Behind Japanese Lines (12 page)

The area was also the home base of the Huks, with whom my second meeting proved no more propitious than the first. Soon after we were hidden in a house in a small village, at least five hundred armed and menacing men showed up in broad daylight. Here, we thought, were the guerrillas we had set out to meet. This proved true, but misleading. As Americans we had expected to be greeted joyously by any Filipino guerrillas. The leader of this band, however, strode into the grass-roofed hut where we sat on the floor and spoke to us sharply. If he and his followers hated the Japanese, they did not seem to be enamored of us on that account.

Nonetheless, they offered to help us on our way, which was, at that time, just generally north. When night fell, they set off, telling us to walk with them for protection. They assured us that later they would furnish us with guides. Meantime we should not talk. We didn't—but we didn't stop thinking about the cool reception we had gotten or its possible implications. After a time we came to a river, sat down, removed our shoes, forded the stream, and, once across, sat down to put the shoes back on. We exchanged apprehensive looks and made haste slowly, fumbling with the laces until the last barefooted Huk had reached us. His demeanor and actions were hardly reassuring; indeed, they stimulated the suspicions already growing in our minds. First he stopped and stared at us; then he looked toward his companions moving off. After a pause and another look at us, he hastened to the front of his column to talk to his leader. This time we shed our shoes in record time, recrossed the stream, and got out of there.

McCoy wanted to proceed northwestward along the foothills of the Zambales Mountains into Tarlac province and toward Lingayen Gulf, while I wanted to go toward the ricefields of central Luzon northeastwardly, mostly because I had heard that American-led guerrillas operated there. So we split, José choosing to stay with me.

Our guess, or luck, proved better than theirs, for McCoy and Schletterer were later reported to have been captured by the Japanese near Tarlac City. José and I, by contrast, found refuge in a house along the main highway to Manila. A religious service was held in the place almost as soon as we arrived. The sermon was given in Pampangano and then, with unfailing Philippine courtesy, repeated in English for my benefit. The language mattered little to me. All I was aware of was the roaring of Japanese trucks as they passed up and down the road
just outside the building. Whenever one stopped, I put my hand on my gun just in case God's Will might need reinforcement. I also noticed that the worshippers' eyes betrayed comparable concern.

We had an even closer squeak a few days later. José and I had intended to stay in a grass hut in the middle of a ricefield, but neighboring people invited us to visit their village. José did not want to go, perhaps because the whole area was infested with Sakdalistas, anti-American Filipinos who at least professed to regard the Japanese with favor. Curiosity got the better of me, though, so I left José behind with all my possessions save a gun. While I was visiting, I learned that the Japanese had raided the place where we were staying. I was broken-hearted at the thought of what I assumed had happened to José, but he was a resourceful fellow and managed to escape soon after the Japanese caught him. He was overjoyed to find me quickly. He told me the Japanese had surrounded our grass hut, thrust guns and bayonets through all the windows, and told him in English, Spanish, and several native dialects that they knew both he and an American were in the house and that it would be wise for both of us to surrender. They had examined my shoes, canteen, and bedroll, after which they had slapped José around briskly when he played dumb and claimed not to know where I was. Now we wasted no time. As soon as darkness fell, we melted into the night and walked northward into Tarlac province. There I would spend the next six months, moving every few days from house to house, village to village, never knowing which day, even which hour, might be my last.

Certain aspects of this existence were not unpleasant. In villages where no American had ever set foot before, I was treated as a demigod, showered with every attention, even observed curiously when I ate and slept. I practiced the guitar and picked up native tongues sufficiently that Filipinos stopped conversing in dialects in my presence if they did not want me to hear what was said. I fished a good deal, and I learned more than I had ever expected to know, or wanted to know, about rice farming.

