Tears in the Darkness (29 page)

Zoeth Skinner of Portland, Oregon, came astride a Filipino amputee hobbling along on crutches. Japanese infantrymen camped along the way yelled and laughed at the cripple, poked him with sticks, tried to make him stumble. A while later farther up the road, Skinner noticed a tail of white gauze dragging in the dirt ahead of him. At the other end
of the tail, twenty feet forward, was a man with a bandaged leg, struggling against his wound, his dressing unraveling as he walked.
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AT FIRST
the marchers tried to keep their sense of society, their culture of comradeship, and help one another. The lucky ones, men like Humphrey O'Leary and Phil Murray, were able to “buddy-up” and watch out for each other, but in the chaos of the surrender and the first commotion of captivity, friends became separated, and men like Ben Steele and Richard Gordon and Dominick Giantonio of Hartford, Connecticut, found themselves in the ranks of strangers, lending a hand when a hand was needed.

“Get up!”

“Let's go!”

“Don't fall, they'll get you.”

Against despair, however, each man had to struggle alone. Ed Dyess got a “sort of sinking feeling” every time he saw a Ford or Chevrolet truck bearing Imperial Japanese Army insignia, prewar American exports
(or a little piece of home, as Dyess saw it) packed now with enemy troops who jeered at him as they passed by.
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Colonel Richard Mallonée from Utah was a veteran of the old horse-drawn artillery, and when he felt low he distracted himself by studying the equipage of his Japanese counterparts. Each time a horse-drawn limber and caisson came along, Mallonée noted the condition of the animals—Were they in good flesh? Well-groomed and properly harnessed?—and the bearing of the men riding them.
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Lester Tenney of Chicago set goals for himself. Make it as far as “the next bend in the road,” he thought, or up to that “herd of carabao in the distance.” He also had a dream—“Without a dream,” he figured, his “resolve would weaken”—a dream of home. He held hard to the image of his wife, Laura, his reason, he told himself, for living. And to keep his dream safe, he tucked a picture of her in his sock, telling himself it gave each step purpose.
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THE SUN
was inescapable. It blistered their skin, baked their shoulders and backs, beat on their heads. Some men had managed to keep their helmets, some wore hats or caps or took rags and handkerchiefs and knotted the ends to fashion a sort of cap, but many men had no cover at all and walked bare-headed under the blazing sun.

The sweat soaked their clothes and streamed down their faces. It mixed with the thick dust and created a kind of gray sludge that ran into their eyes, stuck in their beards, caked on their clothing. They looked like ghosts of themselves mantled in gray, tramping along in a pall.

As each ragged group of men reached Cabcaben, the southernmost town on the peninsula's east shore and the place where the Old National Road turned north up the coast, they were halted and put in a holding area—a dry rice paddy, field, or section of runway at Cabcaben's jungle airstrip. From what the men could tell, there were a number of these marshaling yards in Cabcaben, places where the disorderly processions of prisoners from Mariveles were reorganized.

In the holding areas, the men were made to sit feet to back for hours at a time before moving on (the “sun treatment,” they came to call it). At last, when they were ready, the guards rushed in among them, screaming, kicking, and flogging the men to their feet, then herded them onto the road where they were arranged into regular marching columns, three
or four ranks across, a hundred to four hundred men in each column, with a handful of guards assigned to walk the flanks and bring up the rear.

By now the prisoners' hunger was starting to gnaw at them. They had been half starved before surrender and most had not had a scrap of food since. Even more pressing was their thirst. In the chaos at Cabcaben, only occasionally did the Japanese allow the prisoners to fill their canteens from a nearby stream. Most went without water and they rapidly dehydrated and began to suffer heat exhaustion: their temples pounded with pain, their heads felt afire, they became disoriented and wobbly with vertigo.

Back on the road, the guards yelled at them to pick up the pace.

“Speedo,” they shouted, walking or riding bicycles beside the formations. “Speedo! Speedo!”

Some guards, laughing, started their columns running.

 

BEN STEELE
was watching for socks.

Men were starting to blister. Big blisters, the size of a half-dollar, blisters in clusters, breaking and bleeding with every step. Some men used sharp rocks to make slits in their shoes and boots, makeshift sandals, but their feet were so swollen the skin just bulged painfully through the openings. Others removed their footwear and walked barefoot, wincing with every step.

He had to find dry socks or soon he too would be hobbled. Ben Steele pawed through packs and bags abandoned along the road. Finally, somewhere north of Cabcaben, he saw what he'd been looking for.

A corpse lay on the shoulder just ahead. The dead man was wearing garrison shoes, low quarters instead of work boots, and the laces were untied and loose.

Ben Steele removed one of the shoes, stripped off the sock, and was reaching for the other foot when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a guard headed his way and dashed back to his place in the column.

“What the hell were you doing back there with that dead guy?” said one of his fellow marchers.

“You gotta take care of your feet,” Ben Steele said, “or you're not going to get very far.”

 

MEN HAD BEEN PALLING
by the wayside since the zigzag, but the guards had been so busy collecting all the captives and getting them on the road
that they had paid the dropouts little attention. After the prisoners were put in columns at Cabcaben, however, the guards in charge of each formation started watching their prisoners more closely, and now when a man went down, a Japanese was soon standing over him.

“Hayaku täte!”

The order was unintelligible but the meaning of the kick that followed, the hard toe of a hobnail boot, was clear. Get up! Get up immediately or . . .

The fallen tried to raise themselves, tried to pull their knees under them, push up on all fours, but their heads, thick from fever, pulled them down, and their muscles, wasted by months of malnutrition, collapsed under them.

