Ticket Home

by James Michael Pratt

  “Well I can’t order you to stay now can I?” He grinned.

  “No, sir. No one can order any of us Bastards of Bataan to do anything we don’t want to do.”

  “Bastards of Bataan? I’ve never heard it put that way before. Why do you say that?”

  “It was a song we sang. ‘We’re the battling bastards of Bataan. No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,’ was one of the lines. ‘And nobody gives a damn,’ it ended. See, we felt we were abandoned by our country; expendable. We fought, those men in there fought, without food, ammo. We’d have thrown sticks and stones before surrendering but were too weak by then. We felt like motherless illegitimates, sir, and I’m not going to abandon my brother to fate. If he dies, I die. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Very well. The men rested?” whispered the ranger leading the raiding party to his master sergeant.

  “Ready when you are, sir.”

  “Stick close to this man here, Sergeant. I want to see him and his brother alive when this is over. Move out,” he commanded in low voice. The word was passed carefully along to the entire company of men with hand signals.

  They crawled through waist-high cogan grass for the final one kilometer, avoiding detection by enemy guards in the towers surrounding the enclosure. The rangers were deployed. Each with his assignment.

  Kill the guards in the towers.

  Shoot the lock off the front gate.

  Take the encampment of Japanese out while they slept.

  Kill all who awaken with overwhelming fire power and the element of surprise.

  Other teams would shout, “American soldiers! Get to the front gate now!” clearing each hut and building as they went, killing anyone who opposed them, lifting the sick and weak upon their own shoulders if required.

  The whole operation couldn’t last more than twenty minutes without alerting the thousands of Japanese troops quartered within the five kilometers of the camp.

  “I’m going in those buildings, Sergeant. Here on this map,” he pointed to a piece of crumpled paper containing the layout of the camp, “is the last hut my brother was reported to be kept in. I’m headed straight for it. You can come with me if you like.”

  “Don’t see as I have a choice, do I?”

  “Nope,” Norman replied, emotionless, folding the paper up and stuffing it in his trouser pocket.

  The sound of a sniper rifle taking the guards out at the towers was followed by the staccato burst from a submachinegun shooting the locks off the gates. Explosions and automatic gunfire now added to the general confusion as more than one hundred Rangers fired, followed the designed plan of action, screamed out to the prisoners that they were free, and killed every waking and sleeping enemy soldier in sight. Grenade blasts followed by screams of terrified and confused Japanese soldiers being mowed down filled the night air.

  Dazed, deathly slender Americans peered out from their bamboo prison barracks sure that the massacre they had anticipated at the hands of the Jap guards had begun.

  “Lucian! Lucian Parker!” Norman yelled as he entered the first, second, and third barracks building. “You seen Lucian Parker?” he asked, grabbing a skeletal bearded man in loin cloths. Teeth missing, hair askew, he was the personification of bewilderment.

  “Who? What are you doing here?” the dazed prisoner asked, boggled by the men in olive green uniforms, strange guns, hat styles, and helmets he had never seen before.

  “We’re Americans!” Norman sped past him as the sergeant behind him issued orders to him and each prisoner they encountered to get to the front gate.

  The gunfire, screams, and pandemonium of the moment mounted even though no more than five minutes had elapsed. “Lucian Parker! Lucian!” Norman, full of adrenalin, screamed.

  “Get out! Out now!” the sergeant yelled to each new American as they came out of hiding. “You’re being freed. We’re American Rangers! Get to the front gates now!” the sergeant called above the noise of mayhem as the dazed and sickly POWs struggled to comprehend what was happening.

  Norman ran into the courtyard in the direction of the hospital. He knew from the map where it was.

  Pop, pop, pop, and then zing, he felt the spin of bullets pass his ear coming from the direction of the barracks off to his left.

  He leveled his new M1 Garand at the enemy soldier charging him with a drawn sword and angrily unloaded the entire clip into the man’s chest, dropping him within ten feet from when he started his screaming charge. Another Jap charged at him with fixed bayonet. He dove for the dead Jap’s samurai sword and sidestepping the new menace swung for the head of the smaller attacking enemy soldier.

