Tears in the Darkness (31 page)

As a rule he stayed at the front of the column, often in the first rank, a good vantage point to spot trouble or look for food and water.

Watching the guards on the flanks, he soon noticed they were leaving a lot of space between them. It occurred to him that at those distances, a guard would have to be a helluva shot to hit a man, so from time to time he broke from the line of march to run for water or stalks of sugarcane. (He thought of trying to escape too, but where would he go? Into the malarial hills? The jungle? Wander around lost until some Jap patrol bagged him?)

Early afternoons were the worst. The blistering heat left him heavy legged. Concentrate, he told himself. Left, right, left, right. When the guards stopped the column for a rest, he'd fall into an instant sleep, like many of the others, only to be stomped awake by the heel of a hobnail boot.

 

THE PRISONERS
were
tekikokujin,
the enemy, and the Japanese hated them.

Gabbing in the shade of a tree or gathered around a pot of boiling rice beside the road, the
hohei
in bivouac, waiting to go back into battle, jeered as the prisoners passed by.
Kuda!
they yelled, worthless dogs, then they pelted the marchers with rocks and gravel and handfuls of mud.

Sometimes a group of Japanese soldiers would drop what they were doing, form a long gauntlet on the road, and force a column of prisoners to run single file down the middle, shoving them back and forth and
pummeling them so hard with ax handles and bamboo cudgels the prisoners could hear bones breaking.

One night on the road, Corporal Aaron Drake of Carlsbad, New Mexico, heard a commotion in the dark ahead of him, and a few minutes later the column came abreast of a burly
hohei
stripped to the waist, standing in the middle of the road slugging every man in line square in the face. (The blow that caught Drake, he thought, damn near fractured his cheekbone.)

The
hohei
were especially hard on the Philippine Scouts, the elite regiment of Filipinos that had mauled them in battle. The Scouts were known as dead shots, and someone in the Japanese chain of command reckoned that the best way to cull them from the ranks of their countrymen was to examine the trigger finger of every Filipino captive, and for a time Japanese guards made the
sundalos
extend their hands for inspection. When they found a man with a muscled forefinger—no doubt a carpenter, mechanic, pipe fitter, or anyone else who had made a living wielding a wrench, squeezing a pair of pliers, or gripping a hammer—they beat him bloody, beat him for being what he likely was not.
⁴⁴

 

______

 

IN THE AMERICAN COLUMNS
were a number of officers forty and fifty years old. Those who had been in the field were accustomed to the hardships of combat and could keep up with the younger men, but those who had worked as rear-echelon adjutants or staff, plump majors and colonels, many of them, began to drop to the road or drift back toward the rear, the domain of the buzzard squads.

Zoeth Skinner couldn't help himself. Ahead of him in the line of march was an aging, overweight officer struggling to keep up, a major from the Quartermaster Corps. Like all frontline troops who had gone hungry during the battle, Skinner was sure the quartermaster had been hoarding rations, and he hated the niggardly “bastards” with “a purple passion.”
⁴⁵

“Look at that old fart hobbling along,” he thought. The idiot had on dress shoes, for Christ's sake.

Falling back and back again, the man was soon walking beside him. His eyes were bloodshot with anguish, and Skinner softened. What the hell, they were all suffering, he thought.

He offered to take one of the two musette bags the major had slung on his shoulders.

The bag was heavy. “You're going to have to do something here,” Skinner told the officer.

When they stopped for a break, Skinner spilled out the contents.

“Okay, Major,” he said, “let's see what the Christ you got in these goddamn musette bags you can't live without.”

And there, among a pile of clothes and shoes and toiletries, was a marble desk set—two pens and a brass inkwell set in a piece of inch-thick stone a foot long, all mounted to a lead base.

“Sir, there's got to be two pounds of lead in this friggin' thing. This baby is going right now. I ain't packing that thing another inch.”

The officer looked upset. “Jeez, that was given to me back in thirty-five and—”

“I don't give a shit when or why you got it,” Skinner said. “You ain't going to be doing any writing where we're going.”

Sergeant James Baldassarre of Boston was walking with a couple of colonels named McConnell and Mangunsen. As they neared a town, McConnell staggered out of formation and up to a house hard by the road.
⁴⁶

“Where you goin', Colonel?” Baldassarre asked.

The man looked gone. “I can't make the hike, Jimmy.”

“Let's go, Colonel. You'll be shot.”

“I've got to take a chance, Jimmy.”

And just as he started to mount the steps, a guard raised his rifle, pulled the trigger, and put a bullet in the colonel's head.

A while later Baldassarre came upon the other colonel sitting in a drainage ditch, pulling off his shoes. His feet were sore, he told Baldassarre, so sore he could not manage another step.

A guard had spotted them and was running their way and Baldassarre, getting up to move, pleaded with Mangunsen to follow him, but the officer wouldn't budge.

The round hit him in the chest. His eyes were still open when Baldassarre knelt down next to him.

“Keep going, Jimmy,” he said. “I'll be all right.”

 

THEY WALKED
on rumors and expressions of hope: “When we get to Balanga, we're gonna be put on ships to Manila, then traded for Jap prisoners, and we'll be home by Christmas.” The promises were always empty: “Tonight you eat,” a guard told the men in John Coleman's column as the formation approached the outskirts of Balanga, Bataan's capital city.
⁴⁷

How often had they heard that before, some Jap guard pointing up the road toward the next town, pledging
tabemono, tabemono,
“food, food there,” only to find nothing waiting but more gray dust and the rank water of the wallows.

