Beer turned a few pages in his notebook and read, “Born Shiga Prefecture 1906. His father had been a decorated soldier, so Hiro qualified for a scholarship at the military preparatory school and a direct line to the air academy in Saitama. He was in the top seventh percentile in all the courses he took and proved to be a brilliant flier. But the record states, ‘Due to an injury sustained during training, the result of which his eyesight began to deteriorate, he is no longer considered suitable for the air corps.’ They gave him the compassionate rank of major and attached him to the salvage battalion. He was never to fly again.”

“Poor Hiro,” said Daeng.

“They looked up the incidences of pilots being bumped up the ranks like that. It appears the training regime for young fliers was particularly brutal. Errors were often punished by beatings. There were common reports of cadets being struck about the head with wooden paddles. The training officers believed that suffering made for better pilots. As Hiro’s eyesight was twenty-twenty when he entered the academy, it’s probably fair to guess he got his disability as a result of overenthusiasm by a trainer. Hence the high compensatory rank.”

“Really?” said Daeng. “They beat up their own pilots?”

“Spare the rod,” said Siri to himself. Civilai wasn’t around to complete the proverb.

“Miss Cindy’s official records closely followed the dates and places Hiro wrote about in his diary,” said Beer. “From Manchuria he was transferred to the Vietnamese-Chinese border in late 1940 and continued with his salvage operations there. That was when the Japanese diary entries stopped. But, according to the regional commander, there was an incident at Lang Son. The Japanese surrounded the garrison there and called on the French to surrender. As a rather odd gesture of defiance, the commanders ordered the troops to disconnect the breeze blocks from their 155-millimeter cannons and throw them in the Ky Cung River. This presumably to deny the Japanese the use of French weapons against their own men. Of course there were witnesses to this act and word got back to the Japanese. They dispatched their salvage team, headed by one Major Uenobu, to retrieve whatever had been dumped into the river.

“Now, it happened that some fifty years earlier, the French, at that time running away from the Chinese, had also dumped whatever they begrudged the advancing army into the same river at the same spot. Hiro and his team dived down into the murky water and retrieved the breeze blocks in a few hours. But embedded in the mud they found trunks and cases from that earlier debacle. According to the record it took the best part of a week to retrieve it all.”

Beer read out the official invoice for that operation:

Description Unit

Breeze blocks from current campaign 57

Large wooden chests 18

Small wooden cases 12

Personal suitcases and briefcases 66

Small arms/machine guns (unusable) 132