The Souvenir (21 page)

He held no affection for the nights.

Guard duty was shared by all the forward troops. Staying awake on your watch was crucial. The Japanese launched attacks at night. Single Japanese soldiers were hungry and desperate enough to attempt raids on U.S. supply units. The “plink plink” of pebbles falling around one's foxhole in the midnight hour could mean the beginning of a Banzai attack. Snipers were known to slip behind the lines. The danger wore at one's nerves. “We pulled guard every night in case any Nips got through the outer defenses,” he wrote in July 1945, after he was in garrison and out of combat, “and in the morning we would count up the dead Nips that the boys got during the night.” More than one GI had his throat slit under the cover of darkness.

A
RNEL SWERVED AS
a skinny dog ran across the road in front of our van. In Luzon, all breeds of dog seemed to have been reconfigured as the universal skinny dog. Dog meat is a Philippine highland delicacy, but in deference to tourist sensitivities, dog carcasses were no longer on display in the Baguio open-air market.

Reading my father's letters over the past few years had deepened
my understanding of the Balete campaign, but until now it had been an abstract understanding. Driving across the actual landscape fixed both the chronology of events and the strategy of combat into tactile perspective.

What was becoming physically clear at that moment, as we jounced along, was an inkling of what it meant “not to have cover.” I needed to go to the bathroom. There were no trees in sight, and everywhere we looked, there were people working or walking, children playing. Arnel suggested I hang on until we reached the town of Umingan. That was the town, I remembered, where the young man from Texas, Melvin Smith, had been killed. Peter Lomenzo had described in a letter to me what it meant to an infantry soldier to have no cover:

The Japanese booby-trapped the bare fields and dry riverbeds with landmines. Attacking across the dry rice paddies “was like crawling across a series of pool tables; each time a soldier attempted to cross the dike separating one paddy from another, Japanese tankers, machine gunners, and riflemen laid down withering fire,” Peter added.

The devastating battle for Umingan lasted until February 3, in what the official record called “hop, skip, and jump kind of warfare.” The phrase sounds like a child's game, but in the battle of Umingan, U.S. GIs employed rifle grenades, bazookas, antitank guns, and fifty-caliber machine guns against the Japanese arsenal.

Somehow, during Umingan and the many hard days that followed, my father still managed to write a letter or V-mail to his wife almost every day. His buddies called him “the Ernie Pyle of the campaign” and wondered what he was writing about. His first vignettes from Luzon sometimes convey a traveler's wonder at being in a strange land.

A few days later, the reality of war reappears:

The next day, his company picked up a Filipino boy who claimed to be nineteen, but looked thirteen.

The occupying Japanese treated the Filipinos so cruelly that when the tables were turned the Americans sometimes had to intervene: “We caught a Jap prisoner and the Filipinos wanted to cut him to pieces. We had to convince them that he was more valuable to us alive. Their attitude is the only good Nip is a dead one.”

I'd learned a lot about the nature of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines from Sylvan Katz. Sylvan made it a condition of his college scholarships that his awardees go to their elders—their parents, their grandparents, older people in their barrio or town—and ask them what it was like during the war.

“I didn't ask them to write bad things about the Japanese,” he told me, “but I wanted them to be aware of what happened. The old folks are dying out. There is very little said about the Japanese during the war. It's almost as if it's all forgotten—the horrible way they mistreated the people.”

Sylvan sent me sheaves of these interviews. After interviewing an elder in her village, seventeen-year-old Evy Kimmayong reported: “Babies were cut out of the womb and killed with bayonets. Each woman was raped by five to ten Japanese men and after raping them the soldiers would sometimes insert a stick or an eggplant into her sex organ. Captured guerrillas were tortured, some dumped into mud, others forced to drink the water from swamps. The Japanese also forced the menfolks to rape the pigs. If they hesitated, they would be killed.”

The local Filipinos, my father wrote, were “always eager to work for us. Dig our holes. Do our laundry. Anything at all. Mostly, they want to kill Japs. They want guns and ammunition.”

More than three hundred Americans were killed at Umingan.
My father's letter exhibits a chilled, subdued tone:

Miraculously, he survived the battle without a scratch, “though I might have aged a little and lost a little weight. You and Ruth were my inspiration always—whenever I was too tired to go on—and whenever I was too tired to dig a hole—I always thought of how much I have to come back to—and I'd go on. Then there is the old adage that you are caught without a hole only once.”

