Is Someone Dying? Summary and Analysis

The school children who did not have blistered hands are ordered to work on an airfield runway they are digging four feet down in a ten by twenty foot section. The airfield is twenty miles north of town and would provide a refueling stop for Kamikaze planes from Manchuria to the mainland. The boy spends most of his junior high school's second year working on this airfield with four or five hundred other students. They barely complete one runway but never see any plane use or fly over it. The students live in tents by class with sixty in each plus a teacher. Tents are damp and smell of tar and grease with stale air and rotting straw mats that is nauseating. Students have diarrhea, dysentery and chronic indigestion. They get three meals daily of barley and...