Baa Baa Black Sheep

by Gregory Boyington

  The other prisoners sat around, just the same as I did, and dreamed of all these foods, and then they started making recipes. This was something that always amused me.

  In this camp was Louis Zamperini, the famous miller, now an evangelist, and he is of Italian descent. No doubt his mother is an excellent Italian cook and knows how to make wonderful Italian foods. Some of the prisoners would show me recipes that Louie had written out, and he must have been drooling from the mouth when writing them.

  The others would say of Zamperini’s recipes: “I’m going to copy these things all down,” and they would be busy scribbling them. We were not allowed to have pencil or paper, or be caught writing or reading, so very secretively they would write them down. They swore that when they got home they were going to have all those recipes cooked.

  Once or twice I looked at these recipes and saw that Louie had put the tomatoes in at the same time as the potatoes. And anybody who has cooked at all knows that tomatoes should be left until the last. He would put butter in the first thing, and it struck me that good old Louie Zamperini had never cooked in his life. He was just the same as any of the rest of us. He merely must have remembered that his mother’s Italian cooking was good, and he just dreamed that he had cooked all those things. He would swear to the high heavens, though, that he had cooked all of these dishes himself.

  The meals we had were a dietitian’s nightmare. Often we used to mention to each other: “Good Lord, if any dietitian ever tells me when I get back home what I should eat, I’ll just say: ‘Lady, or whoever you are, you are nuts!’ ”

  Our most favored meal was a heaping dish of barley, which would be given us sometimes on special holidays, and a bowl of mashed potatoes without salt, pepper, or butter on them. Nothing but starch. Practically every meal we had was mostly starch. Later, when I got a job in the Japanese kitchen there and could see for myself, I learned for sure that the average prisoner didn’t get one pound of grease, meat, or fish in a year’s time.

  Sometimes I was interested, far more than amused, in finding out how little it takes to keep the human body alive. All we wanted was a little more barley or a little more of this watery soup and we would have been, under those circumstances, what could be called comparatively content, I suppose. But we didn’t get it.

  Most people, especially in America, just simply do not know what it means to spend one’s days dreaming and thinking of food. It is not their fault that they do not know, and may they never have to know. But We of the World Who Have Known Real Hunger know. And that is why our imaginary club should be such an understanding one, between member and member.

  As another idea of how hungry a human can get, once I had a soupbone as big as my fist and it took me only two days to devour all of it, completely.

  Prior to being captured, if I had been told that a large hungry collie dog could have gotten away with all of a soupbone as large as this one, I would have considered the informant crazy. But I got away with it, every bit of it, within two days.

  After nine months of capture—and with my weight down to almost a hundred pounds—I met one of my most unforgettable characters. She was a Japanese grandmother, and I called her “Auntie.”

  But the reason I am especially thinking of her this evening is, perhaps, that I have helped my wife set the table for supper. And it is always in regard to food somehow that I remember Auntie the most. The Japanese word for “Auntie” is Obason, and this is what I called her.

  After all this time as a captive the Nips were finally through questioning me two or three times a week, and I was getting to be rather an old prisoner around the Ofuna camp. So I was given a job in the kitchen to work from four-thirty in the morning until nine o’clock at night. For my services I was allowed an extra bowl of barley and a bowl of soup a day. It happened that I was not able to get along even with this additional ration because I was lugging heavy barrels of water and sacks of rice around that weighed close to two hundred pounds. For strength to do this I had to resort to other methods.

  I guess everybody is inherently dishonest in some shape or form, or manner, so I stole food. I never stole any of the prisoners’ food, of course, but I stole the Japanese food, which was a great deal more nourishing, and more tasty.

  I decided when I went into the kitchen after nine months of starvation that I was going to eat four times as much as any Japanese guard got of the same kind of food. Many times I had to vomit it up and many times I had other troubles, such as a little diarrhea, but I maintained that diet during all the six months I was in the kitchen.

  Now, due to the help of the little old civilian lady who worked there, by watching out the door to see that none of the guards was looking, and my own kleptomaniac ability, I went from my hundred or so pounds to my normal hundred ninety. I could determine my weight because in the kitchen we had some kilo scales, and the kilo is 2.2 pounds.

  This little lady, who watched the door so carefully to see that no Japanese guards were around, was the only sweetheart I ever had in Japan. When I mentioned this in one of my War Bond lectures (years later in Phoenix, Arizona), with my wife in the audience, some jovial old boy said: “I bet he promised to marry her, too.” He was merely keeping current with the newspapers that were busy printing the statements of some woman who said that I promised during the war to marry her, and then married someone else instead. The newspapers had a spicy story to add to my war publicity, I’ll have to admit, because talking happened to be one of this girl’s strong points. The trouble with me was that I had always been slightly under the influence while these conversations had been going on, so I wasn’t capable of paying proper attention. But neither the newspapers nor I realized that getting sobered up in a prison camp helps one to see things in a different light, at least for a short period of time.

