Tears in the Darkness (9 page)

Morin seemed young for such an assignment, only twenty-one years old, but he had spent four years in the National Guard and knew tanks and tank tactics. He also knew his men; tankers generally were a tight-knit crew, specialists working together in close quarters. Most of all Ben
Morin was a religious man, the son of Roman Catholics, and his faith steadied him.

Sometime after 1:00 p.m., the five tanks of the 2nd Platoon moved up Route 3, close to the town of Agoo, a short distance from the shores of Lingayen Gulf. The Americans rode to battle in M3 “light” tanks, thinly armored vehicles with a small single-shot cannon and an air-cooled machine gun, a cranky and sometimes unreliable weapon. The M3's turret was tall, giving the vehicle a high profile, an easy and inviting target, and its armor was thin and presented a flat instead of an angled surface to deflect incoming rounds.

Morin's platoon rolled forward unprotected. The Philippine infantry had fled south, and American units were regrouping or engaging other enemy spearheads. Morin looked on his mission as a kind of “last-ditch effort” to stem the Japanese advance onto the central plain—five tanks against a battalion, perhaps even a regiment of the enemy.

“We have to hold them, drive them out, drive them back or destroy them,” the lieutenant told his men.

The column moved slowly down the road. Agoo was just ahead, a mile or so. The sun was shining and a breeze was blowing in from the gulf. Tanks and men moved forward in a miasma of road dust, exhaust fumes, and fear. Then all at once the enemy found them.

Shells slammed into the American column and “ripped through” the tanks “like a knife through butter.” In the fusillade, Morin's lead tank lost its front hatch, exposing the men inside to rifle and machine-gun fire.
²³

Morin jumped down from his turret and tried to refit the hatch, but now the tank was ablaze, engulfed in searing flames and choking black smoke. Morin ordered his men to dismount and, hoping for rescue, looked anxiously over his shoulder for the rest of the column.

The other tanks had also been hit and had turned and were starting to withdraw. No way to reach them now. Morin and his crew were alone on the road. And in an instant the enemy was upon them.

Four Japanese tanks trained their cannon and machine guns on the Americans now standing on the road in front of their disabled and burning machine. The lieutenant looked at the enemy guns, looked at his men, put his hands up.

In that moment he felt disgrace rather than fear. He had surrendered—in all likelihood the first American taken prisoner in the Philippines in World War II—and he could not shake a captive's sense of shame.
²⁴

The Japanese rushed forward and forced the Americans to their knees, then they put pistols to the prisoners' heads. Kneeling there, Ben Morin looked for mercy in the eyes of the man pointing a gun at him. Finding none, he started to pray.
²⁵

 

Hail Mary, full of grace
    The Lord is with thee . . .

 

BY THE END
of December 22, the first day of the invasion, MacArthur's army was fighting a tactical withdrawal, a “retreat” by any other name. He had set a skeleton army of native reservists in front of 43,000 invaders, many of them seasoned by four years of war in China. Now he was falling back, back through the divides in the mountains, back down the dusty roads and dirt trails of the central plain, back to one defensive line after another, until there was no place left to fall back to, no place but the peninsula of Bataan.

The withdrawal had been planned well in advance, a complement to the old War Plan Orange, a plan MacArthur had originally rejected. He was back-pedaling before Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma's 14th Imperial Army. Now came a second enemy landing, this one at Lamon Bay in southeastern Luzon. The Lamon force was pushing north, the Lingayen force south. The general's grand scheme to defend the entire archipelago had left him between two pincers, and each claw had the same objective: close on the capital, catch MacArthur in the middle, and crush him. A textbook trap, as old as organized warfare.

