Tears in the Darkness (43 page)

The headlights of the truck revealed the rock-covered river bank . . . It was a warm tropical night, and as our eyes became used to the dark, we could see many people sleeping amid the rocks on the bank. Few of them had anything to lie upon.

The next morning we awakened early, and at dawn the red sun was filtering down into our clearing. Smoke from a few small fires curled straight up and many people were stirring around . . . The jungle was the first I ever saw that was truly impenetrable . . . The sun only shone on the camp when directly overhead, since we were surrounded by tall jungle trees. The place rarely had a chance to dry out, and the mosquitoes were [astonishing].

Ashton started asking questions, talking to the ambulatory, making an inventory of the sick: “everyone had diarrhea or dysentery”; most had malaria too; a handful suffered from dengue fever and couldn't eat. Half the detail seemed to have some kind of respiratory problem, and several of these were developing pneumonia. Others were either yellow with jaundice or covered with jungle ulcers, which were suppurating and attracting flies. A number of the infirm were infested with worms, nematodes, deposited as larvae by flies and mosquitoes. (A local guerrilla, Bernabe de Leon, who sold snacks by the bridge and spied on the Japanese, one day came upon an American on a path in the jungle near the river. The man was only half conscious, sitting on the ground with his back against a tree. His head was leaning back and inch-long worms were crawling out of his closed eyes.)

The doctors did what they could to treat this catalog of disease. Ashton brought what medicine was available, morphine mostly. He ran out of paregoric, the treatment for dysentery, his second or third day on-site and tried homemade remedies: riverbank clay mixed with water and decanted into a silt the men could swallow, and spoonfuls of powdered charcoal ground from burned boxwood, a treatment that left most of the detail black faced from their noses to their chins.

The weak were too weak, “even [to] feed themselves,” and with “the flies, bugs and leeches . . . legion,” Ashton, Brown, and the corpsmen spent their days circulating among the men on the rocks and under the tarp “fanning away the bugs” that would “congregate on the skin,” inflicting “multiple bites that would cause ulcerations, especially on the cheeks and foreheads.” Their “uncontrolled diarrhea” compounded the problem, and the doctors and corpsmen were “constantly” dragging men to the river and “cleaning and bathing them.”

Watching all this, the Japanese conferred a kind of unofficial authority on the doctor. The detail's American commander, Captain Henry Pierce, did not have Ashton's moxie, and his second in command, Lieutenant Thomas Rhodes, had been caught stealing food from their stockpile and the men despised and shunned him. Into the void stepped Ashton. “Few of the guards on the road job seemed hateful or vicious” to him. Instead he saw them as simply ignorant and inept. At first he tried arguing with them. Couldn't they see that if they treated the men better, they'd get more out of them? When that didn't work he took to haranguing them, standing on the rock bar and shouting tirades upstream toward their camp.

He also treated a few of their soldiers for diarrhea and became friendly with one of them, a
hohei
who apparently had been distributing
okurimono
. One day Ashton noticed the man missing from the site and asked after him. The soldier was
byōki byōin
(sick in hospital) in Calauag, and the guards asked Ashton if he would go there and look at the man.

It was a ramshackle barn where fifteen Japanese soldiers lay on the ground on rice straw, some shivering with malaria, some with diarrhea . . . A couple even had my charcoal on their chins . . . [No doctors or orderlies were around.] They prepared their own food or friends brought it to them. Otherwise they got nothing. I had occasion to ruminate on the sort of help or consideration [we could expect] from people who cared for their own in that manner.

After that, the Japanese took to calling Ashton
shōsa,
“Major,” instead of the captain he was, and made him a kind of honorary noncommissioned officer in their unit. Every morning at dawn, however, Ashton reverted to being their antagonist, “the fly in their rice,” as he liked to think of himself, holding back as many sick men as possible from the job site.

In the weeks that followed, the death rate increased—three, four, five men a day.

The stronger men became weaker and several startling cases of sudden death occurred even in the strongest when attacked by dysentery which we could not prevent . . . Our graveyard was growing by leaps and bounds at the edge of the clearing. Most of the men died in black face, and their hats and rags, taken to be washed as best we could without soap, were given to survivors. We had no shrouds for the emaciated corpses covered with bug bites and leech ulcers . . . I said or thought a few words for each man as his last rites.

 

SOME MEN WENT INSANE.
The detail's executive officer, Captain Jerry Gonzales of Magdalena, New Mexico, spent a whole day trying to put both his shoes on the same foot. (He died June 19, and his men, out of respect, buried him in uniform, the only man so interred.) Another soldier—(Hatten, some of the men called him)—developed an obsession
with his mess kit. Every morning he'd become angry at his breakfast and beat his tin canteen cup into a lump, then he would spend the rest of the day banging it back into shape again.

Steve Kramerich was crazy and knew it. Sick with cerebral malaria, he'd been assigned a spot under the hospital tarp. One afternoon he dreamed he had amnesia. “This is horrible,” he said to himself in his dream, and he awoke with his heart pounding. When he looked around, he saw some dirty men in ragged clothes sitting nearby cooking something. Who were these men, he wondered, and why were they sitting in the open around a campfire? And all at once he realized that his dream was no dream at all.

Steve Kramerich, an army signal corpsman from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, could not remember who he was. He wandered over to the circle of men, asked what they were doing. (Maybe they knew him, he thought.)
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“We're fixing a little chow,” one of them said.

He stood there for a while, hoping to hear something that would jog his memory, make him remember his name.

The next morning, still amnesic, he found himself walking through the camp and came upon a man in uniform, holding a long rifle. What a strange-looking fellow, Steve Kramerich thought, and he ambled up to the man and introduced himself.

“And who are you?” Kramerich asked.

The man holding the rifle looked annoyed, barked something unintelligible, and motioned for Steve Kramerich to go away.

