CHAPTER EIGHT

By Design

Finished first day of school. It’s just a refresher course in everything we had before, mostly just to pass the time I’d guess.—January 22, 1945

Dad and I had just finished editing for the day. I reached down, opened my backpack on the floor next to me, and slid my laptop into the padded compartment. Smaller compartments held other necessities: pens, pencils, and paper clips, as well as ibuprofen for the occasional headache. I took a yellow sticky note out and pressed it onto the plastic-encased letter we’d ended with and put the notebook into my backpack too. I stood up, stretching, and went to the kitchen.

“Do you want a glass of water?” I asked.

“No, thanks,” he answered.

When I returned to the living room, Dad was rummaging through a plastic grocery bag. He pulled out a candy bar and then held the bag out to me.

“Choose one,” he said. “They’re much better for you than water.”

Inside the bag were four or five different kinds of candy bars, twenty or so in all.

“Sale, huh?” I asked.

“Three for a dollar,” he said. “Take several.”

We sat back with our candy bars. He watched the muted television. I snuck glances at him.

“Did you have any friends during the war?” I asked.

As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. The words “friend” and “war” didn’t sound right in the same sentence. But it was too late.

So I tried to explain. “Well, you know, is there anybody that you hung out with or became friends with on base?”

Silence.

When Mom stopped to chat on her way through the living room, it was an interruption we were both grateful for. We talked a little about her flower bulbs and the green beans cooking on the stove that smelled so good. But then a look came over her face and she said, “You two are busy. I’ll leave you alone.” And before I could say anything, she was gone, clinking around in the kitchen.

I wanted to bow out gracefully—if that was possible. But a vest of weights held me down. I couldn’t just leave. Even though Mom had interrupted my question, I knew Dad wasn’t easily distracted. I’d finished my candy bar, so I didn’t even have that to focus my attention on. So I waited, trying to think of another subject to bring up.

“I did have one friend,” he suddenly said. “I don’t remember much about him. But his name was Mal.”

Then, to my surprise, my father started to talk freely. His tone was matter-of-fact, even happy, as he spoke of his friend. He began on the day they met.

For those still on the base, there was a morning ritual. They went to an outdoor bulletin board to look for their name on the long list posted each day. Sailors on the list could expect to be in the next group to be shipped out into the battle. Every time my father checked the board, he saw different faces. But one day, he saw a young man who looked familiar.

My father ran his finger down the list of names, and then leaned against the side of the bulletin board.

“I can’t believe it,” Dad said.

“You too?” the man asked.

Dad glanced at him.

“Yeah,” he answered. “Everyone else follows the same pattern. It’s alphabetical. We’re drafted out alphabetically, or we’re supposed to be anyway.”

The man nodded.

“I know,” he said. “Then when it gets to your name, it’s skipped. Am I right?”

Dad nodded, adding, “I just don’t understand. I should have been drafted out several times by now.”

“Well, hey, maybe they lost our records,” the man joked, “and we’ll just have to stay here in Hawaii for the remainder of the war.”

“Wouldn’t that be great?” Dad said.

They didn’t know it then, but their meeting and that short conversation was just the beginning.

They went their separate ways assuming they’d never see each other again. The base was huge, and two servicemen could serve their entire tour of duty there and never see each other.

“We might as well have lived in different cities,” my father recalled.

A few days after their meeting, a jeep parked in front of Dad’s tent. The driver, an armed sailor, stood in the doorway to the tent.

“Fisher, Murray?” he inquired.

“That’s me,” my father answered.

The sailor then asked for my father to recite his ID number, which he did.

“You are to come with me,” the sailor said.

My father sat in the passenger side as the driver zigzagged through the tent city, without speaking. My father’s questions were met with stony silence. When he got to the destination, one of the many buildings on the base, the sailor told him to go inside and await further instructions.

Inside, another sailor was waiting for him. He led my father to a room. When he opened the door, there stood the young man from the bulletin board. A small group of men and an instructor had also assembled. They took their seats at a table, each as confused as the next. But then the officer in charge started to speak and things started to make sense.

All of the times their names had been skipped on drafts were not by mistake but by design. Each man at the table had been left on base while their comrades were sent out into the war for a very important reason.

My father and Mal would be part of a small and elite group. The team’s mission: to copy and break a top-secret Japanese code transmitted in Katakana.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Such a simple question had led my father to share this new revelation. I dared not ask a question, for fear that I’d break the spell and never know what secrets he harbored.

