by John Grisham
Guards took their positions on top of the boxcars and beat the roofs with rifles while yelling, “Shut up, you assholes!”
Finally, the train jerked and rocked and began moving. As the boxcars swayed and rolled many of the men were seized with nausea and began vomiting. The food they had so eagerly devoured an hour earlier reappeared in a putrid mess, and the floor was soon covered with waste and vomit. The smell was beyond description. The air was so hot and thick with vile odors that breathing was painful.
A man fell at Pete’s feet and closed his eyes. Pete’s first reaction was to kick him away, but he realized he wasn’t breathing. Other men were dying too, and some had no room to fall.
As the train picked up speed, the guards opened the doors to three of the boxcars and allowed ventilation. Men fought to get near the doors. One managed to jump and landed on a pile of rocks. He never moved again.
Along the three-hour ride, the train passed through several small towns. The residents lined the track and tossed food and cans of water to the open cars. The engineers were Filipino, and they slowed the train to allow the men to collect anything possible. Almost all of the food was shared.
When the train finally stopped, the men spilled out onto the platform. Those still alive were ordered to drag out the dead. The bodies were stacked like firewood near the tracks. Dozens of Filipino citizens were waiting with food and water, but they were threatened away by the guards. The men were marched a hundred yards and herded into an open field for another hour of sun treatment. The ground was almost too hot to touch.
By then the men knew they were headed to the prison camp at O’Donnell, where, surely, conditions would improve. As they began the seven-mile trek, it was obvious that many of them would not make it. Pete expected mass murder of the weaker ones, but the guards had changed strategies and now allowed the stronger prisoners to assist. But, there were few strong enough to render aid, and men began falling in the first mile. By then the locals had seen plenty of prisoners, and they hid cans of water and mangoes along the dirt trail. The guards smashed and kicked away as much as possible, but miracles happened. Pete found a can of clear water and drained it without getting caught. He would believe that he owed his life to the kindness of some unknown Filipino. When the man in front of him collapsed, Pete grabbed his skeletal remains, threw an arm over his shoulder, told him that he’d made it this far and he was not about to die, and shuffled along with him for the remaining six miles.
Their first view of O’Donnell was from the top of a hill. Spread before them was a forbidding sprawl of old buildings encircled by miles of shiny barbed wire. Guard towers stood ominously, all proudly adorned with the Japanese flag.
Pete would remember that moment well. He would soon realize that had he known the horrors that awaited him at O’Donnell, he would have bolted from the trail and run like a madman until a bullet stopped him.
Chapter 27
Before the war, O’Donnell had been used as a temporary base for a Philippine Army division, about twenty thousand men. With little upgrade, the Japanese had converted it into their largest POW camp. It covered six hundred acres of rice paddies and scrubland and was divided into several large, square compounds. These were sectioned off into rows of barracks and buildings, some dilapidated, some unfinished. After the fall of Bataan, some sixty thousand prisoners, including ten thousand Americans, were crammed into the dilapidated old fort. Water was scarce, as were latrines, medicines, hospital beds, stoves, and food supplies.
Pete and the other survivors limped through the eastern portal, along with hundreds of others as they were pouring into O’Donnell from all over the islands. They were greeted by guards in crisp white shirts swinging clubs that appeared to be designed solely for beating unarmed and defeated men. Eager to impress their new arrivals with their toughness, the guards began pummeling men at random while yelling orders in pidgin English no one understood. It was all so unnecessary. By then the prisoners had seen enough violence and were not impressed, and they had no fight left, no will to resist. They were pushed and shoved to a large parade ground and ordered to stand at attention in perfect rows. They baked in the sun as others arrived. They were searched again, as if they’d had the opportunity to pick up anything valuable along the way.
After an hour, there was a flurry of activity in front of a building that served as the commandant’s headquarters. The great man strutted out to greet them in a goofy uniform that included baggy shorts and riding boots up to his knees. He was a runt-like, funny-looking creature with an air of great importance.
He began to roar and bellow, with a hapless Filipino interpreter trying to keep up. The commandant began by telling them that they were not honorable prisoners of war but cowardly captives. They had surrendered, an unpardonable sin. And since they were cowards they would not be treated like real soldiers. He said that he would like to kill them all but he lived by the code of a true warrior, and true warriors showed mercy. However, if they disobeyed any of his camp rules, he would gladly execute them. Then he launched into a loud, windy tirade on race and politics, with the Japanese people, of course, being the superiors because they had won the war, they had defeated America, their eternal enemy, and so on. At times the interpreter lagged far behind and was clearly making up stuff as the commandant waited for his brilliant words to be rendered in English.
In their dismal state, most of the prisoners paid little attention. As to his threats, they wondered what else the Japanese could possibly do to them, other than perhaps a quick beheading.
He roared and rambled until fatigue set in, then abruptly turned and marched away, with his bootlickers close behind. The prisoners were dismissed and divided by country. There was a camp for the Filipinos and one for the Americans.