The way out of the trap was textbook as well. On December 22, as the Japanese were wading ashore, MacArthur cabled the War Department: He was outnumbered, he said (another fiction), leaving him at “an enormous tactical discrepancy.” He planned to invoke War Plan Orange and declare Manila an open city “in order to save the civilian population.” Meanwhile he would relocate his headquarters to the tiny island fortress of Corregidor at the southern tip of Bataan, then, in a classic withdrawal designed to delay the enemy long enough to allow him to regroup, pull his forces out from between the pincers (sidestepping, in effect) to a “final defensive position” on the peninsula.
²⁶

Among the thousands of troops in central Luzon preparing to withdraw south to Bataan were a handful of men at Clark Field, salvage teams and a rear-guard of Air Corps ground crews, survivors of the
bombings who had volunteered to stay and keep watch—eyes peeled, ears cocked, imaginations running riot.

 

December 25, 1941, Clark Field, Philippines

“We're expecting Jap parachute troops at any time,” the Captain said.

“We're gonna evacuate Clark Field completely.”

“Parachute troops?” Q. P. Devore said to himself. “Can you imagine?”

Every night there had been a new rumor. Fifth columnists, saboteurs, now parachutists.

The captain wasn't joking. Everyone was pulling out, he said, and he ordered Devore to pick six “volunteers” to man a rear-guard listening post at the north end of the main runway, six men in foxholes facing toward Lingayen Gulf and the distant roll of battle.

Back at the barracks, the first man Devore asked was his best friend, Ben Steele.

“A parachute drop?” Ben said. “God, what the hell could six guys do out there against a parachute drop?”

“Well, yeah,” Devore said, “it is kind of a suicide mission.”

At dark they dug foxholes at the end of the runway. The captain made sure they were settled, then climbed into a white Plymouth convertible he had commandeered.

“If you aren't overrun, I'll be back tomorrow to get you,” he said, then drove off.

Ben Steele thought, “God, we're all by our lonesome out here.”

They adjusted their Lewis guns, checked their ammunition, and settled down to watch, six soldiers staring into the dark, whispering their worries. In the distance they could hear the sounds of battle, the vague report of the big guns from the gulf.

Here they were in foxholes at the edge of an empty air base, their enemy perhaps preparing to drop in on them. What man wouldn't be anxious waiting for that?

Then the big guns fell silent, and the men stopped talking and started listening. They scanned the sky and cupped their ears to the dark. It was quiet, lonely quiet.

“If they come,” Q.P. said to himself, “will I fight or will I give up?”

Sitting next to him Ben Steele was thinking the same thing. “I don't know what I'll do. I guess I'll do what I have to.”

They watched, they waited. The black night seemed to get blacker,
then, at long last, gray. Soon morning was upon them, indigo, then light blue. The sun hung like a silken disk above Mount Arayat.

Just before noon, a white Plymouth convertible came roaring across the dirt runways, trailing a rooster tail of brown dust. The car skidded to a stop in front of the foxholes. The driver's-side door swung open.

“Get in!” the captain shouted. “We're goin'.”

The sound of the big guns was back now, louder than the day before. The men tossed their weapons into the car, then tumbled in after them, and the convertible was out of sight before the dust had settled down again.

 

 

 

 

 

M
ONTANA'S BULL MOUNTAINS
are more badlands than alpine peaks, a cluster of hills and rises running east and west along the lower Musselshell River. From a distance the rises look like mounds of earth abandoned on the edge of the state's eastern plains.

In the summer the terraces and benches in the Bulls are covered with sweetgrass, but in the winter when the Alberta clippers bear down from the north, the plains and the Bulls turn into a bleak, snow-swept wasteland.

The meadowlarks and mourning doves are gone now, and the sharp-tailed grouse have left their sage-and-bunchgrass nests to winter among the cottonwoods and pines. Hungry coyotes howl through the arctic night, and in the early morning the frost- and snow-covered ground around the ranch house at Hawk Creek is covered with their tracks.

 

THE WIND WAS PUSHING
against the windows of the big room in the main house, and Ben Steele lay there on his cot in the cold and dark, waiting. Any minute now the Old Man would yell from the bedroom for him to get up and light the potbelly stove.

He pulled the comforter over his head, grabbed it against his chest.

“Bud?”

He lay very still.

“You hear me, Bud?”

He poked his face out now but kept his eyes shut tight against the cold.