“Hayaku! Hayaku!”

 

THE JAPANESE
type 30 bayonet was twenty inches long, overall, with a fifteen-inch blade. The weapon looked more like a Roman sword than a knife-bayonet, and when it was fixed to the end of a fifty-inch Arisaka rifle, it gave the
hohei
a kind of a pike, a five-and-a-half-foot spear.

The average Japanese foot soldier prized his bayonet. It was a symbol of his office, a twentieth-century warrior nodding to his samurai forebears. He would wear his bayonet home on leave in a scabbard. No other modern force spent so much time practicing with cold steel or developing in its men the stone heart to use it.

If a prisoner was straggling, lagging behind the formation or slowing it down, most guards would just jab him in the lower back or buttocks, a quick poke deep enough to hustle him along and make him rejoin the formation. (After a guard stabbed Sergeant Ed Thomas of Knox, Indiana, in the right buttock, he told himself he could run “all the way to Manila” if he had to.) If a man failed to raise himself, however, he usually got the blade to the hilt.
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A young American in Sergeant Tony Aquino's group had fallen face-first to the gravel roadbed, and a guard at the rear of the column ordered the marchers to halt. He kicked the young American in the ribs and shouted at him to stand up, but the soldier got only as far as his knees before he collapsed again. The guard kicked him harder. (Come on compadre, Aquino thought, get up, get up!) The young American raised his head (Aquino could see blood spilling from the man's mouth) and reached out, as if to ask the guard for help.

The guard put his bayonet to the man's neck, shouted, and drove the blade home. The American rocked back on his heels and rose up on his haunches, then the guard jerked the blade free, and the boy toppled over in the dirt.

So it was going to be a death march, Aquino told himself, “death on the road to nowhere.” Falter and fall, he thought, and “there you will stay.”
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When a sergeant in Joe Smith's column fell to the road, two of his comrades broke ranks to help. A guard from the rear of the column came running and shouting, and he beat the Samaritans back into line, then wheeled about and bayonetted the man on the ground. As Smith came abreast of the scene, the guard was struggling to free his weapon. He had driven the blade so deep that he had to put his foot in the small of the man's back and pull the rifle with both hands to wrest it free.
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THIRST
is a warning, the brain reminding the body that its essence is being spent. On an average day, an average man requires two to three quarts of water. The body is liquid, 60 percent of the chemical equation of life, and the brain is always metering the balance. If the level drops just 2 percent, the hypothalamus sends out an alarm—the urgency for water, the craving to drink.

The men on the death march were drying up. As their bodies tried to conserve fluids, they stopped sweating and urinating. Their saliva turned adhesive and their tongues stuck to their palates and teeth. Their throats started to swell, and their sinus cavities, dry and raw from the dust and heat, pounded with a headache that blurred their vision. Some men got earaches and lost their hearing. A guard could shout “Hey!” (
kora!
) all he liked, but a man down from dehydration, dazed and deaf with heat fever, would never hear the warning or sense the watchman's fatal approach.

 

THERE WAS WATER
all along the route, plenty of it. On the way to nowhere the men on the death march passed one artesian well after another. In the towns the wells had spigots; on the outskirts they flowed freely from an open pipe, usually within a hundred feet of the road where parched men could see the water gushing in the air, see it bubbling, smell (or so some imagined) its fresh scent.

The guards were under orders to keep their columns moving. They might stop to make way for one of the convoys headed south, or they
might pull up at a certain point to wait for their relief, but unless a superior had ordered them to stop, or they had covered the distance assigned them that day, they dared not allow their formations to line up for hours at a bubbling pipe. Japanese section chiefs patrolled the road, and any guard who failed to enforce marching discipline was yanked aside and beaten on the spot.

So the marchers had to sneak a drink on the run or during a rest break, and the only “water” within easy reach lay in the bottom of the drainage ditches, carabao wallows, and small stagnant pools beside the Old National Road.

During a rest a Japanese officer watching Ed Dyess's column allowed a few men to collect their comrades' canteens and fill them from a wallow. It was a foul drink, putrid and brackish. Gnats and flies swarmed above green scum on the surface, and the water gave off a “nauseating reek” that made the men retch, but Dyess and his comrades held their noses and “drank all [they] could get,” aware that what they were gulping would likely lay them low.

From their first days in the islands, soldiers were warned not to drink from pools of standing water or slow-running streams, mediums for the pernicious microorganisms that cause dysentery. Some knew that tincture of iodine rendered the water safe, but only a few medics and a handful of others had a bottle of the disinfectant. The rest simply ignored the risk. And on the road north from Cabcaben to Balanga, it was not unusual to see soldiers crazed with thirst on their bellies around some stinking sump or muddy cistern. Just like cats, thought Richard Gordon, “lapping up milk from a saucer.”
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SOME MEN
were so dehydrated, the neurotransmitters in the brain started to shut down. In the pathology of dehydration, they became “functionally deranged.” A few developed visions, hydrohallucinations—the cool mountain spring, the pristine waterfall. Most simply lost their minds, their sense of reason.

Only a madman would ask the enemy for water. Robert Levering thought one of his guards “seemed a little friendly” so he pointed to his mouth and mimed drinking from a canteen.
“Mizu nail!”
the guard shouted, no water, and gave Levering a good smack on the side of the head. Men who begged for a drink were clubbed with rifle butts, wooden cudgels, or golf clubs the Japanese had looted along their way. And it
soon became clear to those men who had any sense left that the key to survival was not in finding a drink but in controlling the urge to seek one.
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