And yet, sure enough, when they reached Balanga, or Orani nine miles north, they saw feeding stations—cauldrons and wheelbarrows and oil drums filled with steaming rice, sometimes tea.

Corporal Bill Simmons of Commerce, Missouri, was asleep in a compound in Balanga, dreaming about food (a table of heaping platters and a large glass of ice water) when someone shouted, “Hey, I smell rice cooking.”
⁴⁸

The men charged the pot “like wild starving animals,” then someone yelled “for some kind of organization,” and two men started ladling the porridge.

Men without mess kits lined up with anything they could find—old cans, palm and banana fronds, their helmets, their bare hands. (Richard
Gordon offered his cupped hands to a guard serving from an iron pot, and the guard laughed as he slopped the scalding mush into Gordon's naked palms.)
⁴⁹

Each man was given a cup of rice, a pinch of salt, and a half liter of tea. The rations were tasteless and too scanty to sate them, but to Simmons and his starving comrades even this bitter pittance “seemed like a Thanksgiving dinner.”

Many of the marchers—maybe a third of the men who passed through Balanga and Orani, maybe more—got no food at all, for the Japanese, chronically undersupplied, habitually unprepared, and stoically indifferent to the distress of men who were their sworn enemies, simply could not, or would not, feed them.
⁵⁰

 

ON THE FOURTH
or fifth day of the march, the Japanese appeared to abandon their original plan and were operating ad hoc. Many of the guards seemed confused now. Some marched their columns south, as if they had no sense of direction, then, realizing their mistake, turned them north again. Others kept re-forming their columns, as if shuffling men around would accomplish something. Orders were issued, countermanded, reissued.

There were simply too many
horyo.

Balanga in particular was in chaos. Columns of prisoners converged on the city from two directions, the thousands who were marched up from the south, from Mariveles, and thousands more who were pushed across the East-West Road from the far side of the peninsula, from Bagac—in all 76,000 captives passing through a staging and rest depot set up to handle less than half that number.

In Balanga they at first left the prisoners standing around in the dusty streets, throngs of milling tatterdemalions staring with blank eyes at the rubble around them. Then guards began to confine the arriving columns in empty buildings or penned them up in barbed-wire enclosures and compounds on the outskirts of town. Soon it seemed as if every schoolyard, warehouse, granary, cockpit, tin pavilion, and factory shed in Balanga was bulging with Filipino and American POWs, and the fields and rice paddies outside of town began to resemble the stockyards of Kansas City or Chicago.

Guards packed the prisoners so tightly they had little room to sit or lie down. During the day they sat shoulder to shoulder with their knees
to their chests, legs against the back of the man in front of them. At night they lay in the dirt elbow to elbow like canned fish.

For the first groups of men, the compounds were a respite from the road. But after several days, and many thousands of men, the overpopulated holding pens of Balanga and Orani had turned into cesspools, and a “noisome stench” greeted the weary, thirsty, and hungry prisoners who filed into them. Entering Balanga, Bernard FitzPatrick thought, “The whole town [smells] like a sewer.”
⁵¹

Thousands of men were suffering from dysentery, and the ground where the prisoners were forced to sit and sleep became coated with layers of excrement, mucus, urine, and blood. Japanese sanitation units had dug slit-trench latrines, but so many men were sick that the open pits (some eight feet long, two feet wide, and four- to five feet deep) filled after a day or so and started to spill over the edges. Hundreds of men, meanwhile, never made it to the latrines; they stumbled into the compounds too enervated, too far gone to take another step. Helpless against the exigencies of the disease—the wrenching cramps and resistless urge to evacuate—they soiled themselves where they stood right through their clothing, then lay down half conscious in a pool of their own filth.

Bud Locke of Hooksett, New Hampshire, looked in vain for a clean spot to bed down for the night. “Before long,” he thought, “everyone [is going to be] a filthy, dust-covered, crap-smeared, stinking specimen of humanity.”
⁵²

The compounds baked in the tropical sun and by midday the stench was so overpowering the men could taste it. Some heaved and retched, covering themselves in vomit. Others walked around hawking and spitting, as if they could expectorate the unspeakable taste that had settled on their tongues.

The stench brought the flies, of course, so many the air became dark with them. They swarmed the men who had fouled themselves and settled on the surface of the slit trenches. Colonel Ernest B. Miller entered a compound where the brimming trenches and surrounding scum wriggled with “a constantly moving sea of [gray] maggots.”
⁵³

To many the degradation of those fetid pens was worse than any hunger or thirst. In one compound Murray Sneddon waded through “excreta of every type and kind.” Already men “had fallen to the ground and fallen asleep wherever they could stand the stench.” The next morning, rising with the sun, Sneddon noticed right away that “the foul-smelling
mud had thoroughly penetrated” his uniform during the night. Getting to his feet he felt “some of the wetter ooze slowly flowing down inside [his] pants on [his] bare skin.” And as the guards came through to marshal the prisoners back on the road, he imagined himself a medieval leper “required to notify all of [his] approach by crying, ‘Unclean . . . unclean.' ”
⁵⁴

Alvin Poweleit, a major from Kentucky who spoke Japanese, pointed to the compound his column was about to enter and told a guard,
kii benjo,
”big toilet.”