A Boy at War

“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 fathers 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.”

The structure dictating the behavior expected of Adam is based in military regulations, which his father insists on extending past his own enlistment and into their home. This includes not only the rigid adherence to schedule, comportment, and discipline considered essential characteristics of a good sailor but also the unwritten rules dictating social mores. This is evident in Adam’s belief that he is part of the military by virtue of his father’s career choice.

“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.”

Adam’s relationship with his father is characterized by a convolution of admiration and fear. Adam’s lateness is due to his excitement as he anticipates seeing his father after 10 days at sea, but though his intentions are good, the tardiness is inexcusable. Though he is only 14, Adam has been conditioned to accept responsibility for his father’s responses and is not afforded reasonable leniency in extenuating circumstances.

“‘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.”

The first words Adam’s father speaks to him after 10 days apart are “your hair,” a disapproving observation of its frequent unruliness. Adam’s father is not prone to affection or warmth, which contributes to the stiff frigidity of their rapport. Emory’s presence alters the entire dynamic of the household, and Adam is forced into a state of heightened vigilance and self-consciousness whenever his father is home.

“…and there was Davi up on the stage reading his winning essay in the American Legion ‘I’m Proud to Be an American’ Contest. He stood in front of the whole school and read in a voice that carried to the last row of the auditorium, where Adam was sitting. […] Adam tried to be unimpressed, but he had to admit that standing up there was not something that he could see himself doing. And besides, Davi’s essay really was good.”

Davi’s essay foreshadows a later conflict over Adam’s uncertainty about Davi’s allegiance to America over Japan. The day before the attack, Davi expresses to Adam that he is proud to be an American, but in the intensity of the moment with Japanese bombs falling on the harbor, Adam forgets how impactful Davi’s speech was and what Davi told him the day before, and he lashes out against him. It is a testament to the raw emotional intensity Adam endures during the tumult of the attack that Adam forgets what he knows about his friend and reverts to seeing him as an enemy.

“His father, so disciplined, so regular, so sober, was once free enough—or wild enough—that he left his family and took to the road. Fourteen years old, Adam’s age. He had thought about that a lot. That was really brave. […] A flip remark. It just sprang out of his mouth. He really agreed with his mother, his father was admirable, but there was something about his being so admirable that, well, scared Adam. Would he ever be capable of doing what his father did? Could he ever be even half the man his father was?”

To Adam, his father’s decision to leave home at the age Adam is now seems uncharacteristic of the man he knows, whose actions and behavior are always, consistently in line with the rigid demands of a lifelong career in the navy. Adam’s father looms large in his mind, and Adam looks upon his father as a hero, but there is a certain resentfulness that occasionally mounts in Adam’s mind. It manifests in his growing need to begin defining himself as separate from his family, not in contradiction to his parents and their values, but as an individual with the ability to make his own decisions and explore the person he wishes to become.

“Adam held his hands up for the ball a lot, but Davi never threw to him. He just kept passing to the other guys, especially Joseph, who made two touchdowns. But then the next time Joseph carried the ball, Martin popped it out of his hands. It looked like another sure Martin touchdown. […] Adam caught up to Martin, then he was in front of Martin, trying to slow him down, until Martin tripped and they both fell. ‘Got him, you got him!’ Davi shouted. After that Adam felt more like part of the team.”

When he plays football with Davi and Davi’s friends on the beach, Adam has a sense of his apartness as the only white person in the group and as a newcomer to the island. This is made manifest when he is at first not included in the game. By employing his athletic skills, he manages to find himself included. The conversation between the boys is peppered with teasing references to their ethnic backgrounds, and though it is not with malice or cruelty, their collective awareness of their racial identity differences is palpable in the way these young men regularly acknowledge it.