When they’d met, both men wondered if there was a glitch in the system. Now their question was answered. There wasn’t a glitch in the system at all. The system was working just fine. In radio school, months earlier, when the former FBI agent taught my father Katakana just for fun, plans had been set in motion.

As they sat in class that day, my father learned that unlike him, each of the other men, five in all, had been sent to code-breaking school. They were told that from now on everything they were told during these special sessions was top secret. They were not to reveal it to their tent mates or anyone else. They would be watched at all times to ensure they hadn’t revealed anything. Their mail would be censored. They were not to talk about it in letters home, to family or friends. Even a hint would be reason for court martial.

At the end of the day, five separate vehicles took the men back to their tents. The driver was different from the one who’d brought him that morning. This time, my father didn’t speak. He didn’t ask any questions as the sailor drove in a roundabout way, finally dropping him at his tent.

As he lay on his bunk that night, he mentally went through all that had happened, beginning at Farragut where he’d learned the code. He hadn’t been told any of the logistics of the mission: when, where, how. In a way, he was as much in the dark as he had been when the jeep pulled up that morning. But he liked code breaking. He liked copying code and he was glad he’d get to use what he’d learned. He went to bed that night wondering about what was to come.

The next morning, he was surprised when a military green car pulled up in front of the tent at a different time than the day before. Again, a sailor asked for “Fisher, Murray.” Again my father gave his ID number. He got into the car and the sailor took a different route, again, winding through the brick-red dirt roads.

If my father was expecting to arrive at the same building as the day before, he was mistaken. It was a different building. A different driver. A different vehicle. A different instructor. The only thing that remained the same was the group of men that gathered in the training room. At the end of the day, he was taken back to his barracks via a different route.

Several days in a row followed the same routine. The only thing that was routine about it was that someone would pick him up, take him someplace, and he would learn something then be taken back to his tent by someone. His chauffeurs were never the same. The vehicles he was picked up in changed. The instructors changed often, though a few returned a couple of times. The location changed each day. Some days the room was in a seemingly abandoned building. One day it might be an office; the next, it could be an equipment storage room.

As the days went by, something was changing in him. He’d been happy-go-lucky and even nonchalant about the war before, but now he was suspicious. He watched everyone around him. He held the secrets close, his mind reeling at even the most mundane of questions from his comrades.

The only thing the soldiers could count on staying the same was each other. Of the team of five, my father and Mal gravitated toward each other most. Mal was younger than my father, just nineteen years old, and Dad began to feel protective of him. But he also marveled at how brilliant Mal was; he was so young to be a part of this code-breaking team. They talked a little about their hometowns during short breaks, but they never revealed very much. Every part of the team seemed to be afraid of developing any kind of closeness with their team members. And yet, they had become like an estranged family reunited by a common goal. Each was the one constant in the other’s life. At the end of the day, they were each sent their separate ways and didn’t see each other on base at all. Looking back, my father wonders if that was by design, too.

Classes ranged from subjects like the technical aspects of radio communication to the technicalities of submarine submersion. But no instructor ever seemed to know what the other had taught. And even the students didn’t know enough to piece it together. They were just given pieces to the puzzle. As hard as they tried, it seemed the pieces didn’t fit the same puzzle at all.

One day, after a few weeks of the secretive classes, a sailor with sidearms came once again to my father’s tent. He wove through the base, but this time the destination was different, very different: the base airport. There, a small airplane—barely big enough for its handful of passengers, which included my father and his new friend, Mal—awaited them. A short time later, they were on the island of Maui.

For weeks before, the base on Oahu had been alive with activity but then had turned eerily calm. With servicemen being sent out in large groups, the base was all but deserted. After all this time of waiting and wondering, he was standing with the small group of men on the island of Maui. What did it mean?

Like a dream or maybe a nightmare, he found himself beneath palm trees and in the bushes, learning things like how to slit the enemy’s throat without him making a noise. This is what was called jungle warfare training. The men were shown an example and then practiced on each other.

“Come up behind him,” the instructor said. “OK, now shove your forearm in his mouth and slit his throat with the other hand.”

They practiced for hours, as their time on Maui would be short.

“Now, this is how to break a Jap’s arm, rendering him defenseless,” the instructor continued.