  Well, it was all good humor, even though this little old sweetheart of mine was about sixty years old. She didn’t know a word of English and she had never been outside of Japan. If any of you mothers have given things to any of the war prisoners in the United States here, you were in a way repaid, for this little old lady certainly did help me out. To her I was just a starving boy. The fact that I was from America, the outfit that was sinking her sons on land, air, and sea, had nothing to do with it.

  Of course, in her conversations when the guards were around, she would damn all prisoners. The poor little old thing felt she had to do that. But when the guards were away, she would continue letting me sneak out the guards’ food; although she would have been beaten too, like anybody else, if she had been caught doing this for me. So when the guards were away, she would let me walk over to their lard barrel, the stinkingest old stuff anyone could imagine. I would get some fish also. Naturally I would look around too, while doing all this, for I wasn’t trusting too much on her tired old eyes, for if one of these guards had caught me it would have meant a beating session that might cost my life. I would scoop out a big handful of this stinking lard, shove it in my mouth, and gulp it down in a second. Even though it did stink, nevertheless to me it tasted like honey.

  And occasionally, when very important persons were expected, they baked fish in the kitchen. To get one of these, Obason and I had to co-operate to the fullest, almost like a quarterback and a fullback on a football field. For we weren’t allowed all the time we had had with the lard snatching. We had to fool a kitchen full of people. Much the same as a quarterback, Obason would nudge me, and say “Gomen nasi, Boyingtonson,” for the guard’s benefit, which means: Pardon me, fellow, for bumping into you. I would then put a free hand down underneath a fairly high working table in the kitchen, and there in the spacious folds of Obason’s apron was a hot baked fish.

  The first time she ever handed me one of these hot fish I stuffed it immediately down my throat to avoid detection. The thing was so hot I had to grab the tail between my front teeth in a futile effort to stop it from sliding on down and burning my stomach. And there I stood—the tears running out of my eyes, a guard asking: �
�Nunda”—while I was pretending to blow my nose and still keep from choking on the hot fish.

  The reason I needed this food of some sort was that, before I worked in the kitchen, all of us had to do compulsory athletics twice a day. And when we prisoners were bent over for our calisthenics we could hear these knee-joints, and ankle-joints and elbows snap, crackle, snap, just like a dry forest of twigs going off.

  During those days in the kitchen we usually had a lull in the midmorning and midafternoon when the civilian cook and the guards were not there. This was when the little old lady would say to me in exceptionally polite Japanese: “Let’s have a yesomai.”

  This meant she and I would have tea together, and in addition she would fix up a few Japanese pickles. She would get us a tiny amount of sugar, too, which was kept on hand only for those high-up naval officers who frequently visited the camp to quiz us. And she would steal a little bit of this sugar for our tea.

  And it was during the winter months that I worked in the kitchen, from September to April, and it was cold, bitterly so. Yet these ovens are kind of Dutch-oven affairs, with big rice pots in them, and we would open up the oven doors. Of course, during the midmorning and midafternoon periods nothing was cooking in the ovens. The big pots merely were inside of them. So we would put a little stool in front of each oven and she would start to talk.

  Only with her did I dare speak Japanese, for I never did around the guards, because we could get our war information better from them by pretending we knew nothing about their language. She was too old, or would forget, when talking to the guards about me, that I spoke practically perfect Japanese to her and understood it.

  We would have this sweet tea and she would break out a little old pipe with some of this hair tobacco we had. The bowl of the pipe was about the size of the end of my little finger, and I would reach in my pocket and pull out a can and sort around for my selection of tobacco from it. My own selection of tobacco consisted of what the Japanese threw down in front of the guard stove. The tobacco consisted of snipes. But they were sanitary because I had made a cigarette holder from a piece of bamboo. I would adjust one of these snipes in the end of my bamboo holder, much like Freddie the Free-loader, and take a sliver of bamboo and reach it through the open doors that were warming us, getting a light for Obason and myself.

  So we would sit there, Obason smoking her tiny pipe and I smoking my snipe, and sipping this sweet tea. And as we sat there talking and smoking, Obason would tell me, oh, how bad that war was, and how she longed for the day when it would be over.

  She would say: “You can’t buy any candy, you can’t get any cloth to make clothes out of.” For all of these people were in rags, officers and everybody. There was hardly a person I saw in all Japan who was not dressed in rags.

  On the first day, for instance, when any American was captured in the combat zone, and if these officers were without shoes, they took them. I cannot say that I blame them for that. If I didn’t have a pair of shoes and captured some poor jerk, I would take his shoes too. We cannot blame each other for such things.

  Anyhow, Obason said she longed for the days when the automobiles were going up and down the streets. For months before the war there was nothing but a few of those coke-burning trucks that have to be pushed up every hill, and they all carried a crew of about ten men, and every time they would come to a slight hill, they would have to shove the truck up the hill. They would go all right on the level provided they had practically no load.

  Then she would ask me: “How is everything in Baykoko?”—Baykoko meaning the United States.

  I was, of course, just like every other G.I. whether in England, France, Italy, Burma, or anyplace else. I liked to brag, so I said: “Oh gee, Obason, it’s great. We have all the tires in the world, all the gas, everyone has an automobile he can just ride everywhere he wants, everybody has a big ranch.”

