Behind Japanese Lines (10 page)

Mackenzie and I were awakened at dawn by the crowing of a rooster. This meant that there had to be some people around, so we headed in the general direction of the sound. Soon we came to a house occupied by an old Filipino man and a young girl. Once more, as was to be the case so many more times during the war, I was the beneficiary of the friendliness and generosity of ordinary Filipinos. Though these two had never seen us in their lives and could communicate with us only in sign language, they fed us rice and venison and then, for reasons unknown to us, probably fear of the Japanese, quietly packed up and left.
¹⁰
Long afterward I cannot help but wonder if we Americans would have taken comparable risks and shown equivalent kindness to Filipinos.

Once more Mac and I had to decide what to attempt next. We were still well up in the mountains. I wanted to stay a while where we were, if only to nurse my sore feet, but Mac was adamant about going down into the lowlands and so departed alone. My guess proved bad. The next day a typhoon, which the natives call a
baguio
, roared through the area. It swept the roof off the house, put out my fire, and crisscrossed all the mountain trails with fallen trees. Now I was out of both food and fire, and my feet were deteriorating visibly. A life insurance salesman would have rated my prospects close to zero. For four days I lived on guavas and green bananas, the latter ranking second only to green papayas as a loosener of the bowels. Then my luck turned. In a nearby outbuilding I found a pair of rubber shoes. The tops had rotted away, but the soles were still substantial. After
tying them onto my sore feet with vines I could walk again, so I headed off for the valley below.

After a time I came to a village inhabited by Baluga pygmies, a mountain people dressed chiefly in G-strings but whose men were armed with American rifles. If they seemed strange to me, I must have looked quite as outlandish to them. Back at the Fassoth camp my head had been shaved to combat lice, and my chief garment now was a pair of extra large overalls that hung limply on my cadaverous frame. Though the Balugas were frightened momentarily at this apparition appearing suddenly in their midst, they soon recovered and fed me some
camotes
and green papaya soup. By now an ulcer had indeed developed in the wound on my foot, and had eaten a deep hole in it. The Balugas treated my malady by grinding a red rock into powder, pouring this into the wound, and then covering it with a white paste produced by chewing some leaf. Then they took me to a trail that led downward into the lowlands and left me.

That evening I came to a house nestled against a hillside where foothills disappeared into lowlands. Here I was greeted hospitably by two Filipino couples and offered a choice of food or cigarettes. Incredible though it must seem to a reader, my addiction to tobacco then was so great that I opted for cigarettes and smoked three or four of them. Later my hosts fed me anyway and let me take a bath, after which I felt refreshed and restored, save only for my throbbing foot.

By now it was in bad shape. The ulcer had eaten a hole an inch across right down to the bone. Little beads of decaying flesh honeycombed its sides and stank atrociously. In fact, as soon as I sat down in the house the family dog picked up the smell and kept coming towards the foot, sniffing inquisitively. I kept driving him away. At length one of the Filipino women, who spoke English, noticed what was taking place and urged me to let the dog lick the wound clean. The mere thought disgusted me, but there was nothing to lose by trying. The dog eagerly worked its tongue into the festering cavity and began to lick away the rotting flesh. The pain was excruciating, so bad that I had to stand and hold my foot down to endure it; but when the dog had finished its loathsome task the foot felt better. I stayed there a week. The dog continued its treatments every day, and my foot began to heal. How easily civilization causes us to forget simple things, that from time immemorial animals have healed themselves by licking their wounds.
¹¹

Receiving unorthodox medical treatment from a Philippine dog began a process that came close to making me a Filipino. William Fassoth had not been caught when his camp was raided by the Japanese because he had been away in the lowlands. From there he began to make arrangements for selected Filipino families to assume the dangerous task of hiding and feeding one American each. I was inherited by Mr. and Mrs. Louis M. Franco, who lived in the village of Tibuc-Tibuc near Gutad at the extreme western edge of Pampanga province, about ten miles north of the northwest corner of Manila Bay and close to the route of the Death March. The Francos did not know a word of English, but they treated me splendidly all the same.