General Ned King had been appointed by the commandant as the prisoner commander, and he met his men at a second gate. He shook their hands, welcomed them, and when they grouped around him he said, “You men remember this—you did not give up. I did. I did the surrendering. I surrendered you. You didn’t surrender. I’m the one who has the responsibility for that. You let me carry it. All I ask is that you obey the orders of the Japanese so that we don’t provoke the enemy any more than he already is.”
The new arrivals were then turned over to their officers for orientation and a discussion of the rules. The Twenty-Sixth Cavalry had scattered and there was some confusion about who last commanded it. Pete was assigned to a group of the Thirty-First Infantry and taken to his new home. It was a ramshackle building fourteen feet wide and twenty feet long, with a partial bamboo roof that looked as though it had been torn off in a storm. The men were exposed to the sun and rain. There were no cots or mats, just two long shelves of split-bamboo poles lashed together with rattan. The men, thirty of them, slept on bamboo. Most had no blankets. When Pete asked a sergeant what happened when it rained, he was informed that the men took cover under the bamboo poles.
O’Donnell had only one artesian well with a working pump and it dispensed water through a half-inch pipe to both camps, Filipino and American. The pump worked occasionally but its gasoline engine often sputtered and died. And since there was always a shortage of gasoline, the Japanese routinely let the tank run dry to conserve.
Pete desperately wanted water, as did everyone, and eventually found his way to the water line, a long, sad assemblage of men. As he walked down the line looking for its end, he passed hundreds of men, all with the same detached and defeated eyes. No one talked as they waited and waited. The line barely moved. It took him seven hours to fill his canteen.
At dark, the men were lined up and told to sit. Dinner was served, a scoop of rice. There was no meat, bread, or fruit. After eating, the men drifted back to the barracks, which had no lighting. There was nothing to do but face the nightly adventure of sleep. Pete found it impossible to get comfortable on the bamboo poles and eventually found a pile of weeds in a corner and cur
led himself into a ball.
His mouth was parched and sticky and he craved water. The starvation was painful enough, but the lack of water was driving men mad. There was barely enough to drink and cook with and operate the hospital, and not a spare drop for anything else. Pete’s skin was filthy and raw in places from the lack of soap and water. He had not bathed in weeks, had not shaved since before the surrender on Bataan. His clothes were rags and there was no way to clean them. His one pair of underwear had been tossed days ago. He could not remember the last time he brushed his teeth and gums and they ached from such a rotten diet. He smelled like a walking sewer, and he knew it because every other prisoner reeked.
During his first night at O’Donnell, a sharp crack of thunder awakened Pete and his bunkmates. A storm was rolling through. As the rain began, thousands of men staggered into the open and looked at the skies. They opened their mouths, spread their arms, and let the sheets of cool rainwater wash over them. It was delicious, and precious, and there was no way to collect it. The rain went on for a long time and turned the walkways into muddy ditches, but the men stood through the storm, savoring the water and happy to get a good cleansing.
At dawn, Pete hustled through the mud to the hospital. He had been told that getting there early was advisable. It was a wretched place, filled with dying, naked men, many lying on the floor in their own waste and waiting for help. A doctor looked at the gash in the back of Pete’s head and thought he could help. Pete was lucky; there was no infection. With a pair of electric army shears, the doctor shaved Pete’s scalp and took his whiskers while he was at it. It was refreshing and Pete felt lighter and cooler. The doctor had nothing in the way of anesthesia, so Pete gritted his teeth while six stitches were sewn to close the wound. The doctor was happy to see a patient he could treat, explaining as he worked that there was so little he could do for the others. He gave Pete some antibiotics and wished him well. Pete thanked him and hurried back to the barracks in anticipation of food.
Breakfast was rice, as were lunch and dinner. Filthy rice, often with bugs and weevils and mold, and it didn’t matter, because starving men will eat anything. The rice was steamed and stewed and boiled and stretched as thinly as possible. Traces of meat sometimes appeared, beef or water buffalo, but the portions were too small to taste. Occasionally the cooks added whatever boiled vegetables they could find, but they were tasteless. There was never fruit. As they starved between meals, the men ate leaves and grass and before long O’Donnell was picked clean of all vegetation. And when there was nothing to eat, the listless prisoners lounged in whatever shade they could find and talked about food.
They were dying of starvation. On average, they were given fifteen hundred calories a day, about half of what they required. Added to the fact that most had been starving for four months on Bataan, the diet at O’Donnell was lethal, and intentionally so.
Like water, food was plentiful in the Philippines.
The lack of it only intensified their diseases. Every man suffered from something, be it malaria, dengue fever, scurvy, beriberi, jaundice, diphtheria, pneumonia, or dysentery, or combinations of these. Half the men had dysentery when they arrived. The officers organized teams to dig latrines, but they were soon filled and overflowing. Some men were so crippled by the violent diarrhea they could not walk and soiled themselves where they lay. Some died from it. With no medicine and a pathetic diet, dysentery was soon epidemic. The entire prison reeked of a huge, open sewer.