The latter was done in a remarkably methodical, even rhythmic, fashion from planting to harvest. When the square paddies were covered with water, carabao broke the ground by pulling one-handled plows. Rice seedlings were then transplanted by hand, by young and old of both sexes, standing in water nearly knee-deep. The young shoots were jammed into the mud with a corkscrew motion, always in a systematic way from left to right as far as the planter could reach. In the tropics people must pace themselves when working to avoid exhaustion. Filipinos did this in a delightful fashion, by having a
guitar player set the tempo. I planted rice for eight days once and found that, outside of the work itself being wearing, the hardest part was to adjust to the tempo of the guitarist. Life in the paddies was enlivened by the presence of numerous leeches and occasional small but deadly green vipers. Men ignored the leeches, though their bites would bleed slowly for hours, but girls wrapped their legs as defense against them. The sight of either a leech or a viper invariably provoked much squealing and either real or feigned terror among the girls.

After the rainy season the ricefields dried, the grain ripened, and the farmers harvested it with sharp hand sickles. Completing the harvest was as stylized as planting. During the day rice stalks were spread on the ground, and carabao plodded endlessly in a circle over them until all the grain was trampled from the straw. Evenings women put rice grains into hollowed logs and pounded them methodically until the husks came off. The sound was as rhythmic as that of railroad men alternating hammer blows when driving spikes. The rice was then laid on broad, hand-woven, nearly flat, circular discs and tossed into the air. The wind blew away the husks, and the rice grains, being heavier, fell back onto the discs. Eventually the rice was packed into sacks or large bamboo baskets. The whole procedure was accompanied by much guitar playing and light-hearted talk. Thus did the Filipinos make rice harvesting one of the lesser fine arts. Alas! they were never able to make it an exact science. No matter how much hand picking went on along the way, harvested rice always contained a few tiny rocks. One soon learned to eat rice cautiously; the alternative was jangled nerves and chipped teeth.

Despite these occasional happy interludes life remained in essentials what it was bound to be for a fugitive in a war zone, highly uncertain and always dangerous. I had more close brushes with death in those months than I like to remember. One night I walked up to the back door of the house of a man named José Louis. (“Just like your fighter,” he had said to me when we first met.) He had also promised to get me a pair of shoes. Now another Filipino came to the door and whispered to me that the Japanese military police were at that moment questioning “Joe Louis” in an adjoining room. I didn't wait for the shoes.

Another time I sat on the floor in a house, a loaded and cocked .45 in my lap, and peered intently through the weave of a bamboo wall at a Japanese cotton inspector who had stopped to ask for a drink of water. On still another occasion I happened to be in a house alongside a road on a day when the Japanese chose to move troops down the road all
day long. The lady of the house, Mrs. Victoriano de la Cruz de Arceo, whom I called Ina (mother), sat calmly on a bench on the porch and smiled at the enemy soldiers as they passed.

The most harrowing such episode I ever heard of had a history of some interest. It was mistakenly attributed to me by an American newsman near the end of the war. I thought it happened to Bob Lapham, with whom I subsequently became closely associated. As I heard it, one day Bob was talking to a few Filipino farmers in a little village near Tarlac City when some Japanese unexpectedly turned up. Luckily, a few of the Filipinos happened to see the visitors before the latter saw Bob. One of them was a Moro girl, a most unlikely person to be in central Luzon, for the Moros' homeland is in Mindanao, hundreds of miles south. Anyway, with amazing presence of mind she grabbed a hollow log of the sort in which rice was pounded, pushed Bob to the ground, and turned the log over on top of him. The Japanese were friendly, made some idle conversation, and asked for a drink of water. Then a couple of them sat down on what likely would have been Bob's casket had he so much as sneezed. Had it been I, my heart would have pounded so loudly the Japanese surely would have heard it. Actually, the whole tale is apocryphal, I learned after the war; just one of those yarns that everyone had heard but which always happened to someone else.
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Though I knew the risks involved in moving about, I found it psychologically impossible to stay hidden all the time. Many days I would go out of doors and start conversations with local people, partly as a relief from boredom, partly because it pleased me to practice some dialect I was trying to learn, partly to observe the delighted surprise of a person who is addressed in his native tongue by a foreigner, partly because I was gradually making up my mind to recruit a personal force of guerrillas. Having experienced and witnessed the cruelties of the Japanese on the Death March, I lived in constant dread of being recaptured. Moreover, the last thing I wanted to be responsible for was the death or torture of the brave Filipinos who had protected me and shown me so many kindnesses. Thus, even though I often talked to people of whose antecedents and credentials I knew nothing, I did so with some feeling of guilt and a deep sense of foreboding.