  Whoosh! the blade sliced the air, smacking squarely against the throat of the enemy soldier. An expression of amazement turned to blood squirting in all directions from the enemy soldier’s severed head. Norman felt nothing. Heart pumping, he threw the saber down and picked up his rifle, loaded a new clip, and resumed his hunt.

  “Lucian Parker!” he yelled as the last of the sick prisoners were being carried and hustled out by the strong and sturdy Rangers. He followed them out to the front gates in a dead-run as bullets whistled through the air.

  Enemy mortars had now zeroed in on the gate and three Rangers fell from a barrage of explosions. He dove to the ground and kept his eyes searching each man that hobbled by, sure one of them had to be his brother. Blood oozed from his left shoulder caused by the mortar explosion but there was no time for attending to that now.

  “Come on, Lieutenant! There’s no one left in there. Just a few angry Japs our teams are flushing out and killing. You can’t stay here,” the sergeant urged as Norman stood up, confused, wounded, trying to decide where to look next for Lucian.

  “Come on, Lieutenant. Maybe he’s out in the group that’s made it outside. We got to go.” The sergeant tugged at Norman and then pushed as he reluctantly left the camp through the gates and fled north, back toward friendly lines sixty-five kilometers away.

  CHAPTER 55

  Present Day, Manila

  “I want to tell you now, Vincente, what it meant to me to have for a friend a valiant man, your father,” Lucian Parker pointedly said. “This is important to me. You see I couldn’t thank him directly for what he did for me and my brother. But you, his son, I can thank,” he concluded.

  He sighed a weary breath for having been so sleepless with the scenes of war revisiting his mind here where it all took place. Having at least this man to recount it to, share it with, was as if God had heard his silent plea for redeeming grace.

  To know that Manuelito, somewhere in the realm beyond, knew he was grateful seemed certain to him now. And to believe that God understood his deepest thoughts and cares, was reassuring to him in the very strange but real chance meeting of the two men this very night of sleepless nights.

  “I always had your father to count on for the entire time I was behind enemy lines while my brother played the part of prisoner to the Japanese.”

  “But you say Norman was with my father. Lucian was prisoner, No?”

  Vincente asked. “You are Lucian. How could you be in POW camp and behind the lines too?”

  The man from Warm Springs sighed. “I am going to clear that part up shortly. Very soon. What is important for you to know is what heros your people are to me. Right here,” he replied patting the center of his chest with his right hand.

  “They put their lives on the line, sí?”

  “Very much so. All of them would have been shot. Your mother and older sister too,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  “Why you stay away so long? My mother talked of you Parkers much. My father was never there for me when I grew up. You have so much information for me. Things I always wondered. I guess you had reasons for not coming back to the Philippines?”

  The old Oklahoman groaned inwardly as he studied the confused look on the face of his new Filipino friend. It was his private war that kept him away but he couldn’t expect this young man to understand that. No one could under
stand why he needed to bury the past. It was too hard on him to recall the terrible memories and too hard to forget them. Then of course there was a secret shame. He hadn’t been ready to clear that until now.

  “So many reasons. Yes, so very many,” he began. “I have been ashamed of some things I did during the war. The hardest part has been to think I let my brother and your father down. Coming back wouldn’t have changed things. And I never wanted to think of the death and killing again.

  “But it was no use. The nightmares have never ended. Ghosts have haunted my days and nights. I have never even told my wife the story I’ve shared with you this night. She only knows my brother and I left from Warm Springs, I endured a war, and came home without him.”

  “I want to know how he died. Was my father courageous? Did he think of us? What was the final thing he did? Said?” Vincente probed.

  “I understand,” he replied. “Courageous? Manuelito Salazar was the most courageous man I ever knew.” Lucian nodded as he looked to the cross with a name inscribed on it that shouldn’t be there. He would finish the story for the young man. He owed Manuelito that. And it brought all the fears he had in telling this story to their proper resting place. Here, in the cemetery.

