Tears in the Darkness (36 page)

The killing went on till dark. By the time Takesada Shigeta and Kozo Hattori were called down from the hill, the battalion had packed up and was beginning to move out, north, to a bivouac by the Abo-Abo River.

Sitting around their campfires that night at the new position, none of the men spoke of the slaughter.

“They were all in high spirits a few hours ago,” Takesada Shigeta thought. “They were saying, ‘I killed this many or I killed that many.' Now none of them are willing to talk because it wasn't an honorable deed.”

He still felt numb, felt nothing, really, neither pity nor fear. The next day the 122nd gathered the remains of its dead for cremation and shipment home. The day after that the unit prepared to move off the peninsula and take up its next assignment.

Takesada Shigeta was sure he had put the Pantingan River behind him, but that night, unable to sleep, he “meditated deeply” on the blood-soaked trail in the jungle and the valley full of bodies below. At length he closed his eyes but could not sleep. An eerie noise began to nag at him, a chorus of moaning and crying he knew would never stop.

 

 

 

 

 

B
EN STEELE
hated this part of the job, sitting here in the pickup in front of Casey's Golden Pheasant, waiting for the shepherds to stumble out of the saloon, their loyal sheepdogs lying on the sidewalk in front.

Same thing every payday, Jug Clark's men couldn't wait to drink up their checks. So he'd sit there, just like Mr. Clark had ordered, sit behind the wheel watching the front door till they came rolling out into the afternoon, then he'd help them onto the mattresses in the bed of the truck, dogs jumping in after them, and haul the ossified load back to the ranch.

Next morning Jug Clark would tell him, take a bottle out to so-and-so's camp, just enough for one drink, some hair of the dog to straighten him out for work. Half the time the shepherds were shaking so bad when he rode up, they'd spill the cure down the front of them.

They weren't a bad bunch, though. Many were old cowboys who'd lost their rides and maybe a wife or live-in woman along the way. The work was lonely, that's all, out there with the sheep night and day, week in week out. Drove most to drink. And made a few of them mean.

 

BY THE FALL OF
'39, he'd graduated from high school, left Snook Art, and signed back with Jug Clark as a camp tender. The ranch was doing well and so was he, making $40 a month and still sending most of it home.

He had grown up well, twenty-two years old now, five foot ten, a lean 150 pounds with a shock of dark hair, an open face, and an easygoing
manner. He got on well with almost everyone, unless, of course, they didn't want to get along with him.

That summer he had a run-in with a shepherd named Blacky Halco, a new man from Wyoming country. The sheepherder started giving him a bad time as soon as Ben Steele rode into his camp.

“I'll bet I can outshoot you with this six-shooter and you using that rifle you got in the buckboard there,” Halco said.

The camp tender had several stops to make that day and long rides between them.

“I didn't come out here to shoot a competition or anything,” he said. “I'm here to tend your camp.”

Halco was a big, hard-looking man.

“That so?” he said. “Well, the last outfit I worked for I killed the camp tender.”

Ben Steele finished unloading the wagon and stacking the supplies, then got back in the buckboard and rode slowly away.

“Next time I go to that camp,” he promised himself, “I'm going with the rifle loaded.”

 

When Jug Clark got wind of what had happened, he kicked the shepherd off the place. Later word reached the ranch that Blacky Halco had walked into a bar in Hardin with a handgun, shot two men point-blank, then turned the pistol on himself.

 

THE REST OP THE SUMMER
was a cowboy's dream. Clark owned ten thousand acres north of the Yellowstone and had grazing rights on another ten thousand south of the river in the massive foothills of the Pryor Mountains. The practice there was to leave the prairie unfenced, and when the wind was up, the grass looked like an ocean, one wave of green after another.

His job in the Pryors was to search for water and good grazing, and Ben Steele traded his wagon for a saddle horse. He always rode at a walk or a trot, never a run. Too much ground to cover for that, fifty square miles of range. No point getting pounded.

Sit back, ride the pockets, relax. Up this slope, across the ridge, down the back side to the next. Lay the reins left, right, nudge the horse along with a touch of the heel. He'll go where he's told. “A good horse will take you anywhere,” the Old Man used to say. And he was right.

He loved riding the Pryors. Green swells in front and behind, mile after mile under a bowl of blue. No trees here, no buildings, wires, fences. Just land, so much of it a rider could go all afternoon without seeing anything but grass, mountains, sky. Open country, they called it, free range. It wasn't free anymore, but that didn't matter. That didn't matter at all. On and on. The country, the horse, the rider.

 

IN THE EARLY FALL OF
1940 his parents drove out to the Clark ranch for a visit. They came in a car they'd bought with his money, $400 of savings. (“The car's yours, Bud,” they told him. “We're just holding it for you.”)

His mother was eager to speak with him. She'd been thinking, she said. He was twenty-two years old, time he considered his future. Back east Congress had just passed the first peacetime military draft, and the first call-up was scheduled for later that month.

“You really ought to get in before they draft you,” she said. “Maybe if you do, you could, you know, do what you want in the army.”