“But I don't know you,” Steve Kramerich said.

The man was getting irritated now, shaking his rifle at him.

Steve Kramerich said to himself, “This man has a gun. I better not do anything foolish.” And he tootled away, more befuddled than before.

 

BY THE MIDDLE OF JULY
Ben Steele was spending all day in his lean-to at the edge of the rock bank. His malaria was so advanced he was having daily attacks. “Each one is tearing me down a little bit more,” he thought. “I'm getting weaker every day.”

The week before, digging on a hillside barefoot and in a G-string, he had stepped on a sharp stick. The point punctured the ball of his foot, and within twenty-four hours the foot became infected. The infection spread up his leg, which started to swell. Blood poisoning, Ashton told him.

On top of all this he was suffering from beriberi and the painful edema that comes with it. His ankles were swollen and grotesque, “as big as melons,” he thought. He could no longer stand and had to depend on Sergeant Russell for almost everything.

Through it all, he had struggled to keep his spirits up. A few days after they'd arrived at the rock bar and learned they'd be living without shelter, he told himself, “The type of life I've lived, dealing with the elements, I think that's going to help me take care of myself here.” He thought about the year he'd worked in the Big Hole, how the crew had slept on a hillside in the rain for days that spring with nothing but their bedrolls for cover, shivering at night and working “sopping wet” during the day, making the best of it. But a rainstorm in a Montana mountain valley was like a sprinkle set against the massive monsoons that rolled in from the South China Sea and enveloped the thick jungle of the Bicol peninsula. At home on the prairie, he might best the elements, but here at the end of the world, sleeping on rocks, he was no match for nature and knew it.

At first he called on God for help. Every day he prayed for deliverance: Please, God, he would say, let this work detail be over before they all died. And he begged the Almighty to show him how to continue, how to survive. Then the beriberi crippled him and he gave up praying and looking to heaven for help.

He thought, “After going through the battle, the march, O'Donnell, now this? We're just a bunch of guys that nobody gives a shit about. “We've been let down by everybody—God, our country. All those promises, nothing happened. We've been sacrificed.”

He didn't believe in anything anymore. He'd lost all hope of ever leaving the river and the rock bar. He thought, “I'm about as low as you can get without being six feet under.”

Every day he could feel himself failing some more. He was so sick and wretched, he thought, “I don't care whether I live or die. I just don't give a damn.”

He wasn't afraid and he wasn't angry. He was dying. And he wondered, “How soon? How soon?”

 

THEY'D REACHED THE END.
After eight weeks at the site, on or around July 25, Paul Ashton told the Japanese that no one was able to work.

None of the men who remained were “fit for duty” and the total census of the working party had shrunk to twenty, including the two corps-men and myself. Of the remaining seventeen, at least seven were moribund. [Everyone] was entirely depleted by the multiple diseases that consumed them. Dysentery had dehydrated them, removing essential chemicals and fluids; malaria with chills and fever had thinned their blood, turning the urine to black water. Their bellies were bloated, yet their extremities thin. Their wizened faces gave them an appearance of advanced age. The far-off lack of focus in their sunken eyes (as a myriad of flies walked drunkenly searching between the parted lips and eyelids, and upon the mosquito-ulcerated cheek bones) revealed their merciful preoccupation with the beat of some other drummer.

The Japanese told Ashton to get his men ready for transport to Manila the next day.

 

BEN STEELE
was half gone. Maybe he heard the news, maybe he didn't. He was delirious. All he could think about was getting a drink. Where was Russell, where was the sergeant? Never mind. He pulled himself slowly across the rock bar to the river and lowered his face into the water.

 

MEANWHILE
the Japanese were telling Ashton that they refused to transport seven men who were lying unconscious under the hospital tarp. Space was tight, the guards said. No point carrying men who wouldn't make it. Ashton knew better than to argue. He knelt down among the comatose men and lingered for a long time.

The Japanese were screaming at him to “Speedo! Speedo!” but Ashton ignored them. He was going to give his patients one last treatment, and he was not going to be rushed.

As a medical student in San Francisco, he'd studied with a professor who had given large injections of morphine to patients with terminal tuberculosis. “G.O.M.,” the professor called the treatment, “God's Own Medicine.”

Ashton reached into his medical bag and took out a syringe. He filled it with God's Own Medicine, then went from man to man, giving each a shot. (“They were yet alive,” he noted, “but quite oblivious to what was being done to them.”) He was not going “to leave them . . . without
water or help,” he told himself, and he was not going to leave them “for the ants to eat” either.
⁸

 

SIXTY-THREE MEN
had been buried at the site and six had disappeared during an escape. A hundred and twenty-four men had been returned to the Bilibid Prison hospital on two earlier trips; thirty of these had died en route or in the hospital. Out of the original detail of three hundred, nearly one-third, ninety-nine men, were dead.

At 5:45 p.m. on Tuesday, July 28, trucks carrying 107 American prisoners of war and one corpse—Oliphant, James L., Sergeant, U.S. Army, 38912574—rolled into the courtyard at Manila's Bilibid Prison.

Waiting for them were Navy doctors and corpsmen. Commander Thomas H. Hayes, Bilibid's chief surgeon, noted their arrival in his diary:

Eight big truck loads arrived. It was the last of the [work detail] and the medical officer came with them. Two lasted long enough for us to lay them out on stretchers under a mango tree where they immediately expired. Another dozen in extremis we laid out on the ground until the Japs would release them to us for bedding down. The rest—horrible walking creatures—like Haitian Zombies, the living dead—dirty, bewhiskered, hollow cheeked, sunken eyes, some too weak to stand. Others still up on their pins, fighting to the last ditch to carry their few remaining articles . . . Pitiful broken human hulks.”
⁹