No Ordinary Joes (20 page)

A guard yanked Gordy to his feet and shoved him toward the starboard side of the ship. It was still dark, but Gordy could see soldiers on the dock. A guard tied his hands behind his back and blindfolded him, then did the same to everyone else in the crew.

Following the men in front of him, Gordy stumbled down the gangway and along a rutted road toward a waiting convoy truck. Unable to see, he felt a hand on his back, someone pushing him up into the back of the truck.

Half the crew was loaded onto one truck, the other half onto another, all of them still blindfolded with hands tied. Squeezed in between Chuck Vervalin and Bob Palmer, Gordy felt the truck begin to roll down the rutted road.

J
ammed in tight with his crewmates, Chuck Vervalin bounced along the bumpy road in the back of a convoy truck, blindfolded, hands tied behind him. He heard a whisper that they had landed on Penang, an island of Malaya. Another convoy truck with the other prisoners followed.

Known as the “pearl of the Orient,” in 1941 Penang was a tropical island paradise filled with lush vegetation and exotic beaches, a popular destination for Asian travelers drawn by its sparkling sea and powdery white sand. It had been under British rule until the Japanese invaded in 1942. The balmy air held a sweet fragrance, reminding Chuck of the orchids he’d smelled walking down Hotel Street in Honolulu.

After a short ride, the truck abruptly stopped. A Japanese soldier opened the back flaps and ordered the men out. Other soldiers untied their hands and removed their blindfolds. The morning sunlight filtered through a grove of coconut palms. Chuck eyed a complex of beautiful white buildings that looked like a school or convent.

Brandishing rifles with fixed bayonets, soldiers hustled the crew through a large, solid wooden gate that opened onto an open grass courtyard, a setting that was serene, almost spiritual. Chuck’s knees shook.

Before the Japanese commandeered it during their invasion, the Convent on Light Street was a prestigious Catholic school for girls, noted for a devotion to the arts and its botanical gardens. Located on several acres of land
close to the harbor, it was named after Captain Francis Light, who first claimed the island for the British in 1786. Scrubbed white buildings with sturdy columns and arched corridors bordered a grass courtyard filled with coconut, mango, palm, fig, and breadfruit trees. Wild orchids scented the air, and the sound of waves drifted in on a gentle sea breeze.

Chuck felt a gnawing in his stomach. During the Depression, many nights he went to bed hungry, but that hunger was different. Back home he knew the next day would somehow provide something to eat. This was a different kind of hunger. All he’d had to eat since the ship had been torpedoed forty-eight hours earlier was a bowl of cling peaches and a hardtack biscuit. Word quickly spread that they’d be served breakfast soon.

Inside the grounds, the crew was separated; the officers, who’d stepped forward to identify themselves, were led to a room upstairs, and the rest of the men were divided into two groups and placed in adjoining rooms that had been used as classrooms before the invasion. The rooms were empty now, with barren white walls and concrete floors. Shuttered windows faced the open courtyard.

Four guards, armed with rifles and bayonets, ordered the men in Chuck’s room to form two lines and stand at attention, shoulder to shoulder. These guards wore different uniforms than the guards on the ship. Chuck figured that they were part of the Japanese army, and from the stories he’d heard, an army that could be brutal.

Slowly, one of the guards walked down Chuck’s line, glaring at each man. Next to Chuck, Gordy shifted his feet to get comfortable. The guard spotted the movement and moved in front of him. Without warning he swung his rifle butt and caught Gordy on the jaw; he crumpled to the floor. The guard kicked him in the ribs, then motioned for him to get back on his feet. Chuck reached down to help his crewmate up. Bad mistake. The guard rifle-butted him across the back, buckling his knees and bringing tears to his eyes.

For the next four hours, Chuck and everyone else in the room stood at attention, staring straight ahead. Every time someone moved or looked
anywhere but straight ahead, they got a rifle butt in the back or to the stomach.

Chuck struggled to stand straight, his whole body aching from the strain. Another hour passed, and new guards entered, bringing with them a renewed sense of arrogance and brutality. One of them stood directly in front of Chuck and glared. Chuck stared straight ahead. The guard screamed, then smashed him in the face with his fist. Chuck staggered but didn’t go down, quickly retaking his place in line, standing at attention, not daring to wipe the blood streaming from his nose.

