Soldiers in Hiding (10 page)

Even the darkness fell strangely that night. It fell upon the tops of the trees, then seeped in slowly, like a fog. And just before it finished drawing its black purse strings around us, there was fire from the trees and several shouts from the ground. Little lights the lengths of cigars shot out of the woods at angles. And with the resumption of the awful sound, I stood up. I imagined that the barrel of my rifle had mud in it and would not fire, so I kept it at my side. Most of the fighting was taking place toward the front of the patrol. At my end the velvet night seemed to have rolled in more thickly, giving me better cover than the others had.

When the fighting was hottest I stepped darkly through the trees and back onto the path. No one would expect me to be there. I waited until the next volley and then took a few quick steps to my left, bumping into the forest wall, but generally staying on the path. The shouts were coming from behind me then, for I was leaving. A flare whistled treeward and lit the guerrillas like a lightning flash, letting the Japanese soldiers shoot at the solid shapes that they saw. I took the opportunity to empty my clip easily into the chorus of sound, then to notice the way the path wound and to run.

I know that the popular cultures of both my countries would despise my actions. I could have saved myself, I suppose, in American eyes, by turning the barrel of my weapon on my fellow Japanese and having the Filipino patriots welcome me to their troop. Or I could have had honor in Japan by standing my
ground and trying to kill as many of the enemy as I could. The truth is, had I been in the American army I might have done something like that, but as it was I simply slipped away. It wounded me to do what I did, but how could I have done otherwise? The eyes of the guerrillas were deep and steady, so sure that they were right. And the Japanese boys had their honor to hold on to. The spirit of the Bushido, the way…

I timed my steps to the sound of the gunfire and was able to get several hundred yards from the action in an hour. It was clear that at first light the small battle would be over. The guerrillas had the upper hand and only those who had managed to crawl away would survive. I thought of Ike, all unhappy about the woman whose life he'd taken, all military in his attempt to order his own life after that. If this had happened before he'd hurt the woman, he might be here with me now. But, of course, he could not want to survive if the others did not. The idea that we should be foraging around in these foreign woods was his, so he could not survive it.

I found a wide spot in the path and slept until gray dawn came to the tops of the trees. The gunfire behind me had stopped during the night, but as I woke I did hear, once more, a dozen shots carefully aimed.

When I reached the camp Major Nakamura was happy to see me but wondered how I had managed to get back. Surely, if I had returned, he said, we could count the whole thing a Japanese victory, if only by the margin of one. I hung my head and nodded, so the major patted my shoulders as if to relieve my fatigue. He knew how to praise as well as to punish. Now, he said, the guerrillas would think twice about stopping the Japanese army from carrying out its tasks.

After the major went off silently to grieve, some of the others came around and asked me to recount the battle for them, to tell how it all took place. Even Jimmy was inching toward my side. I held my head up high and spoke as if refreshed. “It was simple,” I told them all. “We waited until morning and saw their
silhouettes in the clearing sky. They were the solid shapes in the brittle branches of the trees.”

 

MAJOR NAKAMURA MADE ME HIS AIDE. NEWS OF OUR encounter with the guerrillas reached the Manila headquarters, and soon we received instructions to desist, to worry about the open areas of the cities and towns where we were stationed, but to let the guerrillas stay in the woods, to give them that terrain as their own. We waited a week for Ike or any of the others to return and then we were ordered to move, transferred southwest to the province of Bataan. There were prisoners there and we were being called to guard them. The guards they had, it seemed, were in need of some time to themselves, a bit of open warfare for their psychological well-being.

Jimmy grew more silent in the days after Ike's death. Now that I was aide to Nakamura we rarely saw each other and by the time we got to Bataan I was too busy to worry about what he thought of my miraculous return. If he knew I'd run, I wasn't ashamed. If he was beginning to feel we should shoot like all the other Japanese, that was his problem. While working for the major I was assured of staying away from the front, and because I had survived such a brutal battle, I had all his confidence. I carried my clipboard, the same one Ike had used, and I walked about the camp doing my duties. Jimmy spent his free time with his face pressed against the wire, staring in at the poor prisoners of war.

Most of the prisoners at Bataan were American, and because of my duties as aide I often came in contact with them. The conditions under which the prisoners lived were bad. Many people in America are still convinced of the brutality of the Japanese, but part of it was that we simply didn't know how many prisoners there would be, we didn't have the tools to handle them, not enough food, not enough housing. And running a camp was hard work. It was easy to get angry.

When I came into contact with the prisoners, I kept my
knowledge of English to myself. I was responsible for supplies and security. When I walked among them my heart went out, but what was I to do? If I told them I was one of them they would despise me, and there was no way they could help me get back home. If I told them merely that I spoke English they would want to talk to me and the quaver in my voice might give me away, letting them know the feelings of sympathy I had for them and weakening my position with the major.

One day when I got to Major Nakamura's office there was a man from Los Angeles standing at tired attention in front of him. The man was the commander of a new group of prisoners, and had presented the major with a list of demands for better treatment, with requests for a change of diet, for better toilet facilities, for a place that the men could use for physical exercise. The American did not know it, but Major Nakamura was embarrassed. He'd been an elementary school principal before the war and had recently wondered aloud whether he'd ever be back in the school again. The man spoke to the major through an interpreter, a Filipino whose face did not change no matter what was said.

“He's a prisoner. Tell him not to forget his position,” Nakamura told the man to tell the American. “These Americans… If we Japanese were being held captive we'd know how to act.”

“War has rules,” the man told the American. “Obey them.”

Major Nakamura had gained a wide and unreasonable reputation as a disciplinarian but in truth he was a meek man, a man whose mind was set on surviving the war as much as mine was. He wanted to get home to his wife and family once again, to busy himself with the dainty discipline of the elementary school. Still, he knew belligerence when he heard it, even if the language used was English, and as the man from Los Angeles talked on the major got madder.

