I recall looking down, as I was standing at rigid attention, into this infuriated guard’s evil face, oblivious of the faces of my fellow-prisoners. I had apparently answered this jerk because he had been so insistent upon screaming: “Do you understand,” that saliva from his mouth had flown into my face and I couldn’t wipe it off while remaining at attention.
I wasn’t to learn this until several days after this beating, when “Prune Face” Flynn, an Australian pilot, came near me and talked out of the corner of his mouth to avoid being spotted by the guards. Even the Allies were given nicknames we figured befitted their appearance or actions. He said: “You know something, Pappy? I had you Americans figured out all wrong because I hated you for running around with our women.”
“So … why the change of heart, Prune Face?”
“I’d like to take it all back after the way you answered Swivel Neck when he asked you: ‘Do you understand.’ ”
“I don’t recall. What did I say?” For I had said part of it in Japanese and part in English.
“You said, watashi wackaru, watashi wackaru, now go f— —k yourself, little man.”
Then I realized that I had used a very common word in the Australian vocabulary, and the only reason I had used it—I was aware that Swivel Neck did not appreciate its meaning—was that it was merely what I had wished him to do.
So there I stood, in my confined circle.
But every time Swivel Neck wasn’t looking I couldn’t resist glancing over my shoulder, as if something else was back there bothering me, almost disconnected from me, and it was my own old butt sticking out there about a foot. All the blood in your body rushes to the crushed portion.
In this camp every time one of us wanted to go to the latrine we had to look up a guard and bow from the waist and ask him in polite Japanese for permission to go to the latrine. On the diet we had there we often had to go many times a day. When we got through with the latrine, we had to look up the guard, bow politely from the waist again, and thank him in polite Japanese.
I have often thought what a pity it was that neither Lard nor Chennault could see the obstinate Boyington being subjected to some real discipline for a change. Somehow I thought they might enjoy it.
The first thing each morning all the captives were routed out and we had to stand in a long formation in the courtyard and turn to the direction of Tokyo, the Emperor’s palace. The guard spewed the command and we would all bow as one to the Emperor. But if the poor Emperor only could have heard some of the comments we mumbled about him. Or if the guards had heard, they never would have asked us to bow again. They would have slaughtered us all instead, no doubt.
These formations, though, taught me something about ducks, or at least something about a certain duck. I had not known before that ducks are imitative creatures. Maybe all ducks are not, but this one I have in mind certainly was a mimic.
Outside of our cell block was a pool of water to be used in case of fire, and the duck swam around in it. The guards called the duck Gaga, and gave it quite a rough time. They threw it around and kicked it. Some of the guards even masturbated with it on occasion. One of its legs had been broken, and some captive had patched it up with splints. So the duck itself walked with a limp, the same as so many of the rest of us did who had been shot down.
Every morning when we had to fall out in formation to bow to the Emperor, this duck would limp along with us limping captives, and would get in the formation too, and always at the end of the line. And when we bowed, the duck would watch us and then bob its head too. Morning after morning of this, and it seemed almost unbelievable to all of us.
As I sit here writing, in the year of our Lord, 1957, my thoughts cannot help wonder how some other human beings are faring right at this moment. I know there are still some Americans, as well as many others who are forced to bow against their wills. Many are held in plain captivity, the same as I was in Japan. I wonder if they have a duck, or something that is ordinarily thought of as being unimportant, with which to rest their tortured brains a moment while they are praying and worrying if anyone will ever free them. I wonder if there are sufficient good people among the bad that are cracking the whip of submission over their heads.
No, I am not telling you how to think. But I know what happiness means to me at last. And it’s not being satisfied by living within myself. I could never find true happiness until I made an honest attempt to help others. So, it is little wonder that I came to the conclusion that the world will never stand a chance of being happy until the last human being is taken out of captivity.
The years have taught me something I should have known in the beginning: never to generalize authoritatively about races or peoples. Even today some lecturers and some writers who should know better still do this sort of thing. They will imply such thoughts as: “All Russians are …” or “All Frenchmen are …” or “All Englishmen are …” or even “The Japanese are …”
Whenever people ask me today about the Japanese, I rather suppose I am expected to hate them, all of them, and largely because of what was done to us captives there in the camp of Ofuna. I know I am expected to brand them as primitive and brutal and stupid. But we can find right here in the United States, almost in any city in the United States, almost in any city block in the United States, people who at heart are as primitive and as brutal and as stupid as those guards with all their baseball bats. All that this type person needs to assert himself is an opportunity. Maybe the opportunity of numbers, or maybe the opportunity of getting away with it. But such people are here, nevertheless. They are all around us.
I have even generalized about the guards at Ofuna, and this is a mistake too. For finally, after we had been there a long time, four new guards came into camp and they happened to be college boys. They got into this camp through an error, I believe, because two of them could speak English: one of them quite well.
