Cryptonomicon

The very best men in the regiment are in a foul mood. The ones like Shaftoe, who didn't get involved with the Chinese women, are still leaving plenty behind: houses with maids and shoeshine boys and coolies, with women and opium for almost nothing. They don't know where they are being shipped off to, but it's safe to say that their twenty-one dollars a month won't go as far. They'll be in barracks and they'll have to learn to polish their own boots again. When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they'll never see again, a world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again, It's okay with Shaftoe, who wants to be a Marine. But many of the men have become middle-aged here, and don't.

The guilty men duck belowdecks. Shaftoe remains on the deck of the gunboat, which casts off from the Bund, headed for the cruiser Augusta,which awaits in mid-channel.

The Bund is jammed with onlookers in a riot of differently colored clothing, so one patch of uniform drab catches his eye: a group of Nip soldiers who've come down to bid their Yank counterparts a sarcastic farewell. Shaftoe scans the group looking for someone tall and bulky, and picks him out easily. Goto Dengo's waving to him.

Shaftoe takes his helmet off and waves back. Then, on impulse, just for the hell of it, he winds up and flings the helmet directly at Goto Dengo's head. The throw goes awry and Goto Dengo has to knock down about a dozen of his comrades in order to catch it. All of them seem to think that it is a high honor, as well as tremendously amusing, to be knocked down by Goto Dengo.

Twenty seconds later, a comet sails up out of the flesh cosmos of the Bund and bounces on the wooden deck of the gunboat--a hell of a throw. Goto Dengo is showing off his follow-through. The projectile is a rock with a white streamer wrapped around it. Shaftoe runs over and snatches it. The streamer is one of those thousand-stitch headbands (supposedly; he's taken a few off of unconscious Nips, but he's never bothered to count the stitches) that they tie around their heads as a good-luck charm; it has a meatball in the center and some Nip writing to either side. He unties it from around the rock. In so doing he realizes, suddenly, that it's not a rock after all; it is a hand grenade! But good old Goto Dengo was just joking--he didn't pull the pin. A nice souvenir for Bobby Shaftoe.

***

Shaftoe's first haiku (December 1940) was a quick and dirty adaptation of the Marine Creed:

This is my rifle
There are many like it but
This rifle is mine.

He wrote it under the following circumstances: Shaftoe and the rest of Fourth Marines were stationed in Shanghai so that they could guard the International Settlement and work as muscle on the gunboats of the Yangtze River Patrol. His platoon had just come back from the Last Patrol: a thousand-mile reconnaissance-in-force all the way up past what was left of Nanjing, to Hankow, and back. Marines had been doing this ever since the Boxer Rebellion, through civil wars and everything else. But towards the end of 1940, what with the Nips (2) basically running all of northeast China now, the politicians back in D.C. had finally thrown in the towel and told the China Marines not to steam up the Yangtze any more.

Now, the Old Breed Marines like Frick claimed they could tell the difference between organized brigands; armed mobs of starving peasants; rogue Nationalists; Communist guerrillas; and the irregular forces in the pay of warlords. But to Bobby Shaftoe they were all just crazy, armed slopes who wanted a piece of the Yangtze River Patrol. The Last Patrol had been a wild trip. But it was over and they were back in Shanghai now, the safest place you could be in China, and about a hundred times more dangerous than the most dangerous place you could be in America. They had climbed off the gunboat six hours ago, gone to a bar, and not come out until just now, when they had decided it was high time they went to a whorehouse. On their way, they happened to pass this Nip restaurant.

Bobby Shaftoe had looked in the windows of the place before, and watched the man with the knife, trying to figure out what the hell he was doing. It looked a hell of a lot like he was cutting up uncooked fish and putting the raw meat on bullets of rice and handing it over to the Nips on the other side of the counter, who were wolfing it down.

It had to be some kind of optical illusion. The fish must have been precooked in the back room.

This had been nagging at Shaftoe for about a year. As he and the other horny drunk Marines went by the place, he slowed down to peer through the window, trying to gather more evidence. He could swear that some of that fish looked ruby red, which it wouldn't have been if it were cooked.