Elizabeth M. Norman (28 page)

Save for the generosity of Ida Hube, the nurses were broke. As government employees they had no cash, no money to buy the food they needed to supplement the subsistence diet provided by the Japanese. Nesbit and a few of the older women were worried that the younger nurses might sell themselves, like a number of hungry or destitute women in camp, to men wealthy enough to pay for their pleasure.

Nesbit knew, of course, that she could not decree celibacy or dictate morality. So she gathered the older nurses around her and they tried to instill a sense of esprit de corps in the younger women. They spoke at length about their duty to their country and to themselves. They had volunteered for this assignment, Nesbit reminded them. Yes, they had expected a paradise, not the wasteland of war, but that was the way things had turned out. Now their job was to survive and get themselves home, all of them, together, and the only way to accomplish this was to help one another. Everything they did reflected on the group, and the group was their only salvation. If they maintained their pride and identity as army nurses, keeping alive the nurse corps’ traditions of dedication to the sick and camaraderie among women, then they might make it, survive without the shame that survival so often brings.

“Whatever else could happen, first and foremost, we would conduct ourselves as Members of the United States Army Nurse Corps,” she wrote years later. “This was paramount and absolutely inviolate! We reasoned that if we hoped to remain integrated emotionally, our first and primary duty was to carry on in our most professional capacity—that of nurses.”
¹¹

So it was the work that would save them, their sense of themselves as professionals, the knowledge that they were part of something larger and more enduring than any one of them alone, and that something was the group.

The group finally became solvent when a few of the more trustworthy businessmen in camp realized that the women, with their back pay accruing safely in government accounts, were a good risk and advanced
them interest-free loans.
¹²
With a little money in their pockets, the nurses could now buy duck eggs, caraboa milk, papaya and bananas. A few indulged themselves with a haircut at the internee-run beauty parlor. Others pooled their money and bought shanties from internee contractors, furnishing these day shacks with a few pieces of furniture, some old dishes and cooking utensils, and a makeshift stove.

On September 9 the Japanese, consolidating their civilian prisoners in the southern islands, brought to Santo Tomas a group of foreign nationals captured on Davao and Mindanao. In this lot were the evacuees from Corregidor who had been stranded on Lake Lanao by seaplane number two—three civilian women and ten more army nurses, two of whom had been wounded on Bataan and badly needed treatment.

Now all but two of the military nurses captured during the first six months of war were in Santo Tomas. (Ruby Bradley and Beatrice Chambers, who had been stationed at army Camp John Hay in Baguio, two hundred miles north of Manila in upper Luzon, were being held in an internment camp on that base along with 466 other foreign nationals taken into custody in northern Luzon Province.)

As the weeks passed at Santo Tomas, the sixty-four army nurses and eleven navy nurses quickly came to see that for all its apparent amenities—the food stalls, the entertainment, the daytime shanties—STIC was still a prison, a place of the keepers and the kept. It was also clear now that any hope for a quick victory had been an illusion. The war was going to last a long time, weeks giving way to months, months adding up to years. And soon the sixty-acre campus would feel as small and confining as a postage stamp.

Chapter 12

STIC, the First Year, 1942

I
N OBVIOUS WAYS
the work of war is easy, “kill or be killed.” Survival, however, is another matter, much more difficult, for it requires an endurance, a cunning and a strength of will that fighting does not.

After the move from the convent to the main camp, Cassie was on edge. In the convent she had not felt the reality of “prison.” Now, thrown in with thousands of others behind a concrete wall topped with barbed wire, she realized for the first time that she was a captive, shackled by the circumstances of war.

“The lack of freedom, you know?” she said. “The first time in your life you were not free—it was a terrible moment.”
¹

So she resolved to keep busy.

“I was not,” she said, “going to moan in my beer.”

She filled up her day with projects and reading and exercises, “anything,” she said, to “keep my sanity.”