“Watch out,” he said. “I have my orders. I will not have rowdiness.” But when the man heard the translation all he did
was laugh. He had not been a prisoner long. He still had a modicum of meat on his bones.

“What?” said Major Nakamura.

The interpreter looked from one man to the other, but neither spoke. “He didn't say anything,” the interpreter told the major.

“He laughed. Doesn't he know that his life is in my hands? Tell him not to laugh. Tell him if he laughs again I'll kill him. See how he likes that.”

When the interpreter repeated what the major had told him, the man from Los Angeles kept quiet, but in a moment he said, “Obey the international rules for keeping prisoners,” and he turned to try to leave before the major had said he could go.

“No!” shouted Nakarnura. “You can't go until I give the order! Have you no sense of the way things are, of the relationship between conqueror and defeated during war? Don't you know how you are supposed to act?”

The major shouted and the guards at the door pushed the man back into the room. He sighed and said nothing after that, but he stood with his hands on his hips.

“Arms akimbo!” the major shouted, suddenly looking at me. “Japanese people hate arms akimbo! He knows that too, doesn't he?”

The Filipino interpreter had lost the line that the major was taking and when the major ordered the man to put down his arms the interpreter told him to surrender his weapons.

“We don't have any weapons,” the man said. “We just want fair treatment. Tell him we just want fair treatment.”

The interpreter told the major what the man had said, but by this time things were completely confused. Only I knew what was really going on, but I didn't want to talk, didn't want to tell this man that not only was I a fellow citizen of his, but I was from the same town, perhaps the same stretch of city.

“I will not tolerate arms akimbo,” Major Nakamura told the man very slowly. “It is something I will not have.” He was leaning over his desk and speaking directly to the man now, the interpreter
pushed aside. Out in front of the room where we were talking, the American soldiers of the man's company were waiting in the dust. The sun beat down on them but the guards would not let them come into the shade. Everyone could hear the major yelling. When I looked through the window I could see Jimmy standing near the tired, defeated Americans. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and was staring at the group and at the window where I watched him.

“Maki,” the major shouted. “Come here. Maybe you can make this man understand.”

“I'd prefer not to speak to him in English,” I said. “It will undermine my effectiveness later.”

“He's standing arms akimbo, look at him. Tell him to stop. That is what I can't stand about Americans. They are defeated but they act as if somehow they are better than we are. It's too much.”

“The major wants you to put your arms at your sides,” I said quietly, looking at the American directly for the first time. “He feels that your posture is defiant and would prefer that you act the part of the conquered soldier rather than that of his equal.”

The man from Los Angeles was startled at what I'd said, but without comment he dropped his hands to his sides and then looked back at Nakamura.

“That's good,” Nakamura said, talking to me. “Now I want you to put this man and his men in separate housing. We might make an example of this man. It seems every time I look through the fence I see someone standing arms akimbo. I want this guy in the center of the yard for a while. The heat will make him lower his gaze when he speaks to a Japanese officer.”

Without looking at the man from Los Angeles again I went outside and told the guards what they should do. The American soldiers were all about my age. When Jimmy heard that the group's leader would be kept in the center of the yard he looked at me, but when the time came he lowered his rifle and marched them away. The whole thing was disgusting. Major Nakamura had been milder in the jungle region than he was here and I had some
trouble now, picturing him as an elementary school principal. Jimmy and I had been with him for the entire time we'd been in the Philippines and until this day he had not raised his voice, either at a prisoner or at a soldier of his own.

A day passed and the major still made the man from Los Angeles stand in the center of the courtyard. At times it seemed that he wasted more energy than the man did, constantly getting up and walking to the window to see if his prisoner had moved. Jimmy and five others were made to guard the man in rotation, night and day, and though the man was sometimes allowed to sit down, the major had gone out and drawn a circle around him saying that he'd be killed if he stepped or fell across the line.

A few days passed and the man from Los Angeles seemed to grow more defiant. His men could see him when they walked about their barracks and he seemed to take strength from the shouts that they gave him, from the sentimental, football-field mentality that they had. The major had cut the man's rations to a minimum so it was surprising how long he lasted. After the first few days I could tell that the major wanted the affair ended, for he had seen in the American a willingness to see it through. He sat at his desk sitting tall so that he could see the thin shape of the man's head, the way it waggled occasionally all loose on his still shoulders. Unable to sleep, Nakamura would rise from his mattress and stand at his window in the humid darkness just to see the slumped shoulders of the man in the moonlight. I knew, on about the fifth day, that if the man did step across Nakamura's line, the major was ready to kill him. The body of the
sari-sari
store woman had made the major retch, yet now he was willing to murder this man over a test of his will.

Late one night when the major was at his customary position, a worried look upon his face, nose pressed against the dirty glass of his office window, he saw something that broke the stalemate of the situation. Jimmy was on duty, standing facing the tall American, his rifle loosely held in his hands. Nakamura's eyes
were rimmed red, I am sure, yet they were keen, and what they saw was Jimmy 's hand coming up and something passing between it and the American officer's mouth. The major got out his field glasses and watched for the movement again and saw the brown band of a Japanese candy bar folded and tucked back into Jimmy's pocket. He was beside himself. He paced his room furiously for a few moments, then sneaked out his side window and came around to the general barracks where I and the others were sleeping.

“Psst,” he said. “Everybody up. Keep quiet, don't turn on the lights.” He sneaked around from mat to mat shaking our shoulders and whispering in our ears. “What we have here is mutiny,” he told me after I was finally on my feet and awake. “Your friend has been feeding the prisoner. He has been supplementing his strength with Japanese candy!”