They built me a low hut with a grass roof near a small river that meandered through a flat field covered with cogon grass. This made it possible to supply me with food and other commodities twice a day by wading in the stream and thus avoiding formation of a trail that might betray my hiding place. They also presented me with a .16-gauge shotgun pistol for protection, a weapon I was afraid to shoot lest it blow up in my hands. Later they gave me a Lee Enfield rifle, in which I reposed more confidence.

Here I settled down and tried to regain my health. I swam in the stream a great deal, both for enjoyment and for exercise. During the heat of the day I lay in the sun for long periods. Everyone has heard cynical observations to the effect that if one does not like a given medical opinion he has only to wait five or ten years and the opposite one will come into fashion. At the present time (1985) medical orthodoxy has it that long exposure to the sun is harmful to the skin.
Maybe so, but it didn't seem true to me in 1942. Sun, swimming, rest, and ample food gradually healed my foot and restored my health. In the process I turned as brown as the Filipinos themselves. Save for my beard, which I could shave, and my Occidental nose, about which I could do nothing, a casual observer could hardly have distinguished me from a Filipino, no mean asset in the life I was to lead for the next two and a half years.

Much of the time, of course, I had to stay under cover to avoid being spotted by Japanese planes or passing patrols. These days were, I believe, the longest of my life. I soon discovered that the best way to pass the time was to read and study. The Francos brought me what books they could. Most of them were elementary school texts, but since they were all I had I read and reread them many times. From them I learned much about the history, government, religion, and customs of the Philippines. With some amazement I discovered that more than seven thousand islands comprise the Philippines, that at least eight-seven dialects are spoken by their inhabitants, that Spanish was still the official language of the Islands, that Americans had made English compulsory for school children, and that Tagalog, a smooth, flowing tongue that is pleasant both to speak and to hear, would probably replace both Western languages eventually.

I became acquainted with the Philippine national heroes José Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo, the former considered the father of his country and the latter celebrated as the leader of Philippine resistance to American occupation after the Spanish-American War of 1898. I became acquainted with the details of the U.S. occupation, and of the insurrection that followed it; with the excellent record made by Gen. Arthur MacArthur as governor-general of the Philippines; with the career of Manuel Quezon, the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth; and of his close relations with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the famous son of the able governor-general.

Not least interesting were descriptions of how the habits of particular Filipinos had caused the U.S. Army to replace the .38 automatic with the .45 as standard issue. The Moros, fierce Moslems who inhabit Mindanao and some small southern islands, hated the Christian and pagan Filipinos and fought them periodically. They also had the disconcerting habit of occasionally running amok. This state was induced either by binding themselves tightly with bamboo or by winding an elastic vine around their genitals. In either case, half-mad with pain and quasi-religious fanaticism, they would race about wildly, killing anyone they met until someone killed them. By hard experience it was learned that a bullet from a .38 did not pack the
wallop necessary to stop an amok Moro before he could slash or spear his intended victim. Only a .45 would do it.

I also began in earnest to learn Pampangano, the dialect of the area. For many days I wrote out phrases phonetically, memorized them, and practiced their pronunciation. There is nothing like concentration for learning, and eventually I developed a good command of the tongue. Mastery was not immediate, though. One day I addressed a native boy: “Magandang Hapon.” He stared at me quizzically and after some hesitation asked me if I realized what I had said. I replied that I had intended to say, “Good afternoon.” He laughed and told me that the meaning of the word “Hapon” depended on which syllable was accented. Ha-
pon
meant afternoon.
Ha
-pon meant Japanese. What I had actually said was “Good (or beautiful) Japanese.”

As my linguistic studies progressed and my health improved, I came out of hiding periodically to visit local villages and homes where I could practice my vocabulary and make Filipino friends. As a teenager I had studied the Hawaiian guitar for a time. Now some Filipinos gave me a standard (Spanish) guitar, on which I practiced a good deal. Soon I learned to sing war songs and love songs in Pampangano.

I also learned something about Filipino psychology and customs. The favorite weapon of most Filipino men was the bolo, a long, curved knife carried in a bamboo scabbard and used for a variety of purposes. Most Filipinos were good-natured much of the time but, like people everywhere, they occasionally lost their tempers and got into fights. The aftermath of a fight waged with bolos could be devastating. I have seen survivors of bolo battles reconstructed with as many as four hundred stitches.

