Tears in the Darkness (42 page)

Instead of a rice pot, the Japanese gave them a rusty old wheelbarrow coated with dried concrete. They scraped off the coating as best they could, built a fire in a trench in the middle of the rock bar, and rolled the wheelbarrow over it. At first they used too much water and ended up with a watery rice slop. Even after they adjusted the recipe, the rice always tasted of rust, river water, and old concrete.

Their day began before dawn when guards came onto the rock bar and poked them awake. One man looked worse than the next, eyes rheumy, hair unshorn, face hirsute and filthy. (They could peel off the mud in strips.) Stiff and wet in the predawn chill, they sat up slowly, scraping off the mats of mosquitoes, coughing and hacking up phlegm from the damp, shaking from night sweats or swooning with fever. Every morning, one man at least was carried up the bank and into a section of jungle set aside as a graveyard. After the morning count, the men lined up at the rice wheelbarrow for their morning gruel, then they drew their picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows and marched off to work.

Even with heavy equipment, the job of reshaping the Bicol jungle would have been difficult work. Now they were using hand tools to hack the shoulders off hills, dig out massive roots, haul loads of wet fill—weak men working all day, struggling to swing eight-pound picks or push heavy wheelbarrows through a gumbo of mud that swallowed everything that touched it.

Sometimes the muck was so thick that five men were needed to move one wheelbarrow, two pushing from behind and three, trussed up in harnesses of vines and ropes, pulling like horses from the front. They worked barefoot and in loincloths, most of them, saving the rags they called clothes (which they wrapped in palm fronds and left back at the rock bar) for their nights and the mosquitoes.

Most of all they were sick. Every man jack of them was sick with something, and every day that passed, fewer and fewer were able to march off to work in the jungle. On their first day at Tayabas Road only
two-thirds of the men in the detail were able to report for the morning labor call. Two weeks later, fewer than half were well enough to work.

 

BEN STEELE
had awoken in a fever sweat, and the malaria attack had left him flushed and fuzzy all day. Breakfast had been awful too, the rice half cooked and hard raw. And now under a blazing morning sun in a clearing in the jungle, he was chopping at tree roots and lianas with a spade. Thick and hard those roots, like hacking at metal cables. His hands were bruised and tender and his shoulders ached. Worse, the sun was making him light-headed, faint. He stopped, tried to gather himself. The air was still, the clearing stifling and incendiary. “This is goddamn grueling,” he thought, then—

When he came to his senses, he was lying under a tree. Nearby, a guard was beating a slacker. When the guard noticed Ben Steele stirring, he motioned him back to work. The afternoon rain had been heavy, and he slogged through the muck until dark.

Back at the river, the lean-to was down again. He cleared away some stones on the rock bar to make a sleeping pit. Too weak to stand in line for rice, he asked Sergeant Russell to bring him his gruel. Afterward, he made his way to the river to wash himself. His hair was long, his whiskers too, full of clumps of mud, leaves, and grass.

He sat for moment on the rocks, letting the wind dry him. Then it started to rain again, a driving night rain. His body began to shake and his teeth chattered (keep that up, he told himself, and he'd grind them right down to the gums). “Damn, I'm freezing,” he thought. “I'm like to shake to death in this downpour.”

 

EVERY MORNING
there were more bodies on the rocks. After a month at the site, the dead had filled up one jungle graveyard and the living had started another. The infirm, the men too sick to work, dug the graves. Once in a while, someone would stand at the edge of the hole and offer a sentiment. Preston Hubbard, an Air Corps signalman from Clarksville, Tennessee, occasionally acted as an unofficial chaplain. His eulogies were short and his service always included the Twenty-third Psalm, by Hubbard's lights an apt text. In the green gloom of the Basiad River, he could easily envision “the valley of the shadow of death.”
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They buried them as they were born, naked, their filthy rags stripped for the living to wear. If they died balled up or contorted, they were put
in the ground that way, sitting hunched over. Less digging, the men reckoned, too many roots to go down deep. The diggers made crosses from sticks and pounded the rough rood into the damp earth at the top of the hole, then paused for a prayer. “The Lord is my shepherd . . .”