“‘Adam, I am an officer in the navy. This is a military family.’ He was keeping time with his foot, giving Adam the drill, marching him through it. ‘I shouldn’t have to be telling you this. You know this. What you do reflects on your family. Reflects on me and reflects on the United States Navy. […] The Navy has been good to me. I grew up in the Navy. I became a man in the Navy. It’s given me everything. And what it’s given me, it’s given you, too. You know that the searchlight is always on me. On me, on us, on our family. Our conduct has to be above reproach. Do you understand? You wouldn’t want me to do anything that would bring shame on me or on the Navy.’”

Adam’s father gives him this lecture when Adam reveals that his new friend Davi is Japanese. At this point in the novel, war with Japan has not yet been initiated, but it has presented itself as a possibility. Adam’s father forbids Adam from associating with Davi on those grounds. He feels that the accountability he places upon Adam is necessary because of his status as an officer. His rank means that other sailors look to him as an example of how to conduct themselves. In the tight-knit military community, Adam’s actions do not go unobserved. Adam is made to feel beholden to the navy for every aspect of the life they lead, and his father instills in him the impression that he is indebted to the navy and duty-bound to comply with his father’s wishes as a result.

“‘Those big battleships, they’re bigger than two football fields put together. Each one has a displacement of more than thirty thousand pounds. They carry a thousand sailors.’ Adam couldn’t stop. He loved those ships. They were so powerful and so graceful, floating fortresses, the most powerful warships in the world. ‘They’ve got fourteen-inch armor plate. Bullets bounce off them, even bombs can’t get through. They have so much firepower, nothing and nobody can touch them. Those big guns you see, those long rifles, they can shoot a fifteen-hundred-pound shell twenty miles and hit the target.’”

In this moment, as the sun rises above them, Adam, Davi, and Martin are floating in the rowboat on the harbor, looking up at the impressive fleet of warships docked there. When his friends ask which is his father’s ship, Adam cannot help but swell with pride. He begins gushing enthusiastically about the features that contribute to the prowess of the Arizona. Mazer foreshadows the devastating impact of the attack that will occur just moments after Adam’s assertion that these ships are nearly indestructible; Adam’s beliefs are disproven when the Arizona is decimated and begins to sink.

“‘Those are Japanese,’ Adam said. He didn’t even know if it was true or if he was in some crazy weird dream. He couldn’t stop thinking that it was just like the movies. But there was something very wrong with the thought because this wasn’t the movies. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t make-believe. Those were real Japanese bombers, dropping real bombs. Why was Davi cheering? What was he doing? Signaling them? Yes, signaling them! He was Japanese. Japanese first!”

When the attack begins, Adam is at first unable to process what is happening in the sky above them, thinking at first that they must have stumbled upon a film set. It is only when the bombs begin to hit and he looks up to see the “rising sun” identifying the planes as Japanese that he registers what is happening. Davi doesn’t realize that in cheering on the planes he appears to be rooting for the Japanese, and in the intensity of the moment, Adam doesn’t consider that Davi too might be confused, still thinking it’s a training exercise being filmed. Instead, Adam instantly calls to mind his father’s insistence that Davi is Japanese first, his loyalty to the pilots who are attacking the American fleet.

“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.”

This vivid description of what Adam witnesses invokes the true enormity of the destruction that occurred at Pearl Harbor. At the time of the attack, the USS Arizona was a structure 608 feet long with a 30,000-ton displacement, an enormous battleship with over 1,100 soldiers aboard—one of whom is Adam’s father. Adam is in a tiny rowboat; thus, the intensity of the attack and the ensuing chaos and carnage that follow not only endanger him physically but traumatize him emotionally, leaving him struggling to grasp what is happening or determine how to react.

“Everything happened at once. The plane…bullets darting across the water…screams…the boat shooting up into the sky. Adam hung in the air. He saw the red circle on the fuselage, he saw the gunner in his black helmet, and below him he saw the empty rowboat. Then he was in the water, down under the water. Water in his nose and in his throat. He came up next to the boat—it was almost on top of him. He clung to the side, choking and spitting. […] Our side is coming, he thought.”

