No Surrender by Hiroo Onoda

country. Do not blow yourselves up until you can see the enemy from this tent. There is foodhere. You can hold on until the enemy has been sighted.”
    One man answered, “It’s all the same to us whether the enemy comes or not.”
    â€œI know that, but it’s not the same to us. If the enemy invades this base, we can’t return to it. We want some way of knowing whether the enemy has come or not. Do you understand?”
    They said they understood and would do as I requested. Then they all thanked me for making it possible for them to destroy themselves.
    I prepared the explosives and the cannister and left the tent.
    The feeble voices followed me, “Take care of yourself, Commander!”
    I found Corporal Shimada and pushed off.
    Later I came back to the place and found no trace of either the tent or the twenty-two corpses. Nothing was left but a gaping hole in the ground. I stood there and stared at it. I did not think to bow my head or say a prayer. I just stood and stared at that awful hole. Even the tears refused to come.

    After Shimada and I had walked for a while, we ran into the scout that Lieutenant Ueno had mentioned. He was a boy of only seventeen or eighteen. I asked him whether he had sighted enemy troops; he said no.
    â€œGo back to the base,” I told him. “Guide the men there to the point where we are now. In the meantime, we’ll check the road ahead and take up a guard position there. When you’ve brought the troops here and secured the place, come ahead for us. Whatever happens, see that you establish contact with us.”
    After seeing him off, Shimada and I moved on, but we found no sign of the enemy. After a time, we decided to stop and wait for the young scout. If we went any farther, it would be impossible to return to the others before dark.
    We waited one hour, two hours, but the boy did not showup. The sun began to set, and I was worried. In the dark we had nothing to fear from the enemy, but it would be next to impossible to establish contact with our own men.
    Shimada looked closely at my face and asked, “What shall we do, Lieutenant?”
    I did not know the answer. If we started back now, it would be dark before we arrived. On the other hand, we had brought nothing at all to eat, and we were out of water.
    Finally I said, “Before it gets too dark, let’s go down into the valley and find some water.” We clambered down about 150 yards into a ravine and found a brook, but as we were making our way back up, the sun set, and we found ourselves in total darkness.
    â€œWhere are you, Lieutenant?” asked Shimada.
    â€œI’m still here,” I replied.
    It was so dark that we had to keep reassuring each other that we were still together, but we pressed on in an effort to find the ridge again.
    That was a mistake. After a while, we realized that we were going in circles. We decided to sit down and wait until morning.
    At dawn we started out again, and before long we spotted the place where we had been the evening before. From among the trees, I looked out at the road and got the shock of my life. Not one hundred feet away was an American scouting party!
    Shimada had a rifle, but I had only a pistol and my sword. We were hopelessly outmatched. We threw hand grenades simultaneously and the instant they went off scrambled down into the valley. After crawling around down there for about thirty minutes, we cautiously worked our way back up to a point just below the spot where our young scout had been instructed to lead our men. Feeling fairly sure that it would be safe this time, we started up the cliff above us, and almost immediately found ourselves in a shower of mortar shells. Theyarced up into the sky one after another, landing in the valley below us. We hugged the cliff, not daring to move.
    The young scout had followed my orders and brought the troops to the appointed place, where they had set up their machine guns and spent