Dusk came, the light in the room was turned on, and the men still stood at attention. There was still no food or water.

One of the men passed out, falling to the floor in a heap. A guard ordered the men next to him to pull him back up to his feet and support him in an upright position. These orders were given in Japanese, and although nobody on the crew spoke the language, they could decipher the meaning from the gestures and the situation. Other men passed out as well, and they too were propped back up by their crewmates.

Through the night they stood, the guards taking turns walking up and down the lines, randomly stopping to punch someone, sometimes in the face, sometimes in the stomach. By dawn, everyone had been knocked to the floor at least once, each collapse greeted by laughter from the other guards.

Daylight brought the hot tropical sun, draining the strength of the men even more. Still, no one brought them food.

It was Chuck’s turn to go to the head. This had been the men’s only respite, a trip made three at a time: out the door and down the corridor to the left, accompanied by a guard. The head was a small windowless room, containing only a toilet. Chuck and the other two men squeezed inside, shutting the door; the guard stood outside. While the other men urinated, Chuck quietly lifted the tank lid. Using both hands, he scooped out a handful of
tank water and poured it into his mouth, swallowing slowly, savoring each drop. The other men did the same.

The second day passed and the men had still not been allowed to sleep or eat. Like almost everyone else, Chuck had a black eye and a swollen lip.

On the third day, the shutters on the window were opened and he looked out onto the courtyard. Two guards appeared, holding a stumbling man in khakis between them. His face and arms were a mass of bruises, his eyes swollen shut; he had been beaten almost to the point of being unrecognizable. It was Captain Fitzgerald.

Dragging him across the grass, the guards stopped next to a long wooden bench. Two other guards stood alongside, holding clubs the size of baseball bats. Fitzgerald was placed on the bench, then, on signal, the guards started raining down blows on his arms, legs, and chest like they were driving a circus tent stake. It was a contest to see who could hit the hardest and make the captain scream the loudest. Five … ten … thirty blows. They took a breather and started again.

Chuck felt like throwing up.

The beating lasted ten minutes, then a guard took two leather straps and tied Fitzgerald to the bench, his head dangling over the edge. He was barely conscious. Another guard raised one end of the bench, elevating Fitzgerald’s feet above his head at a 30-degree angle. A guard carrying a teakettle approached.

With one guard holding a hand over Fitzgerald’s mouth, another slowly poured the water out of the teakettle up his nose. He coughed and choked, flailing his arms, desperately gasping for air. Each time he moved, a guard hit him. Then another poured more water up his nose.

When the kettle was empty, they refilled it and poured it again up his nose. And again. And again.

Finally, Fitzgerald passed out.

Dragging the captain slowly back across the courtyard, the guards smirked, knowing they were being watched. They pulled him up the stairs and out of sight.

T
he crew nicknamed the meanest guard Goldtooth Maizie (pronounced May-zee) because of the gold cap on one of his front teeth. When the light hit it just right, it sparkled, and he liked to flash it when he glared at the crew.

On this morning, he’d chosen Bob Palmer to pull out of line. Slowly, he ran his bayonet down Bob’s forehead, pressing just hard enough to break the skin and leave a trickle of blood. Bob felt the cold steel continue down the midline of his face, between his eyes and down his nose, stopping on his upper lip. Goldtooth Maizie held it there for several seconds, grinning, flashing his gold tooth. Then, with a quick upward flick, the sharp edge of the bayonet ripped into the bottom of his nose, blood squirting everywhere.

Goldtooth Maizie shoved him back in line.

For three days Bob had been a captive, and for three days he had not eaten or slept or even sat down except on the ship.

But his suffering was not nearly as bad as that of his crewmate Charles Taylor, who’d gotten a bad case of gonorrhea in Fremantle; he had been trying to treat it with sulfur pills while on patrol, without much success. It had gotten much worse since being captured; his testicles had swollen to several times their normal size. To help relieve the pressure, he’d torn a hole in the crotch of his pants. His testicles had turned a grotesque
purplish blue, extending like an eggplant out of the hole in his pants. He could only move if he reached down and cradled them in his hands to relieve the pressure. At times the pain was excruciating, and he would moan and double over. Crewmates pleaded to the guards to get him treatment; instead they made him stand at attention or crawl around like a dog, sometimes poking at his testicles with their gun butts.