Adam’s proximity to the carnage of the Pearl Harbor attack becomes evident when he is thrown into the air and plunges into the water beside the rowboat. It is likely around this time when Adam is struck with a bullet, though he never manages to recall the exact moment he was shot. That Adam can see the gunner inside the plane indicates how close the aircrafts come to the ships in the harbor when they drop in altitude, and how immersed he truly is in the events of December 7.

“Adam wanted to tell Davi he was sorry he’d grabbed him in the boat. He couldn’t explain it. […] It had to do with his father and the Arizona and being scared to death. He was going to apologize to Davi, but not now. The important thing was to get help for Martin. Davi was talking to a sailor who was standing nearby with a pistol in his hand. Suddenly he hit Davi with the gun and knocked him down. ‘Jap!’ he yelled. ‘I’ve got a Jap!’ Adam ran, yelling at the sailor, ‘Stop, don’t! Stop it.’ He hardly knew what he yelled. ‘We’re Americans, Americans.’”

As soon as the altercation is over, Adam experiences an immediate and keen sense of regret for attacking Davi, and he realizes that the impetus was not only fear but a default into his father’s mindset. Though his attack against Davi was impulsive and instinctual, so are his efforts to protect his friend once he can think more clearly. Adam loudly and vehemently defends Davi as an American when the sailor with the pistol strikes him, vouching for their solidarity against their new enemy.

“The water around the once-proud battleship was thick with oil, and it stunk. Smoke and filth. Life rafts, pieces of boats, and men floundered in the watery debris. […] Adam searched their faces, looking for his father, but they were too far away to be seen clearly. […] Adam ran through dark, narrow passageways, down ladders, then up ladders. The ship shook. Adam was blown through a doorway. A hail of debris clattered down around him. Boulders seemed to be bouncing across the decks. Men were screaming. Everything was loose and coming apart. The noise was deafening, as if the ship were being sledgehammered to pieces. […] Pieces of the ship and pieces of men rained down around him. A foot. An arm. He saw everything through a red haze. He ran. He slipped in blood.”

Adam unexpectedly finds himself boarding the West Virginia when he lingers too long at the pier in the rowboat. Until this moment, he has only experienced the attack from the water and not shared in the terror of the men aboard the ships being bombed and torpedoed. Suddenly, he is in the thick of the carnage and in significant danger. His desire to find his father pushes him past the fear coursing through him and his instinct to flee the fire, explosions, and debris, but Adam reaches the limits of what he can stand when he sees the physical gore left behind by soldiers whose bodies have been torn asunder, and he escapes to the launch.

“Nothing in Adam’s life had prepared him for any of this. Not for the maimed, not for the wounded. Not for the dead they left floating in the water. He’d read about war. He’d imagined himself in a war, but never like this. War was a fight between equals. It was clean. It was fair. The best man won. But this—what was it? There were no words that he’d ever learned, no book that he’d ever read, that had prepared him for this. What was it? It was stink and blood and dying.”

Adam has developed a notion of what it means to be at war, derived from his proximity to the navy and his lifelong immersion in military culture as a navy brat. What he is witnessing is in direct contrast to his understanding of the rules surrounding proper combat engagement, the political processes that lead to armed conflict, and the parameters that define what he understands to be honorable warfare. Pearl Harbor is indeed an exception in the surprise element of the attack, but the graphic reality of the aftermath is entirely exemplary of the gruesome truth of war, and Adam’s somewhat romantic ideals are crushed over the course of the day and all that he witnesses.

