Leroy Kauhini

Seventeen, from the Kaimuki side of Oahu, and not old enough to sign his own way into a war. His father had died when he was a baby; his mother raised him alone, and her living room told you everything about how she had spent the years since — every wall covered in his school pictures, that unbroken record a mother keeps because she can't help herself.

When the boys came by on a weekend pass she brought out food, and the beverage was Kool-Aid, which four young soldiers held politely and pretended, with great sincerity, to be enjoying. They adopted her as a second mother on the spot, without a vote.

In the first disoriented days at Schofield, while the rest were still working up the nerve to introduce themselves, Leroy was already moving through the barracks getting every name right the first time — making sure nobody got left standing by himself wondering where he fit. He didn't do it to be noticed. It was just how he walked into a room. His middle name was Saint John. His mother named him well.

And he sang. A voice nobody expected out of a seventeen-year-old from Kaimuki — smooth and unhurried, the kind you'd have guessed belonged to a much older man on the radio. Twice he stood up in a room full of strangers and sang a country song for Bill, when Leroy never sang country at all.

Every Friday was a G.I. Party, and Leroy was always finished before the rest had properly started. Instead of lying down and letting them catch up, he went looking for who hadn't — shining another man's brass, fixing another man's locker, never saying a word about it, smiling the whole time.

When Endo went absent and the whole company was restricted until somebody took a punishment hard enough to put him in the dispensary, Endo said he'd take it himself. Leroy was already stepping forward before he finished the sentence.

In Korea he carried the Browning Automatic Rifle for at least five months, waving off every replacement who could have taken the weight — saying the new men were too small and skinny for it, apparently not noticing he wasn't a big man himself. That was Leroy's arithmetic. His own back over somebody else's.

His number was 10104661. Bill's was 10104686. They trained together, went on pass together, and fought the whole way through in neighbouring companies — close enough that Bill could pick him out of a firefight by silhouette alone: the shortest man in his squad, carrying a BAR like it belonged to him.

Leroy always got the most mail. His mother sent canned poi, dried and salted fish, Island goods that had no business surviving an ocean and a war — and every box had a note reminding him to be sure and share. As if he needed reminding. Somehow, through the flight and the train and the trucks, he had also held on to a ukulele.