In the postwar years, General MacArthur remained all-powerful in Asia, much like an aspiring emperor who once ruled and consolidated vast regions of the Roman Empire. MacArthur’s power wouldn’t hold, however, as President Truman dismissed the popular commander in 1951 at the height of the Korean War. In this novel, I propose, however, that there never was a problem that powerful money could not fix. And as the Seagraves argue, the plundered Japanese treasure would go on to outlive MacArthur by decades, its profits creating one unassailable legacy after another. It went on to fund CIA missions, and black ops, and on and on, right down to the Nixon administration’s dirty tricks. We see the fingerprints of such machinations on all of our transgressions right through to the debacle that was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And onward today. When, upon leaving office in 1961, celebrated former WWII commander and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, he well knew what he was predicting, warning, and deploring.

After the war, the early days of a reborn US intelligence system constituted a type of Wild West prompted by postwar musical chairs, power plays, and the seminal National Security Act of 1947 that ultimately created the CIA. From this font of intrigues arose the true and disputed existence of clandestine rogue operations and camps, classified psychological drug programs, and even plots against major figures, including assassination. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but there’s enough historical record already released to show such things went on. General MacArthur’s power struggle with President Truman of course existed, made no better by an awkward and brief attempt at reconciliation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at Wake Island in 1950. It came to a head with Truman’s dismissal of MacArthur. Like Lansdale, MacArthur remains a controversial lightning rod for the issue of American might. This stretches back to the 1930s, to MacArthur’s involvement leading the brutal clampdown of the Bonus Army as well as to his courting by right-wing interests scheming to overthrow FDR in the Business Plot—both of which are fact (see The Plot to Seize the White House, 2015, by Jules Archer). As with Lansdale, many either love or hate MacArthur depending on allegiances. I find both characters to be those larger-than-life types that a writer simply can’t resist fictionalizing. So here they roam. Some may not like my depiction of MacArthur’s realm or even of the man himself, but there exists more than enough complimentary nonfiction to offset any concerns. Other true events and characters in this story include Marine General Smedley Darlington Butler (and his War Is a Racket, 1935), US Military Government in Hawaii, Hotel Street in Honolulu, the wartime tragedy on Saipan, early atrocities in the Korean War, and many additional details large and small.