“Poor guys,” thought Ken Calvit, an Air Corps mechanic from Alexandria, Louisiana. “Here they are, seven thousand miles from home, lying on the ground naked, covered with flies, covered in shit, sicker than hell, nobody to even hold their hand, nobody to comfort them, nothing. What a way to go.”
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Men dying of cerebral malaria groaned and wailed for days, their song of suffering filling the hospital grove and spilling out onto the rock bar. At the end, their wails would fall to whispers, faint cries to friends and family, then, finally, an inarticulate rattle and rasp. At that point, the worms had already started their work, and everyone was eager to get the bodies underground.

 

BEN STEELE
and Dalton Russell were agreed.

“If they don't get us out of here,” Ben Steele said, “neither one of us is going to make it. We gotta get out of here some way. We're burying more dead every day and soon we're going to be one of them.”

They were huddled in their rebuilt lean-to, staring out at the heavy rain and gray gloom. “We ought to try,” Russell said. “You're right, we're gonna die if we don't get out of here.”

Many of the others, watching the boneyard fill, were also thinking of escape, and sometime in June, six men took flight. It was easy to elude the guards; there weren't that many of them. Besides, it was the jungle, not the Japanese, that was really imprisoning them.

As soon as the missing men were discovered, the Japanese asked for “volunteers” to help search, but after several days of beating the bush, they gave up. Some in the detail were sure the escapees were holed up with friendly villagers or had found a guerrilla camp in the hills. Most men, however, suspected that the runaways had been consumed by the jungle or had waded downriver and gotten caught in the current and washed out to sea.

After that, Ben Steele and Dalton Russell talked about eventualities rather than escape.

“If one of us gets back,” the sergeant said, “we should agree to see the other one's family.”

“Fine,” said Ben Steele. He'd heard so much about the sergeant's blond wife, Donnie, he could almost see her pretty face. And he reminded Russell that if the sergeant was the one who ended up making the condolence call, he should make sure to get some of Bess Steele's roast pork and applesauce.

 

FOR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS,
the Japanese pushed the men to work harder, part of a bet the guards had going. The keepers had divided the kept into teams, five prisoners to each guard, the guards haggling to get the biggest and strongest men. After the teams were picked, they set the wager, so much for the one that moved the most wheelbarrows of earth. With yen to win or lose, the guards drove their charges hard, rewarding good work with a banana or coconut, a short rest or water break. Slackers were scolded with stinging strokes from a punishment stick. The sergeant of the guard was particularly pitiless. He'd been wounded and hobbled at Lingayen Gulf, he told the captives, and he seemed determined to get even. He beat three men so hard with a bolo scabbard, they damn near died. After that, the men started calling him “the Killer.”

Sometime during the second or third week in June, after roughly a month working on the road, the prisoners began to notice a change in the guards. The beatings became less frequent. And every now and then, either at the jungle work site or back at the rock bar, a guard might wander over to where a prisoner was sitting and nonchalantly toss an
okuri-mono,
a little “present,” on the ground.

Irwin Scott was so sick with malaria when the detail arrived at Calauag, his comrade Bill White of Albuquerque had to carry him most of the way to the Basiad River. Scott couldn't work, of course, and in the mornings was left back at camp with the infirm. Every afternoon when White returned from digging on the road, he would try to help his friend. First he would fetch him a cup of gruel and insist he eat it. Scott always refused (he was ready to give up), but White kept pushing the rice on him until the canteen cup was empty. Then White would pull his friend to his feet (Scott screaming execrations) and drag him across the rocks to the river to cool his fever and wash off the crud. After a while Scott started to show some improvement and White made his friend crawl to the water on his own, kicking him in the backside when he balked.

“Leave me alone!” Scotty would yell. “Lemme die.”
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“Aw, go on and crawl down there,” White would say. “You're dirty. You need to wash yourself.”

“Why can't you just leave me the fuck alone? We're all gonna die here. Nobody gives a damn what happens.”

“Oh, yes they do,” White said one day. “Watch.”

A few minutes later, a guard appeared at the edge of the rock bar. He looked around till he spotted White, then started walking slowly and casually in their direction.

“Here he comes,” White whispered.