The faithful Filipinos sometimes went to incredible lengths to protect me. It would be hard to imagine a more heartening demonstration of loyalty than that displayed by Mr. Dolfin L. Dizon, the village leader of Matatalaib, a suburb of San José, east of Tarlac City, in Tarlac Province. Mr. Dizon assembled all the people of his barrio, fingerprinted them in their own blood, and ordered them to swear
never to reveal my presence among them. He told them they were to die, if necessary, rather than provide any information about me to the Japanese.

By now I talked and acted like a Filipino and was the same color as most of them. A casual observer might or migh not have noticed my longer nose and the consideration that while I was of average size for an American I was bigger than most Filipinos. If the Japanese had ever caught me and examined me closely, though, they would surely have discovered the truth, with results likely to have been fatal to me. José Balekow thought it was inconceivable that I could continue to live undetected among Filipinos, so even though he was my “bodyguard” he refused to sleep in the same house with me. José soon grew restless for other reasons as well, the main one being that he longed to go back north to his family and fellow Igorot tribesmen.

His eventual departure was speeded by an incident that was funny to me, though not to him. He had found a girlfriend in a nearby village, and one day he set off to visit her. For the occasion he dressed in his best. He had to cross a river that ran directly behind the house where I was staying, so I offered to ride across it behind him on a carabao and then bring the animal back. All went splendidly on the crossing until we reached the opposite bank. Here the carabao's hind legs slipped. I grabbed at José to keep from falling into the river but succeeded only in pulling him in with me. He clambered to his feet, soaked to the skin and splattered with mud. Outraged as the proverbial wet hen, he took the Lord's name in vain repeatedly and vehemently, then went stamping off in the direction of his beloved. I wanted to laugh but did not dare.

The many weeks of inactivity, interspersed with the narrow escapes detailed above, and climaxed by the departure of José, made me increasingly restless and thoughtful. Ever since the Bataan campaign I had doubted, on the intellectual level, that I would survive the war. Yet I did not want to die, and above all I did not want to die in some anonymous way or place. I thought a lot about my family back home and wondered if I would ever see them again. In fact, I worried about the whole matter so much that I wrote a few brief accounts of my experiences, placed them in bottles and buried them, in each case telling one Filipino where one bottle was in the hope that whatever my fate might be my parents and sisters might learn of it someday. Each slip of paper promised a reward to the bearer, reflecting my hope that at least some of the Filipinos who had done so much for me might eventually receive some compensation. I was the only son of an only son of an only son, and the chance that my name and
bloodline would continue seemed slim. Maybe it is a man's ego that dies hardest.

During these months the Japanese were engaged in building an airfield at San José near Tarlac City. When it was finally completed, the first plane to land on it, a big Betty, flew directly over my current hideout on its final approach. My mind was flooded with fantasies. I longed to blast it out of the air. I dreamed of stealing a Japanese plane and flying away, though I was neither a pilot nor a navigator. Of course, I understood the mechanism of planes, I had watched many takeoffs and landings, and I had often ridden in planes piloted by others; but I knew little geography, and had I managed to steal an enemy plane and get it into the air I would not have known where to head. Besides, it would have been just my luck to run out of gas, or encounter Japanese fighters, or even be intercepted by American fighters somewhere. They would see the “flaming meatball” Japanese insignia on the side of the plane and shoot me down. Of course, there had not been an American plane over that part of the Philippines in more than a year, but one day I was certain I heard one, a P-40. I rushed out excitedly to watch it come—and go. No others followed. Most likely the Japanese had captured or repaired one, and one of their pilots was testing it.