The one who spoke good English had worked for an English law firm. He passed me one day and he was covering something in his pocket. I looked and noticed a pocket Bible. I merely nodded my head that I understood, because in that league it was unlawful to admit you were a Christian. Maybe the Japanese high command didn’t realize it, but their ranks were fairly well saturated with a fifth column, Christians.
This guard and the other college boys were finally transferred from the camp because they absolutely refused to beat any of us captives. Not only that, but this one guard who spoke such good English used to be beaten by his superiors at night and partly because he would not beat us. I witnessed many of those beatings he received because at the time I was working in the kitchen and went to bed long after the rest of the captives did. So, while walking back from the kitchen, I could see some of the beatings.
One night this guard came down to the cell block, woke me up, looked up and down the aisle to see if any of the other guards were around, and then said he wanted to talk to me.
I answered: “Why, sure, it’s all right with me.”
Then he said: “You know, I never have told you boys anything about the war, have I?”
I answered: “No, you haven’t.”
He asked: “But you know that I am being beaten for it?”
I said: “Yes,” that I knew and “I’m very sorry about it.”
“Well,” he continued, “the way I look at it, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if I tell what is going on in this war. As long as they won’t believe I am just trying to better my English by talking to you, I might just as well go ahead and tell you the whole story.”
From then on he was the best source of military information we ever had hoped for. Even after he was transferred from the camp he used to come back and visit. He would come into the kitchen, where I was tending one of the fires. He would sit down on his heels, and if anybody came by, he would pretend to be lighting a cigarette. If nobody came by, he would have a stick going in the dust on the cement floor, showing me all the front lines in Germany, just what was being taken
. He would tell me all about what was going on in the Pacific, and in April 1945, just before I was transferred from the camp, and the last time I ever saw him, he told me that our own forces would be on the main islands by September.
I said: “What about your navy? Can’t it stop them?”
He answered: “No. Our navy is shot. There is practically nothing left of it.”
It was a strange thing that when I used to talk with him I never thought of him as a Jap, as I thought of the other guards. He was one of the sweetest and nicest fellows I ever have known. He told me once that he hated to sleep in the guardhouse.
He said: “I don’t have anything more in common with the guards in there than the man in the moon. I like it much better being with you boys.”
He had been an orphan, he told me, and had been raised by some missionaries, he and his sister.
We had another reason for nicknaming most of the guards because they were hesitant to give out their real names. In fact, when we asked them, several of them said that they were not supposed to tell us. This Christian guard was one of the three guards in Japan who ever told me his full name. And although I had an occasion to correspond with him, among others who should not have been involved in the war-crimes procedure, I hesitate to mention this swell fellow’s name for fear that some of his own people might not understand.
Some of the guards, as I mentioned before, we nicknamed after their characteristics. For example, the one who forever was beating us we called “The Slugger.” Another one we called “Indian Joe” because he had all the appearances of a cigar-store Indian. Another one we called “Flange Face” because his face had all the appearances of a flange, expressionless. And then there were some names that, God knows, I would consider too repulsive to put into a book.
One of the four college boys we called “Little Lester.” We named him this after the character in a comic strip, for Little Lester was a shriveled-up, sawed-off runt. He could not have been more than four foot six. He was one of the boys who never struck any of the captives and was finally taken out of the camp. He had gotten me to one side one day and we had a little heart-to-heart chat. His English was not too good, so we mixed up a little Japanese in the conversation. He told me that the four of them were going to leave the camp, and I said: “Well, gosh, I am very sorry,” for it was such a pleasure to have someone around who would not slug you all the time.
He said: “I will tell you why I don’t believe in beatings.”
“How is that?” I asked.
“Well,” he began, “the four of us college boys don’t believe in striking people to begin with. In addition to that, I look at it another way, too. I can’t see any reason why I should strike you boys because in a short time I am going to be a prisoner and you boys are going to be the guards. So I would be an absolute fool should I strike any of you.”
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28
* * *
Good news and bad news seem to accompany each other so closely that we almost could imagine that they get together on their tricks ahead of time.
Good News to Bad News: “I’ll go first today, and you come immediately afterward and give the wallop.”
Bad News to Good News: “Okay. And don’t worry how far you build him up, because you know I can carry him to the depths again.”
This still seems to be the way of it, even here at Burbank, only it doesn’t bother me any longer. One phone call may be something pleasant, and the next phone call what I used to term a smash in the face. The phone not ringing at all used to bother me, but that is no longer a problem with me. Now I am able to appreciate that everything has a definite purpose, whether I am momentarily pleased the instant it is thrown at me or not.
Looking back over my life, I wanted so many things, and I struggled so hard, always in spurts, to achieve my so-called desires, which weren’t what I wanted at all.
I suppose, for instance, a fellow should feel happy when being informed that he has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. But under the circumstances in which I first was informed the announcement could have meant my death warrant. Nor did I realize that I wouldn’t even appreciate later on this so-called honor in the slightest, and it would remain in the dust in our garage along with other things I don’t know what to do with—or where else to put them.
In this secret intimidation camp of Ofuna I must repeat that the idea there was to make you feel miserable enough so that you would give military information on your own country. That was the sole purpose of the camp. With the “Quiz Kids,” as we called our visiting interrogators, I thought I had been getting along all right because of the original lies I had told about my past. When first captured I had been unable to give a phony name because my own, “Major G. Boyington, USMC,” was stenciled too plainly in yellow letters on the back pack brought aboard the submarine. So I had told my right name, hoping desperately that the Nips would not be able to connect it up in any way. Everything went on fine, and they finally stopped beating me in Rabaul for information. Also, I had given them this story: That I was an operations officer and merely gone along for the ride. Due to my inexperience and inability as a flyer, unfortunately, I was shot down, and that I had no Nip planes to my credit.
But now here in this camp of Ofuna I suddenly was summoned once again into the “Quiz Kids’ Room,” and saw a new interrogator facing me. He turned out to be a Princeton graduate, a captain in the Japanese Navy, and he told me to be seated. He was cordial—far too cordial, I thought.
He fumbled around in his brief case, hauled out a typewritten sheet of paper, and then went on shuffling around in his brief case as though he had misplaced something.
After a pause he said to me: “I thought this might be of interest to you, Major.”
I looked at what he was showing me, and saw emblazoned in ink: “Major Gregory Boyington, United States Marine Corps, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor …” and so on, and so on, along with the number of Japanese planes I had been credited with before being shot down and lost for keeps, and altogether far too much about my past. I always had guarded my conversation about China, knowing that the Japanese would consider it more than legal to shoot me if they ever discovered I had once been a Flying Tiger.
So now, with all this evidence confronting me, I could not look up from the desk. I merely sat there staring at the paper.
Finally this intelligence officer, graduate from Princeton, looked up and said: “Well, Major, what have you to say about this? Is this true? Or is it false? Your story that you have been giving us and this radio broadcast from the United States do not exactly jibe, Major.”
Finally I came up with a feeble answer: “There must be some mistake. That couldn’t be me.”
In the meanwhile the captain had located his other piece of paper in the brief case and said: “Then, do you happen to know a Mrs. Grace Hallenbeck from—I can’t pronounce …”
“Okanogan, Washington,” I rather blurted out without thinking, for he was talking about my mother, and, needless to say, Mom had been in my thoughts more than once.
“Thank you for the kind assistance. Now, who is the woman?”
“She is my mother. Is she well, or has something happened to her?”
“Quite well, Major. As a matter of fact it states here that she has christened a new carrier in your honor, and wishes it Godspeed, to hurry up and end the war.”
I thought, of course, that I would be beaten to death out in the courtyard, or face a firing squad, or whatever they had in mind. And I had resigned myself after hearing this, so I smiled and said: “You’ll never know how nice it is to hear about Mom. It’s great to learn that my gal is still working, even if her dumb son is hors de combat, forever.”
Then this intelligence officer said: “You know, you don’t have to lie to us. There are a lot of us around here who know just what the score is. I’ve spent many years in the United States personally. I was in the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C.
“
But do you know something else?” he added: “Do you know that we appreciate a hero here in Japan even though he’s from another country?” Then he offered me a cigarette, which I gathered up with shaking fingers.
After that I was dismissed from the Quiz Kids’ Room, but only temporarily. And I still did not know what was being cooked up on my behalf or what their game finally would be. A few days later I learned from one of the Japanese non-commissioned officers in the camp just exactly what they did know about me, that the radio broadcast had been true, even though it was hard for me to believe. This Nip non-commissioned officer, strictly against his orders, further told me on the sly: “They’ve got a stack of papers”—and he motioned off the ground—“about three feet high. They’ve got your pictures, everything about you, magazines and everything.”
While I was busy thinking: “Oh, Lord!”
This Nip chief laughed and said: “Your pictures look a lot different than you do now.” With this he blew up the cheeks of his face to try to show me what I used to look like, and giggled again.
I must say, though (and I could take what confidence I could get out of it), that heretofore I had not been treated badly by any Japanese who spoke good English. And in my case this turned out to be true all during my captivity. Practically without exception everyone of these people who spoke English, especially the ones educated in America, all treated us well. They did not go out of their way to do us a lot of favors, and perhaps they could not. But, as far as I know, they were against having any of us beaten if they could help it.
And the navy captain, the intelligence officer, turned out to be one of these. When next he called me into the Quiz Kids’ Room, he asked whether I knew that he spoke the truth when he said that he knew every admiral. I thought that he did because he described their appearances, but he didn’t really know them. He wanted to know what I knew about each one. He asked me to write it down, but I told him that I couldn’t. I said: “I’ve only met one personally and didn’t talk to him for any length of time.”
Baa Baa Black Sheep Page 29