Just prior to the scuttling of the ship, Bob had hustled back down below deck and fetched a bottle of sulfur pills. Several other men on the crew had seen him do this, including Chuck, and when someone questioned him about it, Bob claimed he did it for Taylor. Chuck didn’t buy it, believing Bob had gotten the pills for himself.

As hellish as the physical torture was, the uncertainty was worse. What was coming next? Bob wondered. Would they be lined up against a wall and shot? Would they be starved to death? Would the torture and beatings get worse? Did the Navy know they were there or that their ship was missing? Would his resolve to survive weaken?

Sometimes it was hard to think about anything other than his immediate situation and surviving the next five minutes, or the bayonet being pricked under his nose. He tried to think about Barbara. He closed his eyes and saw her standing next to him at the church in San Francisco on their wedding night; how beautiful she looked. He remembered lying in bed next to her, his arms around her; how good she felt. He created a dinner menu in his head: big slices of honey baked ham, with mashed potatoes and glazed carrots. It was the glazed carrots he savored, the sweet taste filling his senses.

In whispers the crew pondered strategies for survival. They knew that they were at the mercy of their captors, but they all shared the same goal—to get home—and everything they now did would be to achieve that result.

Specific strategies were slowly beginning to emerge. It was clear that Tim McCoy was determined to stand up to the guards and be as big a pain in the ass as he could. Gordy Cox was going to make himself as invisible as
possible and do whatever he could to avoid being noticed. Chuck Vervalin thought he’d be best served by never showing them pain, never looking weak.

Bob’s plan was to go inside his head and escape to a world where he was with Barbara again. She would be the light at the end of the tunnel, his reason to keep going. A part of him wondered if he had the strength and courage to keep going. Maybe under the pain of torture, he’d cave in and tell the Japanese whatever they wanted to know. As the ship’s yeoman, he knew more than anyone except the officers about the ship’s recent history and patrols. If surviving to see Barbara again meant revealing what he knew about any of that, then he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t crack, no matter how much he loved his country and the men in the crew. Still, he was determined not to give the enemy anything they could use.

Bob heard the thump outside the window, the now-familiar sound of a coconut hitting the ground in the courtyard. On his way to the toilet, he’d seen them lying there, tantalizing. The last food he’d had was the hardtack biscuit on the Japanese ship four days earlier.

As a boy growing up during the Depression in southern Oregon, with its rich farmland, he had not suffered as much as others that he knew from a lack of food. The twisting, churning hunger pain in his stomach was a new experience.

He ran his hand over his face, feeling the stubble of his beard. It had been almost a week since his last shave and shower. The layer of soot and grime collected during the 125-degree ordeal at the bottom of the ocean in the
Grenadier
had been washed away in the ocean, but the days in captivity had given him a patina of sweat and dust, tinted with dried blood. More fastidious than anyone else on the crew, he always paid attention to his appearance, whether he was in civilian clothes or his Navy blues. He placed a shower just below sleep and a full plate of food on his wish list.

Bob was beginning to see a pattern in the guards’ selection of targets. The bigger guys were singled out, the smaller Japanese guards taking
pleasure in inflicting pain and humiliation on a larger man. At 5 feet 9 inches and 160 pounds, Bob presented a smaller physical presence than many of the crew. Now he wished he was even smaller.

Everyone looked out the window, watching Goldtooth Maizie and another guard drag Captain Fitzgerald across the courtyard toward the bench again. He was wearing only his Skivvies. Two other guards, armed with machine guns, stood nearby. The crew could see that Fitzgerald’s entire body was black and blue.

Goldtooth Maizie strapped him to the bench, just as they’d done before, but this time, instead of pounding him with clubs, they doused him with water and began beating him with thick leather straps. The sound of the straps snapping against the captain’s body echoed across the courtyard. Bob turned his head, unable to watch.