He knew she wanted something better for him. After all, how long could he work as a hired hand? Later, after his parents left, he kicked the army idea around with Jug Clark.

The rancher was against it. His future was here, Jug Clark said, on the banks of the Yellowstone. “You know, Bud, I've always told you, someday I'm gonna give you your own band of sheep.”

Someday. He began to think that maybe there was something in what his mother had said. He could travel, he could see the world, he could have an adventure. Hell, he'd never been out of Montana.

He'd miss the ranch, no getting around that, the creak of saddle leather, the murmur of the wind. But maybe it was time.

In mid-September he borrowed Jug Clark's car and drove to Billings, found the enlistment center in the Stapleton Building, and signed the papers to become a private in the United States Army Air Corps.

Three weeks later, October 9, in the company of his mother, his father, his little brother Joe, and little sister Jean, he stood on the platform of the Billings train station on Montana Avenue waiting for the westbound Northern Pacific, the train that would carry him to boot camp in California.

His mother kept stealing looks at him. They chatted some, nervous talk. Did he have the sandwiches she'd packed? Was he excited about seeing California? Would he remember to write?

The train rolled into the station. He hugged his mother, shook hands with the Old Man, said good-bye to the kids. Then he stepped up and into the coach and settled himself in a seat by the window.

Standing on the platform, his mother tried to smile. He knew what she was thinking. She'd been reading the newspapers, reading the rumors of war. Never mind, he wanted to tell her. He'd be all right. He'd be just fine. Like always.

The train started with a lurch. He turned in his seat and looked back, looked back as long as he could.

 

 

 

 

 

A
GUARD
was shoving him in the back, pushing Ben Steele to get on the train. Since dawn the Japanese had been rousting prisoners from holding pens throughout San Fernando and herding them toward the railroad station.

As they walked through the streets toward the waiting trains, many men, convinced the worst was behind them, began to say things like, “I think we're gonna be okay” or “Things will be better now.” A few told their comrades they looked forward to riding in comfortable coaches the rest of the way.

At the depot they found boxcars waiting, old French Mercis, “Forty and Eights,” as they used to be called, narrow-gauge boxes just big enough (about twenty feet long and roughly seven or eight feet high) to carry either forty men or eight mules and horses. Now the Japanese were shoving a hundred men and more into these ancient wood-and-metal carriages, packing them in tight, shoulder to shoulder, belly to back, and slamming the doors shut, leaving the men in the stifling dark.

Almost immediately men began to struggle for breath. Some panicked—the Japanese, they were sure, meant to kill them, suffocate them—and they started pounding their fists on the boxcar walls.

“I have to get out!” they screamed. “Oh God, please God, open the doors!”

Sitting atop the cars the guards stamped their feet on the roof and screamed back.

“Ketsu-no-ana darnare!”
“Shut up, assholes!”

Loading each train took time; men might be left for an hour or more in a closed car before the train finally started with a sudden jolt. A hundred men in two hundred square feet of space, stinking men all of them, sick men, too, standing in their own waste.

By then, of course, the sun was up and the boxcars were beginning to bake. In the hot, smothering dark some men lost control and began to claw, punch, and grab at one another, anything to get from the middle of the car to the sides where they might find a crack in the wooden slats and suck some fresh air.

A number of men in the middle fainted, and a number of others died. (The cars were packed so tight that the lifeless figures were often left standing for the three-hour trip.)

Ben Steele was lucky. One of the last men in the car, he found a spot on a side wall and could breathe between the slats. A man standing behind him tried to muscle him out of the way—“Move, you fucker, or I'll break your fucking neck”—but Ben Steele was willing to take punishment, and return it, to keep his spot. Behind him men were dying—he could hear their death throes, for Christ's sake!—but he held his ground and his pity and fought for his sliver of light, his few breaths of fresh air.

 

SOME GUARDS
kept the doors closed all the way, but others opened them as soon as the trains picked up speed, and they allowed the men to take turns in the open doorways.

In the towns and villages down the line, people had gathered along the tracks with food and water. Many of the trains were driven by Filipino engineers, and they slowed their engines as they passed through the stations so the locals could toss their gifts into the open doors or run alongside the platform holding up cans of water. Most prisoners shared what they shagged, but in every car there was at least one man who turned his back and a deaf ear to the pleas of his comrades.

After twenty-two slow miles of this, the trains finally stopped at the station at Capas, Tarlac and the prisoners spilled out and onto the platform. The living were ordered to drag out the dead, and they set the bodies alongside the tracks, shoulder to shoulder, faceup in the sun. Then the prisoners formed up again and started walking on a road that ran west toward the Zambales Mountains in the distance.

Most men wondered whether they were about to make another march—“Where the hell are we going now?”—but officers who had worked in the province before the war guessed they were headed just
down the road about three miles to the site of what was to have been a temporary cantonment for a division of the Philippine Army—a steaming 617-acre tract of abandoned rice paddies and rolling grassland with rows of partially completed barracks and buildings, Camp O'Donnell.

 

WHEN BEN STEELE SAW BARBED WIRE
and watchtowers, he was relieved.