Filipinos love to gamble, particularly on cockfights. The owners of fighting roosters often appeared to think as much of their feathered protégés as of their own children, and spent much time and effort training them. The training itself breathed the spirit of boot camp in the Japanese army. A favorite way of “conditioning” an unfortunate chicken was to tie its feet to a wire clothesline and then flick the wire to make it spring back and forth. The terrified rooster had to strain every fiber to stay upright, a process which gradually turned his leg muscles into something like steel wire.

My Filipino mentors did not tutor me merely in their language and folklore. They also taught me various ways to augment my food supply. One such way was to make and set snares to catch wild chickens, which are smaller than American chickens. The roosters
are brightly colored and crow their brains out all night long. In the 1940s they were plentiful all over the Philippines and though wild were not hard to catch in a simple noose trap that would snare one by the neck or one foot and hoist it into the air. I also learned to catch birds at night by throwing a fish seine over their roosting places in the tall cogon grass, and to catch fish from the river with the same nets. The Filipinos also taught me another way to catch fish that seemed implausible but was surprisingly effective. They would pile a lot of rocks in a streambed, leave them for a week or so, then cover them with a large net and weigh down its outer edges. Then they would slide their hands carefully under the net and remove the rocks one by one until only fish remained inside.

Coping with Philippine livestock was more challenging than with local birds and fish. Most Philippine animals are midgets compared to their American counterparts. A notable exception is the water buffalo, or carabao. Wild carabao are fierce, and those in the Philippines once experienced the distinction of being hunted by Theodore Roosevelt; but domesticated carabao are huge, patient, docile beasts, so gentle that children can tend them. They pull the plows, wagons, and carts of the Philippines at a leisurely pace with seeming contentment as long as they are fed and get a couple of baths a day in a nearby river or mud wallow. Unlike the skin of a horse, that of a carabao is loose and rolls back and forth across the animal's back when it walks. This, I discovered, makes riding one no mean feat. I had seen natives ride them many times, so one day I climbed aboard with a Filipino boy. The carabao either did not like me or rebelled at the idea of being ridden double. He promptly took off cross-country. The Filipino boy wisely jumped off, but I clung desperately to the critter, jerking on the rope that went to a ring in his nose and shouting at him in English, a language to which he remained obdurately indifferent. With each leap and each tug on the rope, I slipped farther forward on his rippling hide until I was astride his neck, just behind his massive, ominous looking curved horns. Here I had no leverage, so I could not jump; I could only
fall
off. I hit the ground hard and lay motionless. The Filipino boy rushed up to me and inquired solicitously if I was hurt. Fortunately, I was only dazed—and more wary of carabao.

As I had just learned, carabao, despite their bulk, could run with surprising speed for short distances. Sometimes Filipinos would race them against horses. The carabao held their own admirably in such matches, though they certainly weren't graceful runners. One day I watched a man train a carabao for racing. He held the guide rope with
one hand and the animal's tail with the other. The very ground shook as the thundering beast thumpety-thumped across the landscape, his trainer's feet hitting the ground every twenty feet or so behind him. I also observed what it would have been useful to me to have known earlier: that when the animal's skin rolled one way the trick was for the rider to roll the other.

In my many weeks in and around Tibuc-Tibuc, I became acquainted with the considerable array of foods eaten by ordinary Filipinos in that locale. Some were delicious; many more were wholesome and reasonably tasty; some I never learned to savor. Perhaps the best foods were the many varieties of fruit. Mangoes were absolutely delectable. Bananas came in a score of varieties, some of which could be fried in coconut oil. Coconuts could be prepared a dozen different ways—after one climbed a tree and laboriously wrestled the nuts out of the top of it. Breadfruit and guava were good, though, once more, procuring them could be arduous. My worst experience picking fruit came in a guava tree when I was attacked by a swarm of large, pugnacious red ants. They were all over me before I noticed them. It would have required a dozen hands to disperse them, and since I had to use one of my two to hold onto the tree I could only swat them ineffectually. By the time I got to the ground, I was painfully chewed up. Cashew nuts were abundant and tasty but had to be handled with care since the shells exuded a juice that produced an irritating swelling if it touched the skin. The best way to deal with them was to roast them slowly until the shell became virtual charcoal, and then remove the nut.