Ship of Ghosts (62 page)

T
he exodus led all of them home through Calcutta. John Wisecup and Robbie Robinson were flown there in a C-47 from Singapore. The ride by “gooney bird” over the Himalayas was an adventure. In the thin, volatile air the plane pitched and yawed and soared and plummeted, wings scarcely able to hold the sky. Down the centerline of the passenger compartment a line was strung tight so that a bucket could be slid to anyone who needed relief.

Wisecup and Robinson were in the air an hour when curiosity seized them and they explored their aircraft. In a small galley area between the passenger space and the cockpit, the two Marines found a box of Butterfingers. They ripped into it, gorged for a while, then returned to their seats. They couldn’t stop themselves from expecting a Korean guard to materialize somehow and punish their thievery with a bashing. When an authority figure did approach them, she was bringing even better fare. They had never seen canned rations before. They tore into them. A few minutes later, one of the aircrew returned to them and handed them a first-aid kit. They didn’t understand why until they looked at their fingers and realized they were dripping blood, split and slashed by the sharp edges of the tins.

At Calcutta, they shambled down the ladder, still somehow afraid that the rations hidden in their clothes would spill out and betray them. They expected to be searched, the contraband confiscated. But they got away with it; they were survivors, which meant they always had. Shown to the relative opulence of the 142nd General Hospital,
they unloaded the rations and slid them under their mattresses. Someone came for them, saying they were wanted in the mess hall. They went there and found awaiting them a dinner of ham, steak, and eggs.

At Calcutta, most of the exfiltrated prisoners ate like fiends. Some of them, their metabolisms still calibrated to starvation, couldn’t handle the rich fare. Given their back pay, they immediately found the chance to spend it on liberty. They went AWOL if they felt like it. They weren’t taking orders from anybody. But the trouble they spent ducking the MPs was generally wasted. The authorities avoided ordering the fragile evacuees to do anything. They
asked
them instead. “They learned right quick not to come out with all these orders,” said Garth Slate. “‘You do this now’ and ‘You better do this’ and ‘You’ve got to do that’ and ‘Oh, you got to do this’ went out the window.” That appears to be the extent of the psychological accommodation most of the ex-prisoners received from the military.

Some of them went outside to play baseball. John Wisecup had some work to do to get his fastball back, but at least there were no guards on hand to tell him how to do it. A well-meaning nurse rushed out to warn them that if they didn’t put their shoes on, they’d be liable to get sick, not to mention lose face with the natives. There was laughter all around.

One night Gus Forsman huddled with Crayton Gordon, just talking about everything, coming to grips with the anticlimactic reality of freedom. Forsman smoked Chesterfields until his tongue swelled, racing with his Army friend to close the circle of the story of how a great U.S. warship had gone down in battle and released its survivors into a horrible and deadly, yet sometimes unforgettably life-affirming, ordeal that led them to this place in the heart of the unlamented Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the once and future Asiatic Station. Injuries to the body were fast-healing. The wounds to the psyche bled freely. They would for a while. It would be more than a few decades before he would ever speak comfortably of the experience again.

R
ed Huffman and Lanson Harris were flown on a British Lysander directly from Pattern camp in the Thai jungle to Rangoon. On the tarmac there, they boarded a C-47. Huffman mentioned to the pilot that in better days Harris had done a little flying. The pilot seemed to appreciate what it meant and offered him the controls. For the first time since SOC floatplanes last flew from the
Houston,
Harris stretched his wings. Hands on the yoke, he turned and looked back into the passenger compartment. Somebody snapped a photograph. Then the two engines roared, the plane rolled and rose, and the former residents of Serang and Bicycle Camp and the
Dai Moji Maru
and Changi Jail and Thanbyuzayat and 80 Kilo Camp and Tamarkan and Phet Buri and Pattern camp set out for a world of more hospitable names, from Rangoon to Karachi and from Karachi to Calcutta.

At the 142nd General Hospital, they were given physicals and medication, then shown to a truckload of khakis and told to help themselves. They got showers and were deloused and fed. They were told that as soon as their worms got cleared up, they could go home. Every morning Harris went to the lab to have his stool looked at, and each time was told he had to stick around for treatment of his parasites. One day after a few weeks of failure, Red came hurrying
over to him. “He had a piece of paper, like a government check, same color, same shape,” Harris recalled. “
Good for one priority passage to the USA,
it said. ‘I got rid of my worms!’ Huffman announced.

“I said, ‘Goddamn it, Red, you’re not leaving me here. You go over there and crap in a box and tell them you’re Harris.’” And that’s what Huffman did.

They flew to Cairo and to Casablanca and to the Azores before beginning the final leg to Washington, DC. On that cross-oceanic flight, Huffman said to Harris, “You know the first thing I’m gonna do when I get home? I’m gonna take my girl down, and I’m gonna give her a tetanus shot.”

“A tetanus shot? What the heck for?”

“Well, I’m so rusty, I’ll probably give her lockjaw.”

