Hiro was about to leave when he discovered a third identity. Beside the bed was a passport and air ticket. Both were in the name of Lee Kwan Hong, a Singaporean. The ticket was from Bangkok to New York. The passport contained an unlimited visa for the United States. The photograph was that of the devil who lay there on the sprung mattress.

General Hiro walked in sprightly fashion—somewhere between a march and a fox-trot—to the airfield. He handed his flight papers to the second lieutenant in charge of aircraft. The man, his neck button unfastened, looked Hiro up and down and saluted halfheartedly. He stamped the orders and led the general to one of the newest Zeros. It was fitted with canisters of high explosives and three additional gas tanks, two of which were not connected to the engine. Every day, the second lieutenant escorted young fliers to the craft that would become their coffins. The youths were always silent, resolved, sad that they’d lived so little, dreamed so wastefully. They were all trapped in the purgatory of imperialism, unable to confess they felt no allegiance to that old man locked away in his palace in Tokyo. He rode a white horse and spoke only to his nearest advisors. None of the young pilots wished to die for him. The honor they carried to their violent cremation was one not of nationhood but of personal pride. They would not be remembered as cowards by their peers, or the ground crew that waved them off. They kept their spines straight and their lips clenched. If one man refused to take to the sky, if he dared question the sanity of sending an entire generation off to a fiery death, if he wondered aloud how his country had sunk to allowing a gang of old generals to pervert its customs and hold its culture to ransom for glory, every other suicide pilot would echo those thoughts silently. But they’d band together to hammer down the nail that stood up and they’d climb into the cockpit and shed tears all the way to hell, but not back.