“They had hardly stepped outside when the sirens went berserk again. He and Rinaldi dove into a drainage ditch and waited for bombs that didn’t come. Adam’s face was in the dirt. He had that sweet Aqua Velva smell all over him. He giggled. He couldn’t stop giggling, and he didn’t understand why. This wasn’t a funny place, nothing funny was going on. But he couldn’t stop. Maybe it was because he was alive. He’d been shot and he’d just kept going, like a cartoon, like Popeye the Sailor Man. Nothing could stop him. Or maybe he was laughing because now he was a sailor. Did you become a sailor just by putting on a uniform? Not in the ordinary, regular world. But everything today was turned inside out. So maybe he was laughing for no reason, because this was a world without reason. Next to him Rinaldi started laughing too.”

Adam’s reaction of laughing hysterically seems to him an inappropriate one, given the gravity of the situation. It is, however, the very absurdity of the events around him that causes him to react this way; it is a testament to the amount of stress he is under that his emotions are so varied, intense, and uncontrollable. Rinaldi reacting the same way, joining Adam in his unexpected laughter, affirms that even many trained sailors were not fully prepared for what they are enduring.

“Adam banged on the cap. People tumbled off the truck. Then he had the gun to his shoulder. How that happened, how he got to the top of the cab, he didn’t remember, but he was up there, shooting as fast as he could, one clip after another. The empty shells bounced off the cab. He was excited, so excited that he was trembling. It was the smell of gunpowder and the way the rifle recoiled into his shoulder. He kept shooting, even after the plane had disappeared.”

Over the course of the few weeks depicted in A Boy at War, Adam’s role shifts from that of a boy beginning to explore making choices for himself outside the parameters of his father’s strict instructions to a young man who has seen and experienced events that belong to the realm of adulthood. When he is placed in a position of danger while armed with a weapon, Adam assumes responsibility for defending his own life and attempting to ensure the safety of the civilians riding inside the truck. His fear has been converted to adrenaline, and the overkill he displays is fueled by the fact that this is Adam’s first chance to fight back and retaliate against those who have caused so much death and destruction since he watched the first bomb drop that morning.

“Adam walked. Sun high, almost no shade anywhere, the sky as blank as a sheet of paper, as if smoke and planes—the attack itself—had been erased. Here and there cars had been abandoned. He heard more firing, sometimes a distant explosion like thunder. Once, he saw a plane falling, spinning out of control. Maybe it was the plane he’d fired at. A thin spiral of smoke appeared over the trees. It reminded him of summers camping in the mountains and the way smoke from their campfire drifted up through the branches.”

After Adam leaves Hotel Street to head for home, he is struck by the lack of evidence of the morning’s events in the environment around him. He can hear the aftermath in the distance, but Oahu seems very much as it was before the attack began. Adam has experienced an event of profound impact over a few short hours. By the time he returns home, it will be sunset; he was awake at sunrise before the attack occurred. During the sun’s journey across the sky, his entire world has been completely and irrevocably altered. He tries to reconcile what he can see and hear with what he knows of the chaos still unfolding in the harbor below.

“Once he left the downtown, everything changed. He passed from one tree-lined street to another. It was another world, a world without bombs. It was too peaceful, too quiet, too ordinary. He kept waiting for an explosion, for gunfire. He stayed close to buildings, looking up, ready to take cover. A car honked and his heart jumped. A door slamming sent him crouching under a hedge.”

Adam is still in a heightened emotional state. The attack by the Japanese was not expected, and as a result, no one, not even the most informed and highest-ranking members of the navy and the air force, knows when the next attack might be mounted or from where. Adam anticipates that another strike could come at any moment and in any form. His involuntary responses to the sounds of the door and the car horn reveal that he is already starting to exhibit the reactivity that will characterize the aftermath of his trauma. Though the novel ends only a few weeks after the attack, the trauma Adam endures on this day will likely continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.

“He wanted to tell her everything, wanted her to admire him, how he’d seen so much, so many terrible things. But he kept hearing his father saying, Not in front of your mother. There were things in the world, things that happened, that you didn’t talk about in front of women. He tried to sort out what he could say and what he shouldn’t say. ‘We found a rowboat,’ he began. Then he couldn’t stop. It all came out—almost all—how they were in the water when the attack began, and the torpedo bombers and Martin’s wound, and how Davi got beaten. He stopped, thinking about how he’d tried to push Davi out of the boat. How could he tell his mother that?”

