I could see, but I couldn't move.

Gurley's Quonset hut looked like the official Army Air Corps circus tent. Ropes and tackle were everywhere. Strange metal-crates, for lack of a better word-lined the walls. Piles of sandbags appeared at regular intervals. And those tarps I'd seen-with the light, I could tell they were much more than that: great fabric teardrops, upended (or balloons, once I'd thought about it), all of them limply hung from on high.

GURLEY'S OFFICE WAS an even stranger sight. Tyrannically neat, of course. Everything was gunmetal gray-the desk, the lamps, the filing cabinet, and a locker against the wall. Even the walls themselves were covered in gray metal paneling. My first impression was that the army had stuffed Gurley into a giant footlocker. I later decided that the metal fixtures and smooth walls resembled something else: I had picked my way into a bomb.

Along the back wall, a series of clocks, each labeled with a Roman numeral-up to VII, I believe. But much more interesting was the map below the clocks. It stretched across the entire rear of the office. It was a map, mostly of the North Pacific-except that it extended all the way south to Hawaii, and as far east as Michigan -and it was the only untidy thing in the room. Bright pushpins spread across the map's rinsed-out blue, brown, and green like a virulent disease, appearing singly and in clumps.

“Fifty,” Gurley said.

“Looks like more than that, sir,” I said, still staring at the map. The truth was, it would have been impossible to count the pins. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. At first I took them to be army bases, but dismissed that idea. Then I decided that Gurley had marked the map wherever he'd struck a man. White for where he'd wounded them, red for where he had killed them. There was a cluster of red just outside Anchorage.

“Fifty men,” he said. Maybe I was right.

“What I am about tell you, no more than fifty men in the country now know.” I started to believe him, but wondered, as he took a deep, melodramatic breath, if Gurley had not delivered this line dozens of times before. I could see him savoring the moment; he had that slight suggestion of a smile I now know steals across some actors' faces before a favorite speech. If I were mapping my own path in the war, I would stick a pin right there to mark that moment, in that office, in the light of that smile, because that's when I should have seen how helpless Gurley really was. It was as though he thought of the theaters of war as theaters, and that his role in the war was exactly that, a role.

He had paused after his “Fifty men” preamble, and now leaned forward to deliver the coveted secret. “The Japs,” he intoned, “have reached North America.”

I sat back: I think I was supposed to be frightened, but instead, I was confused. “The Aleutians, you mean?” A lot more than fifty people knew about that debacle.

Kiska and Attu, two brutally wet and cold islands at the end of the Aleutian chain, had been occupied by Japanese troops in 1943. The islands were of little strategic value, except in the sense that Roosevelt was enraged that the Japanese were occupying American soil. The U.S. had stumbled in its initial response; America 's Army, Navy, and Air Corps all fought each other for a while before turning their attention to the Japanese. Then the weather set in. Then the Japanese dug in. Three thousand Japanese on Attu held off an American force triple their size for days. The Japanese eventually lost, but they fought to the last man, or just about. Just twenty-eight of the three thousand Japanese soldiers on Attu survived to be taken prisoner. Most of the patients in their field hospital committed suicide. Those who couldn't, or wouldn't, were killed by their doctor before he killed himself.

After the bitter slog on Attu, the U.S. brought in even more forces for the assault on Kiska, where the main Japanese garrison was located. Tens of thousands of Americans stormed ashore, guns blazing, only to discover that the Japanese had abandoned Kiska two weeks before. More than one hundred U.S. soldiers still died, all from friendly fire.

So, if the Japanese had returned-well, I couldn't speak. This is why the colonel back in California had laughed when he heard I was being taken to Alaska. The Aleutians! It was where the world ended, careers ended, lives ended. Suicides were rampant. So were courts-martial. GIs sent there weren't even told of the destination until they were safely aboard ship and through the Golden Gate, a practice Gurley himself surely approved of.

“The Aleutians?” he said. “Good God, Belk. This means you're literate-you do read, and read the papers, to boot-” He feigned awe, and then resumed. “But no. Hell no. I'm not talking about the Aleutians -the islands or the swarthy Lilliputians who populate them. I'm talking about the fucking homefront, my brother-in-arms. The watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.” He started tapping the map. “ Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana.” His eyes grew wider, his voice deeper. He was a prophet. A leader. The Wizard of Oz.

I should clarify: recognizing his theatricality wouldn't have immunized me against it. I think I'd have to be as unconscious as Ronnie here to have resisted Gurley's performance. But I wasn't unconscious, I was alive, and I shivered- the enemy is here! Japs all around!-and you know what? It was wonderful. It was wonderful the same way it's wonderful to flinch at some frightening point in a book or a movie; there's a certain dizzy pleasure that comes with knowing you've succumbed, you've been duped.

And, back then, it was a lot more than that: it was wonderful to know the war was real. You had to be young to think this; the country had to be younger, too. But that's the way it was with kids like me: it was wonderful to know that this enemy we'd read so much about was really out there, that I would finally get to fight, and that Gurley would somehow wave a magic wand, take me through a back door, and usher me right into the middle of all of it.

All of it: Japanese soldiers, hiding in trees, leaping out of mailboxes late at night. Bombs in the sky. Balloons in the clouds. A giant red rising sun on a white field, strung between the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. But gradually, as Gurley rambled on, talking more to himself now than to me, my excitement began to give way to a kind of panic.

What he was talking about was preposterous. Evidence of Japanese activity in a dozen states or more? And nobody other than fifty men (fifty-one now?) knew about it? I looked around the office; I looked at Gurley as he stared at the map with red-rimmed eyes. I wondered if fifty men now knew what I thought I knew: here, in this lonely Alaskan outpost, Captain Thomas Gurley U.S. Army Air Corps, had gone mad.

And he'd dreamed himself up a new front line in the process. Even as a work of insanity, it was impressive: his line stretched clear across North America-through Canada and into Michigan. He rattled on, and I marveled at the performance, and at the magnitude of the fiction. I began to wonder which would come first: my transfer away from Anchorage, or Gurley's? Who would assume his post, and its attendant, if imaginary, duties?

What a world this was, wartime Alaska. Half-naked palm readers, rampaging drunken sailors, lunatic captains raving in darkened Quonset huts, and me. If I had been older, I would have been too scared to speak.

But I was young, stupid, and, once the panic subsided, bemused, so what I finally said was “Incredible.”

Gurley frowned, furious. I was not as good an actor as he. “Not enough for you,” he said.

“No, no, it's-incredible. You've-you've come up with quite a, a map.” I tried furrowing my brow, but it was no use-I don't even think I knew what the word furrowing meant back then.