Every day she put in four hours at the camp hospital. It was wearing duty, filled with repetitive and tedious tasks, but Cassie was happy to have the work. She gave her patients a sponge bath, fed them rice gruel from the hospital kitchen, administered the morning’s medications. Some of her charges suffered from “tropical itch,” a skin disease common to foreigners, and she spent hours dressing their sores. Working with the sick gave her a kind of perspective and comfort. Whenever she felt a surge of self-pity—and in those first few months in the main camp
she was often seized with a fit of melancholy—whenever she wondered why, at the age of twenty-five, fate had taken her freedom and thrown her in “elbow to elbow” with a throng of strangers, she consoled herself with the notion that at least she was healthy, free of the diseases and emotional illness that kept the hospital wards at Santo Tomas so full.

Soon she had a routine. Up early she washed her long, dark hair in a cold shower, then tied it back with a ribbon off her face and neck. After work she would sometimes repair to her cot in Room 38 of Main Building and read or knit underwear and socks. She often worked a patch of garden, one of many tiny plots of ground that the Executive Committee leased to internees who wanted to grow their own vegetables—
talinum
, corn and
camotes
(a type of sweet potato). The patch was no bigger than a parking space, but she loved the labor of tending it. The sun felt good on her back, the earth thick and cool in her hands. When she closed her eyes and shut out the noisy, malodorous camp, she could almost imagine herself back in Massachusetts in the fields on her hands and knees next to her father and brothers, weeding and hoeing the dark soil behind their house, that wood-frame building where she was born and where her life would always be waiting.

She saw herself as “a down-to-earth, no-frills girl” who cared little about hairstyles and makeup, a plain woman, much like her close friend Eleanor Garen. “Country gals,” they called themselves, young women with memories of hard work and want, convinced that the country in them, the lesson they had learned at home, would help get them through. They understood each other, supported each other too, often catching the same work shift in the hospital. Afterward, walking together in Father’s Garden, a quiet spot where Dominican priests had once passed the time, they would trade stories of home—Elkhart, Indiana, where Eleanor lived, and Bridgewater, Massachusetts, the place most on Cassie’s mind.

Once she was settled, Cassie signed up for classes at the camp adult school—Spanish with Peter Richards, who taught her possessive pronouns and the sequence of tenses, or on Thursday evenings music appreciation with Father Visser, who taught her the Catholic view of art. “Harmony and melody,” he said, “develop a high appreciation to what is out of tune with moral truth.” Under the circumstances, it seemed a concept the class could easily embrace.
²

At night Cassie returned to her room to chat with her bunkmates: Rita Palmer, Edith Corns, Letha McHale, Alice “Swish” Zwicker, Clara “Bickie” Bickford, Earlyn “Blackie” Black, Rosemary “Red” Hogan.

She enjoyed the good talk and easy society of those evenings. When she was in trouble, however, and needed good advice or a steady hand, she usually turned to Josie Nesbit.

“Josie always made me feel she was my friend, my bulwark, the person I went to if I had work or personal problems,” she said

Cassie worried about Josie. The war had been hard on the forty-eight-year-old senior nurse, and the months of combat seemed to have left the lean, five-foot-eight-inch woman looking ever more angular. At times, Cassie thought Josie looked downright gaunt.

Often that first year and a half, Cassie was able to lose herself in play. The Japanese had imprisoned two American golf pros from Manila’s posh courses and they came into camp with their golf bags slung on their shoulders. One of them joined the faculty of the adult school and gave regular lessons to eight students.

“What he’d have us do was stand in a row with clubs and try to perfect our grip, our stance,” Cassie said. “Once in a while he would let us take a swing at a real golf ball, but if we had a bad hook the ball went over the wall. Then we had a terrible time trying to get the Japs to go out into the streets and look for the ball. [Since] balls were at a premium, we hit on an idea. We crocheted little casings out of string, little round casings, stuffed them as hard as we could with cotton, and then drew the string together. We ended up with a little ball—what we would know today as a whiffle ball. So there we would stand, this class, swinging away.”

Her real passion, however, was baseball. Well schooled by her brothers, Cassie could scoop up grounders, shag line drives and make throws across the width of the infield to first base. She organized a team of nurses to play in the women’s league.
³
Cassie played shortstop, Eleanor Garen was the catcher, Bickie Bickford pitched and Adele Foreman covered second base.