“Damn it, Bud!”

Off came the covers, noisily, so his father could hear.

At least he'd remembered to cut kindling the night before. Nothing
worse than standing out in the vale of Hawk Creek in the frozen dark cleaving off strips of wood while an unseen audience watched from the hills.

He pulled on his moccasins and shuffled, shivering, to the woodbox.

 

HE GOT SO HE LIKED THE COLD
, or so he would say. What he really liked was learning to stand it. Showing the Old Man.

“It's really cold today, Dad,” he used to say at breakfast, as the Old Man handed out the day's work assignments.

“Cold?” the Old Man would come back. “God, I used to sleep in the snow with nothin' but a slab of bacon.”

Maybe. But Bud hated it, the snow and bite of the wind. The Old Man would take him out to round up strays and he'd come back damn near froze to death. Next day, out they'd go again.

He'd say, “My feet are cold, Dad,” and the Old Man would tell him, “Get off your horse and walk, that'll warm you up,” but the cold went right through his overshoes, and he felt like he was tramping on frozen stumps.

“Stamp 'em,” the Old Man said, but that only made the stumps hurt more.

Then one day, maybe he was ten or eleven, he stopped feeling the cold, or he just stopped complaining about it.

 

HE WORKED
. He worked all the time. Started when he was eight, early even for a boy ranch-raised.

Whenever Bess would say, “That's no job for a kid,” the Old Man would come back with, “He has to learn, he has to learn how.”

The Old Man might give him some pointers, if the chore involved the kind of work the Old Man liked—roping, shooting a rifle, working a wild horse. Range work, cowhand work. Most everything else, often as not the Old Man would issue instructions and leave him to figure the rest for himself.

Before he could reach their withers, the boy learned to hitch workhorses without help. He'd lead the large animals into a bronc stall, climb the rails, and drop the heavy collar on them upside down so he could reach the buckle later to fasten it. Lot of bother for a kid.

He started driving a team and hay rake before his legs were long enough to brace him as he sat in the seat. He had to stand on the crossbar,
straddling the center pole and lean back against the pull of the horses. A hay rake was hard enough for a man to handle, much less a boy of nine.

Be careful, the Old Man would warn. “A team could run away with you, and you can get tangled up in those teeth.”

He was okay. He had good balance, never lost his footing. Then one fine September day when the sun was shining and the wind was whistling in the bull pines, he was making a turn at the far end of a field and something, some rut or root, made the rake pitch.

Going down he grabbed for the center bar, his feet dangling, then he started to lose his grip, dragging on the ground a foot ahead of the sharp tines.

“Whoa! Whoa!” he yelled, as loud as he could.

By the time the team stopped, his toes were only inches from the teeth. He looked around to see if anyone was watching, if anyone had seen how close he'd come.

 

EVERYONE SAID
the Old Man treated his oldest son more like a hired hand than a family apprentice. Bud didn't care. When he was young, he took a certain pride in his father's expectations. “The Old Man thinks I can do anything,” he told himself. Even later, when he came to see that he was doing a whole lot more around a ranch than anyone else his age, he never complained.

His father was away a lot now. One business scheme after another, one card game and tumbler of whiskey, too. And his mother and Gert and his younger brother, Warren, took to saying, “Bud's the one who's running this place.”

He liked that, liked the thought that his mother believed she could count on him. He was more her son than the Old Man's, though he'd never say so.

 

 

 

 

 

O
N THE SECOND DAY
of landings at Lingayen Gulf, a launch carrying Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the 14th Imperial Army, landed at a makeshift dock at Bauang. The general slowly climbed the wooden gangway, his
tachi
, his warrior's sword, in his right hand and a smile on his face.

That look of kindness in his eyes always surprised the men in the ranks, accustomed as they were to the icy truculence of their iron-pants
ikans
and
sakans
, their officers, and the dark, unforgiving ethos of the Imperial Army code. But this
taish
, this general, the men said, was different. He always seemed to have a gentle cast, even standing among the most ruthless-looking company.