I
n Los Angeles, Jane Harris had received a Navy Department telegram saying that her husband was safe in American hands. The news came with a demand for strict secrecy, but Jane was not about to keep the news from family. A newspaper article appeared soon thereafter, describing how two unnamed USS
Houston
men had escaped from a Thai prison camp. “I put two and two together with the telegram I got, and I said, well one of those has got to be Lans.”

He called her as soon as he landed in Washington. With no public transportation available thanks to the rush of postwar traveling, they settled for a few hours on the telephone. “We talked for a long time,” Jane said. “It was unbelievable to hear his voice, that was for sure.”

America’s veterans of Asia Station came home to a nation in fervid celebration. But the jubilance was the flip side of an equally widespread ignorance of the costs. It would be decades before the culture of therapy took root and debriefings and psychological counseling became standard practice for men returning home from war’s bloody funhouse. “This was all so new to everybody,” said Jane. “The U.S. had had no experience with POWs. What do you do with them? Doctors at the veterans hospital didn’t know how to cope with it.”

In Washington, Howard Charles, John Bartz, and John Wisecup were ordered to the Marine Corps headquarters building at 8th and I Streets. “They treated us like real psycho cases,” Wisecup recalled. “They didn’t put us in the hospital. What they did was put a corporal to stay with us all the time.” For the few days they were there, that corporal shadowed their every move. He explained once, “I’m
told you aren’t responsible. I’m told to stay with you. You guys are
Asiatic
.” The Marines were offered either a hospital stay, a ninety-day leave, or a return to duty. They were interviewed not by psychiatrists but by prosecutors. War crimes tribunals were gathering. They wanted names, descriptions, affidavits, depositions.

Returning to duty briefly, Wisecup had no great expectations. He wanted two things: his promotion and his back pay. He got promoted to corporal for his six and a half years in the service, but when he asked for his private’s back pay the topkick at the headquarters told him that no Marine, private or corporal, had any business walking around with two thousand dollars in his pocket. Wisecup didn’t disagree and it appears he didn’t take the money.

He had a run-in with a mail clerk who refused to turn over his squad’s mail to him unless he was wearing an NCO insignia. Wisecup erupted and nearly punched the kid’s lights out. The incident got him a meeting with the post sergeant major—and convinced him that there was no place for him in an organization that required adherence to such Mickey Mouse rules. He told the sergeant major he was through with the Corps. “What are you going to do when you get out?” he was asked. “You don’t know how to make a living.” Wisecup told him he had all kinds of experience. He had, in fact, worked on a railroad. “I can work in the mines,” he offered. “You’ll be digging ditches,” the sergeant major responded. “Maybe so,” Wisecup told him. “But I’m going out.”

The trick was to go somewhere. The trick was to do something, keep your mind busy with movement and learning and activity and happiness, faked if necessary, just to keep it from settling in on and picking over the details of the previous four years. But the details were exactly what the U.S. government needed as they were preparing for the war crimes tribunals.

In Washington, Harris and Huffman collected their back pay and bought new uniforms. At the Navy Department of Records building, Huffman was approached by a commodore, who asked him, “Do you know where the
Houston
was sunk?” Huffman said he did, and the officer showed him to a huge room with a two-story-high map. Huffman climbed a moveable ladder and put a star near St. Nicholas Point. The commodore expressed surprise, saying they thought the ship had gone down two hundred or three hundred miles from there.

Their first challenge on survivor’s leave was finding their way back
to the west coast. With no mass transportation available, they hired a cabbie with a seven-passenger DeSoto for ten cents a mile plus two hundred dollars for the return trip. Seventy-two hours later they were in LA. Reunited with his wife and his father, Harris told most of his whole horrible tale. After the suffering and uncertainty his folks had endured on the home front, they were entitled to it. No one else, Harris seemed to think, was. The rest of the world would never understand. “That was bad for him,” Jane Harris said. “He kept all this inside. When he came home, everybody wanted to know something. I said to him he ought to write a book. But he would tell just the funny things that happened, things that they would do to the Japs in the camps—urinating in the baths and so on.” Adventure. Hilarity. End of story.

Lanson Harris was home in Los Angeles when the FBI summoned him and asked him to look at some pictures. They wanted him to identify some guards. Accusations had been made. Charges had been leveled. “They asked me questions like, ‘Did you see this happen? Do you know if this happened? Is there anything else you can tell us that happened?’ I said, ‘No, no, no.’ I didn’t tell them anything. If they asked me a question—‘Did you do this or that?’—I’d say, well I guess we did, or I guess we didn’t. I never gave any positive answers.”

“You had a period of exuberance and then a sort of a pall comes on you,” John Wisecup said. “For four or five months, nothing could make you mad. But after that, gee whiz, I had trouble.” Back in the Burma jungle Dr. Henri Hekking, farsighted and wise, had warned his patients of the fresh ordeal that would confront them on returning home after the war. There would be consequences for those who failed to take good care of themselves. “He told us the importance of exercise, of the mental attitude of living,” Jim Gee said. The transition was strenuous. Howard Charles wrote: