Little by little, the brass started waking up from the haymaker they’d taken. Orders came for units to move to their defensive positions. The Twenty-eighth Infantry Regiment headed for Waikiki. The Ninety-Eighth Coast Artillery Regiment (Antiaircraft) rolled out for Kaneohe, on the windward side of Oahu. And, along with the Nineteenth Infantry Regiment, the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion hurried up to the north shore, to defend the beach between Haleiwa and Waimea.

They hurried, that is, once they got everything ready to roll. That took a while. Along with everybody else, Armitage discovered war was different from drills. The sense of urgency was much higher. Unfortunately, it made a lot of people run around like chickens that had just had a meeting with the hatchet and chopping block.

“Come on, goddammit!” Fletch screamed at a sergeant fifteen years older than he was. “You know how to hitch the gun to the truck. How many times have you done it?”

“About a million, sir,” the sergeant answered quietly. “But never when it counted, not till now.” He looked down at his trembling hands as if they’d betrayed him.

That wasn’t the only foul-up, small and not so small, in the battalion-far from it. Armitage thanked God things weren’t worse. At last, all the 105mm guns and their limbers were attached. All the men who would fire them had piled into the trucks. All the infantrymen in the accompanying regiment had their rifles and ammunition and helmets. They started north from Schofield Barracks a little before two in the afternoon.

They had barely begun to move when the antiaircraft guns still at the barracks began pounding away, throwing shells up into the sky. Through the roar and rumble of the trucks’ diesel engines, Armitage hadn’t been able to hear any airplanes overhead. “Are they shooting for the fun of it?” he asked whoever would listen to him.

He got his answer less than a minute later, when bombs started bursting not far away. The truck stopped, so suddenly that the soldiers in back were pitched into one another. “Holy shit!” somebody shouted.