  The elderly railroader had thought that he couldn’t possibly go on this night. The thoughts had weighed on him for so long they were like a well-worn book, a mentally worn-out book with page after page handled, frayed, spent in going over the same story again and again and never seeming satisfied with the ending.

  Over five decades had passed and Vincente Salazar was the first to hear it all. It surprised Lucian how therapeutic it seemed now.

  He softened to the young man almost thirty years his junior and began recounting the final pages of a personal history, his story, to which he had not yet added the words “The End.”

  CHAPTER 56

  1945—Final days of war, Outside Manila

  Lieutenant Norman Parker was on a private mission and he did not return the sixty-five kilometers to safety with the Rangers. They had boldly accomplished their mission with just three of their number killed and two hundred and fifty enemy soldiers killed in the battle for Camp Cabanatuan.

  All the American POWs were brought out alive. The Rangers, especially the three dead, were heroes deserving the greatest of honors, but Norman didn’t have time to share in the triumph or accolades.

  Norman, with the aid of Manuelito Salazar had finally located Lucian. He had been kept prisoner in the dungeons at Fort Santiago just outside the Inturmuros. He was being used for train maintenance. Once the Japs were done with him, once it appeared that the Americans would be entering Manila, and especially the old fortress city of the Inturmuros, Lucian would be executed. There was no question of that.

  Norman had used his extensive underground Filipino contacts to smuggle him to a hamlet just outside of Manila. Now with the Americans on the island of Luzon, the Filipinos took new courage and aided the Americans in every way possible against their common enemy.

  Manuelito had not accompanied Norman on the raid but had left word with his wife in Santa Rosa a few kilometers down the rail tracks from Cabanatuan how to get in touch with him. Norman hid in the Salazar home until Manuelito and six other loyal Filipino guerrillas had arrived.

  All were motivated by anger at the tortures and executions of family and friends and without exception were eager to exact revenge. The Japanese had learned there was no more dangerous enemy than a vengeful Filipino. Hundreds of thousands of their countrymen had been slaughtered during the three year reign of terror by the Japanese. The Japanese had promised freedom from the imperialist American rule and had graciously granted the Philippines inclusion in their “Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” as they called it.

  “Prosperity with a gun to my head,” Manuelito said. “It is time to kill every Jap on Luzon. Then in the rest of the Philippines.”

  “First we rescue Lucian and the people with him. Then when the American army reaches Manila we go in and take no prisoners,” Norman agreed.

  “Okay. Here is what I know. My contacts in Manila say that Lucian is running the daily train to San Fernando. Taking supplies to the Japs and bringing wounded Japs back. It is on the return trip I think we strike. Hundreds of Japs on the train die.

  We get message through my contacts at the Manila station and then near here, Santa Rosa, we blow the train up.”

  “I don’t want Lucian hurt. Nor any Filipinos riding the train,” Norman demanded.

  “Of course. But we can never be certain in war. You know that, Lieutenant Parker.”

  “I know. But if I can get Lucian to blow the train then maybe we can spare lives. Blow the engine. Sabotage it. There are ways both he and I know to blow up a steam engine. Real quick. When it goes the Jap soldiers can be killed by your guerillas.”

  Manuelito agreed. They set out for the ambush the next day.

  “You come now!” a Japanese guard yelled at Lucian as he fought the malarial attack that had caused spasms of uncontrolled shivering, sweats, and delirium.

  He struggled to his feet and tugged at the diminutive Filipino who was his fireman. They stood clinging to each other for support at the door of the dark and damp six-by-six-foot dungeon cell. The Filipino fainted helpless at Lucian’s feet.

  “No! Only American! No Filipino!” the Jap guard protested as Lucian lifted the struggling man to his feet. “You go now,” he ordered, waving a rifle in the direction he expected the emaciated American to head. The Jap guard offered a toothless, evil grin. A scar ran the length of his right eye to his chin—Lucian had seen this Jap somewhere before. Utterly worn out, he couldn’t recall, his mind fogged from sickness and lack of sleep, he could only concentrate on this moment. But he knew this guard.

