Jamie was loitering outside the hospital huts when a man, wounded by a bomb, was unloaded from a jeep, part of his jaw missing, his uniform soaked with blood. The photographer came running, ducking behind his camera. The man held up a sticky red hand, warding him off. Jamie sketched the man from memory later but felt dirty about it. There had been a helpless intimacy to the destroyed body, something embarrassing about the obviousness that he would die. He’d wanted privacy.
Jamie enclosed a sketch of a row of P-40s in a letter to Marian, their cowlings painted to look like the mouths of roaring tigers.
I wish I could talk to you about Alaska, though I don’t know if you ever had reason to come this far out into the islands since there was only fog and mud and muskeg out here before. Now there’s a harbor and a runway. A tent city. There were some people on Attu and Kiska, missionaries I think, and people at a weather station, but no one seems to know what happened to them.
He wanted to tell her about everything the war had brought to Adak’s empty shores. Endless ships disgorged all the ingredients of civilization, everything needed to feed and house and entertain ten thousand men. Huts and hangars but also cold-storage buildings and mess halls and darkrooms and torpedo shops, movie theaters and gymnasiums and surgical suites. A menagerie of machines arrived along with everything required to tend them, mountains of ammunition and ordnance, of tools and spare parts. The essence of war sometimes seemed to be the accumulation and transportation of stuff, of things. He wanted to list these things for Marian, to make her marvel at their number and variety and mundaneness （consider the journey of a single can opener）， but the list could never be long enough to make his point. Maybe that was where the scale of the war lay, in the bits and pieces.
He made a watercolor of ships in the harbor and sent it to Sarah without a note.
In April, bombardment against the Japanese increased; invasion seemed imminent. The assumption was Kiska would be first because it was closer. Out by the runway, Jamie ran into the executive officer and told him he’d like to go along when the invasion happened. “You want to paint the invasion?” the man repeated, puzzled.
“I’m supposed to paint more than supply lines and air support.”
“The landing force is coming from somewhere else. They won’t stop here, so there’s no way to get you in with them. It’ll be a quick operation.”
“Maybe I could go with one of the bombers.”
Fog was advancing over the water, and the XO jabbed a thumb at it. “You wouldn’t see much, thanks to this shit. Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Kodiak? Get on your way somewhere else?”
Jamie watched the fog drift and creep toward the shore. It was a neutral party to the war but powerful. It shrouded and delayed, swallowed planes. “Maybe,” he said. “Soon.”
On May 11, word came: The invasion had begun. Attu was the target, not Kiska. They thought it would take three days. Probably only five hundred Japanese soldiers were on the island.
Days passed. The officers were grim-faced. There were more Japanese soldiers on the island than they’d thought. Multiples more. Conditions were bad, the going slow.
After a week, Jamie went up with a bomber crew, but the XO was right. He didn’t see anything. They dropped bombs into the gray nothing just to conserve fuel. “Stupid motherfuckers,” the navigator said, and Jamie didn’t know who he meant, the Japanese or their own commanders or the bombs themselves. The thought struck him that, up in the air, they were no different from planes that vanished. Only their eventual return to Adak distinguished them. Being aloft meant being lost to everyone but yourself, and he wondered if that appealed to Marian. Or maybe she didn’t notice anymore.
An armada assembled in Tokyo Bay: carriers, battleships, destroyers, etc., all bound for the Aleutians to drive the Americans back to the mainland. It never sailed. Might have; didn’t.
After two weeks, word came that the infantry was closing in on the harbor where the Japanese had retreated. The XO passed Jamie where he was sketching near the harbor, then turned back, boots squelching in the mud. “A ship’s stopping in later today before resupplying Attu,” he said. “If you still want to go, I could arrange it. You might make it in time for the last push. How about it?”
So Jamie was on a ship, and the next morning he was on a landing craft chugging through the layer of clear air between the low fog and silver water, and then he was on a dismal gray beach, cratered from shelling. A sleeping bag and food and extra socks were in his backpack; over one shoulder he had a small satchel with his pencils and notebook and watercolors, and over the other he carried a rifle and ammunition. Three tractors were waiting on the sand. He helped load them with supplies, then followed on foot with eight other men. They walked for hours. The truck and tractors outdistanced them, but the tracks were easy to follow. Once he tried to sketch, but he was told it wasn’t safe to stop, better keep moving.