Their toughest competition came from a team of girl teenagers fielded by the Bureau of Education. Young, fast and strong, the girls dominated the league and were led by a fourteen-year-old “orphan” named Terry Myers. A spirited, dark-haired girl, Terry bore such a striking resemblance to Cassie that it set people talking.
⁴

Before the war the Myerses, who were Americans, owned a large and successful trucking, storage and stevedore business along Manila’s bustling waterfront. The family—Terry, her mother, father and two brothers—lived the comfortable life of American colonials: private schools, servants, a big house with a wraparound porch. At regular intervals their mother, Frances Myers, took the children home to the
United States to experience what she called “the American way of life.” On one such trip in the spring of 1941, she went to California with Wally, the youngest; Terry and Ken, the oldest, were supposed to join them during the Christmas holiday. When the Japanese attacked two weeks before Christmas, Terry, Ken and their father were stranded like the other foreign nationals in the Philippines. Her father decided to join the guerrillas and sent the children to live with their grandparents in suburban Manila. In mid-January 1942 the four were interned at Santo Tomas, but a day or so later, in an effort to free up space in camp, the Japanese let a number of the elderly, Terry’s grandparents among them, return to their homes, leaving the Myers children alone behind the walls, the first Santo Tomas “war orphans.”

Terry thrived in prison. Without the tether of a parent, she was free to do as she pleased. Like most teenagers she was constantly hungry and spent most of her time scheming for food. She worked as a serving girl on the camp chow line, slipping a few extra ladles of stew into her own portion. Then she trotted over to the commandant’s office to work with those detailed to clean the stores of rice; for this labor she would wear a pair of overalls with deep pockets, which she turned into storage silos for the portions she daily purloined. When she learned that the hospital kitchen had the best food in camp, she convinced Maude Davison to make her a nurse’s aide and took her meals with the Angels.

To Terry camp life “was like a holiday.” She told herself, “We’ll only be in camp a short time before the Americans arrive. Why not run a little wild?” And that is exactly what the tomboy did.

When the army nurses rolled into Santo Tomas that hot day in August 1942, one of Terry’s friends was in the crowd that greeted them. The girl watched as the women disembarked and noticed that one of them looked just like Terry.

“Hey, guess what?” she said, seeking her friend out. “The Japs just brought your sister into camp!”

Cassie met her double at the camp hospital and liked her right from the start.

“I got attracted to Terry’s personality, her athletic ability and the wonderful way that she was taking the experience,” she said.

The feeling, according to Terry, was mutual, and soon the look-alikes were friends, Cassie and “Little Cassie,” as everyone called them.

Little Cassie became part of Big Cassie’s circle of friends. She worked in the hospital and ate her meals with the group. During the long, hot afternoons, she would sit with some of them under a banyan tree and play
cards or just shoot the breeze. The women liked to talk about food and fashion, music and dance, and the teenager, wide-eyed, loved to listen, especially when the talk turned to men and romance. Toward the end of the afternoon they would form an ad hoc chorus, divide up the voices and sing the standards of the day.

“Chattanooga Choo-Choo
,
You’re gonna take me back home
.
Chattanooga … Chattanoo-Ga!…
All aboard.”
⁵

Terry was also a talented mimic, and her send-ups left the nurses in stitches. The teenager called their captain “Old Maude Davison” and parodied her grumpy ways. She nicknamed Ann Mealor “Cobweb Annie” and “Miss Clean” because Mealor was always scolding the young volunteers who scrubbed the hospital operating room. Terry had them down pat, but the teenager was smart enough to know when to stop. She understood that the nurses were “tight-knit,” like a big family. “They were very protective of each other,” she said. “And any member could call someone else an SOB or lazy, but don’t let an outsider do it.” So she watched her tongue, sharing her most private thoughts only with her “big sister,” waiting for the moments when they were alone, strolling shoulder to shoulder in the shadow of the outer wall.