  Lucian slowly took each step up the concrete stairs with great effort. One at a time. Just one at a time, he commanded himself.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! He stumbled at the echoing sound of gunshots from behind him. “Go now!” the Japanese guard ordered to Lucian as he stood over the lifeless body of the Filipino.

  “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill that dirty yellow bastard! I swear it if it is my final act in life, he vowed silently as he got back to his feet and made his way into the blinding sunlight of the old Spanish courtyard.

  His malaria attack subsided with the penetrating rays of the sun upon his shivering wet body. He stood swaying, putting complete effort into remaining on his feet as he waited for the guard. Feeling the poke of a bayonet in the small of his back he dutifully moved forward and onto a waiting truck. Minutes later he was at the train depot that three years before he, Norman, and Johnny Mead had been assigned to guard.

  “You get water.” The Jap guard pointed.

  A Filipino came to Lucian, purposefully bumping into him and spilling a cup of water on him. He slid a piece of paper into his hand with the empty cup and guided him to the faucet in the waiting room for it to be refilled.

  “This note. Read quickly and destroy,” he said, filling the cup and handing two quinine pills to the sickly American. “Take these quickly. The Jap not looking.”

  Lucian eagerly swallowed and focused on the note held close to him.

  “To L P. I am at SR. Look for MS. Blow boiler at highway xing return trip. I will be there to get you. N P.”

  “Norm is at Santa Rosa. It’s over,” he sighed quietly.

  “You drink water,” the guard yelled.

  Lucian put the small crumpled paper in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed with another cup of water. He decided to continue drinking until the guard ordered him back.

  “Tell my brother I got the message and understand,” Lucian whispered to the Filipino messenger. The man nodded and quickly departed. “Thanks,” he offered tiredly. The Filipino nodded without expression.

  The quinine must have been sent by Norman, he thought. Thank you God! Thank you! He struggled back to the rails, waiting for the engine to come up the tracks to where he stood with the guard. A Filipi
no would be engineer with him. He guessed the Japs didn’t totally trust the Filipinos and wanted an experienced American.

  The antiquated steam engine, identical with a few exceptions to the one owned by his pa in Warm Springs, made its way to the loading platform where he waited. He thought he knew the man at the controls and at gunpoint found his way into the cab with the Filipino almost half his height.

  “Say nothing, Lucian,” Manuelito urged. “You don’t know me.”

  “But how?”

  “Papers. I showed my Filipino Certificate of Operations and asked for work. I told them I want to help Japs. They agreed to give me the train today. I almost didn’t get it. Good luck I guess. Shhh,” he whispered. “Guards coming aboard now. I load fuel. Be fireman. You sit and drive.”

  Lucian was grateful to the faithful friend who had been a benefactor so often. Through Manuelito and his contacts Lucian had been able to smuggle food, medicine, and hard currency to the prisoners at Cabanatuan for over a year. Manuelito had risked his life. And although he had never seen Norman since the Death March he knew he had been behind the smuggling. He had received notes, quinine, sulfa, and other items that had made it possible to survive the tortures of prison life.

  The familiar-looking Jap angrily approached Lucian. Lucian studied the face carefully for any hint of where he had seen it before.

  “Go now!” the Jap guard ordered him. He raised his rifle menacingly then mocked him with a sinister grin.

  “Johnny,” Lucian muttered under his breath as he recognized the man’s face, the missing teeth, the scar. “I told Norm I’d kill him.” He nodded silently with satisfaction.

  The ill-tempered killer of Lucian and Norman’s cousin stood guard with rifle at the ready on Lucian’s side of the engine compartment. Another guard stood facing out on Manuelito’s side. Their backs to the fireman and engineer so they could look out of either side during the ride to San Fernando, Lucian and Manuelito talked by sign language, whispers, and hatched the escape plan and destruction of the train.