A Boy at War

“He didn’t have a hometown. He’d grown up in the military, and in the military you moved all the time. There was no one place. They’d lived all over, but no matter where they lived, it was always the same—military. Whatever you thought was a military base, that was his hometown. […] Japanese or maybe Chinese, Adam thought, something like that. Maybe Hawaiian. He’d been reading about Hawaii. There were a lot of different kinds of people here—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Portuguese—and they were all mixed up. There were more Japanese, though, than any other group.”

When Adam arrives on Oahu and begins attending Roosevelt High, it is the first time he has been surrounded by civilian students instead of the children of military service members, and he struggles to communicate to the class that he really has no hometown. Though Adam has lived in many places, he has never encountered people of Japanese or Indigenous Hawaiian descent; the unique, diverse representation of ethnicities is as new to him as being in a public school off base. In conveying that Adam recognizes the diversity among his classmates, Mazer foreshadows the racial complexities that will be heightened in the wake of the Japanese attack.

“When he was younger, he had always gone to schools on the base, and all the kids were Navy, like him. They knew about moving and the military, and how you didn’t pal around with kids whose fathers were lower in rank than yours. It wasn’t a written rule, but it was a rule. The kids all lived by military rules, same as their fathers. They were in the military too, even if they didn’t have the uniforms.”

The structure dictating the behavior expected of Adam is based in military regulations, which his father insists on extending past his own enlistment and into their home. This includes not only the rigid adherence to schedule, comportment, and discipline considered essential characteristics of a good sailor but also the unwritten rules dictating social mores. This is evident in Adam’s belief that he is part of the military by virtue of his father’s career choice.