shoving him and slamming him against the wall. One of them reared back his fist to give him a haymaker, when Tyndall and Moses picked him up in the air and threw him in the street. He got up to face McTavish and Craine. Craine threw him back down, and McTavish stepped on his neck. The other two had to face Brython, Mendel, and Michael. They did not move a muscle. “Little Gook, is it. They used to call me Little Jew boy. Care to try that one?” piped in Moses. He added, “Get your bigoted arses out of here while we give you the chance.” They picked themselves up and ran, as fast as they could. The group picked up the oriental and took him home and helped him clean up. They found out his name was Ki Lond. He was the first born in this country to Jimi Lond, who had immigrated to America when the militarists seized power in Japan. Jimi had used his last money to buy into a shoe store and wanted to prove to the Westerners that he was a loyal American. His effort was rewarded by a Nisei camp. He died there and asked his oldest son to show his loyalty to his new home. Ki joined the Marines and fought on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. He was horrified that he had to shoot at people that had taken refuge in caves and had no food, but they would commit Hara Kari because of the shame of surrender. He saw an officer do this to himself, but he was not allowed to register any sympathy for him to his American buddies because they’d see him as a traitor. That would be breaking his promise to his father. He was haunted by the picture of the officer’s suicide that kept coming up in his dreams.
After the war, he wandered around Asia plagued by the recurrent vision and found that opium could provide relief. He wandered from Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal to Okinawa to Japan to China to Burma to India to Afghanistan with the faces of the officer gutting himself plaguing his vision day and night for two years after the war and his father’s image extracting a promise from him he could not keep. He also saw the pleading eyes of the Japanese soldiers emerging from the caves, as he shot them. Ki stowed away on a ship, heading for San Francisco. He wandered around the states smoking and shooting up drugs to blot out his pain until he reached the point of only wanting the drug and forgetting what he wanted to relieve. From city to city and state to state he became an object of ridicule and abuse until that night in Cambridge. Craine and Rodin got him into a rehabilitation program, had constant contact with his counselors and doctors, and closely monitored his progress for a year until they were sure he was clean. Then Corlando hired him as a chauffeur, handyman, and gardener. This later proved to be a wise investment in a human being.
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