but I don’t feel like I have a right to teach you anything. You were the kindest of our guards, and I took advantage of your kindness, so I could kill you and escape. We were both young men, confused but trying to serve our countries the way we were supposed to. But there in the jungle, we weren’t thinking about what our countries were fighting for. It was just kill or be killed.”
“We could have shot you in your foxholes instead of taking you prisoners. That’s what Ni said we should have done. If we had done that, then you would have been here waiting for me when I went home to my wife and daughter. I would have participated in the peace and prosperity you say our countries have shared since the war. That’s what I had hoped the war would bring to Japan. But somehow it didn’t seem right to shoot you when you weren’t shooting at us. Taking you as prisoners was the right thing to do.”
“Was it right for us to kill you so we could escape?”
“I can’t tell you that, but if I had been your prisoner, I think I would have tried. You couldn’t know it, but we had word that a major U.S. attack was coming, so prisoners and guards were being moved to the coast. We hoped to be taken back to Japan. We were just about the last ones left out at the mine when you escaped. We expected the truck to come to get us in a couple of days. Who knows what might have happened. We knew POWs were being executed if there were no facilities to care for them. They might have shot us as deserters, since we had stayed with you at the first camp so long and couldn’t fully account for ourselves. Maybe you were supposed to go home and live your life. Death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. You said you met five people here in heaven who taught you lessons so you could understand the meaning of your life.”
“I never did get on track after the war. I did get married, and my wife was wonderfully loving. But I was wounded. The first wound was a bullet that shattered my leg and left me with a limp that got worse and worse all my life. The second wound was to my spirit. I felt defeated and trapped. When my father had a heart attack, I took his job as a maintenance man at an amusement park. As a kid growing up, I liked helping him and getting to know the people there, but I never wanted to spend my whole life at Ruby Pier – that’s what it was called. I did what I was supposed to do, but I didn’t think it mattered. My lame leg and recurrent nightmares never let me leave the war behind. The five people I’ve met here have sorted that out for me. But I have no right to be teaching you one of your lessons or making sense out of your life. Neither do I have any right to think that your purpose in any way depends on passing something to me.”
“Perhaps we are sharing the discovery of a lesson together. Not only does war prompt people to do monstrous things, it causes people to see each other as monsters. It goes beyond the perceived threats and causes that drive nations to war, to seeing each other as individual monsters. Ni laughing in despair when he shot your sick friend because we had no way to care for him. You using your juggling skill, learned at the amusement park, to kill the guard you thought was more kind than the others. Now we meet in heaven to be friends, not just by some act of cosmic grace that transcends and transforms the distrust and hatred that defined our brief but formative relationship, but to share the realization that outside of heaven, in the temporal realities of economics and politics, our nations and our peoples are not monsters to each other but partners, friends. We share one story, just viewed from different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle seems to end happily, the other badly. Who is to say which is which?”
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