Snow Falling on Cedars: A Novel by David Guterson

Author:David Guterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780679764021
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1994-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Ishmael Chambers trained as a marine rifleman with seven hundred and fifty other recruits at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the late summer of 1942. In October he fell ill with fever and dysentery and was hospitalized for eleven days, during which he lost considerable weight and passed his time reading Atlanta newspapers and playing chess with other boys. Sprawled in his bed with his knees up and his hands behind his head, he listened to radio news accounts of the war and studied the diagrams of troop movements in the papers with a lazy, unruffled fascination. He grew a mustache for six days, then shaved it, then let it grow again. Through almost every afternoon he slept, waking in time to feel dusk settle in and to watch the light die beyond the window three beds away to his right. Other boys came and went, but he stayed. The war wounded came to the hospital but convalesced on two other floors he had no access to. He lived in his T-shirt and underwear, and the smell from the open window was of dying leaves and of rain in the dirt and turned fields, and it began to seem to him strangely apt that he lay so many thousand miles from home and was so alone in his sickness. It was the kind of suffering, after all, he’d yearned for during the last five months, since receiving Hatsue’s letter. It was an easy, sleepy kind of languid fever, and so long as he did not try to move too much or exert himself unnecessarily he could live this way indefinitely. He surrounded himself with his illness thoroughly and embedded himself in it,

In October he trained a second time, as a radioman, and was sent to a staging area on the North Island of New Zealand as part of the Second Marine Division. They assigned him to B Company in the Second Marine Regiment, Third Battalion, and he soon met men who’d been at Guadalcanal, and he replaced a radio operator who’d been shot during the fighting in the Solomons. One night a lieutenant named Jim Kent recollected how the former radioman had taken an interest in a dead Japanese boy with his pants turned inside out around his muddy ankles. The radioman, a Private Gerald Willis, had propped the boy’s penis up by placing a stone under it, then had lain down carefully in the dirt and shot carbine rounds until he’d blown the head of it off. He’d been proud of himself afterward and had bragged about his aim for a half hour or more, describing for others how the boy’s penis had looked with the head of it severed and how the head itself had looked lying on the ground. Private Willis had been killed two days later on patrol, by friendly mortar fire he’d called for at the direction of Lieutenant Kent himself, who’d given the correct coordinates. Seven men in the platoon had died on that occasion,

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