  I would kind of kid her because she seemed to enjoy the tales so much, so I said: “Well, how do you like that as far as you’ve heard? You come back and take care of my kids for me, as I don’t have a wife.”

  Old Obason would giggle and answer: “Oh, I’m afraid you might change your mind and shove me off the boat on the way back.” Wherewith she clasped her hands, dipped her knees quickly, and giggled—as she always did with a joke.

  And this is the way we would talk over our tea and tobacco during the lulls when the guards were not around.

  On several occasions two or three of Obason’s daughters came around. One of them had a child strapped to her back. Her appearance was almost angelic, her actions the same. One could not believe that she was what we thought of as “Nips” or “Japs”—especially with the guards we knew in camp.

  When nobody was around this daughter would say the one or two expressions she knew in English. They were “I love you,” or something like that. Then she too would giggle. Of course, she didn’t mean it that way, but she had heard it from motion pictures they had shown in Japan. And the baby with her, a little kid with bangs, had the appearance of an ivory doll. The complexions of the women and children are, I think, the nicest complexions in the world, nothing like our American women. The skins were as smooth as if they had just been covered with cream.

  But one day I did an awful thing to Obason, and without meaning to.

  The prison camp was to be visited again by some of those naval intelligence officers who came out to ply us with questions, with their $64 questions. My, how time progresses, for we now have a $64,000 question.

  In preparing the meal in advance for these higher-ups Obason wanted everything just so. Her pride and joy was some China dishes, and on these dishes she carefully arranged pickles and everything, including the fish.

  But the more I kept thinking of these higher-ups, and all their questions that once again might be thrown at me, the less I must have remembered Obason. These intelligence bastards would be out here in a little while trying to pump military information out of us, and so, feeling mad about it, I deliberately selected this moment to clean out the stoves, allowing the grit to go all over their food on those pretty dishes.

  The old lady screamed: “Boyingtonson, Boyingtonson. Yamai, yamai!” Which roughly means “Stop, stop!” And she screamed: “You’re getting toxon gomai!” which roughly means “much dirt.”

  So I stopped, but it does show how, just as in all wars, the innocent must suffer just because somebody (in this case me) had a mad on.

  She forgave me, but I haven’t quite forgiven myself. So when I first got back to the United States and heard that some of my Black Sheep pilots were going out to Japan, I gave them Obason’s address. At least, I gave the best address I knew and told them to be sure and give her some money and some candy.

  Yet the most I could do—even now—would be but the smallest of tokens for her kindnesses to me.

  In fact, while sitting here in the den awaiting supper, I cannot help imagine how it would be if the old lady, through some miracle, should suddenly arrive, as if out of the skies, for one of our old “teas” again. We would sit and talk and discuss and smoke. Only in my case it would not be snipes any more. And then, just when we were about to eat, she quickly would say: “Boyingtonson, Boyingtonson, Haitison,” which means “Look out, Boyington, the guards.” Wherewith, at her joke, she would clasp her hands just as she used to do, dip her knees, and giggle.

  And you can bet your hat and ass that there were many occasions when I sincerely wished I could be back sitting beside Obason in the cold in front of those Dutch ovens. Those too many times that I was pulling myself off a terrific drunk with a terrible hangover. The time that the Bureau of Internal Revenue placed liens upon all my earthly possessions until I paid the tax and interest they claimed I owed them, for the period of time I was overseas and an undeclared prisoner of war, on my service salary, which I unfortunately never received. I found that my drinking troubles amused the world on the front pages of newspapers and in magazines. Anything for a laugh, I thought, as I read
my name connected with the disgrace and drinking of people I hadn’t seen in years.

  * * *

  30

  * * *

  As the years go on, we are going to learn more and more from the Japanese, the same as they are going to learn from us—and want to learn from us. With the bars of hate and suspicion no longer existing we can regard ourselves not as nations but as people. As visitors to Japan in the future we will not be there as spies, as was thought before. All that has been cleansed away, washed off the boards, although it did take a terrible war to do it. But as visitors of the future in Japan I do hope we can show as much sportsmanship in our victory as the Japanese are in their defeat.

  In our guards I was seeing the worst Japanese at their worst, and they in turn were seeing us American captives at our lowest ebb. But even so, there was some little redeeming feature, some little laugh somewhere along with the pain, or some little new thing to be learned.

  As I go through my experiences with the Japanese, I am not trying to build them up or run them down. All I am trying to do is to get across what I saw and what I know. And if some of these observations do appear to be that way, the reason is that the Japanese themselves were often contradictory—the same as we ourselves are often. We are not machines. People are not machines. But I have seen even machines be contradictory, too.

  There was many a college professor, as well as American-educated Japanese, who had been inducted into the movement of Asia for the Asians, with the industrialized nation of Japan on top, of course. Many of this type individual were employed with a reserve military status as interpreter. And I believed the majority of them when they said they didn’t have a thing to say about the matter. And were in a boat similar to ours. The Japs didn’t trust them, either.