No Surrender (19 page)

Cloth and clothing taken from the islanders provided the material for our clothes. When camouflage was necessary, I turned my jacket inside out and stuck small branches, sticks or leaves in loops made of fishing line for this purpose.

To make sandals, the soles were cut from tires, the “straps” from tire tubes, and the two were joined together with pegs. The upper parts of shoes were used over and over, but the soles were replaced by using the soles of islanders' sneakers. Nylon thread was best for sewing them together.

(All illustrations by Yasuo Sakaigi)

We slept in our clothing, of course, and if we put the carryall breast pockets of our jackets too high, they weighed on our chests and tended to keep us from sleeping. We therefore placed this pocket lower than the ordinary shirt pocket. It also had a zipper. Since we were always ducking under tree branches that brushed against our shoulders, we reinforced the shoulders of our jackets.

The shoes I had on when I came out were put together from real shoe leather from the tops of old shoes and rubber soles from an islander's sneakers. I had sewn these together with a thick nylon fishing line. During the early years, I had often worn straw sandles.

Around 1965 synthetic fabrics appeared on Lubang, and we gratefully “accepted” a number of articles of clothing made from them. We were also pleased by the appearance of vinyl plastic, which was useful for rain clothing and for wrapping our guns.

“They must have invented this stuff just for us,” laughed Kozuka.

Our principal staple food was bananas. We cut off only the stem, sliced the bananas, skin and all, into rings about a quarter of an inch thick, and then washed them thoroughly in water. That way the green bananas lost much of their bitterness. Then we boiled them with dried meat in coconut milk. The result tasted like overcooked sweet potatoes. It was not good. But we ate this most of the time.

The rats on Lubang, which grow to a length of about eight inches, not counting the tail, eat only the pulp of the bananas, but Kozuka and I could not afford to waste the skins. At mealtime, we always said, “Let's have our feed.”

Next to bananas our most important food came from cows that had been turned loose to graze. In 1945 there were about two thousand cows on the island, but their number gradually decreased to the point where it was difficult to find a fat one. Even so, three cows a year were enough to provide meat for one man.

When we could not find cows, we hunted for water buffaloes and horses. Although the water buffaloes are large and furnish a good deal of meat, it does not taste very good. Horsemeat, although tender, has a strong odor and does not taste as good as beef.

It was easiest to find cows in the rainy season. When the Lubang islanders harvest their rice, they leave about nine to twelve inches of stalk for the cows to eat. When the rice stalks are gone, the cows are turned loose at the foot of the mountains to eat grass, which grows best in the rainy season. The cows gradually work their way up the hills toward the forest, as much as to say, “Here we are. Come shoot us.”

They usually grazed in herds of about fifteen. We would pick out one and fire at it from a distance of about eighty yards, aiming so that the bullet would enter beneath the backbone and go through the heart. The time to kill a cow was in the evening, after the islanders had gone home from the fields. It was nearly dark then, and if there was rain, it muffled the sound of the shot so that the farmers could not hear it.

If we hit a cow, the others would run away, frightened by the shot. Usually when we approached, the fallen cow still had life enough to move its legs. We would find a stone and smash it into the cow's forehead as hard as possible. Then we would finish it off by stabbing it in the heart with a bayonet. Having pulled it by the legs and tail to an inconspicuous spot under the trees, we cut the aorta to drain the blood.

The cow normally fell on its side, and the first step in dressing an animal was to cut off the front and hind legs on the upper
side. Then we would slash down the middle of the belly and strip off the skin to the backbone. After cutting the meat off in hunks, we turned the animal over and repeated the operation on the other side. Finally, we would remove the heart, the liver, the sweetbread and other innards and put them in a sack. It took the two of us about an hour to dismember one cow.

If we left the carcass as it was, the rain and the crows would reduce it to a skeleton, but the remains would tell the enemy where we were. After we cut the cow up, therefore, we moved the carcass along a mountain road to as distant a point as possible. This was done at night, of course. It was really heavy work, because we had to carry all the meat on our backs at the same time.

For the first three days, we would have fresh meat, broiled or stewed, two times a day. Presumably because of the meat's high calory content, as I ate, my body temperature climbed until I felt hot to the soles of my feet. It was hard to breathe when walking and impossible to climb a tree. My head would always feel a little giddy.

I found that if I drank the milk of green coconuts as a vegetable substitute when I ate meat, my temperature would soon return to normal.

On the fourth day we piled as much meat as possible in a pot and boiled it. By heating this up once every day and a half or two days after that, we kept it from spoiling, and the flavor held up for a week or ten days. While we were eating the boiled meat, we dried what was left for future consumption. We called this dried meat “smoked beef.”

To prepare the smoked beef, we first built a framework like a table frame. We then skewered the meat on long sticks, placed the skewers across the framework, and built a fire underneath. This had to be done at night in the inner reaches of the jungle; otherwise the islanders might see the smoke or the flame. On the first night, we would keep the fire going all night, so as to harden the outside of the meat a little without causing it to shrink. Afterward, we gradually increased the heat of the fire and cooked the meat about two hours a night for ten nights. By that time it was thoroughly dried. The liver and other innards, we first boiled, then dried.

When we shot a cow, we cut the meat up, skewered it and dried it over a fire at night. During the ten days required for this, we ate boiled beef.

Piled on pieces of wood, the liver and other innards were cooked in a makeshift steamer (
left
). Small pieces of meat were boiled in a pot until the water was gone. To keep it from getting moldy, it was reheated every day.

From one cow, we could make about 250 slices of smoked beef. By eating only one slice apiece each day, we could make the meat last for about four months. It did not always work out this way, however, because when we were moving around a lot to keep out of the way of search parties, we allowed ourselves two slices a day.

We did not eat rice much, because it was so much trouble to hull it. In October and November, however, when the islanders harvested their rice, we usually requisitioned some of it. After pounding it, we separated it with a sieve into chaff, unpolished rice and half-polished rice. Both glutinous rice and nonglutinous rice grow on Lubang. The nonglutinous rice varies greatly in quality. We classified it into four grades, which we called “rice, ‘barley' rice, ‘millet' rice and fodder rice.” The fodder rice was so black and the grains so small that we had trouble thinking of it as rice. When we ate rice, we made soup to go with it. This was concocted from dried meat and the leaves of papaya, eggplant or sweet potatoes, with a dash of salt and powdered pepper. Sometimes we made a gruel with rice and dried meat.

We called salt the “magic medicine.” In the days when there were four of us, we had to get by on only about a quart a year. Every once in a while, whoever was cook would say, “It's cold today, so I'll put in a little of the magic medicine.” And then he would put in a very tiny pinch. But even that helped the flavor a lot.

At first we had only the briny natural salt that we found on the south shore. Later, when there were only Kozuka and I, we grew more aggressive and invaded the islanders' salt flats in Looc and Tilik, but we never took more than we needed for the foreseeable future. After about 1959 we managed to obtain coffee and a few canned goods from the houses of the islanders. We called the sneak raids to obtain these valuables “stepping out for the evening.”

Keeping rice from getting moldy was difficult, especially during the rainy season. We put it in plastic bags, then placed these in five-gallon cans sealed with plastic and oil. Since ants were a constant problem, the cans were raised off the ground on triangles of tin.

The fruit called
nanka
has a feltlike skin and a hard core surrounded by the edible portions, each of which also has a core; the taste is sweet. Coconuts provided, besides copra and milk, fibers (
seen at the top
) that we used to brush our teeth. Heating the milk settled the lees, which were boiled with water to make soup.