As the guard passed the two men on the rocks, he dropped a small bundle wrapped in a green banana leaf and wandered off as if nothing had happened. White unwrapped the package. Inside was a rice ball and a tiny white hand-folded envelope that held two pills.

“Go ahead,” White said, handing the rice and pills to Scott. “Eat them.”

“What is it?” Scott said.

“The pills are quinine.”

“Bullshit.”

“Taste it.”

Bill White was right.

“The day after I brought you into camp passed out,” White explained, “that guard came walking by like he was checking something, and when he saw you he tossed me a folded banana leaf. ‘For him,' he said, and he pointed at you. That's the only words he said.” Every two or three days the guard returned with another
okurirnono,
and White slipped the pills into the gruel he had been forcing Scott to eat, the spiked slop that had been saving his life.

One guard gave Louis Kolger a whole bottle of quinine, and another tossed Ben Steele a couple of pills. Air Corps radio operator Paul Reuter of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, noticed that even the Killer was handing out
okurirnono.
He was still beating his workers with his scabbard, but at night he'd sidle up to the men he'd thumped and slip them some quinine and Japanese fruit juice.

The cynics in camp said the Japanese were just looking out for their own interests, tending to their human livestock, their draft animals. But their extra attentions had no effect on the work. Every day fewer and fewer Americans were able to answer the morning call. No, the Killer and his comrades weren't helping their captives because they wanted to
get more production out of them. To some of the men it was almost as if the enemy, moved by the abject misery of the place, was starting to feel sorry for them.

 

TWICE IN JUNE
the Japanese culled the sickest prisoners from the detail and put them on a truck and drove them 173 miles north to Manila and a hospital for prisoners of war that U.S. Navy doctors had set up in the city's Bilibid Prison. One of those trucks rolled into the prison compound on June 19, the day Army doctor Captain Paul Ashton happened to arrive at Bilibid with some five hundred patients from one of Bataan's captured field hospitals. Ashton had just settled his patients in their beds (straw mats on concrete floors) and was strolling around the prison compound getting the lay of the place when the truck from Tayabas Road stopped just inside the front gate.

Thirty invalids were in the back, men so emaciated, filthy, and malodorous no one moved to help them. “They were not in uniforms,” Ashton noted, “just nondescript shirts and pants, rags really, and caked with muck. They looked wizened and dehydrated . . . quite the sickest” and most “broken men” Ashton had ever seen.
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Who were these wretched derelicts? Ashton wondered. And what kind of “frightful” hell had tossed them up? When the prison medical staff learned that there were more such cases at the road-building site, they asked the prison commandant if they could send someone down, and Captain Ashton—intrepid surgeon and irritating swashbuckler—was the first to volunteer.

In 1940, living in San Francisco, Paul Ashton had almost everything he'd ever wanted—a pretty wife (Yvonne Toolen was as beautiful as a “fairy queen,” he thought) and a good job as a surgeon at Letter-man Army Hospital. All that was missing was a little “adventure.” He'd spent “a lifetime sitting in chairs studying,” and now he yearned for some “excitement,” some “color,” so he put in for a transfer to the Philippines, arriving in Manila in June 1941 and assigned to the 12th Medical Regiment, Philippine Scouts.

On Bataan Ashton had become a triage specialist, operating in the open or under a tent next to the front lines. His first job, of course, was saving lives, but he thought himself a fighting man as well as a doctor and was just as willing to take lives as save them. He kept a .45 automatic strapped to his hip and told anyone within earshot that he was ready to
use it against the nearest Jap. (Riding in an ambulance once, he came under fire from a Japanese Zero, grabbed a Browning automatic rifle, and started shooting at the plane.) He could be abrupt and abrasive, but he was a steady surgeon, ready to carry his doctor's kit into any foxhole or jungle waste.

Ashton convinced Major Charles Brown, a doctor from San Antonio, Texas, and a few army medics who'd chased around on Bataan as his assistants to accompany him to Tayabas. The medicos likely arrived at the site on Monday, June 22, almost a month to the day since the detail left O'Donnell to start working there. It was dark when the truck carrying the six men from Bilibid came up the road from Calauag, crossed the bridge, and stopped at the riverbank. Ashton, an avid memoirist, never forgot his first impression of the place.