By the tenth of February, the Central Plains phase of the Luzon Campaign was over. Some 2,654 Japanese were dead, including twenty-one-year-old Yoshio Shimizu. Three days later the troops had begun their ascent up Highway 5 toward Balete Pass. On February 13 my father reported his acquisition of Yoshio's flag. A few days later, without fanfare, he mentions, “we were all awarded the combat infantryman badge.”

There's no way to know the exact circumstances of Yoshio's death, but it's fair to say he was probably spared worse to come. In the early stage of the northern Luzon Campaign, General Yamashita's troops were well fed, battle ready, convinced of their duty to kill any American rather than risk having him walk the streets of Tokyo. By the end of June, when the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division finally reached the town of Santa Fe, the downhill side of Balete Pass, Yamashita's surviving soldiers were in desperate shape—wandering around the jungle in a hallucinatory daze. They had little ammunition. They were lice-ridden. Many had malaria
and other tropical diseases. Their food and medical supplies had run out. Officers ordered their soldiers to kill their own wounded comrades who could not keep moving. Early in the campaign on Balete Pass, the Japanese military command issued an order to their troops: “Positions will not be yielded to the enemy even though you die. Our only path is victory or death; therefore, defend to the last man. Those who retreat without orders will be decapitated.” By June, the survivors were reduced to foraging for grains of rice in the pockets of the rags that covered their fellow soldiers' remains, or even worse—eating the flesh of their dead comrades.

In 1986, the Japanese newspaper
Asahi Shimbun
issued a call to readers to share
their
memories of World War II. Over four thousand letters were received. One surviving Japanese veteran of Luzon described how “spending every day among dead bodies makes one doubt whether one can know where the dividing line between life and death is. One's thoughts become hazy and disorientated.” That same former soldier, now a corporate executive in his seventies, also recalled his lowest moment:

A marauding black dog spared him the final descent into cannibalism. The man managed to fend off the beast with a knife. He stabbed it to death, roasted it, ate it with salt, and regained enough strength to stumble on.

After the Battle of Umingan, on February 10, my father sat down at a desk chair salvaged from a bombed-out schoolhouse and composed
a letter. The air corps zoomed over his head, en route to a mission. He smoked his pipe and surveyed the smoldering landscape: “It would be pretty if it were peaceful. But with the noise of firing and the burned out areas, and the rubble and especially the smell—God what a stench.”

H
ALF AN HOUR
past Umingan, we reached San Jose, the little town at the Highway 5 intersection. After refueling, we began to drive up mountainous Highway 5 toward Balete Pass.

The hillsides were mostly bare. Aggressive logging over the past decades has stripped away the jungle canopy. On February 21, 1945, when the Twenty-seventh Regiment was ordered to advance and secure Highway 5 from San Jose to the next little town of Digdig, these same hillsides were dense with luxuriant tropical growth: palms, clumps of bamboo, gnarled balete trees, which indigenous headhunter tribes considered sacred and never cut down.

The thick underbrush provided the Americans with plenty of cover and concealment. Unfortunately, the Japanese, who waited above them in suicidal readiness, shared the same advantage. As General Swede Larsen put it, the enemy was “looking down our throats.”

Peter Lomenzo recalled, “You were always wondering about the enemy—where
was
he?” Novelist Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam vet, once commented that in Vietnam, “You couldn't
find
the enemy. So the
place
itself became the enemy.” That was also true for the infantry in northern Luzon. The Japanese were dug into caves, camouflaged in bunkers. They struck at night in the dark. The place was spooky.

My father's voice sounded in my head. Why in God's name have you come to this place? Dad, I know it seems perverse. I can explain.

But I couldn't really explain. I couldn't yet answer what I hoped to learn in this place where he had spent “six long months in hell.”

H
IGHWAY
5,
THE
“national road,” was a narrow strip of gravel road that hugged the side of the steep mountain. We traveled, at best, ten miles per hour. Arnel wore a grim expression. The twisting road had no shoulder, and when we encountered a truck coming
from the opposite direction, we had to back around blind curves until there was a section wide enough for the truck to pass.

In 1945, when my father was here, this entire rugged area was unmapped. The army gave names to strategic sites: Norton's Knob, the Wart, Lone Tree Hill, Wolfhouse Ridge—each one the locus of a ferocious engagement with the Japanese. The terrain, even now, was incredibly rough.

Yamashita's troops contested every step of the Twenty-fifth Division's advance toward Balete Pass. They honeycombed the ridges with a maze of tunnels and caves, some as long as forty feet. Yamashita's tragic error, states the
U.S. Army in World War II
, “was in not anticipating the cave-sealing technique devised by 25th Division troops.”