Pete had suffered through two mild bouts of dysentery since Christmas, but he had been able to get paregoric from doctors. During his second day at O’Donnell, he was suddenly short of breath and fatigued. The warning signs arrived, and like all the prisoners he spent a few hours self-diagnosing and wondering which disease was coming. When his stomach began cramping, he suspected dysentery. Halfway through his first bout of bloody diarrhea, he knew for sure. The first few days would be the roughest.
His new pal was Clay Wampler, a cowboy from Colorado who had been a machine gunner with the Thirty-First. Clay shared a space in the barracks next to Pete and had welcomed him to his miserable new home. With Clay’s assistance, Pete went to the hospital in search of paregoric, but the demand was so high there was none in the prison. Clay was a dutiful nurse and joked that he was happy to help Pete because he, Clay, would expect the same attention when he got hit with the damned disease. On the third day, Pete was somewhat relieved when he realized his current bout was not as severe as many he had witnessed. Dysentery killed many men. Others suffered the cramps and diarrhea for a week and shook it off.
That night, Pete awoke soaking wet and with violent chills. He had seen enough malaria to know the signs.
* * *
—
The remnants of the Twenty-Sixth Cavalry were housed in the northeast compound, as far away from Pete as possible. When it had retreated to Bataan, it was still intact and operating, with forty-one American officers and about four hundred Filipino Scouts. Early in the siege, though, cavalry proved ineffective in the treacherous jungles of the peninsula, and the horses were soon needed elsewhere as hunger became an enemy. April 9, the day of the surrender, the Twenty-Sixth had lost fourteen officers and about two hundred Scouts. At O’Donnell, thirty-six of the Americans were together, including Sal Moreno and Ewing Kane. Six of the missing were known dead, including Pete Banning. Others had evaded capture and were still at large, including Lieutenant Edwin Ramsey, the leader of the last cavalry charge at Morong. Ramsey was on his way to the mountains, where he would organize a guerrilla army.
In charge of the Twenty-Sixth was Major Robert Trumpett, a West Pointer from Maryland. He had arrived at O’Donnell two days before Pete and was busy organizing his men into a survival unit. Like everyone else, they were suffering from starvation, dehydration, exhaustion, wounds, and disease, primarily dengue fever and malaria. They had survived the death march and were quickly realizing that they would have to survive O’Donnell as well. Trumpett prepared a list of the six men killed either in action or on the march, and managed to hand it to an aide for General Ned King. The general had asked all commanders to do this so families back home could be notified.
Of the six, four had died in action, with two known to have been buried. Pete and another lieutenant had died on the march and their bodies would never be recovered.
General King asked the commandant to pass along the names of the dead and captured to an American administrative staff working under house arrest in Manila. At first the commandant refused, but later changed his mind when his superiors ordered it. The Japanese were proud of the large numbers of American casualties and wanted it known.
* * *
—
The hospital was a collection of flimsy bamboo huts on stilts. There were five wards, long buildings with no beds, blankets, or sheets. Patients lay shoulder to shoulder on the floor, some in agony, others in comas, still others already dead. Under manageable conditions, it could safely house two hundred patients at a time. By late spring there were over eight hundred men lined along the floors, waiting for medicines that were not going to arrive. Most of them would die.
Not long after the Bataan prisoners began flooding O’Donnell, the hospital became more of a morgue than a place to be treated. The doctors and medics, most of them also suffering from one or more maladies, had almost no medicine. Even the basics such as quinine for malaria, or paregoric for dysentery, or vitamin C for scurvy were in urgently short supply. Most of the supplies—tape, gauze, disinfectant, aspirin, and so on—were smuggled in by doctors from other hospitals. The Japanese provided virtually nothing.
The doctors were forced to hoard the medicines and give them only to the men who seemed most likely to survive. Giving drugs to a severe case was, in effect, wasting the drugs. As the supplies got thinner, the doctors devised a simple lottery system to determine the winners.
Clay dragged Pete back to the hospita
l and finally managed to corner a doctor. He explained that his friend had not only dysentery but malaria as well, and seemed to be fading fast. The doctor said he was sorry, but he had nothing. Clay had heard the rumor, and with so many idle men the rumor mill raged nonstop, that there was a black market for some of the more common medicines. Clay asked the doctor about this, and he claimed to know nothing. But, as they were leaving, the doctor whispered, “Behind ward four.”
Behind ward four, sitting under a shade tree was a plump American with a deck of cards. On a makeshift table, he was playing some type of game that needed only one participant. The fact that he was not emaciated was clear evidence that he was gaming the system. When they had surrendered, Clay had noticed a few heavier American captives. They were generally older and worked somewhere in the army’s vast administration abyss. When forced to march, many of them had fallen quickly.
This guy had not marched anywhere. Nor had he missed many meals. He was powerfully built with a thick chest, muscled arms, a squat neck. And a sneer that Clay instantly hated. He dealt some cards to himself, glanced up at Clay, and asked, “Need something?”
Clay released Pete, who managed to stand on his own, and assessed the situation. It was one he did not care for. It was one that infuriated him. Clay said, “Yeah, my friend here needs some quinine and paregoric. Somebody said you got it.”