Adam is conflicted about telling his mother what happened to him that day, even though he wants to talk about it. His father has created in Adam’s mind the notion certain truths should be kept secret, even from one of the people he loves most and is closest to, because women should not know about certain topics. Nevertheless, Adam needs his mother to understand what he endured; he needs to process it aloud for himself.

“He lay down near the open doorway on the floor, next to her. Outside the long leathery leaves of the banana tree chattered in the wind. Adam couldn’t get comfortable, but his mother was here, and he didn’t want to leave her. Images flickered through his mind with the rapidity of a movie projector. Water…ships…a boat rocking…men like fish beneath the water. He awoke abruptly, sat up, his whole body tense.”

With his father missing, Adam automatically assumes the role of protector of the household, keeping his rifle nearby and creating a physical barrier in front of his mother and sister to guard against any harm. Like many people who have endured a trauma like he has, Adam is bombarded with intrusive images and imagined sounds as he tries to rest. He is still in shock and has not yet begun to draw the conclusions about his father’s fate that he will soon be forced to confront.

“Davi was the first person he’d ever met who talked about light. Adam had never thought about it before Davi. He had never thought about air, either, and being able to breathe. But was there anything better than breath? He remembered Martin and the stick in his chest and the way it had moved with every breath. And then he thought about his father trapped inside the Arizona, him and all those men in that suffocating darkness. He filled his lungs. He breathed. He breathed again. He couldn’t get enough air.”

Adam has not seen Davi and Martin since they escaped the water together in the rowboat. Adam’s relationship with Davi has caused him to think about concepts he had not considered before, and when he thinks of his new friends and how close they came to even more severe injuries, he feels a sense of fear and gratefulness that manifests in his need to remind himself that he is alive. To Adam, being trapped and drowned inside a battleship is a fate he narrowly escaped, and his anxiety is heightened when he imagines what his father must have experienced in the terrifying early hours of the morning of December 7.

“On the way to the hospital to see Martin they went through Davi’s neighborhood. It took Adam a while to figure out why the narrow, crowded streets seemed different from the last time he’d been here. The streets were just as crowded with the same Japanese faces, but it was quieter now. Now the banners and signs and Japanese things were all gone. No portraits of the emperor, no ceremonial samurai swords in the store windows. Even the women were different. They all wore dresses, Western style. No more kimonos and sandals. It was as if no one wanted to look Japanese anymore.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor created a hostile environment for Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans living in Hawaii. Though none of them were involved in the attack, their neighbors questioned their loyalty and allegiance, and they were met with harassment and cruelty. Many of Japanese descent proactively adopted appearances that aligned them with American forces. When Adam witnesses this dramatic shift, he has just learned that Davi’s father was taken away by the FBI. The change in the neighborhood cements in his mind the impacts on and reverberations throughout Japanese society in Hawaii.

“He’d been kidding himself. He’d been praying, hoping, believing, agreeing with his mother, that they would still hear from his father. But he knew better. It had been too long. He’d been there. He’d seen the bodies floating in the bay. He’d seen the Arizona. He knew. Half the crew was still down there, buried, entombed. Dead. He said it to himself again. Dead. His father had been taken from him. He was at the bottom of the harbor, in the Arizona. And it didn’t make any sense. It would never make any sense.”

Waiting to hear news from the navy regarding his father’s status is agonizing for Adam. He is beginning to accept that his father must be dead, especially given what he saw, but for his mother’s sake he does not share his thoughts. Adam desperately wants an official notice from the navy so that he can stop wondering, and it is with this knowledge in mind that he goes to the base to learn what he can about any survivors from the USS Arizona. Adam may be convinced rationally that his father must be dead, but the lack of confirmation keeps him in a kind of purgatory.