My father went along with the training. They all did.

When they weren’t outdoors training, they were in the classroom, where they were taught Japanese. If they should be captured, hopefully these short lessons would come back to them, and they’d be able to understand what their captors were saying. After spending so much time on the base while others were sent out, the war was suddenly very real for my father.

Mal and my father were now part of a top-secret code-breaking team. Each person had a specific and crucial job to do. But without each other, the job couldn’t be done at all. My father and Mal were both Katakana code specialists; they copied the code. The rest of the team consisted of the cryptanalyst, who deciphered the code; the technician, who kept the communications equipment working; and an officer who oversaw the whole operation.

After a few days on Maui, they were flown back to Oahu and told only that they would be leaving the island soon. They were ordered to start writing letters to their family. My father followed the orders, post-dating letter after letter, sealing and addressing the envelopes. But instead of mailing them, the letters were given to someone else who would send one every day or two while he was gone. His parents would never see a break in the frequent letters they were so used to getting and wouldn’t suspect he was off the base.

The team was kept in the dark. No one knew where they were going. Would they be sent, as so many had, to the initial invasion of Iwo Jima?

The special classes continued on Oahu but took on a more sinister tone.

“What you will be doing is top secret,” the instructor said one day. “We will have people watching you wherever you go. If you go to a restaurant, you can be assured we will have someone there watching you. If you are sitting at a bar, the guy next to you could be one of ours. If you talk, if you say anything about what you are doing, we will know about it.”

The air in the classroom was already thick with fear, but what the sergeant said next brought a chill to the room.

“If you reveal anything about what you are doing, you will be sent to solitary for the remainder of the war. If what you revealed compromises security, you will be shot, without court-martial.”

With fear and suspicion swirling around them, my father and Mal found comfort in being in each other’s presence. The only people they could trust were each other. Anyone could be a spy. Anyone, of any class or rank, even a civilian, could be the one who was watching.

One day, they ran into each other outside of class. Though their friendship was one of few words, they decided to go off base to Nimitz Beach to relax a little. They sat on the beach, talking and watching the waves crash against the shore. When they got too hot, they swam way out in the surf, enjoying the warm water. Beyond the last waves, clear ocean water surrounded them as far as they could see in all directions. Treading water, my father asked Mal, “So do you think it would be safe to talk out here?”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Mal said.

My father agreed.

And with that, the foundation of their friendship was set. It was a friendship that had its own protocol. Back at home in civilian life, he would have gabbed with friends about the ups and downs of the job, of family and leisure time activities. But now, he and Mal could talk of nothing in the past and nothing in the future. Their communication was stunted as each worried about where even a casual conversation might lead. It was easier to not talk at all than to censor each word.

Still, they were in this together. They knew the secrets they must keep. Their friendship grew despite being deprived of sunlight. Somehow it thrived without words. They signed a contract with their silence. It was a vow they would never break.

In a few days, they were aboard a four-motor amphibious plane. Finally, they were told their destination: Iwo Jima. But first, they had stops to make, island hopping to refuel at Johnson Island and Guam, among others. Finally, a Navy ship in sight, they landed on the water and transferred to a small rubber craft with their communications equipment.

The ship was huge and those on board barely noticed when the men climbed aboard with the waterproofed equipment strapped to their backs. A few officers seemed to know who they were and what they were there for.

They changed ships twice, going first from Guam to Saipan and then from Saipan to Tinian. And then there was one more transfer, to yet another rubber raft in the middle of nowhere. My father recalled being grateful that the day was clear, the ocean calm. It was in stark contrast to what was to come.

I stared at my father as he leaned back, clearly finished with his story for the day. He looked exhausted.

“Wow,” I said. “I had no idea, Dad.”

“Well, that’s because I didn’t tell you,” he said.

“I don’t even know what to say.”

“And now, it’s time for a nap,” he announced.

“I think I need one too,” I said.

He laughed a little and then stood up wearily. But this time he didn’t wait for me to leave. He walked past me and slowly up the stairs to his bedroom.

Back at home, although it was the middle of the day, I curled up on my bed next to my kitty, covering myself with a knitted blanket my aunt made me when I was in high school. Somehow his story had exhausted me. I could only imagine how he must have felt. My imagination ran away with me. I could see the whole story replaying in my mind. The last thought I had before falling asleep was, He must have been so scared.